Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

ACT ONE: Foosha

Luffy was a lot of things (and he meant like, a lot), but completely insane wasn’t one of them. 

"Yeah, sorry Lulu," Ace said as they observed a tow truck try to extract Luffy's car from a tree. "But that shit's totaled."

Maybe Luffy had been insane five years ago. But he was older now. Wiser. And he had even gotten a driver’s license! Dadan would probably add that it took him seven tries, but who's counting, really? It’s not like he’s ever run anyone over.

Whatever. The point was that Luffy knew how to drive, had a couple of years with a (mostly) clean driving record, and even received postcards from his driving test examiner ("Every day I'm not in your passenger seat is a gift!"). His car has had many names throughout the years—he’s never been able to decide on just one, mostly because he kept forgetting it—but it was his. 

The point was that this morning he was speeding down the highway, heading home after picking up mustard from the only place Dadan would buy it, a mean old guy with a meaner, older dog named Chouchou. The next second, Luffy’s head was ringing, glass was everywhere, and his ability to go wherever he wanted whenever he wanted had been abruptly halted by a pothole and a tree.

Whatever thoughts that had been rattling around Luffy’s brain before—second breakfast, lunch, that he needed to fart, dinner—finally stilled from the inertia of the crash. Within the cacophony, one thought took hold. It grasped his insides, his gut or his heart or his stomach or whatever else lived deep within his flesh, and squeezed until he couldn’t breathe. Well, that last part might be because of the gasoline leak, but still.

THE THOUGHT

He wasn’t leaving Foosha any time soon.

Because of course it was next to impossible to leave this stupid town. Unless you were Ace, apparently. 

Speaking of, Luffy vaguely registered Ace and the tow-truck driver continue to argue. They’ve been at it for at least the past half-hour. Or an hour. Luffy couldn’t really tell time with all the ringing still in his ears.

OVERHEARD: A SERIES

PART ONE: ACE VS TOW TRUCK DRIVER

“No, no, turn and then back up! No, the other way! You’re gonna dent it even more!”

“Quit fucking barking at me, it’s already totaled!”

Luffy stared, eyes glazed over, at nothing in particular. “I’m normal now,” Luffy said in delirium, as if he were watching his body from far, far away. “Not insane.”

It was the first thing he had said since Ace, upon arrival, had screeched his car into a probably-illegal U-turn to park on the side of the highway. The skid marks streaked across the pavement.

“Cool, I believe you,” Ace lied, glancing over at Luffy mid-argument. “But your car is still wrapped around a tree.”

Okay. Fair point. Luffy had saved up for that awful 1990-whatever with a missing radio dial and a left rear window that couldn’t roll down unless you pulled it with your bare hands. Total piece of garbage, and it made him deal with awful things like “premiums” and “deductibles” and “turn signals,” but it was his.

And he had just bought air freshener for the rear view mirror, too. 

“She was a good car.”

Ace snorted, which annoyed Luffy because he wasn’t joking. “No the fuck it wasn’t, unless it somehow fixed itself while I’ve been gone,” Ace shot back, “It broke down constantly and you almost lit the town on fire trying to do your own oil change. You almost got arrested. Again.”

“She was a good car,” Luffy insisted, mind finally settling enough to make its way back into his body. He readjusted his hat. 

“And Dadan picked both of us up from the marine station that time,” Luffy added, an afterthought. 

Instead of answering, Ace dug a matchbox and a loose cigarette out from his pocket, which looked difficult because he was wearing skinny jeans. He lit the cigarette, shook out the match, and took a drag. The smoke curled in the air like a long string of confetti.

Luffy from five years ago—the insane one, not the normal one he is now—might have made fun of Ace for his jeans. The insane one might have thought something like, What’s with the pants? Didn’t he used to run around half-naked all the time? Something about needing to feel the wind in his loins or whatever?

The Luffy of right now was too busy wondering why Ace had started smoking again. 

Moments later, the tow truck driver finally figured out the whole “towing” thing now that Ace wasn’t yelling at him. Luffy watched longingly as his 1990-whatever car shit out one last miserable groan from deep within its bowels. The tow truck lurched forward with the full weight of Luffy’s hopes and dreams. 

And no, he wasn’t being dramatic, okay? Let anyone else try staying within the same ten-mile radius their entire life without gnawing off a limb or two. He’d come pretty close a couple times. Luffy was so normal.

HALF AN HOUR OR MAYBE AN HOUR OR MAYBE A DECADE EARLIER

Ace had asked an eerily calm Luffy over the phone, “But are you like, good?”

“Yeah,” Luffy had said, head still spinning from what was maybe an aneurysm or a stroke or whatever happened when you hit your head too hard. “Was wearing a seatbelt and everything.”

“That’s not what I meant—whatever, you’re lucky I’m in town. Call a tow, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Ace nudged Luffy’s shoulder with his own. “Hey, we’ll grab something to eat at Dadan’s, on me, then we can hang out.”

“We eat there for free,” Luffy said, weirdly not that hungry. Must be the stroke. 

“And Dadan probably regrets it every second,” Ace said, nodding his head towards his shiny red pickup truck. “Get in the car.” 

Luffy glanced back at the retreating figure of his car, if it could even be called that anymore. The windows were shattered—thanks to the crash—the license plate was duct taped onto the rear—not the crash—and the passenger door’s paint had been scraped off (Luffy wasn’t really sure about that one.) 

They got into Ace’s car and drove off. Luffy watched the tow truck get smaller in the rear view mirror, a memory fading into obscurity. He was so normal it made his head hurt.

Wait, his head really hurt. Realization struck Luffy almost as hard as he had banged his head on the steering wheel.

“CONCUSSION!”

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Luffy used to not be an only child. But then Ace had gone and died.

Sure, Ace was sitting right next to Luffy, driving a fancy new truck with fancy new seats (dark red, plush), but his brother, Ace, was dead and gone and never coming back. 

His heart was still beating, and Luffy assumed that his brain was still mostly working, but Ace’s truck was different from the one he had left Foosha in. The wheels were tall enough to reach Luffy’s waist, and it didn’t even look like any of the tires were deflated. There were no scratches, dents, or weird smells coming from the exhaust pipes. Whatever Ace was up to nowadays, it was able to pay for his new gold chains and straight teeth. 

Luffy thought that dead people were supposed to look worse than when they had been living. That their skin was supposed to be green, smelly, and rotting, and that they said braaaaains all the time. Ace was very much not green, smelled normal, and was probably not rotting. And he had definitely been saying way more than just braaaaains—like, "Lulu, this tow driver’s an idiot,” or “Lulu, this is taking forever,” or “Lulu, why is there mustard everywhere?”

Luffy studied his brother’s face from the passenger seat, watching the beginnings of the day’s sun curve down his face. His freckles had been darkened by the past few summers. The faintest traces of his teenager-era acne scars lingered on his forehead and right cheek.

Ace regarded Luffy with a raised eyebrow through the rear-view mirror. A momentary pause.

Then: “The fuck you looking at?” 

“You have a booger hanging out of your nose,” Luffy said, more of a knee-jerk reaction than an actual observation. There was in fact, no booger or snot of any kind hanging out of Ace’s nose, but the air would have been empty if he hadn’t said anything at all. 

Ace was aware of this, rolling his eyes, but he still wiped his nose with the back of his hand. A peace offering. “Better?” 

“Yeah,” Luffy said, a weird, heavy sensation curling up in Luffy’s chest. He continued wondering if he was sitting next to his brother or a clone/zombie/cloned zombie. He tried to take a deep breath to dislodge the weight in his chest. Nope. Deeper still. It didn’t budge.

Instead, Luffy put his elbow on the armrest and watched as the crumbling barriers of the highway morphed into the chain-linked fences of Foosha.

Clearly, the only thing that made sense was that the person sitting next to him was a cloned zombie who had eaten Ace’s brain but then kept his memories and learned how to shower and use acne wash and talk like a regular, live human. Luffy had never met a zombie before, unless he counted some of the regulars that would shamble through Dadan’s Bed N’ Brek at four in the morning. But those customers were the ones that were the most interesting to watch, so maybe having a zombie as a brother wasn’t such a terrible thing after all.

Actually, it sounded like a great sit-com. Maybe Luffy could call it “My Brother Turned Into a Zombie After Disappearing for Five Years?!" and his catchphrase could be “Wow, are you brain-dead or what?!” 

They slowed to a stop at an empty intersection, the only sound in the car being the blinking of Ace’s turn signal. Luffy’s gaze flickered between the empty road in front of them, the dashboard, and Ace’s face, weirdly neutral. Maybe he was trying to feign innocence. If Ace suddenly went zombie-mode and attacked him, Luffy might be able to take him. He had never won a fight against Ace before, but Ace had also never been a zombie before, so. Pros and cons.

But now it’s been at least thirty seconds, and the light turned green but Ace still wasn’t stepping on the gas. Luffy’s driving instructor definitely would have deducted points for that one. No Christmas cards for Ace.

The car rolling up behind them probably wasn’t happy about them blocking the entire road. It expressed this by honking its horn, loud and annoying and over and over again. Ace snapped out of whatever daze he was in and lurched the truck forward.

“You’re not gonna eat my brains, right?” Luffy blurted out. He paid no mind to the car behind them, ominously inching closer to rear-ending them. 

“Why would anyone want whatever you have going on in there?” Ace said. “Not very nutritious.” It didn’t seem like Ace’s heart was really in it, but at least he was trying.

Luffy wasn’t sure what he was searching for when he looked at Ace’s face, but he couldn’t find it. He shifted in his seat back towards the window, disappointed that his TV sit-com dreams were ruined forever. And screw Ace, Luffy’s brain totally had nutritional value. Calories. Vitamin C. Iron. Eat cedara. Or whatever that phrase was.

When they merged onto a wider street, the car that had been behind them at the traffic stop pulled up next to them and gave Ace the middle finger before speeding up again. The car’s bumper sticker demanded that they all COEXIST. 

Ace didn’t mockingly read the bumper sticker in a high-pitched voice or say something mean about the driver’s receding hairline. He didn’t curse them out or blow a raspberry or make any faces. 

Zombie-clone-Ace was not only dead, but also annoyingly, alarmingly, awfully—and that was only the A’s—dead fucking silent.

✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼

The dirt patch in front of Dadan’s Bed N’ Brek could only generously be called a parking lot. There was no blinking neon sign in front of the inn—despite Luffy’s completely helpful and wise suggestions over the years to drive up customer traffic—but there was a dingy old banner out front that announced that it was the inn’s “grand opening” despite the fact that it’s been open for the better part of three decades. 

The front of the inn was coated with a layer of white paint, contrasting with the sad looking, piss-stained sides of the building that Dadan hadn’t even bothered recoating. (“I’m not about to go broke buying no fucking paint,” she had grumbled. “Front is all anyone sees anyway.”) Which wasn’t true but Luffy wasn’t about to volunteer to coat layers of white paint over decades-old drunk-people-remnant. 

As they began to pull into the parking lot, they caught sight of a marine cruiser nestled in the front corner of the lot, close to the diner’s entrance. Two plainclothes officers were leaning against the hood of their car, sharing a cigarette and doing whatever marines do in their free time other than harassing poor people. 

Ace wrinkled his nose, speaking for the first time in what felt like fifty years. “Since when does Dadan let marines hang around?”

“Since never. Maybe her people ran out of fireworks,” Luffy offered. 

Their own run-ins with the law aside—some of which, to be completely fair, were a little warranted—Dadan never liked it when marines hung around the diner, for reasons nobody bothered asking and she never bothered explaining. The important point was that every time a uniform came in or a marine car was outside, she’d call one of her “contacts” to set off fireworks, sending the marines—eager to yell at what were probably just dumb teenagers, not that Luffy hadn’t been there before—to the other side of town. They either never noticed the pattern or decided it was an opportunity to reach their arrest quota or whatever. 

“The fuck is the point of wearing regular clothes if they’re still driving around a marine car?”

“They’ve never been very smart,” Luffy said.

“Hm.” Ace didn’t seem convinced. He turned around and put the truck in reverse, arm reaching around Luffy’s headrest. “I don’t need anyone running my plates.”

“Oooh!” Luffy said with some relief, “So you did steal this car!”

“Fuck you, I didn’t steal it,” Ace laughed, and the confused, awful stilted silence of the car ride was starting to seem more like a weird daydream. “I just don’t need to deal with marines on the one day I’m back in town.”

Oh, okay. The leather of the seat chafed the insides of Luffy’s thighs. It probably wasn’t even real leather. Did leather even come in red? He’s seen pink leather before, he’s pretty sure. 

“Just one day?”

Ace made a pained face, like he could read Luffy’s mind. He pursed his lips. “Can we talk about this later?” 

“Why? We’re talking now.”

“Because,” Ace said, and nothing else. Maybe that would have worked if Luffy were still five (it wouldn’t have then either, if he’s being honest) but it definitely wouldn’t work now. 

“Because…?” Luffy gestured for him to go on. 

“Because I don’t feel like doing this right now. Please?”

And it’s not like Luffy was convinced. The sun has nearly reached its peak. The shadows of the Bed N’ Brek and its surrounding buildings stretched onto the pavement under the moving sun. Calling it “one day” was being generous.

But Luffy had never heard Ace say please before in his entire life. He didn’t know Ace was capable of producing that sound with his mouth. Some weird, smelly dude at the Bed N’ Brek had lectured Ace about manners after he heard him not say “please” to Dadan in the kitchen 

(“I think it’s worse manners to have breath that smells like ass,” Ace had said to Luffy afterwards. “But you didn’t hear me say shit to him.”) 

They turned back onto the main road, but remained still as if Ace was waiting for Luffy’s permission to continue on like nothing had happened. His fingers were tapping rapidly on the steering wheel. The “please” was still ringing in Luffy’s head as if Ace had yelled it. Screamed it. Bellowed it. Eat cedara. 

Luffy sighed and crossed his arms. Fine. Whatever. 

“So...where're we going?”

Ace looked at him. His eyes glistened. “You know where,” Ace said simply. 

And maybe the reason why Luffy didn’t try to continue the conversation was because he really did know where. 

They left the secluded area where the Bed N' Brek stood and passed the strip mall full of closed-down businesses, save for the fancy carpet store that was still open (even though the only people that were ever in that store were buff guys that rolled up in big cars with tinted windows). They passed the marine base, where the both of them had been left to spend the night a handful of times. They barreled past the barber, their old high school, and the gas station. They ran a yellow, the last traffic light before they left Foosha proper. 

They eventually made it to the edges of town, brush-laden and overgrown, where all that was left of human life were telephone poles and chain-linked fences, until those too grew sparse before eventually disappearing. 

Ace turned onto the windy, two-lane road that broke off from the main street, instead taking the route that carved through Mount Colubo like a knife wound. In, out, around, through. If mountains could feel, Colubo would be in pain.

The road hasn’t been repaved in a long time. The rumble over the numerous potholes made Luffy feel like he was in a shitty massage chair. 

The last time Ace had driven him on this route, Luffy had homework he was ignoring at the bottom of his backpack. The car had been silent, notably because Ace didn’t believe in turn signals. It kinda smelled like Cheeto puffs. 

This time, the car didn’t smell like anything. Luffy didn’t know why that bothered him so much. Takis were way better than Cheetos.

✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼

It wasn’t a vast or impressive creek by any means. Most of the time it was barely deep enough for a toddler to wade in, and it ended abruptly and pathetically long before it could ever reach Foosha proper. Its water was clouded by sediment. Any fish that had called it home had long died out. There were no reeds, lily pads, or much of anything that would contribute to making a creek interesting or noteworthy. It would only get full enough to flood once every few years.

Still, in a world where they couldn’t call many things their own, it was their creek, so it was beautiful. They’d memorized the shallow bends, the places the creek bed would drop off, and where the sharp rocks would become smooth. They knew the smell of mud, the weight of the humid air, and the quaint sound of the trickling water. They knew what it had given them and what it had taken. Its ebbs and flows. Or maybe that was more of an ocean thing.

Around and above they were surrounded by a canopy of gnarled trees with half-dead leaves. The berries on them had mostly been picked clean by various wildlife, but Luffy didn’t mind too much. He had learned the hard way that eating them did this funny thing where his throat would close up. Still tasted pretty good, though. Like cherries, except no pits. And more tingly.

Ace did not take off his skinny jeans or pull out a pair of swim trunks in a miraculous display of foresight. Unfortunately for him, their first trip to the creek in years happened to take place during the rainy season, causing the creek to swell to a sorta respectable shin-deep level. Ace waded into the creek with his jeans still at his ankles. He moved unpracticed through the water, like he was parting oil. With how bad the dumping used to be, he probably was parting oil a little bit. 

Luffy had left his flip-flops on a nearby rock next to where Ace had left his new-looking sneakers. Luffy, perpetually wearing shorts, was more prepared than Ace. His straw hat blocked the worst of the sun from blinding him.

The creek water was cool and refreshing between his toes. The stones underneath his feet had been smoothed over by years of running water that had carved away their edges and bumps. 

Ace was looking up at the branches that stretched and twisted above them. The shadows dotted his face and his arms, crisscrossing over the tattoo on his right bicep. 

He was skinnier than when he had left, which wasn’t too surprising since he wasn’t living off of Dadan’s greasy food anymore. Luffy still wondered, though. Was he eating enough? Was he sleeping enough? Does he share a room with anyone now, or was he making enough to have his own place? Does he still have nightmares? Does he still sleep talk? And why was he smoking again?

Luffy glanced down at his hand, where a thin sliver of light had pierced through the foliage and pooled across his fingers. He closed his hand around it, but the light slipped away. 

Ace’s jeans were already soaked up to his knees as he tried to roll up the cuffs. He turned around to prop his foot up onto a nearby rock, as if that would make any difference.

“They’re already soaked,” Luffy observed.

Ace said nothing, continuing to fuss over his jeans.

“They’re…already soaked,” Luffy repeated, wading slowly towards Ace in a moment of clarity. He bent down to skim his fingers through the creek water and splashed it directly at Ace’s back. A declaration of war. 

Ace whirled around, his jaw dropped in fake outrage. He wasn’t fooling anyone, though. There was a gigantic grin stretched across his face. “So that’s how it’s gonna be?” 

Ooooh. Ominous. Foreboding enough to make Luffy pause for a beat.

Then he immediately kicked up a wall of water in Ace’s direction, nailing him in the face.

Throwing any remaining reservations aside about staying dry, Ace lunged at Luffy and tackled him into the creek, soaking Luffy from head to toe. Laughing, Luffy managed to roll out from underneath Ace, splashing water directly into his mouth. 

Ace pulled at Luffy’s leg as he tried to scramble away for respite, so Luffy dug his fingers into the riverbed and lobbed a chunk of mud behind him. He wasn’t looking backwards, but Ace let go of his leg and swore loudly, so he figured it worked. Luffy scrambled back onto his feet and ran further down the creek. 

“Piece of shit!” Ace yelled at his back with no real malice. Luffy could hear the smile in Ace's voice, but knew that the moment he slowed down he would get a mud ball straight to the face. He ran further downstream until he couldn’t hear yelling anymore. 

Luffy was laughing, giving away any chance he had at hiding up ahead. Instead he kept running, relishing the cool water droplets that hit his skin. Running just to run, to move. Usually, Ace would have caught him by now, but Luffy guessed that the weight of his jeans was slowing him down. Luffy heard a faint “SHIT” calling out behind him. 

It couldn’t have been that late—Luffy hadn’t even eaten lunch yet––but it was getting dark out. Probably had something to do with the clouds that rolled overhead, not quite heavy enough to rain but enough to block out the sun. A single beam of light escaped from the sky and pierced through the trees, finally laying to rest on a pillar of neatly stacked rocks up ahead.

Ah. Shit.

Their cairn looked untouched after all this time. Luffy waded closer.

It kind of bothered him, honestly. Made it feel like all the time that had passed since the last time he had stood in this spot was just a bad dream. That all the grieving and screaming and crying had never happened at all. That he had dreamt it, or imagined it, or astral-projected it or whatever. 

He took a step closer and used his index finger to trace the initial that had been crudely carved into the topmost rock. 

The sound of Ace’s trousers sludging through the creek alerted Luffy of his presence before Ace had said a word. The heavy breaths turned less labored until they stood silent, the only sound remaining being the gentle trickle of the creek. 

There were lots of silences between them now, Luffy noticed. Maybe some part of them was still waiting for it to be filled by someone else. The cicadas began to buzz in his place, a canopy of sound smothering the air and his breath.

“I ruined my keys, carving that,” Ace said quietly, the closest thing to a prayer that they were going to get.  

Luffy squatted in front of the cairn. He reached his hand down under the water and felt around until he could find a rock small enough to stack on top. It was dark gray and lumpy, probably more mud than stone. He watched as bits of it disintegrated in his palm. When he looked up, the large ‘S’ that was carved into the top of the cairn was staring back at him, judging him. He dropped the rock back into the creek.

“What’d you do with his car, anyway?” Luffy asked, voice low.

Ace didn’t say anything for a while. They both stayed still, anchored to the creek bed in their sopping wet clothes. Luffy knew that the answer was going to be one that he didn’t like. 

“Sold it,” Ace said. He refused to look Luffy in the eyes.

The words fell into the creek like a stone, rippling through the water and through Luffy. He blinked, hand tightening around nothing, nails beginning to break skin. The buzzing of the cicadas grew distant in his ears, drowned out by his own…anger? Sadness? Fear? All of the above but also none of them?

Luffy figured he had waited long enough. He stood up and turned to Ace.

“Is it later yet? Can we talk about why you’re leaving again after one day?”

“Can we not argue right now, please—“

“And stop saying please! It’s weird!”

“How is saying please weird?!”

“Because you’re weird!” Luffy yelled, unsure of how to communicate the overlapping thoughts in his head. So he just did. All at once. 

“Your pants are weird! And your car is too fancy! You aren’t wearing your stupid hat and you’re all far away. Your hair isn’t greasy, and you smell like, I don’t know, nice, even though you’re smoking again, and—“ 

The words seemed to keep coming, an avalanche. “It’s weird having a room to myself and it’s weird that the jukebox only plays good music now and it’s weird that Dadan asks me if I’m ‘doing alright’ and it’s weird that you didn’t say anything before leaving me!” 

He probably shouldn’t have said that last bit. Which usually meant that he really, really wanted to.

It was supposed to be quiet after all that. But the bubbling water around them only seemed to grow louder, cutting through the tension like nature itself was intruding on their conversation. 

It was as if the creek was trying to remind Luffy of something—of how life goes on, of how he should be grateful. Grateful that Ace had bothered to come back to Foosha at all, grateful that he still had a brother, and grateful that Luffy hadn’t accidentally continued a family tradition by getting himself killed in a horrible car accident a few hours ago.

And then Luffy was reminded that he was soaking wet in muddy water, sulking at a pile of rocks and weeds while on the verge of tears over a brother that didn’t even bother to say goodbye. Which brother he was talking about, Luffy couldn’t really tell anymore.

Ace stared at him, his jaw tight. The Ace that he knew would have swung at him by now, or at least shoved Luffy backwards, maybe hard enough to knock him back into the cairn and topple it over. Maybe they would have yelled and screamed at each other until they both ran out of breath, maybe they would have fought in the mud for real. But this Ace just stood there pathetically, arms limp at his sides. Maybe he was looking for the same thing that Luffy had been trying to find back in the truck. Or maybe Ace really was just going to punch him. 

Luffy had no idea because he couldn’t read him anymore. 

After a while, Ace just sighed, defeated. Which was kind of worse. 

“Look, I’m not leaving-leaving, I’m just…trying to figure stuff out.”

“Five years to figure stuff out?” Luffy’s voice cracked. The weight of his tears pushed against the last vestiges of restraint he had. “Are you stupid?”

Ace’s face was carefully blank, devoid of any redness or tears or anything that would indicate that he felt even a little bad about leaving Luffy behind. 

After a while, Ace spoke, voice annoyingly even. “You’re not a kid anymore, Lulu. You don’t need me sticking around all the time, and there’s stuff now. I can’t just—“ Ace paused. Closed his eyes. Took a deep breath. Opened his eyes again. “I can’t just do whatever or dump all my shit onto you. I’m older.”

”So what? Am I not a kid anymore, or am I too young to handle your shit?”

“It’s not about any of that,” Ace huffed. “I just have some stuff I need to take care of. You have your own life, and I have mine. I thought you knew that.” 

When they were little, the creak of the floorboards had always alerted Luffy whenever Ace would slip out of their room at three in the morning. There was that other time, when Dadan, Luffy, and Sabo had all caught Ace behind the Bed N’ Brek with a cigarette. And that time in ninth grade, when Luffy watched Ace stain their bathtub blue with hair dye.

But then, there were also the nights he’d sneak after Ace, feet silent against the floor as he tailed his big brother. The time he grabbed a cigarette from Ace’s nightstand, lit it just to see what the big deal was, and nearly choked to death on the first drag. The day he walked into school with red dye staining his hands, his neck, the back of his ears—everywhere except his hair, where it was actually supposed to go.

Of course Luffy knew that Ace had his own life. The same way Sabo used to have his. 

But come on. They’ve pulled each other’s baby teeth out. They’ve fought over the bathroom. They’ve skipped school together. They’ve proclaimed their hatred for each other dozens of times. They’ve punched and kicked and screamed and roughhoused, got grounded and yelled at and bullied and arrested together. And they’ve stacked a pile of stupid rocks by a stupid creek to honor their stupid dead brother. There was no universe where Luffy’s life wasn’t a little bit of Ace’s, and where Ace’s wasn’t a little bit of Luffy’s. 

“Yeah,” Luffy said, “You are just stupid.”

“Shut up Lulu,” Ace said, flat like week-old soda.

Luffy blinked, reeling from the lack of a reaction. He was ready for an argument, words and emotions and feelings bouncing around in his head. What was he supposed to do with them now, eat them? 

He sat on the creek’s edge with a huff, arms draped over his knees. The water bubbled past, loud as ever. The cicadas were back, too. Nature was being real dramatic about all of this.

“You’re not supposed to just agree with me,” Luffy said. 

“Then what am I supposed to say?”

“I dunno.” 

Which was a lie. Ace could say a whole bunch of things. He owed Luffy a lot of answers. Like where the hell he’s been, or why he never bothered to call, or where he got his stupid fancy car, or if he was a clone, a zombie, a clone-zombie, or just another stranger passing through his life the same way all the rest of the Bed N’ Brek patrons did.

Of course, Ace wasn’t going to give him any of these answers because they never did things the easy way. Whatever or whoever Ace was now wasn’t in the business of telling Luffy jack shit.

But of course Ace had the audacity to ask him a question.

“Why’d you call me earlier?” Ace said the next part real quiet. “Not like you knew I’d be around.”

Luffy turned the question over in his head. 

“Dunno,” Luffy mumbled. “I just did.”

Ace made a face, like Luffy’s answer wasn’t good enough. Boo-fucking-hoo. It’s not like Luffy could have offered him a better answer. Luffy didn’t exactly think when he speed-dialed Ace’s number—hadn’t even expected him to pick up. It was just instinct, to ask his big brother for help.

And that was the problem, wasn’t it? Five years apart, and Ace had appeared at Luffy’s beck and call like he had never left in the first place. If he had called sooner, would Ace have come then? The thought made Luffy’s stomach feel weird. Like he was hungry, but he wasn’t. 

“Remember how Dadan would only ever buy mustard from that old guy?”

Ace regarded him for a moment, seemingly deciding if he was going to let Luffy change topics. He opened his mouth, inhaled like he was going to speak. But then he closed it again, decided better of it. 

“She told me to go buy some more this morning, which I don’t really get because I think it’s mostly food coloring anyway. But then I crashed, and now I’m here. And you’re here. Sabo’s not here, though. I don’t really get why people are like, ‘Well, He’ll Always Be In Your Heart,’ but I guess it sounds nice.” 

WHAT LUFFY MEANT

“I just missed you.”

Luffy turned back towards the cairn, nodded once. “Good job staying put,” he said to the pile of stones and weeds. He patted the topmost rock. It wobbled a bit, but stayed put.

“We good now? You’re not gonna start bawling?” Ace asked.

“I wasn’t gonna cry!” Luffy shot back immediately.

“Sure, Lulu,” Ace teased, legs fighting to cut through the water.

WHAT ACE MEANT

“Missed you too. Also, there’s mud in your ears.”

Ace’s wet jeans made gross squelching noises with every step. Luffy followed close behind him, finding it easier to go upstream if Ace was already parting the creek ahead of him.

“Your pants are making weird sounds,” Luffy said.

“It’s your fault for attacking me!” Ace snapped over his shoulder with no real heat.

“It’s your fault for wearing stupid pants!”

“They’re not stupid!”

They kept bickering all the way back to the rock where they had left their shoes. By the time they made it back to the truck, the clouds had completely hidden any slice of sun that tried to break through. The sky was the color of smoke.

Ace put his keys into the ignition and spoke to the steering wheel.

“I thought about coming back every day.”

His voice was low and wobbly, which was supposed to make Luffy feel better. It was supposed to tell Luffy that Ace felt bad and that he wished that he had never left.

But the words sounded weird coming from Ace. Luffy was the crybaby. Ace was untouchable, unwavering, unrelenting, un-every adjective Luffy could think of, even the good ones. 

After Sabo died, Luffy had never once seen Ace cry. 

When Ace had left, Luffy cried until his head hurt. Until he could feel his heart pulse in his ears and his teeth, his throat and his stomach. And then he kept crying until he fell asleep. And then he had woken up on the floor, saw that Ace’s side of their room had been cleared of any and all of his belongings, and then cried some more. 

“Sorry it took forever,” Ace said. 

But it was so obvious that Ace was now different, malleable. That even though the cairn had remained unchanged, Luffy’s world and the people in it had bent and contorted irreversibly around it. And after seeing the fancy new truck, the gold chains, the white teeth, and the skin-tight jeans, Luffy wanted to ask one question more than anything else. It was only the single, silent tear finally trickling down Ace’s face that stopped him in his tracks, the question dying at his teeth. 

What took you so long?

Chapter Text

“DADAAAAN!” Ace yelled as he swung open the door of the restaurant. The door shut in Luffy’s face. He heard the next sentence muffled through the door. “Lulu fucked up his car!” 

Luffy swung open the door, hitting Ace in the back and causing him to stumble forward. “Did not! The road stopped working!”

Dadan emerged from the kitchen and stood in the doorway. Her copper-colored braids were laid meticulously along her scalp, contrasting with the tacky “Bed N’ Brek” apron that hung around her waist. It had splotches of various colors from years of use, a palette of stains. Ketchup. Mustard. Anchovy oil. Barbeque sauce. Someone’s blood, probably.

She squinted at Ace, blinked a few times as if she were seeing things. Maybe she was.

Finally, she spoke. “Anyone hurt?” She said nothing of Ace’s appearance from what might as well have been the dead. 

“No,” Luffy huffed. “‘’Cept my car.”

Her eyes narrowed and bore through Luffy. He checked to make sure his hat was still on his head. Cool, it was. Whatever problem she found in Luffy’s appearance couldn’t possibly be that bad, then.

After a moment she must have decided she was satisfied with whatever she saw in him, because she turned back to the kitchen without another word.

Luffy shoulder-checked Ace. “Snitch.”

Ace shoulder-checked him back. “You were never gonna tell her if I didn’t.” Ace checked his nails, a nervous tick left over from when they were kids. “You think she missed me?” 

Dadan appeared again and chucked a towel at each of them. “Stop getting my floors wet and go outside. Come ‘round the back when you’re dry.” She disappeared back into the kitchen before they had a chance to answer, calling behind her, “Don’t get no fuckin’ mud on my floors, either!”

Ace and Luffy exited from where they came in, probably still tracking mud, and sat on the curb right by the leaky hose, their dripping clothes adding to the puddle. Drip drip drip went the hose.

Ace leaned forward, elbows on his knees. His towel was draped over his head, obscuring his face. “She didn’t seem surprised to see me.” 

“Maybe she was more pissed about us tracking mud in,” Luffy offered. “You know how she is.”

“She seems the same.”

“Duh,” Luffy said. “She is the same.”

They watched a car inch past the Bed N’ Brek, tires hissing on the dry asphalt. Whatever water the creek managed to drink from this year’s spring rain clearly hadn’t made it to their part of Foosha. The grass sprouting up between the curb and the lot was brown. It almost blended in with the dirt. And there weren’t any dandelions to blow into Ace’s face.

“She didn’t even ask where I’ve been,” the towel said, and that’s how Luffy really knew that something was up with this dude, because why would he want Dadan to ask where he’s been? He could barely talk to Luffy in complete sentences. Maybe the zombie-clone theory had some truth to it after all?

“You want her to ask you?” 

“Dunno. Maybe?”

Luffy tossed his own towel to the side and leaned back, pebbles digging into his palms. The two trees planted at either end of the diner had no leaves for autumn to tug off. Luffy was waiting, waiting for Ace to say something else. Any second now. Any minute now.

“So hey…where have you been?” Luffy asked. He turned to look at Ace, but he was still talking to a towel.

The towel kept on doing that thing where he let the silence between them grow large and dense enough to take the shape of a person. It was really annoying. How was Luffy expected to have a conversation like this? 

Well. Guess it was up to Luffy to fill in the gaps all by himself. He’d been doing that a lot since becoming an only child. It was tiring.

“Magra figured out a way to make the hash browns suuuper crispy,” Luffy said. No response. Drip drip drip went the hose. Apparently crispy hashbrowns weren’t cutting it for Ace anymore because he was the insane one now.

“And now we have a lady that just specializes in soup. Isn’t that awesome? She just throws stuff in a pot all day and stirs it and it turns out amazing,” Luffy continued. She made cooking soup look so easy. She always poured Luffy double-portions and added a few extra pieces of meat. Easily Luffy’s favorite person in the kitchen. Not that Ace cared, since he was still in the middle of his towel impression and ignoring him. Drip drip drip went the hose.

“I bet I could be a soup guy. Just put some meat in and wait. And then add some more meat. Maybe bones? And like, milk.”

The towel made a noise. It was either a chuckle or a cough, but it was a reaction so Luffy would take that as a win. 

“You wouldn’t have anything to serve,” Ace finally said, draping his towel over his shoulders. “You’d eat it straight out of the pot.”

“Never said I was serving it to anyone.”

Ace laughed in a way that Luffy hadn't heard from him before (or maybe he had just forgotten how Ace normally laughed?) but he sounded like he was over whatever vow of silence he had going on. It was nice. This was nice. They were together and talking about soup like it was the only thing that existed. Ace was acting normal. So Luffy decided to try again.

“You never answered my question.”

“What question?”

They were interrupted by a screech of tires trying and failing to grip the road.

A SEQUENCE OF EVENTS IN A MARINE-FREE PARKING LOT

A mostly okay-looking gray minivan took a HARD turn into the Bed N’ Brek lot and circled around aimlessly.

Luffy did not understand this. The lot was basically empty.

The minivan eventually decided on diagonal-double-parking exactly where the marine car had been before. The front bumper was kissing the curb.

The driver swung open his door. He had a scowl on his face, as if it was taking everything in him to simply tolerate it all. His cargo boots seemed way too warm for the sticky summer evening. 

His hair was green. He looked like a Chia Pet.

He got out of the car, unfolding like an accordion. He had a black golf bag slung over his shoulder. He approached Luffy and Ace. 

“Do people—” he stopped to clear his throat, gravelly from disuse. He tried again. “Do people sleep here?”

Ace piped up first. “You good? Or do you just double-park as a hobby?”

Chia Pet proved unable to keep a conversation, which somehow wasn’t surprising. “Whatever,” he said, before attempting to stalk inside. 

His mistake was that he tried to go through the main entrance, the one that people weren’t supposed to use because Dadan had wedged a table up against it to fit in extra seating. Chia Pet would have known this if he had just taken a second to read the sign taped to the inside of the door. 

Luffy and Ace watched him attempt to push and then pull and then push the door again. He glared at the door as if it would open out of sheer willpower. He reached into his left boot and pulled out a knife like he was about to pick the lock. 

“Woah, woah!” Ace leapt up from the curb. “Read the sign! Side entrance!”

Chia Pet turned to them, knife in hand and pointed at them. The blade was gray but shined turquoise, like pigeon feathers. The grip was bone-colored. 

“Can I see that?” Luffy asked. 

“No,” Chia-Pet-Knife-Guy said. He looked back to the door, only now noticing the paper that had been taped to the inside glass: USE SIDE ENTRANCE. His scowl deepened as he turned to go around the corner. 

Before Chia Pet could leave his sight, Luffy called to him. 

“People do sleep here!”

Chia Pet looked over his shoulder. “You work here?”

“Kind of. Sometimes. It depends.” Luffy recalled what Chia Pet had asked them before. “If I give you a room key, can I see your knife?”

Chia Pet looked at Luffy. At Ace. Back to Luffy. And then for some reason, the sky. His entire chest puffed with air, like a bird about to sing. He let out a deep sigh that sounded like he’d been holding it in for ten thousand million billion years.

“Fine,” he said to the clouds. 

A very reluctant sounding bird, then.

Luffy followed him as he turned the corner to get to the side door. After pulling the door that clearly said PUSH, he finally made his way inside. 

“He’s not very smart, is he,” Ace said, rounding the corner from behind. It was not a question. 

“He’s funny!” Luffy answered anyway. “His knife is cool.”

After toweling themselves off, Luffy and Ace went into the Bed N’ Brek's kitchen/break room (and poker room, when business was slow). 

Despite the grimy exterior of the building, Dadan (and after great effort, sometimes Luffy) did a good job of keeping the inside clean. The tiled floors were mostly spotless except for some stubborn stains that were probably as old as time itself. 

The cooking appliances weren’t exactly new either, but Luffy knew that they were cleaned and taken care of regularly. The kitchen was buzzing with activity as the line cooks prepared for the lunch rush. It was a nice contrast to The Before Times.

During the Before Times—when they struggled to fill the dining room on a Friday night—the only thing that kept the Bed N’ Brek afloat was the collective decades of unpaid orphan labor. And look, it wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Dadan had put a roof over their head and fed them, which is more than they could say about any of their parents (except for Sabo, whose parents just sucked). 

So they worked.

Watch that pot simmer. Chop these tomatoes. Plate that catfish. Kick that guy out. Wash the dishes. Except Luffy was never allowed to do that last part after The Incident. Actually, he wasn’t really helpful with a lot of things, which was probably why Dadan had finally caved in and hired outside help.

Dadan had always been a good cook, but she was never built for running a kitchen. Bringing on staff who, a) were over the age of thirteen, and b) had actual restaurant experience, had turned the kitchen from completely dysfunctional to well-oiled but very shouty.

At the moment, Dadan was watching a pot simmer at the stove in front of the order window that peered into the dining room. The other chefs moved around her easily, like their creek’s water around the big rocks. Her back was turned to them, but she still greeted them in her signature, welcoming tone. 

“I’m guessing you motherfuckers don’t have my mustard?”

She opened a drawer to pull out a knife, which was for the food. Probably. Luffy felt thoroughly welcomed. 

“Nope,” Ace said. “Could probably scrape it off the highway if you really wanted to.”

As Dadan and Ace continued talking, Luffy snuck towards the one other cook that Dadan regularly kept on staff. Target spotted.

Luffy had to be strategic about this. Casual. He shouldn’t come off as too desperate or needy. He could start with an opener, something to ease the tension. Or maybe a joke! Luffy was hilarious, after all. 

“Hey Magra–“

“No,” the cook said, whirling around with a knife in hand. “The lunch rush is about to start,” He stepped towards Luffy, “-we’re low on white meat,” another step, “–and we don’t get another delivery until Monday. No.” He enunciated each word with a wave of his knife. 

Weirdly enough, this was the third time a knife had been pointed at Luffy within the last five minutes. Maybe he should be more worried about the amount of sharp objects that get pointed at him, but that was a problem for Can’t-Sleep-Luffy to think about later.

Awake-and-Hungry-Luffy had to keep it casual. Not too desperate.

“Don’t you have scraps? Some burnt fries? Leftovers? Please? Pleeeease?” 

Nice and subtle.

Luffy inched closer, going on his toes to peer over Magra’s shoulder at the chicken that he had been carving.

Holy shit. The skin was golden-brown, evenly crisped, and beautiful. The white meat looked moist and juicy. The house blend seasoning of brown sugar, garlic powder, and paprika made it glisten under the kitchen lights. And the smell, holy shit, was—

Luffy’s stomach growled loudly, reminding Dadan that he was unsupervised in the kitchen. On instinct—honed from years of keeping him out of the walk-in fridge—she grabbed the nearest non-sharp object, a half-chopped onion, and lobbed it at his head. He ducked without hesitation. The onion smacked against the wall before rolling pathetically across the floor. They watched in silence until it wobbled to a halt, deformed from the impact.

“You—“ she started, using her knife like a pointer finger, “—aren’t eating until you set up the rooms for tonight,” Dadan said. That made four times in the last five minutes. 

She then pointed it at Ace. “And you are taking orders. Start with green hair.”

“Huh? I just got here! Aren’t I a guest?”

Dadan gave him a flat look. 

“I know, Ace groaned, deflated. “Stupid question.”

The eyes in the back of her head (or whatever superpower it was) compelled Dadan to throw the other half of the onion at Luffy’s wandering hand, which was once again inches away from the chicken. He flinched back. The half-onion joined its discarded sibling on the floor.

Ace snorted. “You’ll get ‘em next time, Lulu.”

“Over my dead body, you will,” Dadan said, another onion at the ready. “Clean the fucking rooms.” 

✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼

To be completely honest, calling it a proper Bed-and-Breakfast was kind of overselling it. Which explained why their actual name was missing a couple letters.

There were five total bedrooms in the building, and two of them were occupied by Luffy and Dadan. Sometimes Magra crashed in one of them if dinner service was running long or if the weather was bad, so that really only left two rooms available for guests on a regular basis. And Ace was already using one of them tonight.

But it wasn’t like Foosha was regularly overflowing with tourists. This town was too out of the way from anywhere that mattered. So two bedrooms worked fine.

It was simple enough to replace the sheets and throw the old ones in the hamper, same as Luffy had done thousands of times before. He was back downstairs soon enough to hear another argument, this time in the dining room.

It wasn’t uncommon for Dadan to argue with a customer. Didn’t make it any less entertaining. 

And okay, look, it’s not like Luffy was stalking Chia Pet. He wasn’t. He was simply eating his hard-earned lunch at a counter seat that just happened to be next to where Chia Pet was sitting, conveniently within earshot of the argument.

“No weapons,” Dadan said, withholding what Luffy assumed to be Chia Pet’s order. “Especially after that stunt you tried to pull with my walls earlier.”

“Not my fault you can’t tell the difference between a revolving door and a wall, lady.”

“Your knife, or I’ll show you a door.” She made a gimme gesture.

They stared at each other. Luffy looked between the two of them, his own cheeks stuffed with a spicy chicken sandwich. Ace pretended like he wasn’t watching from the order window. The other diner patrons carried on like nothing out of the ordinary was happening, which. Well. Was true. 

Chia Pet rolled his eyes, escaping eye contact with Dadan. He reached down to his boot to retrieve his knife. Despite his annoyance he placed it gingerly on the table, though he didn’t look happy about it. Dadan pocketed it.

“Thank you,” she said. She gave him his food, a spicy chicken sandwich, same as Luffy. A man of taste.

“I’ll give it back when you leave.” She disappeared back into the kitchen. 

Luffy looked down at his plate, which was clean. Huh. No idea when that happened. Anyways. 

“So what now?” Luffy asked Chia Pet.

“What.”

“I said I’d get you a room if you showed me your knife, but now there’s no knife. Do you have anything else cool?”

“Uh-”

Ace materialized next to Luffy and gestured to Chia Pet’s golf bag, leaning innocently against the counter. 

“I bet that doesn’t have golf clubs in it.”

Luffy turned to Ace. “How do you know?”

“Does Knife-Guy really look like the type of dude that plays golf?”

“Guess not,” said Luffy. “But you aren’t supposed to judge people based on appearances.”

“Yeah, and when have you ever followed that rule?” Ace turned to Chia Pet. “Knife-Guy, what’s an eagle?”

“The fuck does a bird have to do with anything?” he said, “And stop calling me Knife-Guy!”

“You coulda made up some fancy golf bullshit and I would have believed you,” Ace said, putting up his hands. “Whatever, I’m not a snitch-“

“What about telling Dadan about my car earlier?” Luffy cut in. 

Ace sighed. “You know that’s different.“ He glanced at the golf bag. “Tell me you don’t have an AK in there, Knife-Guy.”

Chia-Pet-Knife-Guy’s face soured at the nickname but answered. “I don’t fuck with guns.”

“Good enough for me.”

And with that, Ace went back into the kitchen. Luffy heard the telltale sounds of yelling between Dadan and Ace, which meant that they were beginning to have a deep and thoughtful conversation. 

Chia Pet, trying to ignore Luffy entirely, willfully looked at his chicken sandwich like it was an enemy and took a bite. And then another. And then another. 

Luffy thought of his own sandwich that he had eaten like, a hundred years ago. He mourned over his empty plate before remembering why he was here in the first place. 

“Soooo…what’s in the bag?”

Chia Pet turned to Luffy, mouth now stuffed with fries and dribbling with ketchup.

He might have responded via the various sentence-sounding noises that came from his mouth, maybe. Some ketchup got on his chin. 

“You shouldn’t talk and chew at the same time, Chia Pet,” Luffy said. Ignore the fact that he did that shit all the time.

Chia Pet rolled his eyes. Despite his reaction, he did listen to Luffy’s advice and finished chewing. “Don’t call me that either,” he said. 

“Sure. You also look like those sponges where one of the sides is green.”

Eye roll again. Chia Pet seemed to do that a lot. Eyeballs like a hamster wheel. “Is it normally policy to insult your customers?” 

“Kinda!”

Chia Pet regarded Luffy, narrowing his eyes. Scanned the rest of the diner. Glanced through the order window, through which they could see Dadan and Magra bark orders at the rest of the kitchen staff.

“Don’t you have other tables to serve or something?” Chia Pet asked, flapping his hand vaguely elsewhere. “Let me eat in peace.”

“Dadan doesn’t let me wait tables anymore,” Luffy admitted. “Not too good at remembering which orders go to who. And I drop trays sometimes, when I try to balance too many things at once. Or eat the orders, which—I mean, really, they should probably know better. Well I guess Dadan does know better now, which is why I don’t wait tables anymore.”

Chia Pet—honestly, Luffy probably should get his real name, because that was getting to be a mouthful—said nothing. He just turned his head back to his sandwich and looked at it like he was going to fight it. He brought it closer to his face, and—

“Oh, right!” Luffy remembered. He hopped off his stool and went around the counter and into the kitchen. Dadan and Ace’s deep and meaningful conversation was actually being had at a normal volume. That probably wasn’t good. He’ll ask Ace about it later.

OVERHEARD: A SERIES

PART TWO: ACE VS. DADAN

“If you’d come back a millionaire, I’d get it.”

“It’s complicated.”

“Being broke ain’t complicated ‘til you start selling organs.”

“Who said I’m not already?”

“It’d explain your empty skull.”

Luffy continued past them into the “office” (it was really just a mop closet with a filing cabinet) and grabbed Chia Pet’s room key from the lockbox. Chia Pet’s knife had been put in there too, so Luffy took the opportunity to examine it. He unsheathed it from its case-thingy.

It was surprisingly heavy for such a small looking knife. The handle was white and covered in some kind of leather. The metal of the blade had little wiggles going across like a zebra. It was clean though, for something that seemed to be kept in a boot. Luffy could see his own face, tinted purple and turquoise in the reflection. 

More gentle than he had held perhaps anything else in his life, he put the knife back into its sheath and placed it back into the box.

Almost bumping into one of the waiters—another one of Dadan’s contacts that mostly communicated through grunts—Luffy found his way back to where Chia Pet was sitting.

“Already paid,” Not Chia Pet said, turning his stool to face Luffy. It was a good thing he did, because otherwise his voice was low enough to get lost in the lunch rush buzz of the diner.

“You waited for me?” Luffy asked, both pleased and surprised.

Chia Pet rolled his eyes. “As much as I enjoyed talking to you,” he said, wry, “You owe me a room key.”

“You still haven’t shown me anything cool!” Luffy said. Nevermind about what he had seen in the lock box.

Chia Pet glanced around nervously at the busy restaurant. He seemed to do that a lot. Antsy. Like he was waiting for something bad to happen. “Look…I’ll show you what’s in my bag, just not here.”

“Okay, when?”

It was then when a woman entered the restaurant with a little girl in tow. Luffy wouldn’t have noticed her at all if he wasn’t already facing the entrance. She shut the door behind her so it wouldn’t make a noise, then turned around, wide-eyed. Her hair stuck up in some places and clumped together in others. Her clothes were all wrinkly. Her bottom lip was bleeding.

She had a suitcase and duffel bag, the child following her donning a backpack. Luffy waved to get Dadan’s attention through the order window and nodded his head over to the entrance. 

Dadan caught sight of the woman, orange brows furrowing as she squinted through the window to get a better look. Luffy has watched her do this many times—her “pain-in-the-ass appraisal process” as she called it—to assess whether or not someone who had entered the restaurant will have to be escorted off the premises. It doesn’t happen nearly as often as one would think, probably because everyone in town who would cause trouble already owes a debt to Dadan, but out-of-towners gave them issues sometimes. 

The woman and child apparently passed (not that Luffy was really expecting otherwise) so Dadan left the kitchen and went out front to greet the woman. Ace followed her out, stopping next to Luffy to watch. He leaned against the counter.

The child from behind the woman’s leg was taking her surroundings in before her gaze settled on something. Luffy followed it until he too was looking at Chia Pet. He looked back and forth between them.

“You know those people?”

“Why the fuck would I?” said Chia Pet. “I don’t know why it’s looking at me like that.”

“It?” Ace laughed. “You mean the kid? With the unicorn backpack?”

“So,” Dadan started, voice cutting into the middle of their conversation. “You lost, or you booking a room?”

The woman answered quickly, digging around in her duffel bag. “Booking a room. How many nights can this get me?” She pulled out a crumpled wad of cash mixed with some coins for good measure. Not too unusual for the Bed N’ Brek. Dadan probably prefers being paid in cash anyway. 

Luffy watched Dadan mouth the numbers as she counted the money, sliding the bills and coins deftly between her manicured fingers. She slipped them into her apron pocket and wiped her hands on the front.

“Four nights,” Dadan said.

“The fuck?” Chia Pet said, turning to Luffy as if he had any say in how much Dadan charged for rooms. “If I’d given that hag that much she woulda only given me two and a half!”

Ace gave Chia Pet a weird look. “Huh. Didn’t expect you to know how to count.” 

“The fuck does that mean—”

“Oh, wonderful!” The woman said to Dadan, visibly relieved and unaware of any passive aggressive side conversations they were having. “Thank you so—“

“Hold on,” Dadan interrupted, “I’m sorry, but I need something for incidentals. You’ll get it back if you manage not to break anything.”

“You already have all the cash I have,” she said, anguished. “I guess I can make three nights work—”

“Doesn’t need to be cash. Valuables work,” Dadan cut in, not unkindly. 

The woman shifted on her feet, thinking. Her hand drifted, as if it had a mind of its own, to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. 

Luffy noticed it the same time she did. From her ear, three gold dangly earrings shaped like teardrops managed to sparkle in the flickering diner lighting. She took a second to unfasten them before holding them out.

“Do these work?”

Dadan, gentler than Luffy had ever seen her, took each earring one by one and held them in her palms instead of slipping it in her stain-splattered apron pocket.

“Dinner is at seven,” Dadan said, “Don’t expect anything fancy.”

When she noticed Luffy’s gaze, she gave him a the fuck are you looking at, which—fine, it’s not like Luffy hasn’t seen a similar exchange before. He knew Dadan was capable of being nice, when she felt like she needed to be. Kind, even, if the situation called for it. Which it probably did. 

It wasn’t just the crumpled bills or packed bags that told Luffy everything he needed to know about the new guests. It was their faces. Their eyes, which always seemed to drift behind them, waiting for something. The woman’s bottom lip, puffy and still bleeding. The child, an expert in turning invisible. 

Guests like them were never looking for a destination—just running away from one. It wasn’t the Bed N’ Brek’s job to ask questions or give advice.Their job was to simply exist as a place for someone to catch their breath, shovel food into their stomach, and figure out what came next. No fresh starts, no second chances. Just a truth that had been carved deep into Luffy’s bones time and time again. He knew this truth better than he knew just about anything else. 

THE TRUTH

This place was made to be left behind.

Before he realized it, he was looking at Ace dead in the eyes. Ace seemed startled by the eye-contact, but held his gaze. For the first time since seeing him again, Luffy could really, truly see him. And he saw that his brother understood because of course he did. Ace was running, too.

Because the kind of people who showed up here—single mothers with their children, scared teenagers with nothing but the clothes on their back, old men that sat at the bar alone for hours—they weren’t tourists. They weren’t on vacation. They were running. And you didn’t ask what they were running from.

✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼

Well, okay. Scratch that, kind of.

Luffy knew that you weren’t supposed to ask the guests questions. But honestly, Luffy never felt the need to because he could usually tell what someone’s deal was. The story of the woman and the girl, while probably tragic, was also one that Luffy has seen before. It was written all over their faces, all over the woman’s split lip and the girl’s disappearing-while-still-appearing act. Old guys drinking themselves stupid at the bar late into the night, that was easy too. And Luffy could kind of guess what Chia Pet’s deal was. Probably after something, because guys like him always were. Probably revenge. He looked like a guy who would care about revenge.

“Aaaaand this one is yours!” Luffy said, swinging open the door wide enough to ram its handle into the flimsy plaster wall behind it. Dadan had just caulked it over, too. “Oops.” 

Chia Pet did a funny sounding half snort half sharp exhale through his nose. He stepped around Luffy to drop his bag onto the bed. 

“The key?” He asked, putting his hand out.

“So, about that…” Luffy said, putting it in his hand. “This key is to get up here and into the bathroom. Which is the only room with a lock.”

Chia Pet turned the key over in his hand, staring at it like Luffy had handed him another knife. He seemed to finally process what Luffy had just said. Guess he was a bit slow.

“What? ”

Luffy shrugged. “Yeah, none of the bedrooms have locks. Dadan says it’s ‘cause we’ve had to break down too many doors.”

Chia Pet blinked at him. “Why?”

“Uh, cause people lose keys?” Luffy said even though it was obvious. Chia Pet really was slow. “One time Magra got real into it and tried to kick one down, but he twisted his ankle. So Dogra tried, and then he also twisted his ankle. Then Dadan used a crowbar but the wood around the door snapped so we had to replace the whole thing. Dadan said it was a waste of money so now we just—y’know. No locks. Except for the bathroom because I think it's illegal if we don’t have one for the bathroom?” 

“That’s what you guys are worried about? What about—” Chia Pet dragged a hand down his face. “Y’know what? Nevermind.” He plopped down onto the bed next to his golf bag, testing the mattress. It squeaked. Loudly.

“Comfy?” Luffy asked. A twin XL probably wasn’t gonna cut it (get it?) for Chia Pet, but it would have to do.

The bed squeaked again as Chia Pet shifted. “Barely.” 

The golf bag was heavy enough for the mattress to sag slightly under its weight. The sight lit a match inside Luffy’s brain. 

“So?” Luffy gestured for him to go on. “That’s not a golf club.”

Chia Pet did that thing where he looked upwards at something then sighed like he had been holding the air in since the last ice age. 

Wordlessly, he unzipped the bag and pulled out an Entire Fucking Sword. The revenge theory was growing stronger by the second.

The handle was purple, with wavy gold embellishments at the top and bottom of the hilt. The blade was half black, half silver, and fully sick as hell.

And just when Luffy was about to start gawking, Chia Pet pulled out another sword—this one with a cool red-and-gold theme going on—and laid it next to the first. They were by far the shiniest things in the room, and probably within at least a five block radius. They did that thing that shiny things do, where they catch any sliver of light available to them and reflect it back twice as bright. Blinding, almost.

Luffy's eyes practically fell from their sockets. “Can I hold them?”

“No.”

“Why not?!”

“Wasn’t part of the deal. You can leave now.” He started to block the view with his body, but Luffy navigated around him easily and stood directly in front of the bed. He kept on switching his focus between the two swords, unsure of which one he wanted to look at more. His hands were even folded nicely behind his back and everything, like you were supposed to do in museums.

“You fight with these?”

“No, I just carry them around for decoration,” Chia Pet deadpanned. He then put one hand on each of Luffy’s shoulders and attempted to steer him out the room. 

Of course, that wouldn’t work. Luffy still had questions.

“Are you like one of those wandering swords-people? Looking for revenge?”

“Half-right.” A gentle nudge against Luffy’s back, towards the door. Luffy was like 99% sure the sword part was right, so the revenge thing was wrong. Weird.

Chia Pet’s palms were warm. Not weird. Just nice. 

“Can you cut rocks? What about metal? Or– ooh! –a bullet? In mid-air!”

“Depends.” A more forceful shove towards the door.

“So you’re like a dual wielder then? Two-sword samurai?”

Luffy was fully expecting to be completely ejected from the room, but any hint of struggle ceased immediately. Chia Pet got very, very quiet. Luffy couldn’t see his face.

After a while, a simmering voice: “You can leave, now.” 

Well. Luffy knew when he had pushed someone’s buttons enough, though this time he really had no idea what he could have possibly said. He turned to leave for real this time, but the woman and child from earlier were standing in the doorway and blocking his path.

“More people, great!” Chia Pet said, throwing his arms up. He clearly was not as happy as his words may have suggested, “Should we invite more people from downstairs into my hotel room that I paid for with my own money? Throw a party? Get some firecrackers?”

“Dadan banned those a while ago,” Luffy offered. Chia Pet shot him a withering look. If Luffy was a flower he probably would have wilted and died.

The woman looked between the two of them, figuring out when it was a good time to speak. When she did, every word sounded like an apology. “So so sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt anything important—”

“You’re not.” Chia Pet sighed, having enough sense to look at least a little guilty for snapping at her. The child watched the exchange from behind the woman’s legs. Her eyes were like spotlights.

“Okay, good. I just wanted to ask…are you Roronoa Zoro?”

Chapter Text

“Okay, good. I just wanted to ask…are you Roronoa Zoro?”

The answer was probably yes, because Chia Pet—or Zoro, apparently—went rigid. 

Luffy watched Zoro’s eyes dart around as he mapped out the entire room. Window. Table. Keys. He could almost hear the calculations clicking into place, each possibility weighed and discarded. We’re only two floors up, Luffy imagined him thinking, so I could kick in the window and escape if needed. 

(What Zoro probably wasn’t thinking was that Dadan would definitely come after him for breaking a window. That’s okay, because Luffy was thinking it for him and it was pretty funny.)

Zoro’s gaze lingered on the bed, where the swords laid out in the open like a giant neon sign that read “HI, I HURT PEOPLE.” Notable however, was the fact that Zoro hadn’t hurt anyone since arriving here. He’d been shifty. Quiet. Suspicious. Weird. But never dangerous.

“…Who are you with?” Zoro finally asked. Half of him was facing the woman and girl. The other half looked ready to lunge for his swords.

The woman raised her hands in surrender. “No one! God forbid, no one. Rika just recognized you from Shells Town.”

Luffy had no idea what she was talking about, but it’s not like he had to. Zoro, though? No light bulb. None. Just tilted his head, like a confused dog.

“I’m Ririka?” The woman said like it was a question, even though Luffy was pretty sure she didn’t have to ask Zoro for her own name. “You bought food from us at the farmer’s market?”

Zoro tilted his head further. Any more and he’d snap his neck in half.

Ririka sighed. Luffy assumed she was about to give up trying to remind Zoro who they were, but instead she provided:

A DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF CERTAIN EVENTS AT SHELLSTOWN

1. Some dog completely tore through their supplies cart at the farmer’s market, tackling the little girl, named Rika apparently, in the process.
2. Ririka apprehended the owner, who refused to take responsibility
3. The owner, turned out, was the local marine captain’s son, who proceeded to yell and threaten Ririka and her daughter in front of the entire market
4. There was a line behind him. Zoro had been in that line.
5. An exchange took place.
1. “So, you gonna keep bitching and moaning or you gonna let me buy my fucking food?”
2. “Who are you to tell me what I can do in my own town? You need to be mindful about who you’re talking to!”
3. “Your mutt starts tearing through random shit and attacking people, and you wanna talk to me about ‘being mindful’?”
6. The exchange got punchy.

“And then after that he called the marines on you so you asked where the nearest bus stop was, and then asked us again after you went in a circle–”

“Okay, okay,” Zoro interrupted. “I remember.” 

“You asked us three times! I counted,” said Rika, who finally decided to pipe up.

Zoro looked like he was in physical pain. “Great.”

Ririka put her hand on Rika’s shoulder, gently silencing her. “We just wanted to thank you for sticking up for us. Captain Morgan and his son hurt too many people in that town."

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Zoro said, looking at everything but the person he was supposed to be communicating with. “I was just hungry.”

Luffy followed Zoro’s gaze to the hole in the wall that Luffy made when he swung open the door. The bits of caulk remaining were the wrong shade of white and had never blended in with the rest of the wall in the first place. 

Ririka smiled, endeared by his shyness. “Either way, you left town before we could thank you properly.”

“Well…” Zoro started, but Luffy got bored and stopped listening. Instead, he watched Zoro’s every movement. How his hands were steady, careful, almost reverent, as he slid his two swords back into that weird golf bag. He didn’t just carry them. He held them. Kept them close, like they meant something. 

Zoro zipped the bag closed, then turned abruptly. Luffy didn’t look away fast enough. “Why are you all quiet now?” He demanded. “Don’t you have anything to say?” 

Which was very interesting because up until now, Zoro had been doing everything within his power to avoid Luffy’s input. But now Zoro was now looking at him like he needed something from him, which was kind of exhilarating. Kinda like taking a shower when the hot water wasn’t working. Except Luffy was willingly subjecting himself to this moment, to the way the freezing water pelted his skin. He stared back because Zoro was nice to look at. Big arms and sharp eyes. Weird but cool hair. Tall. Shiny and new.

Luffy shrugged. “Why would I? I wasn’t there.”

Zoro dropped his head in defeat, turning to his bed and shouldering his bag in one smooth motion like he’d done it a million times before. Probably because he has.

He stepped towards Ririka and Rika. (Did that mean that if Luffy had a kid, he’d need to name it Luluffy?  Was Dadan’s mom named Dan? Much to think about.)

“‘Scuse me,” Zoro mumbled to Ririka, still in the doorway. “I need a drink.”

She and Rika side-stepped out of his way. Zoro took a wrong turn but eventually managed to make it to the stairs.

“A drink?” Ririka wondered out loud. “It’s three in the afternoon.”

✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼

The kitchen staff were in the middle of prepping and the wait staff were all on break, so it was up to Luffy and Ace to mop the floor before dinner service started.

“Can’t believe she’s making me do this shit,” Ace mumbled as he forcefully dunked his mop in the bucket. Soapy water sloshed out over the edges. “Actually, nevermind. I can.”

Luffy was perched up on the countertop, taking a short break. He had genuinely been doing his part of cleaning, okay? If anything, it was annoying that Ace was complaining so much. He got to skip out on this for years, while Luffy was stuck wiping up dirt and mud every day. 

Nevermind that it was only assigned to him everyday because it was one of the few jobs he could do without breaking anything. That wasn’t the point.

Luffy watched Ace mop the floor from his countertop throne and pretended like he was the King Of The Bed’N’Brek watching a servant do his bidding. For what it was worth, Ace didn’t actually seem that annoyed. Cranky, maybe. Tired. But he had the beginning of a smile forming, a scowl thawing out. He still bitched and moaned, but only because bitching and moaning was something they all did, easy as breathing and twice as often.

Ace’s smile went away as soon as he noticed Luffy on the counter doing fuck all.

“Why do you get to fuck around?”

“Taking a break.”

“Yeah? Sword guy, how long has he been there?”

Zoro, who was sitting at the counter next to Luffy nursing a pint of beer, turned his stool to face the both of them. The nickname bounced off of him like an onion against a wall, no reaction. Luffy really thought it would take them more time to break Zoro in.

“Dunno, five minutes? Ten?”

“Ten!?” Ace let go of his mop and let the handle clatter to the floor. He collapsed dramatically into a booth behind him, closing his eyes. “Shit, I’m taking a break too.” 

Luffy snorted and turned his attention to Zoro.

Apparently the beer here wasn’t too bad. Dadan had proclaimed as much when they had first gotten it on tap. Something about “having new standards,” which Luffy has never heard of before. All beer tasted like earwax to him, old or new standards.

Earwax seemed to be good enough for Zoro, who was currently downing his third glass of it. Luffy watched as he alternated between pouring beer straight down his throat and sighing afterward like he was drinking soda. Maybe this was what he counted as a meal. The apples of his cheeks were a touch rosy.

“Sooo,” Luffy started. “Are you like, drunk?”

Zoro let a puff of air exhale through his nose. His version of laughter, apparently. Didn’t cows do that? Or like, bulls. Horses. Large animals. 

“No. Just had a headache.”

“‘Cause that lady was nice to you? That sounds healthy.”

“Leave me alone,” Zoro said, vaguely waving his hand to shoo Luffy away. Zoro’s gaze was fixed on the empty glass in front of him, like he could make it magically fill up again if he thought at it hard enough.

A loud clatter from the kitchen. Both him and Zoro craned their necks to watch the exchange. The kitchen staff were loud and shouting and annoying, but that went without saying.

OVERHEARD: A SERIES

PART THREE: KITCHEN VS. KITCHEN

“CORNER!”

“Hey, did you take my knife? Can’t find it anywhere.”

“HANDS!”

“Why the fuck would I take your knife?”
“FIVE CUPS OF CHOPPED KALE–hey, since when have we served salad?”

“It’s a nice knife! My wife bought it for me.”

“Dadan wanted something green on the menu, and she doesn’t like key lime pie.”

“No one wants your wife’s knife, dude.”

Who came to a diner and ordered salad? Magra, maybe. His stupid little red mohawk and goatee made him look like a rooster, which probably made him against eating his own kind. Now that he thought about it, Luffy has never seen him eat chicken even though it was half of the menu. 

“You guys seem to argue a lot,” Zoro observed, cutting into Luffy’s thoughts.

Despite what he claimed before, maybe Zoro was a little tipsy, because this was the first time he had initiated a conversation with Luffy all on his own with zero prompting. Like he wanted to talk to him and everything.

“Not really! That’s just how we talk.”

“He’s right,” Ace called, still laying down in one of the booths. “That’s how people communicate around here, Lulu just doesn’t know any different.”

“Not true! I can be polite!” Luffy said. He looked at Zoro. “Right?!”

“You called me a dish sponge.”

“Yeah, politely!”

The door to the kitchen burst open, but Luffy didn’t see anyone come through at first.

Moments later, a voice, small but mighty: “YOU,” it proclaimed.

Luffy looked around from atop the counter. Ace was still laying down in one of the booths. Zoro sat hunched over his beer, staring at the floor like it had insulted him. Luffy followed his gaze, and there she was.

Rika stood at Zoro's feet, glaring straight at him.

Wow. She was small. Very punt-able. Luffy forgot that they made people in that size.

“Teach me how to fight with swords,” Rika said. “So I can beat up Captain Morgan!”

Zoro turned away. “You’ll hurt yourself,” he said, brushing her off. His golf bag was resting against the counter. He pulled it closer to lay against his thigh.

Rika frowned, then looked around. Her eyes settled on the mop that Ace had left unattended. She navigated around the puddles on the floor to obtain it. The handle was approximately two heads taller than she was.

She pointed it at Zoro. “Fight me!”

Zoro’s face eclipsed with an expression that Luffy didn’t recognize. Didn’t seem happy, but not sad either. Recognition, maybe. Of what, Luffy had no clue.

“I’m not fighting a kid,” Zoro said, turning his back to Rika.

She stomped back over to both of them and jabbed Zoro in the back with the mop handle.

“Fight! Me!” She enunciated each word with another poke.

Luffy slid closer to Zoro and poked his head into his line of sight. Zoro pointedly looked in any direction but Luffy’s.

“God. You’re so boring,” Luffy said, hopping off the counter.

He grabbed the mop he had been ignoring for the past ten minutes and pointed it at Rika, noodle part first. The soapy water dripped onto his hands. “I’ll fight you!”

Clearly, he wasn’t her first choice and Luffy didn’t take it personally. And Luffy understood, he really did. Zoro was the dude who beat up those marines for her, not him. But still, disappointing a kid (who was like, three? Maybe four? Luffy was never good at telling these kinds of things) didn’t sit right with him.

“What?” Luffy asked. “You think I’m not as strong as him? I could totally beat him in a fight.” He threw the last part over his shoulder at Zoro’s back. These words seemed to do something. They stuck onto Zoro and tensed him up. 

Rika immediately picked up on Luffy’s train of thought. “You’re right. Guess he’s chicken,” she said, in that devastating tone of voice that little kids used when they were casually insulting people. Luffy had a lot to learn from this kid.

Zoro’s right eye twitched. “Nuh uh,” he said.

Luffy grinned. Got you. Sinker, hook, and line. Those words in some order.

“I could beat you with my eyes closed!” Luffy said. “I bet those swords are decorations after all.”

Ace’s voice carried from his booth. “Wait, swords?”

Luffy ignored his brother, a talent that had lain dormant for many years.

Zoro took the bait, because of course he would. He sighed, like he knew he was falling for it but couldn’t help himself. “Gimme the mop.”

Zoro snatched the mop out of Luffy’s hand before he could react, tossing it from one hand to the other to test its balance. Then, maybe just to show off, he spun it behind his back, something that probably would have cut off his fingers if he had been using a real sword.

Rika didn’t seem to care. She giggled in delight and tightened the grip on her own mop.

“Mirror me,” Zoro said. He slid one foot behind him, bending his knees. Rika did the same. “It’s crucial to keep track of your center. It’s the most important part of any sword strike.”

“Really?” Luffy interrupted. “Not the sword? I feel like the sword is the most important part of a sword strike.” Honestly, the whole “strong, silent, and scary” thing that Zoro seemed to be going for was ruined by the fact that he was also super dramatic.

Zoro exhaled slowly through his nose. Luffy was unsure if this was a part of the whole keep your center thing or if he was just sighing. That was also something he did a lot. 

What even was a center, anyway? His chest? How could anyone have trouble keeping track of that? It was right there. 

Finally, Zoro seemed to gather the temper to respond to Luffy without yelling at him. His tone was measured, even. “You don’t need a sword to understand how to use one.” 

Luffy squinted. “Really? I dunno about that…”

“We’re literally using mops!” Zoro waved his around, mimicking the motion of mopping the floor. It was a good thing that Zoro was a swordsman and not a janitor, because he clearly sucked at cleaning.

“Sounds fake,” Luffy responded, enjoying the way Zoro seemed to come alive every time Luffy pushed his buttons. Luffy couldn’t help it, not that he wanted to.

A hint of amusement colored Zoro’s voice. “Then don’t listen.” 

“I never do!” Luffy chirped.

“Great.” He turned his attention back to Rika. “So keeping track of your center helps you stay adaptable to–” blah blah blah blah yeah whatever Luffy was over it already.

He glanced over to Ace, who was now sat up in the booth with his elbow propped on the table. He was watching Zoro and Rika closely, probably paying better attention than Luffy to what they were saying. Maybe Ace wanted to learn how to swordfight, too.

That was fine. Luffy kept to his word and didn’t listen.

AN ADMISSION

But he did watch.

He watched how Zoro would nudge Rika’s elbows in the right direction, how he would adjust her grip to show her how to hold the handle better. How seriously he seemed to be taking all this even though they were wielding wet noodle sticks and Rika was like, two.

Rika was trying to balance the awkward height of the mop as she lunged forward towards Zoro’s legs. Zoro easily nudged the mop handle with his own, sending hers clattering to the ground.

“Dead,” Zoro announced. “I win.” 

“Not fair! You’re taller than me!” Rika huffed. “And I thought you were teaching me!”

“I am teaching you,” Zoro said. “Rule one? Don’t pick fights with me, ‘cause I’ll win.”

“You’re way too proud of yourself for beating a four-year old,” Ace remarked from his seat.

“I’m six and a half!”

A smile was fighting to bloom across Zoro’s face, and for some disconnected reason Luffy suddenly felt like running a marathon. Or punching something. Or maybe building a house, mowing a lawn, lifting a car, or all of the above at the same time.

Unfortunately all of the previous options were unavailable, except for maybe the car thing. Instead, Luffy’s energy was used to reach over the counter to grab a broom and lunge at Zoro’s back with it.

Zoro whipped around and stopped Luffy’s attack with a well-placed and totally unfair block with the end of his mop handle. His eyebrow raised in amusement, the smile finally managing to take over his entire face and wow his eyes were like, silver. Luffy didn’t know they made eyes like those.

“Were you not listening to rule one?” Zoro said, bordering on breathlessness. It was so annoying that they didn’t have air conditioning, because Luffy always sweated so much during the summer. But Zoro was perfectly dry. Not sweaty at all. His face was so close. 

“Already told you,” Luffy replied, heart pulsing in his ears. “I never listen.”

Rika saw her opening and whacked Zoro with the wet end of her mop, splattering dirty soap water all over his clothes. For good measure, she dragged it up and down his right leg, slow and deliberate, like she was painting a canvas.

“Deserved,” Ace heckled from his seat.

Zoro’s hair looked like a freshly watered grass lawn, glistening and dewy under the diner lights.

And then, without hesitation, he smacked Luffy in the face with his own mop. One of the strings managed to get into Luffy’s mouth. Tasted soapy. Did… this count as brushing his teeth?

“Hey!” He pointed at Zoro, like he was five. “What was that for?!”

Zoro shrugged. “I can’t attack a little girl.”

Uh. Yes he could, actually. She started it. Luffy couldn’t, because they were on the same team, but Zoro? No excuses. Maybe he’d trained Rika too well during their lesson and was afraid to face off against his own student. Too much centering.

So Luffy grabbed a dish rag off the counter and whipped it across Zoro’s arm, water droplets spraying with the impact.

“Hey—!“

But Luffy and Rika were already moving.

“SURPRISE ATTACK!” She shrieked. She ran at Zoro with her mop once again, flicking soap water in every direction. Zoro twisted out of the way, movement fluid and calm in a way that really really didn’t seem fair.

“Rule two: don’t yell ‘surprise attack’ when you’re trying to surprise someone.”

He took a sponge from one of the water buckets and chucked it hard enough for it to hit Luffy directly in the forehead and stick. Droplets of water ran down the bridge of his nose.

Luffy peeled the sponge off his face and handed it to Rika for use in future combat.

From there the dining room erupted into chaos.

Zoro threw a mop at Luffy like it was a spear. Rika clambered up onto a table so she could shove a wet sponge down the back of Zoro’s shirt. Luffy pelted balled-up dishrags at him like they were snowballs, not that he’d ever thrown one before. And most importantly, Luffy and Rika were totally winning. 

And then a shadow loomed behind Luffy. He turned around, but it was already too late.

Betrayal. Tragedy. Violence. Bloodshed. It all happened in slow motion.

His straw hat. His hair, his shirt, his shorts. All drenched in water that was equal parts dirt and soap. For the second time today, Luffy’s clothes were dripping all over the floor.

Ace stood over him, shaking out the rest of the bucket over Luffy's head. Ace was completely dry.

“Oops,” Ace said. “I slipped.”

Zoro and Rika burst into laughter, dropping their mops and holding onto tables to keep themselves upright. Zoro’s laugh was sudden, loud, and caught Luffy completely off guard. Luffy felt like he had been punched in the throat. Twice.

Rika, on the other hand… 

“Hey!” Luffy said, pointing at her like she could feel it. “I thought you were on my team!”

Rika managed to get some words out between her laughs. “I was! But he got you goooood.”

Luffy gasped. Betrayal for the second time in as many minutes. He yanked his soaked hat off his head and gave it a good shake, sending more droplets of dirty mop water in every direction, including Ace’s.

Ace danced back a step. “Dude, you’re so gross, stop— ”

Luffy did not stop. The possibility of stopping had never even crossed his mind. Only revenge.

What Luffy did do was lunge two steps forward where Ace had only taken one backwards, and full-body tackle him into a slimy, gross, mop-watery hug. Ace squirmed, but it was already too late. Luffy was an expert in holding onto things and not letting go.

When they were kids, Luffy used to get stuck smushed against Ace’s chest whenever they’d hug like this. But now? Now they were the same height, which meant Ace got just as soaked as Luffy.

Luffy’s waterlogged hat dripped water all over Ace’s stupid fancy shirt and his even stupider jeans. Ace’s gold chain glinted in the light, and Luffy hoped it was fake gold so the whole thing would rust and crumble off his neck.

And then—

Luffy broke his grip around Ace and pivoted to chuck his dishrag straight at his other target. The wet fabric smacked into Zoro’s face with a loud splat. Zoro peeled the rag off with the slow, deliberate motions of a man ready to to maim.

Luffy beamed. “Surprise attack!”

Dead silence. A fat drop of water trickled down Zoro’s cheek. He looked like he was contemplating murder. Then, before any of them could move—

“The FUCK are you brats doing out here?!”

And there was Dadan with her fists balled at the door that separates the dining room and the kitchen. Magra stood obediently beside her, a chicken-shaped shadow. A very large, possibly vegetarian one.

Dadan looked at the empty bucket discarded at Ace’s feet, the mops lying unused and forgotten, and the puddles of water pooling in the uneven parts of the floor.

She pressed her fingers to her temples and massaged them. Luffy didn’t really get why she did that because it never seemed to calm her down.

Her unamused gaze settled on the four of them, and Luffy could only imagine what she was thinking:

AN INCRIMINATING SIGHT ACCORDING TO DADAN, PROBABLY

1. A little girl, mostly dry except for her sleeves. They sagged under the weight of water.
2. A watered lawn with legs. He was more damp, but it seemed like most of the damage had been limited to below his waist.
3. Dipshit number one. Drenched from head to toe and shivering like a pathetic wet chihuahua. Holding a broom, even though he was supposed to be mopping. 
4. Dipshit number two. Bone dry. Holding an empty bucket. Acting like he hadn’t just disappeared for five years.
5. Stuck to the ceiling, a sponge. Watching over all of them.

Luffy hoped with all his heart that Dadan rubbed her temples like that so her hands were too preoccupied to strangle someone. He was currently standing the closest to her.

She eventually spoke, measured and slow and therefore more terrifying than any other version of her. “And who is going to clean this up?”

Zoro, standing in a soapy puddle like he hadn’t just spent the last five minutes committing war crimes with a sponge, gestured lazily between himself and Rika. “We’re guests.”

Silence.

Dadan didn’t react. 

Zoro moved slowly, as if he were trying not to startle a bear. He slung his golf bag over his shoulder and took a single step backward. Rika followed his lead.

“Thank you,” he said, voice calm. Neutral. “For your hospitality.”

Without breaking eye contact, the two of them took another step back. And then another. Repeated this until they were at the door leading to the kitchen and therefore their escape. 

Luffy could only stand there and stare. Traitors, both of them. 

They very slowly backed away until they were behind the safety of the kitchen door. Dadan, Luffy, and Ace remained in utter silence.

Luffy and Ace opened their mouths at the same time to argue—

“Zip it,” Dadan said. Their mouths clamped shut. “Pick up a fucking mop.”

✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼

Dadan, Ace, and Magra got to use the dry mops. Luffy got…towels wrapped around his feet. Which…okay, actually, sliding around the floor was way more fun than pushing around a mop, but it still felt kinda unfair.

Luffy attempted a moonwalk with his towel-skates, squeaking each foot against the linoleum until he knocked his back into the wall. He pivoted, tried again—one, two, three—until he knocked his back into Ace and almost toppled over another water bucket. He didn’t even spill anything this time, but Dadan had already been set off.

“This is the second fucking time today you been in this restaurant soaking wet,” Dadan said, wiping up a puddle. “Should I build you a doghouse out back? Get you a water bowl?”

“Would free up another room for guests,” Magra supplied.

Luffy maneuvered through a beautiful three-point turn and jabbed a finger in Ace’s direction.

“His fault! He poured the entire bucket on me!”

“You’re the one picking fights with toddlers,” he shot back.

“Yeah, with toddlers,” Luffy corrected. “I was helping her!”

They continued alternating between cleaning and arguing until the sky began to splotch with the sunset’s colors. Red here, orange there. Beautiful sunlight sinking under the horizon, or whatever. Luffy might even find it pretty if he weren’t still damp with mop water.

“Fine,” Dadan eventually said. “Floor’s dry enough. Go change,” she told them, collecting their mops. Luffy slid over to his flip-flops and tossed his rag-skates into a bucket. 

“Great!” said Magra, clapping his hands together. “I’m taking a break. And a shower. I’m exhausted.”

“Try not to take a century-long shower like last time. Be back by dinner service,” Dadan warned him. “Next time you run up the water bill it’s coming out of your paycheck.”

✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼

Magra’s paycheck wasn’t looking so hot.

It was an hour into dinner service and he still wasn’t done in the shower.

Luffy wasn’t that pressed about it. He wasn’t the one paying the water bill, and it’s not like he showered that often anyway. But Magra didn’t even have that much hair! It was just his stupid little rooster mohawk and a beard. It was like he was cooking himself in there. Maybe it was so he could feel closer to the chickens he prepared in the kitchen. Maybe he had to understand what the chickens felt like in order to cook them so good.

But Magra being gone meant that their fry chef would have to take his place, which meant the dude that runs stuff to and from the freezer would have to take over the fry station, and that meant that the dishwasher would have to become the dude that runs stuff to and from the freezer. 

And of course Luffy wasn’t allowed to wash dishes anymore, so instead he was stuck clearing tables, the job that required the least amount of contact with the dishes. Just take one plate, put it in the giant tub on the cart, and then move on. Dadan had warned him that she’d cut him down to three meals a day if he broke any more dishes, so he was careful. Mostly.

The diner was full, and there were still a couple of people waiting by the entrance for a table to clear up. Luffy wasn’t sure whose idea kids-eat-free night was, but he wanted to hit them. It was annoying having to maneuver the dishcart around the waiters and the diners and the drunks and the little kids running around. 

(Okay, maybe he was pressed about Magra taking so long.)

But as far as little kids went, Rika was fine. She was happy dangling her stubby little toddler legs from one of the counter stools as she scribbled rainbows into her coloring book. She had somehow talked her way into french fries from Magra, which was so unfair because Luffy had asked for the same thing only to get another onion thrown at him. They couldn’t possibly have that many onions. Maybe that’s why Dadan had been throwing halves at him earlier.

Zoro, traitor that he was, looked content slouching in the stool next to Rika. He was drinking another beer because he seemed to be really good at making decisions that were good for his health.

He didn’t talk much, but when he did his voice easily blended into the buzz of dinner rush. He didn’t flinch at the yells coming from the kitchen, or the yells coming from the other diners, or the yells of the drunk people outside. Wow, lots of yelling going tonight. 

Broody, mysterious guys like him tended to be more of the “hole up in their room and not come out till breakfast” type, but Zoro was soaking in the sounds and sights around him, observing and not acting. He was like a plant that shied away from sunlight but secretly craved it. Which was fitting if Luffy wanted to stick with that whole “Chia Pet” comparison.

But even if he looked relaxed, Zoro’s golf bag of shiny mysterious swords still laid innocuously against his thigh, ready to be used at a moment’s notice.

Ririka appeared in the dining room threshold, the first time she had been downstairs since she and Rika arrived. Her lip looked more healed than before and her hair had been pulled up into a neat little ponytail. She scanned the room until she located Rika, but all the seats by her were occupied.

“Here,” Zoro said, sliding off his stool as she approached. “Take it.”

Ririka’s eyes widened. “Oh no, I couldn’t possibly—” 

God, just take it, Luffy thought. It’s a stool.

Zoro agreed. “Take it,” Zoro repeated, “I’m done eating.” Luffy guessed that they were all supposed to ignore the fact that the only thing he had eaten was several pints of beer.

“Oh…okay. Thank—”

Zoro picked up his bag and walked off before she could finish. 

“—you very much?” Ririka said to the Zoro-shaped hole in the room. She paused for a second and contemplated her options before sliding onto the newly available stool.

“Bye, Zoro!” Rika waved at him. He froze for a moment before turning his head. He gave her a curt nod before turning away. He managed to leave the restaurant through the correct door without incident. Luffy was proud. 

Rika turned towards her mother. “Mama, I learned how to fight today!”

“Is that right,” Ririka said, pouring herself a glass of water. “Does that have something to do with you waking me from my nap drenched in mop juice?”

Rika took a response straight from the Ace Book Of Non Responses. As in she didn’t say anything at all. She pouted and turned back to her coloring book, picking up a crayon. “Nevermind,” she eventually said. “My teacher was mean anyways.”

Speaking of her teacher.

MEANWHILE, OUTSIDE: PT. 1

Zoro sat on the curb in front of the revolving-door-turned-impassable-wall.

Between each table he cleared, Luffy glanced outside to see if Zoro had moved at all. Each time, the answer was no, which was honestly kind of creepy. Like one of those bird-lion statues that sat guard in front of old buildings. A gargle oil.

It was weirdly dark out for this time of evening in the summer, but it probably had something to do with the gray, heavy looking clouds hanging overhead. They’ve been gathering overhead for a few days now, always looking like they were just about to spill over and rain. They never did.

A loud bang from the kitchen door. Not particularly unusual, except Ace’s voice immediately followed it. Luffy still wasn’t used to hearing it in places outside of his dreams, especially when it said things like:

“We had extra. Don’t worry about it.” Ace placed two plates of pie in front of Rika and Ririka. Rika’s eyes lit up, but she didn’t make any movement to eat it or push her coloring out of the way. She instead looked up at her mom and waited. 

Ririka hesitated, like the pie in front of her might vanish if she so much as breathed in its direction. But at this rate, it was going to vanish—because Luffy, who’d just been denied a slice, was right there, staring at it like it was calling his name. It sat perfect and untouched, glistening under the moonlight—or maybe the diner lights, whatever. And she still wasn’t eating it. 

“You’re annoying,” Luffy said to Ririka. Ace looked at him, surprised.

“Hey, that’s not—”

“I mean it,” Luffy said to her. “If someone offers you something, just take it.”

Ririka looked at him, face carefully blank, turning into whatever version of herself she thought Luffy wanted her to be, like she was a professional at taking whatever words were thrown in her face. And that annoyed Luffy, too. 

MEANWHILE, OUTSIDE: PT. 2

Three fancy black cars pulled into the Bed N' Brek lot.

One of them parked right next to where Zoro was parked.

Luffy did not understand this. The lot was still basically empty. 

(Which also didn’t make any sense because they had a full dining room?) 

Rika ping-ponged her head between Luffy, her mom, and the food in front of her. She ignored her mom’s hesitation and went all in, pushing her crayons out of the way and inhaling her entire slice with her bare hands, ignoring her fork. Luffy felt deeply connected with her.

A green crayon fell off the table and rolled across the floor.

Ririka tensed her shoulders, but took a fork and sunk it into the crust. She carved out a small piece of the pie and brought it to her lips.

“It’s good. Not too sweet,” Ririka said, shoulders relaxing. A raving review in grown-up speak, if Luffy had ever heard one.

“Ugh, don’t say that too loud,” Ace groaned. “Dadan gets so annoying when people say nice things about her pie.”

“That’s because none of you motherfuckers ever appreciate my cooking!” Dadan yelled from the kitchen. “And Luffy doesn’t count!” 

“What? Why?!” 

“If a dog eats all your cooking, it doesn’t mean it's good,” Ace said.

It was a testament to the mountains of self control that Luffy had built up over the years that he hadn’t immediately pied his brother in the face.

MEANWHILE, OUTSIDE: PT. 3

The driver of the car parked next to Zoro’s truck swung his door open.

It almost hit the left-side mirror. 

Zoro didn’t look happy about it.

Some words were exchanged, probably.

Sorry About That, Just Don’t Dent My Truck, etc etc. 

That should have been the end of it.

But they seemed to keep talking, which was weird.

Dadan emerged from the kitchen, stalking toward Ace. “Want me to starve you? Or beat the shit out of you, if you think my cooking is so bad?” Dadan asked Ace, right in front of Rika. To her credit, she didn’t seem bothered by all the yelling and swearing, simply returning to her coloring book now that her slice was gone.

“You can’t, though,” Ace shot back, “I’m faster than you. And you’re old.”

“And you forgot I can beat your ass ‘till I’m a hundred,” Dadan said. “You get dumber since leaving?”

“Who do you think is gonna win?” Luffy asked Rika in the midst of all the yelling.

“The scary lady,” she said, coloring a butterfly with three crayons bunched up in her fist. “That other guy looks too skinny.”

Luffy nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, Dadan hits like a truck.”

“Hey, it’s been a while,” Ace added. “I got stronger. And she got older. Maybe she’s a hundred and one.”

Dadan rolled up her kitchen grease-stained sleeves.

MEANWHILE, OUTSIDE: THE CONCLUSION

The guy Zoro had been talking to was now lying unconscious on the concrete.

As exciting as this development was, it probably wasn’t good. They all stared out the window at the body.

Rika crossed her arms smugly. “Bet that guy couldn’t find his center.”

Chapter Text

Zoro burst through the side door with more energy than Luffy had seen from him in the last three hours combined. He was interrupting what was shaping up to be Luffy’s evening entertainment, which was too bad. Dadan looked about thirty seconds from beating the shit out of Ace for calling her old.

“Get them out!” Zoro said, leaving no room for whatever shit beating was about to occur.

A nervous murmur rippled through the dining room. Luffy opened his mouth to ask what Zoro was talking about, but Rika and Ririka were already on their feet. Ririka’s pie sat abandoned on her plate, only a single bite missing. And Rika didn’t even look scared. Just tired. 

“Marines,” Zoro breathed. Luffy felt the collective, shuttering inhale of every patron in the restaurant. “They’re after Ririka and Rika.”

Dadan scoffed. “Thought they knew better than to come here.”

“Shit,” Ririka swore under her breath. “They followed us all the way from Shells Town.”

Luffy glanced again at Rika, who seemed to be absorbing the panic of her mother into her tiny body, so used to turning herself into whatever version would draw the least amount of attention. Back to invisibility. Luffy felt his stomach begin to churn.

He opened his mouth to ask—who they really were, what else happened in Shells Town, why the marines were after them—but the questions died before they left his lips.

The answers didn’t matter, not really. Just fix it.

Luffy watched Dadan run her “pain-in-the-ass appraisal process” on the black cars outside. One by one, plainclothes marines filed out and began to approach the front entrance without so much as a glance towards the dude (who was now drooling onto the cement) knocked out on the curb.

“We’ve got maybe thirty seconds before they realize they have to use the side door,” Ace said, hurried. He knelt and swept Rika onto his back. Ririka stuffed her daughter’s crayons into her skirt pockets and slid the coloring book underneath her shirt. 

“I’ll take them upstairs,” Ace said. “We’re probably surrounded so we can’t sneak them out back.” Ace paused at the door to the kitchen to glance back at Dadan, who gave him a curt nod. He then met Luffy’s eyes.

“Hold them off,” Ace said, before he and Rika disappeared into the kitchen, Ririka following close behind. 

Yeah duh Luffy would “hold them off.” Ace just got here. He didn’t know that Luffy had been waiting to punch something for years . Not that he hadn’t punched anything in years. But now he had a really good reason to.

“Oh, and Luffy,” Dadan said. “Don’t say anything . Not a fucking word, got it?”

Fine. Whatever. Talking got boring real fast.

“And no fighting either!”

Wait, what—

And before he could answer, one of those punchable reasons swung open the side door. Any remaining chatter or conversation in the diner died immediately. The diner lights buzzed in the quiet. What felt like the entire world was holding its breath.

The marine took a gigantic whiff of the room like he was some kind of hunting dog. His eyes raked across each person in the diner, looking for a woman and child who were nowhere to be found. He had a grin on his face that was maybe supposed to be intimidating but instead just looked…goofy. 

Luffy shifted from one leg to the other, wanting to do anything but stand still and wait. God. Why couldn’t they just punch them and be done with all of this? Luffy watched Zoro's hand drift to the zipper on his golf bag.

Five other plainclothes marines followed Goofy inside, blocking the restaurant’s only exit (probably on purpose) and the way to the bathroom (hopefully not on purpose, though it would be at least a little funny if their game plan was to withhold potty privileges until someone snitched.) 

Okay. It was pretty funny. Enough to remind Luffy to breathe. 

“The fuck you smiling at?” Goofy snapped, voice too loud and weirdly high-pitched, like he was a toddler in a thirty year-old body.

Luffy pressed his lips together. Dadan owed him so much food after this because he was following her directions so well. He was really, really trying to keep the laughter in for Rika’s sake but then the image of the Goofy barking orders at big burly men with his little balloon-squeak voice was not helping. 

Whatever face Luffy was making only pissed him off more. He stomped over and yanked Luffy up by his collar. His feet left the ground, dangling. Weirdly enough this was not the first time this has happened to him. Or the second. Or the third. Or the–

“Where’s the woman and girl?!” Goofy squeaked.

This dude’s breath kinda stank, so Luffy turned his head away. That only earned him a rough shake. His brain felt like a DVD logo bouncing around a screen. 

Goofy brought his face and stank breath closer to Luffy’s. “Don’t make me ask you again.”

“But…” Luffy struggled to get the words out while smelling as little of Goofy’s breath as possible. “Dadan told me not to say anything.”

Dadan smacked her forehead like it was about to slide off her face.

“What?” Goofy breathed a bunch of his stank mouth air into Luffy’s face. It had to be on purpose.

“Are you dumb? I said that Dadan told me not to talk.”

“You’re talking right now,” Goofy breathed breathily, breathing his breath for Luffy to breathe. “Just tell me where the woman and girl are.”

Right. That. Well, the whole point was that they were here but Luffy couldn’t tell Goofy that because that would put them in danger. Which meant that Luffy had to not tell Goofy that they were upstairs so that Rika and Ririka were not in danger. 

God, all of this was so complicated. Punching was easier.

“Ohhh. You mean them! I actually don’t know who you’re talking about. Never seen a woman or girl in my life.”

Goofy narrowed his eyes. This was the best response he had given Luffy so far, because it meant that he didn’t have to ensure more stank mouth air.

“Okay well…that’s not true. Dadan is a woman,” Luffy offered. Dadan did not add any commentary as she stood stone-faced by the counter. So he continued. “I’ve seen Dadan before, obviously. But never any others! Well, there are some here right now in the restaurant, but not upstairs! Down here, with us. See?” Luffy waved his arm toward the other diners. 

There was, in fact, a single other woman in the dining room who looked at least three bajillion years-old. She was knitting happily, completely oblivious to the drama occurring around her. Maybe she hadn’t heard all the yelling.

“Y’know,” Luffy started, even though Goofy definitely didn’t know, “Dadan says that I have bad hearing because I don’t listen to her, but I just don’t feel like it sometimes! I heard that your brain takes a nap whenever you ignore something, ‘cause it means you’re using less of it. Magra says that’s not how brains work, but he also thinks that tomatoes are fruits so I don’t really trust him.” 

Goofy’s eye twitched, sentences clipped. “Just tell me. Where they are.”

Luffy’s legs still dangled off the floor. They were falling asleep. “I already told you, Dadan’s right there and that old lady is in the corner!”

Goofy took a slow, deep breath, which people around Luffy seemed to do a lot for some reason. “You think you’re funny?”

“Maybe! But you’re kinda funny,” Luffy answered honestly. “Your breath stinks and your voice is really high. It’s like–” Luffy pitched his own voice up several octaves, “Where’s the girl? My breath stinks! Get me some mouthwash!” 

Zoro coughed, maybe to hide a laugh. Dadan didn’t have what Luffy would call a smile, but it looked close enough. She was…proud of Luffy? Maybe??

Goofy snarled and dropped Luffy to the floor. “This is going nowhere! I want to know where that damn girl and her kid is! And my voice is very manly!” He said this last part an octave or four lower. "And my breath is fine!"

He reached into his coat. Luffy felt it—something shifting in the air, like a storm about to break. Luffy hoped he was reaching for a mint, or something. But then—

THE NEXT 0.2 SECONDS

BANG! Goofy fired his pistol into the air.

AAAHHH! Diners screamed as they cowered under their tables.

SPONGE! It was still stuck to the ceiling. It now had a hole clean through the middle.

And just as quickly, Zoro appeared behind Goofy and knocked him out cold with the hilt of his sword, the red and gold one. Goofy crumpled to the floor, a perfect twin of his face-down buddy outside. Zoro sheathed his sword with a clean click.

Finally. Luffy scrambled up off his feet and cracked his knuckles, grinning at the other marines. Finally , he got to punch something—

“Okay, okay,” another one of them said. Goofy Two, then. “Let’s calm down. This doesn’t need to get violent.”

Luffy’s shoulders sagged. He felt like shriveling up into a raisin. Dadan said no fighting but of course Zoro got to knock out two entire dudes. Luffy still hasn’t been able to punch anything. He was ready. He was so ready. Just let him at them– 

“Doesn’t need to get violent?” Dadan parroted. “Y’all harass my–” She stopped, glanced at Luffy. Swallowed whatever word was about to come out, the lump traveling back down her throat. “Y’all harass this idiot—”

“Hey!” 

“—go firing shit in my business and now you’re preachin’ nonviolence?”

Goofy Two held up his hands to placate her. “We didn’t mean to cause a scene. That guy’s new and gets a little excited.” He gestured at the original Goofy, still knocked out at Zoro’s feet.

“Your other friend seems pretty stupid,” said Zoro, jerking his head towards the drooling guy out on the concrete. “Wouldn’t stop talking.”

“Well, we’ve been on the road for a few days. Like you,” the marine replied, smoothing his voice into something casual. “Forgive us for being a little antsy.”

Zoro stilled. Put a hand on his golf bag. “What do you mean, ‘like me?’”

Goofy Two didn’t hesitate. “We know who you are, Roronoa Zoro. Didn’t expect to find you here—we sent our close-range combat team out after we spotted you heading north. We’re not looking to start anything, we know we can’t take you down. So maybe just… relax.”

Zoro didn’t move his hand. But he did start breathing again.

Dadan finally spoke. “So…y’all gonna order food or something? Book a room? If not I’m gonna have to ask you to leave. Gunshots aren’t good for business.”

“We didn’t mean to cause a commotion. We’re just looking for this woman and her daughter.” One of the other Goofys stepped next to Goofy Two and unrolled a picture of Rika. “Her husband is worried for her safety and wants her to come back home.”

“Well,” Dadan said, crossing her arms. “As you can see, no one around here looks like her.”

“Oh, really?” one of the other Goofys said. He was holding up the green crayon that Rika had dropped earlier. Part of its wrapper had been torn off. “Whose is this, then?”

Dadan barked out a sudden laugh. “You gotta stop leaving those everywhere, Luffy.”

Huh? “What do you mean, those aren’t–”

Dadan’s smile stretched tight across her face, making her look almost manic. Her left eye twitched. 

Ohhhh . Got it. Got it got it got it.

“Oh yes, my crayons! That I love using soooooo—”

“Right,” Dadan interrupted, cutting his performance off. Rude. “So if you could please take your leave.”

“Well,” Goofy Two said, looking around at the remainder of his goof-squad. “You said you have rooms available, right? Like I said, we’ve been on the road for a while so it would be nice to have a place to stay. We’ll pay double for the inconvenience.” Goofy Two took out his wallet. “How much is one night for six—” he glanced out the window and winced at Zoro’s first victim. His eyes then flickered to Zoro’s second victim, “Eight rooms?”

“Well, unfortunately we only have one vacancy, so we can’t accommodate your group.”

“No worries then,” Goofy Two said. “I’ll stay here, and the rest can go stay at another inn.” He tossed the entire wallet at Dadan’s face. She caught it before it could hit her nose. She opened the wallet only to see a credit card. Some coins fell out and fell to the floor. 

Dadan smiled fakely, realizing that he had cornered her. “Sure. Okay.” She robotically turned to Luffy, her face conveying a multitude of emotions, none of which seemed to be happy about what she was saying. “Why don’t. You go. Show him. His room,” she said pointedly to Luffy. Luffy looked at her questioningly. Do it , her face seemed to say. Ace will protect them .

But why did Luffy have to do it? Why couldn’t Magra, or Dogra, or one of the waiters? 

“Try not to look so excited,” Goofy Two said. “You can get back to your coloring books soon.”

Luffy turned to Dadan and scrunched his face up into the most wrinkly, disgusted look he could muster. Really channeled that inner mean old hag. Dadan gave him a solid thumbs up. 

The other marines continued to mill around the dining room, inspecting people’s meals as if they could hide an entire person in there. Which wasn’t…entirely impossible. One time on Thanksgiving, Luffy had managed to stuff his entire arm inside of a turkey. The stuffing had been the perfect balance of savory and sweet. It was warm, soft, and had little bits of bacon in it. Ugh. Luffy still had dreams about that stuffing, even if Dadan had banned him from having any more that night. Sabo had to sneak him some in exchange for jukebox privileges for a week.

“Quit playing around,” Goofy Two said. “Give me my key.”

"Ugh, fine." Luffy went to grab another key from the lock box, stealing another glance at Zoro’s knife—now joined by Rika’s three gold earrings. Goofy Two trailed close behind, watching him the entire time and nearly stepping on the backs of his flip-flops as they headed up the stairs.

Goofy Two and Luffy arrived at the threshold of the empty hallway. 

“Yours is the one in the—”

And of course now they were done pretending, because Goofy Two ignored him and went to swing open the first door that he saw. There were framed photos on the nightstand. A plant on the windowsill. A neatly made bed. And a vanity upon which sat at least a bajillion different hair products. Goofy Two stepped onto Dadan’s carpet with his outside shoes and tore through her wardrobe, flinging clothes behind him.

“I don’t think any of those will fit you,” Luffy said as he watched Dadan’s single dress flutter to the floor. “Dadan’s gonna be maaaaad.”

Goofy Two huffed and pushed past Luffy towards the actual guest rooms, all of which he checked for signs of Rika and Ririka. Each time he found nothing. His frustration reached a tipping point when he had opened the door to Luffy’s room only to immediately recoil and gag. Lame. Dadan had done the same thing earlier this morning, though Luffy saw no reason why they had to be so dramatic about it.

“God, what the hell is that?”

Luffy tilted his head. “Uh, my room?”

A pair of boxers hung from the ceiling fan, spinning lazily.

“I mean the smell, dipshit. Something die in here?”

Luffy stepped in and moved some clothes aside with his big toe. Looked perfectly fine to him. Maybe he would have to throw some stuff in the laundry one day, but nothing worth this bad of a reaction. 

Luffy took a deep whiff of his room before letting it out with a contented sigh. Ah.

“That might be the meat sock.” 

“The—the what ?”

Was this dude hard of hearing? He clearly wasn’t comprehending anything Luffy was saying. Was this how people felt when Luffy didn’t listen? Nah, this was definitely way worse. 

“The meat sock, duh . For when I get hungry at night. Gotta refill it soon.”

Goofy Two stepped into the room, boots crunching down on what was either loose cereal or chips. He moved like every square inch of floor might explode beneath him.

A POEM, BY LUFFY

Boxers on. The ceiling fan.

Boxers fall. From the fan.

Boxers now. On the man.

The room held its breath. 

The fan continued to spin.

“Those are clean. I think,” Luffy offered.

Goofy Two wobbled under the weight of Luffy’s underwear. He exhaled slowly, a man defeated. A man broken. He shambled towards the room’s exit because that’s probably what shambling looked like. 

“Not gonna look in here?” Luffy asked.

Goofy Two spoke to the ceiling, the same way Zoro would sometimes sigh at the sky. What the heck was even up there, anyway? Luffy looked and just saw wood. Some cobwebs, maybe. Nothing interesting. 

“That room must do things to your brain,” Goofy Two said, finally. He leveled a look at Luffy. “Would explain a lot.”

He stepped back into the hallway and attempted to open the bathroom door. If Goofy Two had listened to Luffy in the first place, he would already know that his room key would open it. 

“Oi, why won’t this one open?” Goofy Two grumbled.

“Well, when doors are locked, they don’t open, so—”

“HEY!” Goofy Two interrupted, banging on the door. “ANYONE IN THERE? I GOTTA PISS.”

“Occupied!” Magra’s voice carried from behind the door. The water was still running. Of course, Goofy Two didn’t care because he was annoying and awful. He banged harder on the door.

“I GOTTA PISS REAL BAD,” and he said this loud enough for probably the entire rest of the restaurant downstairs to hear.

Magra yelled again. “IN THE SHOWER, ASSHOLE.”

Goofy Two only knocked harder.

“Fucking hell,” Magra said. They heard shuffling behind the door for a moment before Magra opened it in his bathrobe. His rooster-looking mohawk had been flattened by the shower that he had clearly been in the middle of. Magra must be single handedly keeping Foosha in a state of perpetual drought.

Goofy Two seemed to forget what they were all standing there for. His mouth opened and closed like he was a fish.

“Ever heard of conducting a field irrigation experiment?” Magra asked. Steam was curling up from behind the shower curtain, the sound of the running shower filling the silence. Dadan probably wouldn’t be too happy about that.

“...What?” Goofy Two asked, clearly confused.

“Piss off. Preferably outside.” And then Magra slammed the door.

The rest of the search was uneventful, which was fine if not boring. Open a door, look around, check the window, rinse and repeat. He wasn’t surprised when Goofy Two told him that he wasn’t going to stay at the Bed N' Brek, after all. They were both equally happy about this news.

“Real homey place you got here,” Goofy Two said to Dadan once they were back downstairs. “But it’s probably best that I stay with my men.”

“Totally understand.”

Two of the marines outside were trying to load Zoro’s first victim (Goofy Zero?) into one of their cars. The guy holding the top half accidentally knocked the head against a side mirror, cracking it. Goofy Two slung the original Goofy’s limp arm over his shoulder. Luffy has never been to a zoo but right now he really felt like he was getting the full experience. 

Dadan held the door open for them, giving them her best customer service smile. It looked painful. “Thanks for stoppin’ by. Call ahead for a reservation next time.”

Goofy Two hesitated in the doorway, making Dadan hold the door open for him a little longer.

“We’ll be around,” he said, sparing a glance back at Luffy and Zoro. “In case anything turns up. Wouldn’t want anything bad to happen.”

He smiled an ugly smile and left. Dadan shut the door behind him. Luffy and Zoro shared a look. Was that…a threat?

One of the diners finally peeked out from under their table. Had they been there this entire time?

“Um,” he said. “...can we go now?”

As the chatter in the Bed N' Brek started to build again, Luffy watched the brigade of black marine cars leave the parking lot, growing smaller in the distance. They reminded him of a line of ants. Or cockroaches. 

The diners left soon after the marines did, no surprise there. Zoro retreated upstairs. After an hour of no new customers, Dadan sighed loudly.

“Alright, call it. We’re done for the day.”

The only person left was the three hundred year-old knitting lady in the corner who might’ve been asleep. Or meditating. Or dead. Or all of the above at the same time in some kind of weird old-lady meditative state, which was probably a thing. Honestly, elderly people kinda freaked Luffy out. Probably Gramps' fault.

ENTER MAGRA, ACE, RIRIKA, RIKA

One was dry. Three looked like they took a dip in the creek.

Three guesses on who the dry one was.

“Anyone wanna tell me why people keep treating this fucking restaurant like a water park?” Dadan jabbed her finger at Magra’s chest. “And why are you the dry one?!”

“They needed to hide,” he said simply. Luffy could smell his shampoo all the way from where he was sitting at the booths. Vaguely orange scented.

“And you couldn’t have turned off the water while they did?”

Ace stroked his imaginary beard. “Huh,” he said. “Didn’t think of that.”

“My fingers are all raisiny,” Rika said, her pigtails dripping with water. “I hate raisins.”                           

“Do you have more extra towels?” Ririka asked Dadan. “We’ve gone through all of ours already.”

✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼

Luffy wasn’t allowed to end his day yet, because of course he wasn’t. If the last twelve hours had taught him anything it was that he wasn’t allowed to have fun, joy, or…anything that meant the same things as fun and joy.

This morning he’d had to go run an errand (which ended in a car crash that he should probably be more rattled by, all things considered). Then, he got into an argument with his long-lost brother who was also dead but not in the same way that his other long-lost, actually dead brother was. Then he had to mop the floors, get a bucket of water dumped over him, mop the floors a second time, and then deal with the stupid marines who randomly showed up and insulted his meat sock. 

And he didn’t even get to punch anyone. There was no justice in this world.

Luffy rolled his shoulders. “My arms hurt.”

“The less you whine the faster this gets done,” Dadan said.

“Why couldn’t you get Ace to help?”

“He’s a guest.”

“You already made him clean with me earlier!”

“Which is why he gets a break now.”

“But I don’t?”

“I still need someone to help take these out.”

After everything that had happened today, though? Helping Dadan take out her braids wasn’t the worst thing. Better than mopping. Or listening to the marines talk and complain. With each braid undone, more of Dadan’s hair puffed up, freed from the weight of a million different hair products. All Luffy had to do was pull stuff apart until the fake pieces of hair came out and fluttered to the floor. Easy. It gave his hands something to do, too.

Dadan was playing her old lady music on her CD player, the sound shallow through the speakers like it was being broadcast from a cup connected to a string. The CD stuttered and skipped through parts of songs sometimes, but it meant that the same music sounded different every time they listened. Kept things interesting.

Woah, old man trouble , Dadan’s old-lady music went. Stop knockin’ at my door .

Dadan’s clothes were still all over the floor from when Goofy Two went on his rampage. Luffy shifted to the left to start on another braid, careful not to step on another shirt (Dadan had yelled at him for doing just that five minutes ago).

If only Dadan had some kind of security system in her room, a way to ward people away when she wasn’t there. Her ceiling fan wasn’t living up to its full potential. But sure, Luffy was the crazy one. All he was saying was that one room had clothes all over the floor on purpose .

“So,” Dadan started, eyes all shifty in the vanity mirror. The braid she was working on was halfway undone. “Ace tell you why he left?”

“No,” Luffy huffed. “And he’s leaving again tomorrow.”

“Interesting,” was all she said. Her eyes moved back to her hair.

“Did he tell you anything?”

Dadan shrugged, not looking up. “Kinda.”

“Kinda?! What did he say?”

“Kinda none your business.”

It wasn’t like Luffy didn’t like knowing stuff. He knew lots of stuff. It was just that knowing stuff also tended to make everything slow and complicated. People would start thinking too much and taking too long, and then nothing fun ever happened. It made them do things like Wait It Out. Pause. Hesitate. Think It Through. Hold On For A Second. Or, worst of all, Be Scared.

Being scared meant standing in Dadan’s bedroom, her clothes thrown all over the floor because the marines were allowed to waltz in and do whatever they wanted. Back at the creek, Ace had gone on and on about not wanting to burden Luffy with the Duties Of An Older Sibling or whatever, because he was scared.  

But when it came down to it? If Luffy had to choose between being scared and being left behind? 

Luffy would take being scared, every single time. 

“Oi,” Dadan said, whacking his hand. “Quit pulling so fuckin’ hard. If I go bald I’m taking you with me.” 

Luffy relaxed his grip on Dadan’s hair. Her natural curls puffed up in his hands like cotton balls.

“Just tell me what he told you,” was what eventually made it past Luffy’s lips. The room and the air within it clenched like a fist.

“Not my ‘why’ to tell,” she said, all quiet and mysterious.

“So he did tell you something!”

Dadan snorted. “He fuckin’ better have, after leaving the way he did.”

Good. Dadan was also upset with Ace. Maybe that’s what they had been arguing about in the office.

“Then you don’t have to be so weird about it, you can just tell me.” 

“Ain’t being weird. You always been this fuckin nosy?”

Luffy frowned at her in the mirror and began undoing another braid.

You used to be a good friend of— the CD skipped. Stuttered. Went back. Woah, old man trouble—

Was it really that hard to play a song from beginning to end? A few scratches, and suddenly the CD was broken forever, going over the same part over and over again. The scratches weren’t even noticeable when you looked at the CD. Just a shiny, rainbow-y warped reflection of whatever stared into it. 

Luffy imagined himself looking at his bald reflection, like Dadan had threatened. Ace would look funny bald. Sabo too. They could have been the Bald Brothers. The Three Musketeers, except bald. The Three Baldketeers.

“You think I can stop him from leavin’ again?” she started, voice crumbling Luffy’s thoughts like they were made of sand. “Hell, if I could, you think I’d let him run off the first time?”

Luffy tried to look at her in the reflection of the mirror, but it was clear that she was directing the question at the woman across from her, smudged and speckled with dust. 

The woman’s hair had three colors. There was the orange that they were currently in the process of taking out, brighter than any of the clothes she owned. Then there was the black of her real hair, plain as any other shade of black could be. And then closest to her scalp was the gray hair, slowly overtaking the black. The hair was wirey, like that weird metal lump Dadan used to scrub down the pots. 

You can go join Mr. Trouble, the CD player crowed, And be on your merry way.

Luffy looked out the window and there was Ace, standing in the middle of the empty parking lot, smoking. His cigarette flared and then dimmed, like the fireflies they used to catch together during summers not too different from this one. His back was to Luffy as he watched the empty street in front of him. In turn, Mount Colubo loomed over the town, watching all of them.

“He told me he was ‘figuring stuff out,’” Luffy said. “What is there to still figure out?”

She sighed a long sigh. “That’s what I keep asking him, but you know how that brat is.” She tore a matted part of the hair out. Part real hair, part plastic pretending. “Too fuckin’ stubborn for his own good. That’s where you got it from.”

“What were you guys arguing about?”

She blinked once. Twice. Then looked away, like Luffy had poked something in her brain too hard. Her eyes dropped to all her clothes, wrinkled and on the floor, then tracked back up to the mirror where Luffy watched her.

“We weren’t arguing,” she said finally. “Just…talking loudly.”

Well now he knew she was lying. Shouting at each other was the only way Dadan and Ace knew how to communicate with each other.

“You weren’t though. You guys were just talking. All serious.”

Dadan wasn’t like Luffy; she knew how to lie. She’d lie to customers about how fresh the meat was. She’d lie to Magra about the Bed’N’Brek being closed when she thought he seemed burned out. She’d lie to Ace about killing him if he insulted her food. She’d lie to marines about hiding a woman and child in her restaurant. God knows how much she lied to people to keep this place running in the first place. Again, unpaid orphan labor.

This formed half of her and Luffy’s own style of communication, because Luffy tended to believe people. Like, really believe them. It was the same reason why he was so shit at not telling them the truth.

But this lie seemed too big to squeeze into the shape of a truth. It poked out, spilled out over the edges, overflowed. She knew that Luffy recognized what it really was. She had to know.

Time stretched, slowed, sped up and stopped. They were over halfway done with freeing her hair, now. Clumps of the orange extensions fell on top of the scattered clothes. The wire-sponge hair was struggling to breathe.

“God. This shit always takes too long,” Dadan finally said, rolling her neck. “Shoulda gotten Ace to help after all.”

“You could just…not braid your hair.” Certainly would have saved Luffy a lot of grief over the years. 

“Well, it’s either this or my hair gets all up in the food. Take your pick.”

“C’mon, it wouldn’t be that bad—”

“God, nevermind. You’re the wrong person to ask. You weren’t old enough to see the beginning when my hair shed everywhere.”

“The beginning?”

“Yeah. Before I opened this place, I never bothered braiding.”

Right. Before . The word sounded strange and distorted coming from Dadan’s mouth.

It made sense, sort of. Technically. She has lived more of her life outside of this building than in it. She did not enter this world as mean, large, or good in the ways that she was now. She used to be a girl, probably one that fought with her siblings as much as Luffy used to fight with his. Maybe she had an older sister, or a mother who had her help take out their braids, too. Maybe she also had taken seven tries to pass her driving exam.

She had lived dozens of different lifetimes before Luffy and his brothers had ever entered one. Her before contained how she earned the respect of the town, the fear of the marines, and the trust of Luffy’s shitty grandpa who dumped him here in the first place. Her before contained whatever problems she had with her own family that she never talked about. And her before contained the reason why she opened the Bed’N’Brek in the first place.

Obviously there was a before, but Luffy had never considered the possibility of an after. Unlike Dadan, this was the only lifetime Luffy has ever lived. There was so much outside of this building, of this town, of this life. There was so much after to wade through, if only Dadan and Luffy weren’t so waist-deep in the before.

And before Dadan opened her mouth, Luffy knew on some level what she was going to say next. 

THE AFTER

“I’m gonna retire soon. Sell the Bed’N’Brek.”

Oh. Nevermind. Luffy thought she was gonna say something normal like, “I’m getting a dog,” or “After much consideration, I have decided that I will be going bald.” 

Not that. Not retire.

She continued anyway.

“I want to sleep in, eat food I didn’t cook. Live my life without someone yelling ‘ Dadaaaaan!’ every ten seconds because some dipshit lit the sink on fire.”

“That was only twice,” Luffy said automatically, like a toy whose string had been pulled.

“Luffy.”

He shut up. He looked at her in the mirror, hair half braided and half poofed. She sighed, suddenly looking as old as Ace joked she was. The gray of her hair engulfed more of the black than Luffy originally noticed.

“Sabo’s gone,” she started, and the words smacked him in the face. “Ace fucked off a long time ago. And I know you already got one foot out the door.”

The old hair gel was building up under his fingernails, sticky and wrong. And his hands were shaking, probably tired after pulling apart hair for the past three hours. It was also freezing in here even though it was the middle of the summer and they didn’t have air conditioning. And Luffy’s head was ringing from the crash that happened either this morning or five years ago. 

Because Luffy couldn’t argue. How could he? Ever since he was little and especially since Sabo died, Luffy would fall asleep wishing that he would wake up as a bird so he could fly far, far away from the Bed’N’Brek. 

Which, he supposed, also meant far, far away from Dadan, the only person who had stayed right here with Luffy this whole time as he waited for Ace to come home.

Dark clouds hangin’ over my head, the woman in the CD player sang. But this time sure won’t rain on me.

“Aren’t you mad at me?” he asked. “At us?”

“God, all the fucking time,” was her instant reply, a reflex. That wasn’t the real answer, though. Maybe she’d been a bad liar this whole time, and Luffy was just now noticing.

She took a breath. Looked at Luffy in the mirror through the dust specks and smudges and dried water droplets that coated the glass. She was looking so hard that Luffy thought that she must be looking at something else. Because why else would she be staring now? Luffy had been doing the same thing this whole time: running her errands, clearing her tables, unbraiding her hair, being an only child. Nothing new. Nothing special.

She tried answering again. “Well, are you mad at Ace?”

Luffy glanced out the window. Ace dropped his cigarette and ground it into the dirt with his foot. He didn’t come back inside, though. Just stared at Colubo in the distance.

Luffy wanted to say yes. He wanted to say no. But both of them sounded like lying, and Luffy sucked at lying.

So he just shrugged.

“You and me both, brat,” Dadan said, starting to undo another braid. “That’s just how it is, sometimes.”

Woah, old man trouble, CD player went. Over and over and over again.

Chapter Text

Zoro could not, for the life of him, keep his fucking eyes closed.

For one thing, his ankles dangled over the edge of the bed, which evidently wasn’t made for people over the age of twelve. The springs inside of his mattress squeaked every time he so much as shifted an asscheek. And the old knitting hag from earlier was asleep in the room next door, snoring so fucking loud that she might as well be waking the dead and then killing them again for good measure. And he’d forgotten to eat earlier during the whole marines-trying-to-abduct-a-woman-and-her-brat incident, so his stomach was loudly and continuously reminding him that he needed food to survive. Annoying and unnecessary.

It wasn’t like Zoro was trying to be picky. There were plenty of things about this place to be grateful for: four walls, a roof, a ceiling fan. He had a pillow, clean sheets, and a meal waiting for him in the morning. The booze hadn’t been half-bad either.

He just also thought that maybe, perhaps, possibly—after spending the last eight nights sleeping in the barely reclined driver’s seat of a fucking rental—that he would be able to doze off more easily.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed. Training usually allowed him to forget his hunger. If he wasn’t going to sleep, he might as well do something useful.

He took Enma and Kitetsu from their bag, laying them beside each other. They both caught the light differently; Enma drank it in, absorbing the moonlight while Kitetsu reflected it, casting slivers of silver across the room.

Outside was now a proper shade of night, pressed up against the windows. The wind had shifted, warm and barely there. A breath on the back of his neck. 

Zoro did not reach for Wado Ichimonji. He didn’t need to. She wasn’t in his bag, or this room, or anywhere near him. She hadn’t been for a long time.

He picked up Kitetsu, knelt to the floor, and unsheathed her, carving through the air with a motion he had performed ten thousand times over. Where one kata ended, another began—seamless and slow, like the pull of the tide, dragging him under and rinsing his mind clean of everything but motion.

Zoro did not believe in a God. He did not worship. He did not atone. He did not confess or beg for forgiveness. If there was a heaven, it had ruled Zoro a lost cause a long time ago. 

But he did move his blades in the same way that some people would pray: Every day, wholeheartedly, and with the knowledge that nothing short of complete and utter devotion would yield the result he sought. But faith was far too blunt a blade for the type of absolution that he needed. 

Zoro stayed low to the floor, bare feet planted on the old wood. Kitetsu hummed in his hands. He moved through another kata, this one slower, like drifting smoke. Koshiro had taught him this one in the early summer mornings while the cicadas were still asleep. Back then, Kuina’s steps were more quiet. Her blade moved exactly as much as she intended it to, no more and no less. Steady and disciplined. Perfect.

Zoro paused mid-form, holding Kitetsu parallel to the floor. His arm faltered from the weight of the memory. He closed his eyes and let a breath fill his nose and his chest, his body and his mind. Hot, empty air pushed out thoughts of a dojo, a girl, a sword, a shared dream.

He reached for Enma, a shiver rippling through him when he picked her up. He moved through two-sword style katas in silence, parting the night with his blades. Enma and Kitetsu. Shadows and silvers. Sisters without their third.

They had learned to feel the sorrow that Zoro would not allow within himself. He sensed it every time he wrapped his fingers around their hilts. Every lunge was agony, every swing was betrayal. Something here was deeply wrong, but he could do nothing but grit his teeth and keep going. Keep pushing.

Zoro had never stopped training, never stopped fighting. To stop was to grow weaker. To grow weaker was to give up. To give up was to die.

But sometimes, Zoro wondered if going through the motions like this was only deepening the gaping hole in his chest.

His stomach chose this moment to growl. 

…Maybe he should eat something after all.

He sheathed his swords, slipped on his boots, and stepped out into the hallway.

Zoro regretted it almost immediately. There were so many doors. Why did this place have so many fucking doors? Shouldn’t they have room numbers, or something?

He opened the one directly across from him—it was Rooster-Mohawk-Guy, snoring. Another—bathroom. Another—Dadan, who thankfully was a deep and thunderous sleeper. Zoro got lucky with the fourth door which led to the stairway that had surely been shifting around just to fuck with him.

He finally reached the kitchen only to realize that he had no plan going into this.

He blinked. The kitchen blinked back.

It appeared to contain the things that a kitchen should contain: stoves, ovens, pots, pans. Deep fryer, grill, big metal thingy number three, big metal thingy number four. Everything that could possibly exist under the sun except, evidently, food.

It was his own fucking fault for expecting anything normal to come out of a place where one of the employees had crawled across the floor on all fours to swipe a drumstick from his plate. Luffy was so fucking weird.

There were no other options though, so Zoro began to fling open the kitchen cabinets. He was met with bowls. Plates. Blenders. Cups. Weird contraptions that looked like miniature torture machines. He looked through drawers next. Spoons. Forks. Knives. Bigger knives.

His stomach began to claw at his insides.

Zoro considered just grabbing a used mug from the sink and filling it with the beer they had on tap at the bar. It wouldn’t sate him, but maybe he could get drunk enough to forget that he was hungry in the first place.

Then he saw it. A spinny-thingy of spices, each in different shaped bottles. Zoro moved to pick one up:

FIVE-SPICE SEASONING

* NEW RECIPE! * 

106 CALORIES PER SERVING

CONTAINS ~50 SERVINGS

FRESH, NATURAL INGREDIENTS

He could work with this. Nutritional information equaled nutrients—duh, it was in the word—which equaled food.

The chicken sandwich from lunch was roughly…510 calories? Or 24…he’ll just say 25 percent of his daily requirement. He didn’t get to eat that drumstick that Luffy stole from him, so that was a wash. Which meant that he would have to eat around 1,600 more calories, or about 16 servings, rounding down. No one in their right mind would ever scarf down that many calories solely through seasoning. He wasn’t insane or anything.

He’ll just eat 11.5 servings and get today’s intake up to about 60 percent of his daily requirements, then make up the rest of the calories in the morning.

Simple enough. He twisted open the spice bottle, stuck out his tongue, and started—

“Hungry?”

Luffy blinked at him.

Zoro retracted his tongue.

Luffy stood at the bottom of the stairs with a sock in his hand, smelling vaguely of salami. He wasn’t wearing his straw hat, just a blue t-shirt and a pair of boxers. Where Zoro had come to expect a wide, impish smile was instead just... A face. Which Luffy certainly had had this whole time, it was just. He seemed subdued. Thoughtful, even.

“Fillin’ the meat sock.”

Nevermind.

Regardless, Zoro had been caught, plain and simple. His stomach, clearly less embarrassed about this situation than he was, chose this moment to gurgle loudly.

He braced for laughter from Luffy, but it never came. Which made sense, now that Zoro thought about it a little more. To Luffy, being hungry was probably Very Serious Business.

Zoro did his best impression of someone who was supposed to be in the kitchen of a B&B at four in the morning, offering the bottle of five-spice to Luffy.

Luffy shook his head. “Tried that once. My poop was weird for days. Do not recommend.”

Zoro twisted the five spice cap shut. Lefty-righty, tighty-loosey. Something like that.

Luffy opened a small cupboard—Zoro must have just missed that one—to reveal a mini fridge. He grinned at Zoro like they were both in on some conspiracy that they had uncovered together. His smile was less blinding than it had been in the daytime, but it was warm all the same.

“Dadan doesn’t think I know about this ‘cause it’s near the vegetable station,” Luffy said. The light of the fridge lit up that corner of the kitchen. “She doesn’t know I like cucumbers. They’re better if you sprinkle some salt on ‘em.”

Zoro watched him take out a half-chopped cucumber. Luffy gasped in delight at something in the back of the fridge, the intake of breath punching a hole in the silence of the kitchen. He went on his tip-toes to try and reach towards it. He stuck his tongue out in concentration.

“I can grab it,” Zoro said automatically. He reached over Luffy to grab the tray in the back of the fridge. His palm brushed against the back of Luffy’s hand—warm, in contrast to the fridge. He pulled out the tray to be faced with a full tin of pie.

Zoro didn’t know that people’s eyes literally lit up, but that’s exactly what Luffy’s were doing now.

“Oooooh, score! Lemme get forks.”

Luffy navigated the kitchen with a practiced ease. He yanked open a drawer and grabbed a fistful of forks without looking, then closed it with his hip in one smooth motion. He ducked beneath the hanging pans and filled the space like he belonged there, like the kitchen existed around him and not the other way around. His every movement flowed into the next, seamless like the push and pull of the tide.

This was Luffy’s home, and he knew it better than Zoro had known any place in his life. Not Johnny and Yosaku’s, not Perona’s, and not the dojo. Not after Kuina.

“Water?” Luffy asked, forks in hand.

Zoro blinked himself from his thoughts. Luffy blinked back. “Uh, yeah. Thanks.”

“Hold.” Luffy handed Zoro the forks.

Zoro held.

It was a bouquet of utensils. He glanced at them, then back at Luffy, who was at the sink filling two mismatched glasses with tap water like it was just a thing that they did. Like Zoro belonged here long enough to pour water for.

“What?” Luffy was now standing by the door leading to the dining room, hip holding it ajar. He had been waiting for Zoro, who now realized he had been staring at Luffy silently for the past few minutes. Did he look like he was glaring? Zoro has been told that he just had that kind of face.

He tried to mold his expression into something more neutral. “No plates?”

Luffy raised an eyebrow. “You’re really serious about plates.”

Zoro’s attempt at a neutral face must have made him look angrier. “No, just…Why?”

“Don’t wanna wash anything,” Luffy said. “C’mon, let’s eat at a booth! The windows at night are really pretty.” He left before waiting for an answer.

Zoro braced himself, just because he just felt like he needed to. Every conversation with Luffy was like negotiating with a bridge troll. Answer my riddles three, he could imagine Luffy saying. And I may finally let you…have some peace and quiet? Zoro would have to workshop that one. Though Luffy didn’t seem like the riddling type.

And yet, when he stepped into the dining room, Zoro had to admit it—Luffy had a point. The windows at night were pretty.

The moon filtered through the smudges in the glass, scattering specks of pale light all across the room. The chairs were stacked onto the tables, aligned neatly. The salt and pepper shakers, the napkin holders, the condiment bottles—all were placed meticulously and uniformly on each table.

And there was Luffy, waiting for Zoro at a booth by the windows, dressed in the same deep blue that seeped through the rest of the restaurant. He looked up and smiled, and Zoro suddenly felt off-balance in a way that had nothing to do with his feet.

Thankfully, he was close enough to the booth that he could sit down before his legs gave out. Luffy picked a fork off the top and nudged the pie tin toward Zoro. 

“You first.”

…What.

“You’re hungry,” Luffy explained as if he weren’t rewriting Zoro’s entire understanding of him this very second, “—so eat.”

So Zoro took a fork, dug out a piece, and ate. Half because he was hungry, and half because he didn’t want Luffy looking at him like that anymore. You first, he had said in the moonlight. What the fuck did that mean?

He took a bite of the pie, sweeter than anything Zoro would purposefully subject himself to. But otherwise…not that bad. 

Luffy took his own mouthful and immediately spit it out onto the table. “Blegh. Pecan.” He stuck his tongue out like the air would get rid of the taste.

Zoro raised an eyebrow. “What’s wrong with pecan?” The possibility of Luffy not liking a food hadn’t even crossed his mind.

“Tastes like tree bark.”

“You know what tree bark tastes like?”

“You don’t?”

Yet despite his complaints, Luffy slurped his discarded piece straight off the table like he was bobbing for an apple. Zoro watched him the way one watched a car crash: fascinated and vaguely concerned about head trauma. Luffy stabbed his fork in the pie tin and shoved another bite into his mouth, making faces the whole time.

Zoro opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Shoveled a forkful of pie into his mouth to avoid saying anything. Then spoke anyway.

“Are you usually…?” The words came out garbled, warped around the food. Zoro resorted to waving his hand in Luffy’s general direction.

Luffy understood him anyhow. “Shouldn’t waste food,” he chewed.

And that, Zoro supposed, was that.

They took turns scraping from the tin. Zoro continued eating long after he had had enough to stave off his hunger, because Luffy kept eating and it felt weird to suddenly stop the strange rhythm they had going on. You first, Luffy had said. They were sitting on a see-saw with pie in the middle. Up and down they went. You first, then me.

The pie disappeared faster than Zoro would have previously guessed, considering that neither of them seemed to really like it all that much.

A yawn engulfed Luffy’s face. He picked his nose with his left pinky and wiped it on his boxers. 

“Surprised you’re not asleep,” Zoro said, also surprised that he was the one continuing a conversation with a grown man who still picked his nose. Lots of things were surprising Zoro lately. Must be the full week he spent on the road.

“‘M not…tired,” Luffy said, the last word stretched around another yawn. “But today was fun! It’s usually sooo boring around here. You came at a good time!”

Zoro leaned back against the plush of the booth. “Doesn’t need to be a good time. Just need a place to sleep.”

“You’re not sleeping, though.”

“Yeah, well. I got a couple more nights to sleep and regroup. Then I’m back on the road.”

“Where’re you headed?”

Well. Truthfully? Zoro didn’t know where he was going, when, or even how. The only thing he knew for sure was who he was looking for.

Zoro didn’t have dreams, but if he did, Mihawk would be in every single one. Standing over him, Wado Ichimonji in hand—Kuina’s sword, now warm with Zoro’s own blood and guts—mocking him. Zoro would be face down in the dirt, slowly bleeding out from a wound that had been gouged from his back. He’d taste the blood in his mouth, a mixture of copper, dirt, and shame.

(“You don’t deserve her,” Mihawk would say as he ran his finger down Wado, claiming her as his own. “She should be with someone who doesn’t lose.”

And then Kuina would be there too, arms crossed, voice sharper than any blade. “I tried going easy on you,” she’d say. “You still lost. Every time.” Then for whatever reason she would turn into a giant snake and swallow him whole. 

That was usually when he woke up, pulse in his teeth and reaching for a sword that wasn’t there.)

Luckily he had no such dreams.

Either way, Zoro had thought out his answer to this question long before Luffy had even asked it. He repeated his go-to line for the thousandth time.

“Just passing through.”

If Luffy were a balloon, he would have deflated so severely he’d have melted into the booth. As it was, he just looked like a sad, wet dog, not unlike the aftermath of the mop incident earlier.

“Everyone’s just passing through,” he eventually said.

“What about you?” Zoro asked.

“Huh?”

“You also passing through?”

Luffy paused, fork halfway to his mouth. His expression was unreadable for a moment—maybe even thoughtful, if he was capable of it—but then he just shoved the bite in and chewed. Zoro watched him swallow, watched the way the lump in his throat bobbed. Watched the way the moonlight cradled the edges of his face and softened them.

In the few hours that Zoro had known him, Luffy had never sat still for more than half a second. But here in this moment, he was eating pie in the dead of night, across the table from Zoro, slow and unhurried. Like there was nowhere else he’d rather be. 

Actually, scratch that. Luffy was eating, which probably took the vast majority of his attention. The moment felt significant to Zoro anyway.

“Nah,” Luffy finally said around a mouthful of pie. Zoro vaguely remembered being told off for doing something similar. “Not going anywhere. Not yet.”

Zoro frowned. “Not yet?”

Luffy gingerly placed his fork down, propping an elbow on the counter. He was facing Zoro, but his mind was clearly elsewhere. “I wanna leave,” he admitted. “Just…haven’t yet. Can’t.”

Zoro didn’t know how to interact with this quiet, thoughtful version of Luffy. And Zoro didn’t understand why he was even trying to. Zoro was only staying here for a few days to regroup, to map out where to go next, to find some new leads on Mihawk. And then he would leave. There was no need to think of Luffy or what would become of him. 

All of these things remained true. But before Zoro could reign the words in, they fell from his lips.

“You don’t seem the type to stick around if you don’t wanna.”

Luffy scraped his fork against the bottom of the pie tin, now empty save for some chunks of pecan. “You ever had like…a favorite ice cream flavor that you get every time? But then you think, Oh, maybe I should try something else! I can’t just eat the same thing all the time.”

“...Sure?”

“But then you get the uh—” Luffy pointed his fork at Zoro. “What flavor ice cream did you like again?”

“Pecan.”

Luffy made a face indicating that he didn’t think Zoro was very funny. “But then you get your—blegh—pecan ice cream, same as you always get, and say you’re gonna try something new next time. But then things keep happening like…they start taking flavors off the menu. Or they change the recipe juuuust enough for it to taste weird but not bad. Or something bad happens to you, so you just wanna eat comfort food for a while ‘cause you don’t know when it’ll be gone.”

Zoro exhaled through his nose. “I think…I get it?” Or some approximation of it, anyway. Zoro wasn’t huge on ice cream. But he got it.

What he didn’t get was Luffy.

In the daylight, Luffy was easy to read. In the daylight, he telegraphed each of his actions, displayed each intonation of emotion in the way he tilted his head, scrunched his mouth, widened his eyes. Simple to deal with, if not irritating at times. It was easy.

At night, though? Maybe it was the moonlight, the lateness of the hour, or the way exhaustion gnawed at Zoro’s body, but something about the night made Luffy shift into something unknowable. Like looking into an ocean, blacker than black in the dead of night, and seeing a reflection that wasn’t yours.

How many times has Luffy stood on the precipice between Foosha and the outside world, and decided to turn around, to stay? How long has he held himself back? A year? Five? Ten? And most importantly, what did that do to someone like Luffy?

A metallic clatter echoed from the kitchen. Zoro’s hand went to Kitetsu before the sound had even fully registered.

Luffy jumped up from his seat and started winding his arm up. “Hope that’s a bad guy! I didn’t get to punch anyone today!” He ran to the kitchen door, bumping into multiple stacked chairs but miraculously not toppling even one of them.

Zoro followed him, hand resting on Kitetsu’s hilt. Maybe the marines were back to whisk Rika and Ririka away in the night towards whatever horrible past they were escaping. Zoro took a full-body breath the same way he always would whenever he was about to fight someone, and followed Luffy into the kitchen.

It wasn’t an intruder at all. Ace’s duffel bags had knocked into various pots and pans that had been stacked on the counters and stoves. They now laid on the linoleum like blood splatter. Luffy did not look nearly as excited as he had been just two seconds ago.

Zoro hasn’t been at the Bed’N’Brek for long, not even twelve hours. But he was getting the sense that they had just caught Ace doing something very, very bad.

Luffy wasn't winding up his arm anymore, though he was staring at Ace like he was about to punch him. Ace looked at a fallen pan by his foot.

“Leaving already?” Luffy asked, voice low—too low—and unreadable.

“Told you I’d be gone in the morning, Lulu.”

“Yeah, the morning. It’s still dark out!” Luffy’s voice grew louder.

Well, technically the night was plenty old enough for it to be morning. Zoro somehow got the feeling Luffy didn’t mean it that way, though. In this kitchen, morning had nothing to do with time.

“I can’t stick around for long, it’s just gonna bring trouble—”

“Why?” Luffy cut him off, voice climbing fast. “Can’t we just beat up whoever’s after you? The marines, or whoever you owe money, whatever else? We’ve done worse! We’re strong. I’m strong!” That last part didn’t sound like pride. It was a plea.

Zoro lingered in the doorway, half-shielded by shadow, presence either unnoticed or ignored. He was standing at the threshold of a fight that wasn’t his. But it was like the rubber of his boots had melted into the linoleum.

“You know it’s not that simple.”

A kaleidoscope of emotions passed through Luffy. Zoro couldn’t name any of them, he just knew that all of them looked like they hurt. Like he’d been carved raw and left to rot.

“No,” Luffy said. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything ‘cause you haven’t told me anything. You even have Dadan covering for you!”

“She’s not—” Ace paused. He chewed up whatever words he was going to say and swallowed them back down like they were nails. His eyes raked across the room to look at anything that wasn’t Luffy. They settled on Zoro, probably because he was the only person in the room not yelling at him.

Luffy took a step forward. “She’s pissed but still covering for you,” he said, his voice holding something back, a tsunami at its peak. “Tell me why.”

Ace clenched his jaw, still staring at Zoro. “Can’t.”

“That’s not fair!” Luffy stomped like he was Rika’s age. “You know what it’s like losing both of your brothers in a week?”

It all lurched to a halt.

Their breaths, the buzz of the freezer, the sound of the fan in the dining room, time itself. It all melted and warped into silence. Luffy was a pot on the stove, churning, festering. About to boil over.

“Lulu—”

“Shut up.” Luffy said, voice cracking under the weight of something terrible. “Don’t call me that. Ever since you drove us into that stupid creek, no one looks at me the same and no one tells me anything! You look at me like I’m dead but I’m not! I’m right here! I’ve been right here this whole time waiting for you!”

Zoro wasn’t supposed to be here. This wasn’t his business. He didn’t know these people. This wasn’t his baggage, his history, his betrayal. He should be upstairs, in bed, ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

But God. It didn’t add up. Luffy, waiting? Just for Ace to come visit? Maybe Zoro didn’t have Luffy figured out at all. 

And then, a voice from the bottom of the stairway: “Been tooooo long a day for y’all to be doing this shit when I’m tryin’ to fuckin’ sleep.”

Dadan was standing at the bottom of the stairs, dressed in a nightgown and lumpy bonnet. She was barefoot, like Luffy. She went to pick up the scattered pans, bones creaking as she knelt to the floor. Zoro felt like he should help her, felt like he should do something other than watch two people he barely knew destroy their relationship before his eyes. It felt eerily similar to watching something die. Or more accurately, watching something bleed out.

“Who dropped my pans?” Dadan’s voice was gravelly from sleep.

Luffy crossed his arms and turned away from Ace, who adjusted his hands on his bag strap nervously.

“He did,” Luffy spat. “He’s leaving. And you’re not gonna stop him, right? Same as before?”

Zoro watched Dadan purse her lips and level a look at Ace. Something passed between them. A conversation, an argument, an agreement, the wind, who fucking knew. 

“Ain’t my choice,” she said, holding a pan. It was dented at the edge nearest to the handle. Probably still usable for eggs, or something. Maybe pancakes if you didn’t mind them being lumpy.

Ace looked at Zoro like he was sorry, for some reason. Then at Dadan, probably to continue their telepathic conversation.

Ace swung open the back door. Turned to look at Luffy one last time.

“Lulu—”

“I hate you,” Luffy snapped, his back an impassable wall between them. “Just leave.”

So Ace went.

He closed the door behind him so it wouldn’t slam, like he was ashamed of the sound of him leaving.

Chapter Text

Zoro was big into stabby-fighting. He’d even settle for punchy-fighting. But feelings-fighting? No shot. He never stuck around long enough for that.

Which was why last night was so fucking weird. Whatever the hell Luffy and Ace had been feelings-fighting about in the kitchen had worn Zoro out so much that he fell asleep as soon as he had gotten back to his room. He hadn’t even been the one talking.

But now he was awake at the crack of ass because the old knitting hag’s snoring had been loud enough to cut into Zoro’s not-dreams. And right when he was about to fall back asleep, she started singing. In between the snores. And she wasn’t even fucking good at it.

Zoro sat up, still in his clothes from last night which were the same ones as the day before and the night before that and the day before that. He spared a few sniffs to his armpits. Smelled fine. Weirdly enough, he wasn’t really all that hungry either. The pie he had eaten with Luffy was more filling than expected.

Luffy, rubbing his eyes at the bottom of the stairs. Luffy, holding far too many forks. Luffy, turning to stare at the door his brother had just vanished from. Luffy, immediately turning to kick a stool over to watch it topple to the floor. Luffy, who had looked at Zoro with eyes glassy and big and dark, dark brown, the kind that burned into your retinas and stayed there even after you blinked and holy shit what the fuck was wrong with Zoro? Was he good? Was he really that sleep deprived?

A loud snore-song carried from the next room over. It would have maybe been profound, if Zoro wasn’t going insane.

It had to be this town. This building. This fuckass B&B and everyone in it was driving him insane and he needed air that didn’t smell like five-spice or family melodrama or whatever the fuck was in that sock that Luffy had.

Zoro found himself in the kitchen standing precisely where he had been mere hours ago. The pans were where Dadan had stowed them away. The stool near the order window was pushed in under the nearby counter precisely where it had been before. Before Luffy had looked at him like that.

God. Get out. Get air. You fucking idiot.

Zoro ended up stepping through the very same back door in the kitchen that Ace had used the night before. Unlike Ace however, he didn’t go much further. He just stood there, taking in the breath of the morning.

There were two dumpsters behind the restaurant, black and blue like an eye. Empty glass bottles lined the wall, a couple of them filled part-way with a deep yellow liquid that Zoro hoped wasn’t what it probably was. Shards of broken glass sparkled in the dirt.

The smell didn’t help the whole “I Hope Those Aren’t Piss Bottles” thing, but it wasn’t anything Zoro couldn’t handle. His rental truck smelled similar and he was mostly fine with it, but that didn’t make it ideal. He glanced wearily at the bottles as their presence mocked him and his impending insanity. 

It did feel better out here despite everything.  The sunlight was only just beginning to crest over the mountains in the distance, the birds were starting to chirp and whatever, et cetera. New day and same old shit. 

The same old shit, in fact, for as far back Zoro could care to remember.

Find Mihawk. Fight Mihawk. Win. Win no matter the cost. Win and take Wado back for good. Win because it was all that mattered. 

But stupid shit kept getting in the way, like “eating” or “sleeping.” And needing to eat and sleep meant needing a steady income. That steady income—bounty hunting—was fucked, thanks to his run-in at Shellstown with Captain Morgan’s shitty brat.

And it wasn’t like he could get a regular job. Zoro was built for a 9-to-5 in the same way a sledgehammer was built for brain surgery.

He kicked a glass bottle (empty, thankfully) at the foot of the dumpster behind the restaurant. It rolled about its base in a circle, back towards him.

What he needed was a lead. The information on Mihawk being in Shellstown was a bust, and ending up in Foosha had been entirely an accident.

Zoro could not for the life of him remember seeing this town on his map, wherever that fucking thing was. The best thing about this place was that it existed at all, a splatter of civilization on an otherwise barren desert canvas. After driving for days on end, Zoro was just happy to find a real bed to sleep in.

While Zoro was here, though? He might as well try getting information from Dadan. She seemed well-connected enough, though her willingness to share anything with Zoro was probably as likely as him getting useful information from that little brat with the pigtails.

There was always the option of hassling other diners for information. A place like this, with decent beer and an owner that didn’t roll over for the marines? Someone had to know something. It was a Saturday—and a summer one, at that. And if the flyers plastered on the windows and napkin holders announcing SATURDAY NICKEL SHOT NITE meant anything, there’d be plenty of drunk idiots around to beat information out of later.

Zoro sat on the ground, careful to avoid the bits of glass scattered on the floor. He crossed his legs and closed his eyes in the same way he had done many times before, and inhaled.

He tended to the breath in his chest like a flame. It fluttered and curled beneath his ribs. He exhaled and let it go. He repeated once more, twice more, three times more, like Koshiro had taught him.

A bird cooed. He took the distraction in and let it pass through him, returning to his breath. 

He heard the crunch of gravel of a passing car from the road. He took the distraction in and let it pass through him, returning to his breath.

Very faint from within the restaurant, Zoro heard the kitchen sink running. Plates clinking together. He took the distraction in—

Zoro wondered who was up, then wondered why he cared. It was probably Luffy, maybe finding something to eat. Zoro couldn’t recall him getting any real food last night, especially after everything had happened: the bouquet of forks, the pecan pie, and the smothered shouting. The fridge, the pans scattered on the floor, and the way Luffy had smiled at Zoro in the moonlight, soaked in dark blue. That last thought was like a black hole, pulling everything else back to it. Zoro tried to let it pass through him and return to his breath, but—

“Whatcha doin?”

Yeah, yeah.

Zoro should have seen it coming.

He opened an eye, though he really shouldn’t have bothered. He knew who it was.

Luffy was crouched into a squat, still in last night’s t-shirt and boxers even though they were outside and in full view of whoever drove by. His hair was flat on one side like he had just rolled out of bed. All things considered, he probably had.

“Meditating,” Zoro answered, though at this point he knew that wasn’t happening anymore. He mainly closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to keep looking at Luffy.

“Oh. That’s where you have to sit up straight and go ohmmmm , right? Sounds boring.”

Okay. They weren’t gonna talk about last night. Fantastic, actually, because Zoro would rather stab himself with a fork than talk about last night. The pie and the kitchen were equally dangerous in terms of figurative landmines.

“Not really. You can meditate however you want.”

Which was the truth. When Zoro was a kid, he had watched Koshiro meditate while he weaved grape vines up the trellis in the dojo’s backyard. He would move his fingers around the leaves like he was playing a cello or equally large stringed instrument.

Zoro would inform Kuina of this observation. Kuina would ask him if he actually knew what a cello looked like.

Koshiro used to say that caring for the plants was an extension of caring for his mind, body, and soul, whatever the fuck that meant. The grapes always turned out good, though. Firm and juicy.

Zoro, eyes still closed, heard Luffy clear some glass away and drop down to cross his legs in front of him. His knee pressed into Zoro’s.

“What are you doing?” Zoro asked.

“So what now? I just sit and think?”

“No, you sit and stop thinking. Empty your mind.”

“Oh, that’s it? That’s easy.”

Zoro couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah, that would be easy for you.”

“I’m ignoring you,” Luffy said, though Zoro could hear the smile in his voice. “Am I doing this right?”

Zoro opened his eyes to check. Whatever smile Luffy had before was gone now. His eyes were scrunched shut like they hurt, eyebrows furrowed. For some reason his cheeks were puffed up. And his knee was still pressed against Zoro’s.

“You’re not supposed to hold your breath, moron.”

Luffy gasped for air. “Oh.”

Zoro snorted. But honestly? The fact that Luffy was giving this a genuine shot was more than he would have expected from someone who acted less like a person and more like a tornado personified.

No tornados now, though. They sat in silence for a bit. Clear weather for miles. 

Maybe Zoro could go back to meditating after all. He closed his eyes and breathed in through his nose, ignored the scent of piss, let the flame within his chest flicker to life once again—

“This is haaaaard,” Luffy interrupted, and there the moment went. “I’m thinking about not thinking, but then that means I’m thinking, and then I start thinking about how I’m thinking when I shouldn’t be thinking.”

The edges of Zoro’s mouth tugged upwards for some strange reason. “It happens. Stuff slips in. You let it come and go.”

“What kind of stuff?”

Ah. Well.

Zoro glanced at the chain-link fence that separated the back of the Bed’N’Brek from a lot containing nothing but a pile of dirt. It was very tall.

The truth? Mihawk, usually. Kuina, if he hadn’t had a beer in a while. But also—

“Last night. The pie was okay. Everything else not really,” Zoro said, the words bleeding out from him like an open wound, completely without his permission. What the fuck was he saying? 

He didn’t know Ace, or Dadan, or what their secret telepathic conversation had been about. And he especially didn’t know or understand Luffy, and he never will. Why was he pretending like he could? Fork take him now.

And what the fuck was that gigantic pile of dirt even there for? Was that even there yesterday? Where did it come from? Would it be there tomorrow? Was there a ditch nearby? And most importantly, could someone throw Zoro into said ditch and bury him so he’d never be able to speak again?

“Yeah,” Luffy said, shutting his eyes again. “Sorry.”

Luffy’s apology interrupted his thoughts of immediate, expeditious burial. “What the fuck for?”

“The pie. Kinda sucked.”

“Oh. Yeah, kinda.” That wasn’t Luffy’s fault, though. Hopefully Dadan wasn’t anywhere within earshot. Luffy closed his eyes again.

Zoro took the opportunity to look at Luffy, really look at him, for the first time this morning. The skin around his eyes had been rubbed red and raw, snot peeking out from his nostrils. Various damp splotches darkened the bottom of his shirt, like he’d been using it to wipe his face. Dry tear tracks carved down the slope of Luffy’s cheeks, running over the scar under his left eye.

Zoro was vaguely made aware of the fact that while he had been able to get at least some sleep last night, Luffy probably hadn’t gotten a wink.

✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼

Zoro was a multitasker. His whole thing was that he fought with three (well, two for now) swords. He was perfectly capable of pursuing several goals at once.

Task one was intel-gathering. It went like this:

“Hey,” Zoro said from the counter.

Dadan ignored him, continuing to clean out the espresso machine behind the bar. The entire place reeked of coffee grounds, not that that was a bad thing. Maybe Zoro could absorb the caffeine through scent, one of the few things this establishment would happily dish out for free.

“I need to talk to you,” Zoro tried. Because the way she handled the marines yesterday wasn’t how a normal person would react to someone shooting a hole through their ceiling. She knew things. Possibly useful things. Possibly useful things that would point him in the direction of the Cross Guild or even Mihawk himself.

“Hellooo?”

She banged a container repeatedly over the edge of the trashcan. 

“Oi, lady—”

“Ever heard of excuse me ?” She whirled around and pointed a pair of tongs at him. “You’re not getting your knife back until you check out, if that’s what you’re asking.” Clack clack went the tongs in his face.

“It’s not.”

“Fine. You ordering something?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t care.” Dadan turned around to continue doing whatever the fuck with the espresso machine.

Zoro expected this response. But she hadn’t immediately walked away, so he’d keep trying, making full use of his admittedly lacking interrogation skills. This was a lot harder to do without a sword at someone’s throat.

“So...you deal with the marines a lot?”

Dadan scoffed and poured coffee beans into the espresso machine. “They learned not to deal with me.”

“Not truuuuue,” Luffy chirped, appearing at the threshold between the kitchen and the dining room. He still had this weird air about him—muted, like a town under downpour. Like his heart wasn’t really in it. “Gramps made you promise to take care of me and Ace and then said he wouldn’t chase after you anymore because you’re—” He wiggled his fingers like the boogeyman, “—scaaared of him.” 

Dadan slammed the lid onto the espresso machine, likely imagining it to be Luffy’s face. “Don’t think I’ll take it easy on you today, dipshit.”

“Would be weird if you did,” Luffy replied, gaze wandering to where Zoro was seated. He fidgeted in his seat. After what felt like three to five business days, Luffy nodded once like he had decided something important, and then disappeared back into the kitchen.

“His gramp’s a marine?” Zoro asked, choosing to ignore what the fuck that was all about. Luffy’s grandpa being a marine made sense in the way that things that shouldn’t make sense did. 

Dadan paused to eye him closely. Zoro didn’t like how much people in this place stared at him all the fucking time, or kept giving him looks . He hasn’t even threatened anyone. If he had known that people looked at him like that regardless of what he did, maybe he wouldn’t have bothered hiding Enma and Kitetsu in a golf bag.

“You ask a lot of questions for a hunting dog.”

Oh. So she did know who Zoro was. Or some version of him, anyway. If chasing down easy, no-strings-attached cash made him the marines’ mutt, fine. Let Dadan and whoever else think whatever they wanted. Zoro knew what he needed to do. None of it mattered but Wado.

“I’m not after anyone here,” Zoro said. “Looking for Hawk Eyes.”

Dadan put a hand on her hip. “And what makes you think I know anything about him?”

Zoro gave her a look.

Dadan gave Zoro a look.

They shared a moment. Not a pleasant one, but a moment nonetheless. Dadan ended up turning away first, if only to bang the espresso machine a few times to coax it into turning on. Zoro could only take this as a coffee-scented victory. Another free thing this place was capable of giving.

“Look, Brat—“

“I’m twenty-two.”

“Brat,” she insisted, whirling around to snap the tongs at him. “No reason’s good enough to get involved with Cross Guild.”

“It’s personal.” 

“Especially that reason.”

Zoro longed for the carbonated, sweet sweet release of beer. (Beer was usually bitter, but still.)

He didn’t expect her to get it, to get him , nor did he ask her to. Wado belonged to him, sure as the sunrise. “What’s it to you?”

“I barely got out with my head attached to my body and I don’t need you bringing trouble to Foosha. Don’t get involved unless you’re trying to get yourself killed.”

“Didn’t ask for advice,” Zoro said, “I want information.”

“Well, I don't got any. You won’t find what you’re looking for and I’m not gonna be a part of whatever Kill Bill shit you got going on.”

Fucking. “Fine.” Whatever. He had other options to get the information he needed. Probably easier than what he had just tried to do, even if they were a bit more on the punchy- or stabby-fighting end of negotiation tactics.

And even if Dadan was right? Right about the fact that the world he was clawing at would chew him up and spit him out broken? Right about the fact that the closer he got to Mihawk, so too was he closer to dying?

Didn’t change the fact that there was nothing left in this world for him but to try anyway. To find Wado. Because Zoro wasn’t meant for anything else, not anymore.

Also, Kill Bill? Who the fuck was Bill?

✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼

(Later, Dadan wordlessly handed Zoro a map titled EAST BLUE LANDMARKS. There were a few red circles marked around different places. They were all random spots in the middle of the desert, no names or identifiers. That was nice and all, except he still couldn’t find where the fuck Foosha was on this thing. And there was no way he was going to ask anyone about it.)

✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼

Task two: Survey the landscape. Zoro was planning his next move. Zoro was taking in the environment.

Zoro was watching Luffy. 

Not in a weird way, because Zoro was a normal person who watched things normally. He was watching Luffy in the same way people at zoos watched interesting animals do utterly uninteresting things which were only now interesting because they were unusual. Or in the same way an anthropologist studied a civilization, except Zoro was not an anthropologist and the civilization that he was observing was just one dude.

Watching Luffy in a not-weird way for a few minutes turned into watching him for a few hours (still in a not-weird way.) And maybe the problem here was that Zoro wasn’t actually watching one dude. He was watching two who would swap places when one of them got tired. Normal Luffy and Other Luffy. Fun and not-so-fun.

Fun: When he ate the leftover fries at an empty table and licked the abandoned plates before clearing them off into his little dish cart.

Not-so-fun: The dozens of times throughout the day where he’d stare longingly out the window as if he could summon a version of his brother who wanted nothing more than to stay here with him.

Fun: When he tried to lift a giggling Rika up into the air to peel the bullet-holed sponge off the ceiling only for him to lose his grip and drop her onto an unsuspecting customer’s meal. The sponge was still there. 

Not-so-fun: When his eyes would get glassy out of nowhere so he’d disappear into his room for half an hour.

Fun: When he said, “Zoro, look!” and tried to spin a plate on his finger like a basketball before it eventually fell to the floor and shattered. And then said, “Okay, this time!” and tried to spin another plate on his finger like a basketball before it eventually fell to the floor and shattered. And then said, “Okay, this time!” and tried to spin another plate on his finger like—

Not-so-fun: When he went out back and walked up to the fence separating them from the giant dirt mound and kicked it over and over and over again, and then went back to the dumpsters to kick those too.

✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼

It should have been dark out by now, except it was the time of year where the sky hung onto the sun long enough for daylight to still be around at dinnertime.

Not that anyone here was bothering to eat dinner; They were too busy getting shit-faced on cheap alcohol. If Zoro were a slightly different person, he’d probably be doing the same. Instead he was still watching Luffy—this version appearing to be the normal, happy one—fiddle with the jukebox.

“Zoro, look! I found a way to trick it into taking pennies! It’ll only play one of Dadan’s old-lady songs, but still.”

“I think I’d prefer that over whatever your music taste is.”

“I have great music taste!”

“Sure, dude.”

Also, since when did this place have a jukebox? He hadn’t seen it in the dining room yesterday. Zoro didn’t know places even had jukeboxes anymore. With so much yelling and screaming and bitching and moaning going on in the Bed N’ Brek, why would anyone want to voluntarily add more noise? And judging by whatever Luffy had gotten to play, it wasn’t even good noise. Or maybe it was good, and he just couldn’t fucking hear it.

Zoro could tolerate it well enough though, because the beer here really wasn’t that bad. Pressed between drunk, sweaty people it tasted downright divine. It went down easy as water and felt twice as crisp. He wasn’t even buzzed.

A group of tall, burly men entered the restaurant. The dude in the front—their leader, maybe, except he was shorter and less burly than the rest of them—had a cigarette perched between the corners of his lips. He also had a comically large rifle tucked into the front of his pants for all to see.

This was normally the moment where Zoro’s hand would have gone to his bag to pull out Kitetsu, but Luffy was already turning away from the jukebox and greeting them.

“Oh, it’s you guys!”

“Hey, kid. Dadan around? She owes us grub.”

She certainly was around, noticeable only because the sea of drunks had parted for her when she appeared. The doorway she stood in bled white light over the dimlit dining room. She stalked towards them, saying nothing of the fuck-off-big-as-fuck rifle displayed in plain sight.

Evidently the whole “no weapons allowed” thing was bullshit. At the very least, Zoro had an idea of where his knife was after watching Dadan confiscate a few more weapons from some bar patrons earlier. It probably wouldn’t be too hard to convince Luffy to nab it.

“The fuck I owe you grub,” Dadan said, jabbing Rifle-guy square in the chest with a manicured finger. He stumbled back a little. “Where the fuck were the fireworks? I gave y’all the signal but marines still showed up!”

Rifle opened his mouth—

“And I know you’re not smoking that thing in here.”

Rifle closed his mouth. He plucked the cigarette from his mouth and put his hands up in surrender, smoke curling up between his fingers. “Those weren’t ours then, must’ve been from out of town. Last night Foosha’s marines were—”

“Taking turns seeing who could get themselves out of their own handcuffs the fastest, I know, I’m not a fucking idiot, they do that every Friday. I’m talking about the day before yesterday. Two marines, smoking a cigarette right outside! Barely got any fucking business ‘till they left.”

Rifle furrowed his eyebrows. “I don’t think those were ours, either. Our marines started the handcuff thing Thursday morning and did nothing else. One guy just took a while.”

“So Thursday’s were from out of town, too?”

“Had to be.”

“Hm.”

Dadan peered through the windows. Scanned her eyes around the restaurant. She mouthed something unintelligible under her breath.

Rifle leaned closer. “Huh?” 

“I said, fucking fine,” Dadan bit out. “I’ll get your grub .” She turned around back down the path the sea of drunks had cleared for her. They filled it in once she was back in the kitchen, the chaos of the dining room resuming like it had never ceased in the first place.

Zoro had no idea what the fuck fireworks had to do with the marines being here or what any of that was all about, but that wasn’t anything new. Zoro had gotten used to not knowing what the fuck was going on around here.

Rifle’s crew dispersed throughout the dining room. Most of them had to stay standing, what with how many people were crammed into seemingly every nook and cranny of the restaurant. Luffy was arguing with one of them over the next song that would play, because apparently they’ve fought over this before. 

Rifle took Luffy’s seat next to Zoro. For some reason, Zoro’s mood soured almost instantly. 

That was until Zoro noticed a tattoo peek out from beneath Rifle’s shirt collar: A winged Jolly Roger with a strange nose, a striped hat, and an ornate sword hilt piercing it from the top.

Zoro blinked and it was still there. For years he had only seen it in his not-dreams.

“You’re Cross Guild,” Zoro breathed. He imagined that sentence normally wasn’t spoken with such relief, but holy shit. This dude had practically dropped into his lap.

“Was Cross Guild.” Rifle corrected, rubbing the tattoo at the back of his neck. “Still need to get that shit covered up.” 

A flicker of a light bulb. “Was Cross Guild…” Zoro said, “like Dadan?” 

Rifle stilled. Eyed Zoro up and down. It must have been only now that he noticed the golf bag pressed against Zoro’s hip.

“Oi!” Rifle waved over the bartender. “Get a few shots of whiskey over here, wouldya?”

Fine. Not normally Zoro’s choice of poison, but he’d go with it. This was an opportunity, the closest he’s gotten to Mihawk in months. How could he refuse?

Plus it wasn’t like he was a lightweight. He’d have a few drinks, get the information he needed, then take a cue from Rika and Ririka and fuck off upstairs.

✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼　 　✼

So,

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One small problem.

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Zoro forgot how sleepy whiskey made him.

It wasn’t awful—just mean—and it lurched down Zoro’s throat like it had claws. And if he wasn’t sweating before, the way the alcohol warmed his blood certainly wasn’t helping. And that was to say nothing of the aftertaste, bitter and tinny.

A foul burp wretched itself from the bowels of Zoro’s insides.

Okay. Maybe it was awful. But they were talking. Turns out going shot for shot with Rifle—whose real name he still didn’t know but the weapon was the most important thing about him anyway—made it difficult to steer a discussion.

“Dadan got out b‘fore me n’ the guys. Asked her for a job once we got out n’ she said no, the greedy hag.” Rifle’s words warbled and slid around his mouth. “Said she’d rather take th’ free orphan labor.”

“You ever meet him?”

“...The orphan?”

“No. Mihawk.” 

“Oh.” Rifle’s voice got real low, like he was embarrassed. “Few times.”

“And?” He was so close. Zoro was so fucking close.

He spared a glance at the rest of the room, more out of habit than anything else. Whenever anyone moved, whether it was to use the restroom or step outside, they moved like they were swimming. The air was heavy and humid enough for it. Zoro felt like he was watching a fish tank.

Rifle’s hand was curled around his next shot. “Was ages ago, Pirate Hunter. You’re not after his bounty, are you?”

Maybe it would be easier if Zoro was just after the bounty. He liked to think that he did a good job keeping his feelings from getting in the way, but the reason why Zoro was doing any of this in the first place was because he felt like he owed something to a girl who was nothing but dirt and worms by now. If he was being honest with himself, what he was after was nothing but feelings: Pride in his self-discipline, in his ability to keep training long after he left the dojo behind. The joy—and there was joy, he was capable of it—of defeating an opponent that people thought would tear him to shreds. And the relief that would come with getting Wado back, that he hadn’t betrayed Kuina and their promise to each other after all.

Whatever feeling Zoro was feeling at the moment? He needed to not be feeling. Preferably as soon as possible.

Zoro took another shot before Rifle could take his. Number eight, or maybe nine. Nine was a good number. Perfect square. “No,” Zoro finally said, “I’m not after the bounty.” 

“Good.” Rifle gave Zoro another once over, like he was considering Zoro light of this new knowledge. “Y’know, if y’ really wanted to hide your identity, y’ shoulda considered dyin’ your hair. Not too many folks with that color.”

“I like my hair,” Zoro said. “People have green hair. It’s possible.”

“Tha people y’go after—” Rifle got out between hiccups, “—know who y’are?”

“Quite an interesting question you propose there. Generally, once people find out there is a bounty on their head, they tend to research the individuals that will come after them, myself certainly included. But that is besides the point. You mentioned that you were in the Cross Guild. Did you, perchance, make contact with any of Dracule Mihawk’s associates, or his underlings? Are there any locations they tend to frequent?”

…was what Zoro wanted to say. Unfortunately, he was getting to that point where saying anything more than four words at a time was a genuine challenge.

“Mm,” was all he could manage. 

God. It was so warm in here, in the restaurant and in his own body. Both hummed under the haze of alcohol. It was probably noisy in reality, but to Zoro it all just sounded like he was underwater. Like he was in the fish tank, same as everyone else.

And—oh. 

There he was, sitting on a table on the opposite end of the room chatting up one of dozens of patrons.

Zoro didn’t even realize he was looking for anyone in particular. But then again, Zoro never really needed to look for Luffy. He was just always there for him to find.

Luffy must have felt his gaze because this was the exact moment where he turned around to meet Zoro’s eyes. He immediately hopped off the table and snaked his way through all the diners.

Well, there went Zoro’s chances of getting anything out of Rifle. Luffy probably had no idea what they were talking about, and would be of little help. Of no help. Of negative help.

Luffy bumped into Zoro’s side, causing him to sway in his seat a bit. But it was fine because Luffy made him laugh and Luffy said you first and Luffy had long eyelashes up close.

“Why were you staring?” Luffy’s voice was the only thing that didn’t sound like it was underwater.

“Huh.” Had he been staring? Zoro couldn’t remember. The room wasn’t spinning, but it was close. Just a tilt here or there, if Zoro moved his head too quickly. If things moved too quickly they left behind after-images. Before-images. During-images. So many images, all at once.

“Well, whatever! Did you see when that lady beat the Heart Attack Challenge? It was a little lame because she was five minutes slower than my time, but still cool that someone else finally beat it!”

Zoro had many questions. He tried to grasp at one of them as they slid around his brain, managing to grab hold of the one that happened to require the least amount of words to ask.

“You drunk?”

Luffy frowned. “No? Why would I drink something that tastes bad? Are you drunk?”

Zoro pinched his fingers so only a tiny gap remained. “Little bit.”

“So…” Rifle cut in, and Zoro had honestly forgotten that he was still there. “Y’all know each other?”

“We’re friends!” Luffy patted Zoro’s head a couple times. Each one felt like Zoro’s skull was being rammed into a gigantic gong. The word echoed.

“He’s…staying here? Not just here for th’ booze?”

“For a little, yeah!”

“And you know who he is?”

Friends. The word tasted like whiskey. Bitter and once-familiar with sharp, gnarled claws.

“Uhhh, duh,” said Luffy. “Are you friends with people you don’t know?”

For Zoro, friends were distant and unknowable, flighty and ephemeral. Just like his body, right now.

“No, th’ point—he’s a bounty hunter, kid. He kills for the marines, hunts people like dogs. That’s why they call him the Pirate Hunter.”

Unattainable and impractical. And dead. For no good reason at all.

“I’m surprised Dadan’s lettin’ him stick around. ‘magine what Ace would say if—”

A shot glass toppled to the floor and shattered. The noise was lost in the chatter of the dining room, business as usual. Zoro had only noticed because he watched the glass fall.

The alcohol blush in Rifle’s cheeks was now redder and swollen. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth where his cigarette would have been. Luffy’s fist was balled up and bleeding.

Rifle opened his mouth. “Okay, that was m’bad. “M just tryna—”

“Zoro, I wanna go outside.” It was Other Luffy. And also Regular Luffy. It didn’t matter. They were both him. And he had hair that curled up a bit at the ends, and a ratty little straw hat hanging by a drawstring around his neck, and eyes glassy and big and dark, dark brown, the kind that burned into your retinas and stayed there even after you blinked and holy shit there was something deeply, deeply wrong with Zoro, and he wasn’t going to look at it.

“‘Kay,” was the sound that Zoro could get out. He got up and slung his bag over his shoulder.

Luffy took his wrist and wow no one has ever done that before. Compared to the warmth of everything around him and within him, Luffy’s hand burned deeper, like a brand. He tugged Zoro away from Rifle and weaved them between the diners, and yeah the whiskey was definitely one-hundred percent awful because he could feel it on the verge of coming back up again, and Luffy’s hand was still around his wrist, and they passed Dadan holding a tray of food that was probably meant for Rifle, but it didn’t matter because Luffy’s hand was still around his wrist as he pushed open the back door and—

There were the dumpsters. The bottles were all gone.

Luffy dropped his wrist. Zoro looked down at his arm fully expecting to see a ring of red where Luffy’s fingers had been. Instead there was dried blood.

Before-images, during-images, after-images. They all warped in the heat like vinyl.

Zoro closed his eyes to steady himself. It wasn’t cooler outside, but it didn’t feel like he was swimming in sweat anymore. The noise from inside drowned out the buzz of the cicadas. Or maybe there were no cicadas, and all that buzzing was courtesy of Zoro’s very own brain. It was better than feeling like he was about to puke, so he’ll take it.

Luffy sat on the ground where Zoro had meditated this morning. He sat next to him.

“Dadan’ll be pissed,” Luffy said. If there was anything in his voice to read, Zoro wouldn’t have been able to.

“She always seems pissed,” Zoro offered. 

Luffy gave him a weak puff of air in response. “Yeah, but for real this time.”

“You could tell’er he called’er a hag. Could help.” Zoro swayed a little. His shoulder bumped into Luffy’s.

Luffy stared at the big stupid mound of dirt like Ace would pop out from underneath it with confetti and firecrackers and say, Surprise, Lulu! This is a really elaborate but mean prank and I’m sorry! But I’m here. I’m here.

His hand was clenched in his lap, blood still smeared across his fingers.

Zoro tugged at the bandana around his arm to untie it. “Gimme that.”

Before Luffy could react, Zoro tugged at Luffy’s wrist to bring it in front of him. He began to wipe the blood from his knuckles. Pinpricks of it were forming in his palm. Luffy must not cut his nails often, no surprise there.

Zoro could feel Luffy’s eyes on him. 

He wrapped his hand with the bandana as neat as he could. The blood barely stained the cloth, or maybe it was just too dark to see. But the buzzing was gone. Either the cicadas stopped chirping or his brain stopped humming. He felt less like a palm tree in the wind.

“You’re really drunk.”

“No‘m not,” Zoro said to Luffy’s bandaged hand.

“It’s okay if you are.”

“But’m not.”

“But you are.”

Of course he wasn’t. A really drunk person couldn’t clean up bleeding nearly as well. Or tie a bandana this neat. Once Zoro was done with Luffy’s arm, he gingerly put it back where he found it and gave it a pat for good measure. Soberly.

Then the buzzing came back, louder than it was before. Okay fuck maybe he was really drunk whatever. Zoro was more of a light weight than he remembered being.

“Sorry you couldn’t keep talking to that Rifle guy.”

Zoro scoffed. “No reason t’be.”

“Yeah, you’re right. He was kind of an asshole.”

“He prob’ly shouldn’t’ve mentioned Ace.”

“Well yeah, that. But also you. He said all that bad stuff and he doesn’t even know you!”

Zoro pursed his lips. He thought of the swords in his bag and the blood that they’ve seen, thought of the first time he took a real blade to real flesh and bled it to real death, thought of how many times he’s repeated that process since then, and thought of how it didn't feel like anything anymore.

“Do you know me?” Zoro asked, his own voice sounding far, far away. The words felt carved from his ribs.

Luffy snorted. "I don’t care about the bounty hunter thing, figured that out ages ago. You’re just…not bad like they say you are.”

Zoro has never cared whether people thought he was bad, or murderous, or bloodthirsty. He knew who he was, what he was going to do, and who he was doing all of this for.

But this one time. Just this one time. It was nice to know that someone didn’t think the worst of him. Even if the worst was true.

It had only been a couple of days, and Zoro would be gone in just as much time. No, Zoro didn’t think that Luffy really knew him, but Zoro liked that someone as good as him was trying. Someone as pretty as him.

Wait. What.

“Whataboutyou?” Zoro said quickly. Cut that shit out. You fucking idiot. “You meet anyone interesting?” Shit fucking shit fuck.

“Not really anyone new other than the Heart-Attack lady. Oh! But I was talking to one of Rifle Guy’s crew and he was telling me about how they almost got in a fight with some clown dude named Baggy? Biggy? Boogy? I don’t remember. But I guess they had some really old beef.”

Amidst the panic, a light bulb, dim but there. “Do you…know where?”

“I think it was a town with a color? Red Town? Orange Town?”

“Oh, cool.” Turns out Luffy could be more than a little helpful. Zoro felt oddly at peace.

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After an eternity of watching the dumpsters slide back and forth (much like his stomach), Luffy leaned his head against Zoro’s shoulder. Zoro ignored the stress ulcer that was surely forming in his stomach because of it. “Are you sleeping?” 

He was feeling so good. And sober. Mostly. Not really.

“I’m inventing a new type of meditating where you’re allowed to think,” Luffy huffed. “Your version is too hard.”

Zoro didn’t quite laugh at that—too busy keeping his insides inside—but it was a near thing.

Chapter Text

Zoro woke up to yelling outside, which was kind of weird because he didn’t even remember when he had gotten inside. Or upstairs. Or in bed. Or asleep.

There had been a time in his life where he had woken up every other morning with no recollection of the night before. He’d be in an unfamiliar bed, or an unfamiliar floor, sometimes with people he had no memory of meeting. The only thing that connected all of these instances was shame, almost primal in how deep it bore into him.

Zoro has made it a point to never let things get that bad again. And they wouldn’t. 

It was just that trying to put the events of last night in chronological order felt a little bit like sorting molasses—a thing that people did, probably—with your bare hands. He tried anyway if only to prove to himself that he wasn’t that far gone. The memories were viscous and difficult to wade through, but they were there.

A man with a rifle, that was earlier. Wrapping his bandana around Luffy’s bloody knuckles, that was later. Shot after shot of awful whiskey, earlier. Luffy helping him up the stairs, later. Watching Luffy, both. It should have been neither. This would all be so much easier if it was neither. 

Luckily, Zoro knew how to deal with distractions.

He closed his eyes again, though it was dark enough in the room for it to not make much of a difference. He imagined the beginnings of a flame within his chest and inhaled.

Zoro let himself think about how Luffy’s knee had pressed up against his own this morning by the dumpsters, about Luffy sneaking around the kitchen long after dark to find them something to eat, about Luffy lying to a marine’s face for a woman he barely knew, about the mop fight and the first time Zoro saw Luffy’s face up close. And he let himself think about how Luffy had asked to hold Enma and Kitetsu in the very beginning, and how he might react differently if Luffy asked again, as mortifying as the thought was. Zoro let himself think about how he was in a perpetual state of understanding Luffy and then not understanding him at all, and feeling helpless but to watch either way.

He took all of the distractions in and let himself turn over every thought and relive each memory over and over again until they felt like nothing, until Luffy’s face was just a face and his hands were just hands, and his laugh was just a laugh and his silence was just silence. 

Zoro exhaled and let it all go.

He opened his eyes. Okay.

He sat up to get his bearings and—oh, fuck. Ohhhhh fuck. Ow mallet banging against his skull fucking ow.

Pain pierced his head like a gunshot, sudden and terrible. This was why he didn’t fuck with whiskey anymore.

Sure, it’s been a while since the last time it felt like his brain was pushing against the confines of his skull to the point of cracking, but it was fine and he was fine and there was no way he was going to be held back by a mere shot-or-ten of whiskey.

Alcohol doing Zoro in? Please, he wasn’t nineteen anymore. Zoro just needed to focus, to take things one step at a time.

Step one: Swing your legs over the side of the bed. Done.

Step two: Plant your feet on the floor, which was warm for some reason. Easy.

Step three: Stand up, ignore the lurching of your insides, clench your teeth. Fine.

Step four: Take a deep breath only to double over and cough uncontrollably to the point where you lose the breath you just took.

Okay. That last part was not a part of the plan.

Zoro now understood why it was so dark in here. It wasn’t the night or the sleep deprivation or whatever the whiskey left in his body was doing to him.

It was smoke.

It filled the room. It blackened the air. It swallowed any moonlight that might have spilled through the windows. And it was impossible to breathe in, like a layer of oil had coated his lungs.

Zoro didn’t know how he didn’t notice it earlier (yes he did, it was because something was repeatedly banging a gavel into his skull which was maybe a little distracting). He held his hands out in the air just to check if they were still there, since nothing else in his fucking body seemed up for cooperating with him. He couldn’t see them until he brought them close enough to touch his nose. He counted his fingers. All there. Good because there were still ten of them and good because he still had the capacity to count without blacking out again.

The door to his room swung open, at first only known to Zoro from the sound of the handle lodging itself into the plaster wall. The smoke dissipated just enough for Zoro to see who it was before black air filled the room again.

“Maybe it’s a good thing we don’t have locks,” Luffy said. Near unbearable heat radiated from the hallway behind him.

Zoro attempted to respond, but instead he just started coughing again so hard an organ might have fallen out without him noticing. The stomach-lifting nausea from earlier was back too, and he needed to swallow it down before whatever was in there came back up. He tried to take a deep breath to ground himself but then he just started coughing again because the smoke was burning his lungs, and now it was getting into his eyes, so he rubbed them with the heels of his palms until he saw white and of course that fucking hurt because anything bright caused his stupid fucking brain to start pulsing within his skull.

And then, because the universe had nothing if not great timing, the source of all the smoke appeared, blue and orange and red and white and really bright, Jesus Fucking Christ. The flames climbed up the walls on the far side of the room and began to consume the wooden beams overhead.

Maybe Zoro should be more alarmed, show a little more urgency. But Zoro was stuck coughing, over and over again from deep in his chest. He tasted copper. He felt very dizzy. No one ever told him that fires were so fucking loud.

“Hey,” Luffy said, and when did he get that close? “You good?”

Zoro couldn’t talk—little preoccupied—so between coughs he gave Luffy the most Does It Fucking Look Like I’m Good? look that he could muster.

Luffy was close enough for Zoro to see amid the haze, his straw hat hanging precariously from the string around his neck. His lashes were still very long, which Zoro really, really didn’t need to be reminded of right now. And worst of all, his eyes were wide and brown and the only things that didn’t hurt to look at right now, which sucked because they were also the exact things that were the very hardest to look at. Not the time. It would never be the time.

Luffy’s hand grasped Zoro’s shoulder, his thumb grazing his neck. Zoro’s blood pulsed beneath Luffy’s fingertips. He felt like he was boiling alive, and it had nothing to do with the fire.

“We’re gonna leave now, okay?”

Zoro nodded. Even if he was capable of speaking properly he wasn’t sure he would have anything to say. 

Luffy’s fingers grazed down Zoro’s arm until his fingers could encircle the smallest part of Zoro’s wrist, because apparently this was just a thing that they fucking did now. A shiver ran through Zoro’s body despite the heat. It affected his balance to the point where he stumbled after Luffy when he tugged Zoro into the hallway. 

The air here was worse than the bedroom, because it wasn’t just air. Black flakes of whatever the fire had already devoured drifted lazily around them like dust in a sunbeam. Any and all color had been painted over with ash.

Zoro reflexively sucked in air to cough, which was maybe the worst possible thing he could have done at that moment. Smoke and soot and dust filled his chest. He twisted his wrist from Luffy’s grasp to hack out another cough into his elbow, which of course reminded his skull that it was in the middle of hydraulic pressing his brain from every angle. Zoro crumpled onto his hands and knees.

The fire has already completely engulfed Zoro’s room. If Luffy had arrived moments later he would have already been seared alongside the rest of it. Hell, moments later from now he and Luffy would be cooked in this very hallway.

But instead of panicking, Luffy was waiting for Zoro as if they were strolling through a park and he had merely stopped to tie his shoe. Inconvenienced maybe, but in no real hurry. And here Zoro was, sputtering and retching like an animal close to death. He was already on his hands and knees like one.

Except…his breaths came easier, down here. The air still tasted like coal but it didn’t move through his body like he had swallowed a lump of it. Zoro screwed his eyes shut and willed the bile in his throat to settle. He took stuttered breaths to appease the burning in his lungs.

“It’s better down here,” Zoro croaked, each word barely passing his lips.

“Huh?”

Zoro wasn’t up for using his voice again so soon. It was easier to take Luffy’s wrist and tug him towards the floor.

“Hey, what’s your probl—”

Zoro put a finger to Luffy’s lips to shush him. He pulled back and put his hand to his chest, taking a deep breath like Koshiro had taught him.

A flame, the small, controlled one that he kept in his chest. Vines twisting around a trellis. Cicadas in the early morning. His headache faded to a dull throb, a constant but manageable drone.

Luffy watched him, eyes owlish like they had been this morning by the dumpsters. It was one of the memories that Zoro had trodden upon until it was barely a thought, but it was there. It was still there.

“Breathe,” Zoro instructed.

Luffy, in all his infinite wisdom, did the exact opposite. Also like this morning, though it felt different, somehow. Not that it mattered. 

“C’mon dumbass, in through your nose, out through your mouth.”

Luffy blinked a few times, like Zoro had unpaused him. He watched Luffy’s chest expand and deflate. 

“You’re right! This is a lot better.”

“Yeah.” Zoro still felt like puking a little bit but this was a much better predicament than earlier if he ignored the all consuming inferno beginning to surround them. “Anyone else still inside?”

Luffy shook his head. “You’re the only one who slept through the explosion.”

Huh? The, fucking, “What?”

“LUFFYYY!” screeched Dadan's voice from outside, somehow audible over the sound of the entire building crackling with fire. “Get your ass OUT OF THERE!” Fucking ow. Dadan was really good at making her voice carry.

“COOOOMING!” Double fucking ow. Luffy was really good at making his voice carry, too. Zoro was pretty sure Dadan wasn’t his real mom, but some strange version of genetics probably had something to do with it anyway.

“You heard her,” Luffy said, “Stay close.” He nodded his head in the direction of the stairs, or what was probably the stairs. Zoro wasn’t entirely sure.

“Okay.” He only agreed because it would be harder to hear Luffy otherwise.

They crouched under the worst of the smoke as they made their way through the hallway. Luffy’s hand was pressed up against what was left of the walls to find the doorway. Zoro was focused on putting one step in front of the other while managing his twisting stomach. See? Multitasking.

Eventually they reached the door to the stairway. Luffy swung it open. Would have been great progress, except—

“Um,” Luffy said. “The stairs are broken.”

“The fuck you mean the stairs are broken?”

“I mean they’re broken.”

Zoro pushed past Luffy to look.

Okay, well. “Broken” wasn’t the phrasing Zoro would have picked. Maybe ”charred” or “skeletal” or “missing most of its steps.” Still, he got the point. Zoro sighed, resigning himself to finding a window to jump out of. “So what do we do n—”

Luffy took one step down and immediately fell straight through the stairs, causing the rest of the stairway to collapse with him.

Ash and burnt splinters slowly fluttered down after him.

“LUFFY!” Zoro leaned as far as he could through the doorway, but it was impossible to see where he had landed beneath the orange haze.

“I’M OKAY!” Luffy declared. Zoro could hear him clamoring over whatever rubble had fallen on top of him.

“Idiot,” Zoro said, relieved at the simple fact that his way out was alive. “You see an exit?”

“Yeah, but we gotta hurry!”

Without sparing a glance behind him—he would probably just be faced with the wall of flames he could already feel licking at his back—Zoro sat on the ledge where the stairs had been and pushed himself off. The ground was a lot closer than he imagined it being, but he managed to land on his feet without breaking anything or immediately throwing up. This hangover shit was easy.

Of course there was still the issue of getting out. The orange haze ruined any chance of seeing anything. Zoro called out despite his throat feeling like someone had scraped nails down his esophagus. “Luffy?”

“Over here!”

Zoro followed the voice. “Where?!”

“You sound further away!”

“I’m not, I’m going where your voice is!”

“No you’re not!”

Well it wasn’t Zoro’s fucking fault the sound of a burning building was louder than an asteroid hitting the fucking planet. All the smoldering wooden beams criss crossing over his path weren’t making this any easier.

“Just…keep talking!”

“Okay! No one’s ever told me to do that before. Well, there was the time a dude told me to ‘keep talking and see what happens next’ before cracking his knuckles, but—”

The crunch of wood, more brittle than bone. The sizzle of embers threatening to grow into flames once more. And of course the fire, only leaving him alone now because it had already razed whatever used to be here.

Zoro stepped on something that made a scraping metallic sound against his shoe. It was a pot, half melted into a sludge of asphalt and linoleum.

Right. He was in what used to be the kitchen. He tried to imagine where the threshold to the dining room might have been. Luffy’s voice might have assisted in figuring it out, but Zoro wasn’t going to tell him that.

“—that was the first time I ever saw Dadan knock someone out with an onion, and I think that’s why she prefers throwing them?”

A dozen or so more paces through debris and he was able to make out Luffy’s figure in the fog.

“This is our way out? Can’t we just break the windows?”

“Can’t—they’re bulletproof!”

Of course they were.

Luffy was clearing rubble off the table that was lodged in that stupid revolving door that should just be the entrance. His problem was that more debris kept falling from a hole in the ceiling right onto where Luffy was working.

Zoro gripped the end of the table and yanked it from the revolving door, sending it toppling out of sight. “There.”

Luffy blinked at him a couple times. “Woah, you’re strong! Thanks Zoro!”

His face was just a face and his hands were just hands and his voice was just a voice, even when it said his name like that. 

“It’s whatever.”

Luffy began to shove at the door with his shoulder, but it barely budged.

“I thought it was locked?” Zoro recalled Ace telling him off for trying to pick it when he had first arrived.

“Nah, Dadan just super-glued all the hinges.”

Zoro was kind of surprised this place hadn't caught fire earlier.

He joined Luffy in pressing his body against the revolving door. Of course this was the one fucking thing in the entire building that the fire had left alone. But after a few moments of their combined efforts, Zoro heard something snap, the wood groan, a hinge squeak. Luffy pressed his entire back against the door and pushed.

Then all at once the revolving slid open beautifully, sending the both of them outside to crash into the floor and each other.

Zoro never thought he’d be thankful to feel the armpit-like summer air against his skin, or to feel Luffy’s elbow between his ribs, but here he was, first-degree burn free. Probably.

“We did it!” Luffy beamed at him. 

Zoro instead looked at the curb, blackened by soot. “Yeah. Can you get off me?”

They stood up and made their way to where the rest of the Bed N’ Brek patrons were waiting, scattered in small groups across the dirt lot. They appeared a little rattled—who wouldn’t be—but it was clear that Zoro was the only one who had barely made it out of the building by the skin of his teeth. Even that old knitting lady was here.

Dadan and Magra stood off to the side from everyone else, closest to the building. Their faces looked carved from stone as they watched the fire. That was, until Dadan noticed him and Luffy approach. Now she looked just about ready to murder the both of them.

She did no such thing, but she did whack Luffy upside the head when they got close enough.

“Ow?!”

“Have fun in there, dipshit?” Dadan scolded. “Enjoy your sauna?”

Dadan clearly hadn’t hit him all that hard and Luffy clearly wasn’t all that hurt. Like many other things that Zoro has observed in the Bed N’ Brek, it was mean but good. An exchange born out of habit.

“Zoro was still in there!” Luffy waved his hands in Zoro’s direction as if he were presenting him to a panel of judges. The judges did not seem very impressed.

“If he doesn’t wake up to an explosion, that’s just nature taking its course,” Magra said.

“What explosion?” Zoro asked no one apparently, because no one bothered answering. 

Dadan only glanced at Zoro like he was a piece of dog shit that she had accidentally stepped in. She turned back to Luffy as if to say, See?

“He’s a little dumb—”

“Oi,” Zoro said, “I’ll smack you too.”

“—but he’s my friend!”

And there it was again, that word, once-familiar. And there it was again, the nausea, a dozen more times familiar. Both were equally distracting. Zoro pressed his lips together to keep his insides inside. He swallowed everything down once, twice.

After another moment, Dadan took Luffy by the shoulders. “Lemme see you.”

She manhandled Luffy like a rag doll, his arms limply swinging around with each push and pull. She checked his face, his hair, his clothes. She checked along his arms and stopped at his right hand, still wrapped in Zoro’s bandana.

“Who fixed this?” She asked.

Luffy nodded his head in Zoro’s direction.

Zoro wasn’t ready to be faced with evidence of who he was just a few hours ago, before he had gotten his shit together. But wrapping Luffy’s hand, feeling the calluses on his fingers, it wasn’t like it meant anything. He saw bleeding and he wrapped it, same as he had done for himself a thousand times before. 

Dadan turned back to Luffy. “You’re fine,” she declared.

“Duh,” Luffy said. “I knew that already.”

Dadan glanced at her burning restaurant and home, then back at Luffy. Her hands were almost white-knuckled as they gripped his arms.

“Your clothes are all ruined,” she huffed.

“So are yours!”

“And when’s the last time you showered? You stink like shit.”

“The shower’s gone now.”

“And you need to drink more water, your skin is too hot.”

“The diner is on fire!”

“And…” She looked again at what was left of the Bed N’ Brek, and then at Luffy, for a long, long time, like she was about to embrace him.

She instead shoved him away, just hard enough for him to stumble backwards and bump into Zoro. The impact caused Zoro’s stomach to lurch.

“…don’t do that again,” she said, “or I’ll kill you.”

She stalked away before Luffy could respond. He huffed and adjusted his hat as if Dadan had grievously ruined it.

“You know how she is,” was all Magra offered. 

“Yeah. Still annoying.”

The three of them watched as the questionably white paint turned to brown turned to black turned to ash. Zoro has never seen snow before, but he imagined that snow fell just like this: delicate, slow, powdery. Except he knew that it probably wasn’t a good idea to stick his tongue out to catch a snowflake unless he wanted to cook his tongue and blacken his teeth.

“Don’t run into burning buildings,” Magra told Luffy, because that was the type of thing Luffy needed to be told, apparently.

“Whatever,” Luffy said.

“She was about to go in after you.”

“Then I would have brought her out with Zoro too.”

“And if you couldn’t?”

“Who cares if I couldn’t?” Luffy said, crossing his arms, “I did.”

Magra sighed like he has had this conversation with Luffy hundreds, thousands of times before.

Dadan was speaking with Ririka a dozen paces away. Rika stood silent beside her mother with her unicorn backpack, eyes transfixed on the inferno ahead. Zoro wondered how many places she had lived in. Zoro wondered if she’s tired of moving all the time. Zoro wondered if she still remembered their lessons.

“Dadan won’t say it, but she loves you,” Magra said eventually. 

Luffy picked at his fingernails.

“Try not to give her a heart attack. She’s older than she looks.”

And then Magra winked at Zoro for some fucking reason, like he was in on the joke. He then knocked Luffy’s hat off his head and ditched them to follow Dadan. Luffy did not bother fixing hit hat this time.

And then it was just Zoro and Luffy. Which was fine, because Luffy was just some dude he met a couple of days ago. Nothing more and nothing less.

They watched as the flames claimed the roof, leaving charred, wooden ribs that stuck out against the haze. The entire building sagged as if something heavy had been placed atop of it—the sky or stars maybe, except the smoke thickened the air so much that neither of those things were visible. Zoro couldn’t see much from down here, and if against all reason there was a God, they weren’t seeing much from up there.

The sky was dark gray like it had never known another color. Smoke obscured the pile of dirt behind the Bed N’ Brek. It draped over the hills in the distance which morphed into mountains in the further distance. It disappeared whatever laid beyond them. Beyond Foosha.

Technically, Zoro has already gotten what he needed from this town. Sure, it would have been nice to stay for a couple more days, see if he could get any more information out of Dadan about this Red-Or-Orange Town that Luffy had mentioned earlier, but nothing was really stopping him from leaving. Not having a room or bed anymore certainly helped his case.

Zoro has been to plenty of bed and breakfasts, inns, and motels, and this one was no different (except that it was burning down). They were all used to patrons coming and going and then never seeing them again (though probably not used to fire). It was just the nature of the business (except for the fire).

And besides, Zoro was a bounty hunter. He was trouble on two legs, bad for businesses that thrived on giving people a place to stay regardless of who they were, including and especially people with bounties. 

Sure, it was rubble now, but they’d rebuild the Bed N’ Brek. If he stuck around, it would come to be known as That Place The Pirate Hunter Frequented. He couldn’t do that to these people, not after the kindness they had shown him.

Luffy could live his life, and Zoro could live his, keep going after Wado—

Oh, fuck.

Ohhhhh fuck.

Nausea, unbearable nausea. All of his senses turned to static and something terrible gripped his chest so tight that Zoro couldn’t help but think about the one other time in his life that he’d ever felt like this, so awful that Zoro has dedicated his entire being to making up for it.

Slowly, he felt at his waist.

Oh. Oh, God. Oh Thank Fucking God.

Enma and Kitetsu were pressed into his side by his haramaki.

Somehow, despite everything else, even when he couldn’t see and couldn’t breathe and struggled to find his thoughts in his own fucking brain, he still thought to take Enma and Kitetsu with him. He unfastened his haramaki so he could see his swords with his own eyes. He blinked hard to try and shock his body into realizing that this was a world where he at the very least still had them.

His other stuff—the few clothes he had, all his cash—was ash by now for sure, but who cared about that shit? As long as he had them he could keep going. The fire could singe the clothes off his back for all he cared.

Zoro didn’t realize that he had kneeled on the dirt floor until Luffy was looking down at him and the death grip Zoro had on Kitetsu’s hilt. 

And then Luffy’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, shit,” he breathed.

Zoro barely heard him through his relief. “What?”

Zoro watched as something clicked in Luffy’s dumbfuck stupid idiot fucking brain. Instead of answering, he ran straight into the smoldering doorway that he tumbled out of with Zoro moment's ago.

Dadan’s reaction was immediate. “You FUCKING idiot!” He heard her running before he saw her. Magra caught up to her and pulled her away from the threshold at the same moment the first floor’s ceiling crumpled like tissue paper and caved in, crushing everything beneath it.

Embers fluttered from the doorway, kind of like the confetti that Perona had hurled in Zoro’s face when she threw him a surprise birthday party.

Zoro tried to stand up to do something, anything, but his stomach started twisting again, and smoke was making its way back into his airways and he couldn’t breathe, and

it was stupid because he didn’t even know how Perona had found out about his birthday in the first place. He wasn’t one of those people who hated birthdays, he just thought that people made way too big a deal out of something that was ultimately just a distraction from the things that actually mattered during the other 364 days of the year. But

the brightness of the fire blinded him like a flashbang every time he blinked. Luffy was in there, and Zoro couldn’t breathe, and

somehow, Perona had even managed to get a hold of Johnny and Yosaku, who had been over the moon to see him. Zoro remembered laughter—some of it even coming from him—as they sat around Perona’s coffee table and got tipsy playing some stupid drinking game. Loathed as he was to admit it,

he needed to go after Luffy to help him get out just as Luffy had done for him, but

he felt warm. Safe, not because he was protected from danger, but safe in the knowledge that these people were here with him because they wanted to be, and not because they wanted something from him. For all the fear that he had apparently sown in the East Blue, it wasn’t thick enough to breach the awful hot pink walls of Perona’s apartment.

“To Zoro!” Yosaku said, raising his beer bottle.

“To Kuina,” Zoro had said, evidently drunker than he thought he was because he had no fucking clue where that came from.

“Who?”

“Jus’ someone,” Zoro mumbled.

“Oh, cool,” Perona said. “I really thought there was something wrong with—”

his head was splitting open and Zoro was now on all fours trying to get something, anything in his lungs so he could stand up and go back for Luffy because even if his face was not a face anymore and his hands were not hands anymore, and his laughter wasn’t anything anymore and his silence was all that he was, Zoro would still go back for

“—you! Didn’t know you were capable of talking to people other than us.”

“Without killing them, she means,” Johnny added.

Sometimes, in the deepest and most awful parts of his mind, Zoro wished that he had been the one to kill Kuina. Sometimes he could picture it, too, colored by his real memories of murder. He imagined the hint of resistance that her flesh would give before his blade pierced through it and painted blood. He imagined his heart dropping into his chest in the same way that it did every time he ended a life. And he imagined living with the guilt afterwards, because at that age it would have been his first murder. And he imagined growing up with the knowledge that he killed his one and only friend instead of what he actually grew up with: a deep, all-consuming hole in his chest that he's been trying to fill since. 

Zoro swallowed all of this down and instead asked, “Aren’t you guys supposed to be nice to me today?”

“We are! Look!” The three of them raised their bottles. “To Kuina,” Perona chirped, clinking her bottle with Zoro’s, “whoever the hell that is.”

Luffy, because the thought of going back for him was the only thing that was keeping Zoro from, from, fucking…what?

What would this do to him? Luffy, not only dying, but dying for no reason like Kuina? Zoro wasn’t ready for that answer. He didn’t want to be. Not again.

Zoro tried again to take a deep deep breath before looking up and

Maybe it was a trick of the smoke. Maybe it was all the fumes that he had inhaled. Maybe it was something like a ghost, a spirit, or a phantom. Or maybe it was something else entirely. Something divine.

But Luffy was knelt in front of him, haloed by a wisp of smoke with a lock box tucked under his arm. He was covered in black, powdery snow, his shorts singed at the edges. His eyes were glassy and big and dark, dark brown, the kind that burned into your retinas and stayed there long after you blinked. He was smiling, unharmed and whole and alive and perfect.

The feeling in Zoro’s chest—previously smothered in cloth and waterboarded by meditation down to a single smoldering piece of coal—ignited in an instant. Every safeguard Zoro had put in place disintegrated like spun silk on a stove. In quantity it wasn’t much, but in weight his every moment with Luffy felt like hundreds, thousands. And they all flooded back all at once. And Zoro knew something was deeply wrong with him. And he knew that it was never fucking ending. That this, this would be never fucking ending.

Luffy rummaged around in the lock box, its contents banging against the metallic sides. A few bills spilled out over the sides and fluttered away.

Zoro watched his every movement, the way his tongue stuck out of the corner of his mouth as he dug through the box, the way his eyebrows knitted together as he concentrated, the way Zoro’s bandana was somehow still tied around his hand.

Eventually, Luffy fished out whatever he had been looking for and held it out for Zoro to take, handle first. 

Zoro would have laughed if his throat wasn’t already raw.

In Luffy’s hand, blade pointed towards himself and away from Zoro, was the stupid white-hilted knife with a black blade that Zoro had swiped off some dude in a bar fight and kept because it reminded him of Wado. In reality it meant nothing, as valuable as the shoes he dragged through the dirt every day. But it was the closest thing he had to Wado, to Kuina, to their promise. And Luffy had gone back into a fire for it, knowing none the wiser. Luffy had gone back into an inferno for Zoro twice, knowing none the wiser.

“Yours, right?” Luffy asked. His smile was wide and bright, almost blinding.

Zoro tried to smile back. Instead he just puked all over Luffy’s flip-flops.