Archive of Our Own ^beta

The paper bag’s warm against Zoro’s side, bottles knocking together, steamed buns still breathing heat. A token for the girls he’s been talked into carrying, yet again. The path under his boots is worn deep, carved by years of bodies crossing the island from one coast to the other. The sun sits steady on his back, a crisp bite at the hinge of his neck.

Usopp and Sanji have stayed behind at the market, bartering and probably running their damn mouths. It’s a tiny island, a perfectly forgettable place that they’re only visiting out of necessity, really. Nami didn’t even step off the ship, just barked that they were gone in an hour to some archipelago that’s got Robin all in a tizz, so make it quick: refuel and scram. 

A bun slips free and he catches it against his ankle a second too late, sending it tumbling off the path to land with in the leaf-litter.

He should leave it because it’d be perfectly fucking normal to leave it, but the cook’s a pissy little freak about this kind of thing. And it’s been a good day. Quiet. Definitely not worth the grief over one stupid bun.

Before his fingers can reach it, a hand pushes up through the leaves and cups the bun, neat as a waiter.

Zoro goes still.

It’s a known hand, calloused, scar notched across the knuckles in a way he recognises as his own. The wrist dips at an angle a wrist shouldn’t have. The fingers flex once, twice, offering the bun like a prayer.

He straightens fast and treeline leans in, bowing toward him on creaking trunks like rigging dragged taut, branches knitting overhead until the light goes cold and thin. A hill shoulders up through the path where there wasn’t one before, slouched like it’s tired of its own weight. The sun stays nailed in place behind grey-gold cloud, a lid that won’t blink.

The air twists, like the whole island’s taken a breath.

Something brushes his ankle. The bun bumps against his boot and stops. When he looks down, the hand is gone. Just leaves. Just dirt. Just – 

The ground gives. 

His boot slides in slick mud, shoulder slamming down, jaw cracking off something hard. White pain bursts behind his eye, hot and clean, like a collapsing star. His hand flies up on instinct to find a wet, open gash just past his cheekbone.

He can’t get his breath right. Every inhale stutters like he’s been sprinting, fighting – dying.

The mud smells wrong. Sweet. New. It clings too thick as he scrabbles forward – 

– and his fingers close on Wado’s hilt buried to the guard in the dirt, like a gravestone.

He wraps his palm around it and yanks until blood smears along the blade where his skin splits. Something cold tests the hinge of his jaw, light as a tap, like measuring, then withdraws when he bares his teeth.

“Shit,” he mutters, the word punched out.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

He finds the Sunny down in the bean-shaped wharf where he left it, tucked under the crescent moon, waiting for him. He’s finally gotten his gait back under control, finally shoved down the arc of pain that hits his left leg whenever he puts too much weight on it, when Usopp barrels out of the ship, half-manic. 

“Zoro! Luffy just went to rustle up the locals to find you!” 

Zoro grunts at him, just trying to – get the fuck inside, away. If he can cross the deck it’ll be okay. If he can just stay it’ll be – it’ll be fine, and he’ll sort it out, and it’ll be fine. 

“Market,” he manages and Chopper’s hooves hit the dock with a slap. Franky’s voice echoes behind him – “Is it really him?!” – but Zoro doesn’t answer. 

Sanji’s the one who gets to him first, skidding to a stop a few metres away, chest heaving, shirt half-buttoned, smoke curling from his mouth. For a second, Zoro thinks it’s almost relief in his face.

Then Sanji’s grabbing his shirt and shoving him back a step. “What the fuck, Marimo?! Luffy’s been tearing the island apart looking for you!”

Zoro jerks his arm free. “Why would – ”

“I don’t know,” Sanji snaps. “Because you’ve been gone for eight hours, maybe?!”

Zoro’s heart slams sideways in his chest. Fury thatches in the base of his throat. Eight hours. Eight hours. He snarls. “You’re the one who made me take your goddamn groceries, don’t go blaming – ”

“Zoro,” Chopper jumps in, patting at the expanse of Zoro’s stomach, chest. Where his shirt is bloodied and torn, skin ripped through underneath like he’s gone toe-to-toe with a bunch of fucking razors and lost. Badly. “Are you… did you get in a fight?”

“How the hell do you get in a fight on a twenty-minute walk?!” Sanji shouts. He throws his hands up. “And where are the buns?!”

“Got wrecked,” Zoro throws over his shoulder and goes to clean himself up, running the shower hot enough to sting. 

He plants both hands on tile and lets it drum the back of his neck until his skin aches. He’s lived with adrenaline after a fight before, a thousand times over, but this is – different. It’s like his pulse won’t just fucking settle, like it misses a stair, takes the next two and then decides to start again. 

It’s the kind of rhythm that makes breath feel optional and wrong inside. 

Eight hours.

He keeps saying it in his head like the number’ll magically turn into something sensible, but all he can see is the path bending in front of him. The hill not being where it should be. Fighting for air with his jaw ringing and Wado stuck in the ground like a fucking grave marker. 

Last time it got this bad he’d woken in a field with the taste of steel in his mouth and a fight he couldn’t remember behind him. Last time it was this bad he was barely a day over sixteen, dumb as hell, raging against the world like it’d marked him specifically. Like any sixteen year old he’d sworn it was a mistake, a mirage or two: just a rowdy kid’s bad luck, a stupid brain, something you can out-stubborn if you put enough muscle on it. And he had out-stubborned it: he’d trained. He’d won. 

(Won in the sense that he kept moving forward until the ground agreed. Not always, but most of the time. Enough of the time to matter. Won in the sense that it’s normally a hairline slip, a crack. Not a hole.)

He presses his forehead to the wall’s cool tile. His palms are a mess: they’re raw where the callouses have split, grit worked into the lines. His knuckles are scabbed over like it happened a week ago. The welt on his face throbs in time with the wrong beat. He tells himself it’s going to be fine. He probably slipped. He probably got jumped. 

He tells himself a lot of things.

The knock’s soft for Luffy, which is how Zoro knows he’s been there awhile. “Zoro?”

Zoro turns the tap off and doesn’t answer right away, because what the hell is he meant to say? He doesn’t have any answers for any question his captain might ask. He dries his face with a rough towel that smells like salt and soap and ship. 

He doesn’t chance a look in the mirror. Not yet. 

Luffy’s on the floor in the hallway, knees up, chin on them, like a kid waiting outside an infirmary. His eyes go wide in the way they get when the fight’s over but the thinking part isn’t. “You back now?” 

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” Luffy nods, clearly accepting that at least this is a fact he can set on the table somewhere. His gaze flicks over Zoro, taking in his jaw, hands, the angle he’s holding himself. “You were gone all day.”

“Market was crowded.” 

Luffy doesn’t blink. “Don’t lie to me.”

Zoro’s mouth tightens. He leans on the doorframe because he needs something to lean on that isn’t a person. His heart hammers somewhere. He says the only damn true thing he can stand to say: “I’m back.”

Luffy pushes to his feet in one rubbery fold but for once he doesn’t grab him or make a scene. He just reaches out and hooks a finger in the edge of the towel at Zoro’s shoulder and leaves it there, a light pressure, like he’s tying a line without tying a knot. “Next time, don’t go alone.”

Zoro bristles, an automatic reaction even though he knows it’s disproportionate, here. He hates losing time but above all he hates the babying that comes with it. “I’m not a kid.”

“I know.” Luffy’s mouth is a flat line that isn’t quite a smile. “You’re my first mate.”

Something in Zoro’s chest shifts, begrudging. The bad rhythm tries to restart and fails. He makes some butchered noise that might pass for a laugh, if they didn’t know him well enough. Tragically for him, Luffy reads him like a book every damn day. 

“Nami’s mad,” Luffy says almost cheerfully, because stating facts is how he does kindness. “She yelled so loud the gulls left. Chopper cried a little and then said he didn’t. Sanji said he’d kick your skull in if you made him worry again.” The last part is lighter, teasing, even if the eyes behind it aren’t.

Zoro rolls his eye. “Yeah, he can try.”

Luffy tilts his head. “Eat something. Stay close.” 

It’s not an order and it is.

Zoro nods because it’s easier than saying yes, because saying yes feels like admitting there’s anything to guard against which – no, thanks. 

Luffy watches him a second longer, as if he’s looking for a thing he can’t name, then pats the towel again and lets it go. “Good. Don’t get lost right now.”

Zoro snorts. “I just took a shower.”

“Mm.” Luffy’s grin finally shows up, crooked and soft. “You smell like the ship again.”

The hallway feels wider with him in it and narrower the second he’s gone, and Zoro stands there until the wood’s warm against his spine before kicking his own ass into gear and forcing himself to get dressed. His hands don’t quite want to work but he’s dealt with worse, probably, so he does what he needs to do and keeps his eye off the mirror and does Not think about tiles that aren’t tiles. Roads that open like mouths. 

When he finally steps out Luffy’s planted on the stairs like a guard dog pretending to be a boy. Zoro doesn’t comment, doesn’t need to. The mask he puts on to pass him on the way to the galley is steady, practiced and the only thing keeping him upright.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 

Dinner’s loud in the good way, the way it always is when things are smooth and no-one’s trying to kill them and everyone feels safe. There’s heat from the stove, the familiar clatter of crockery, the drift of salt through an open porthole. Zoro sits where he always sits, with his back to the bulkhead, his swords close enough he can touch them with his knee if he needs to. The table’s crowded with plates and elbows and the easy noise of people who know each other’s terrible habits inside out and then some.

It’s fucking nice, is all.

“You should’ve seen his face,” Usopp says, fork fencing the air. “Whole day gone and he strolls in like, ‘ah yes, I took the scenic route through a volcano, no big deal.’”

Laughter breaks around the table. 

“I didn’t –” Zoro starts, blinking uselessly. Wait, was there a volcano? He wouldn’t have noticed.

Sanji flicks his lighter against his thumb, tale as old as time. The flame jumps and for a half second it’s too bright, longer, thinner, like it wants to climb, and then it’s a normal flame again. Zoro pretends not to notice. “Lucky I didn’t have to put up missing posters, Marimo.”

“Those cost money,” Nami adds, without looking up from ladling herself more soup. “You’d be billed.”

Luffy chews, thinks, swallows. “We should put a bell on him. A leash!” 

Brook’s violin string gives a cheerful plink that echoes wrong for a heartbeat, bright, then thin as glass, before it’s just music again. “A leash, yoho! I have no body to get lost, but if I did, I would sympathise.” 

Franky wipes his hands on a tea towel and leans in, eyes glittering. “Forget bells, we fab up a Zoro-locator. Chrome antenna, super audible beep… it could work, guys!”

“Absolutely not,” Zoro snorts but it’s under  Franky’s laughter, under Nami’s muttering, under Chopper’s giggle.

He keeps eating. Jaw, then swallow, then breathe. The rice is hot and sticks to his tongue and it’s good in the way that Sanji’s cooking is always good. He tells his shoulders to climb down from around his ears. He tells his pulse to stop kicking the wrong beat under his jaw. 

The jokes don’t sting; it’s the same noise they make every time he takes the long way home so it’s fine, really. 

What isn’t fine is the way he blinks to find the light over the table splitting for a blink into a seam, sharp as a line drawn with a blade, before it snaps back into warm yellow again, easy and round. Luffy reaches for the platter and his arm doesn’t stretch too long, it doesn’t smear into the air like taffy. The floor doesn’t breathe.

Everything is fine.

“Seriously,” Usopp says in a gentler tone now, good-natured needling giving way to the kind of soft worry that comes with nakama. “Where’d you go?”

Zoro shovels in more rice. “Market was crowded,” he says around the mouthful, casual enough to pass despite Usopp and Sanji being at the same damn market.

In the corner of his eye the window shows water. For a moment the water is black glass that reflects the galley back at him wrong, everyone seated, but the reflections half a second late. And then a gull cuts past and it’s just the sea again, waves, sky, horizon. Zoro’s fingers find the saya at his hip and stop there while he talks himself into breathing. 

He tells himself he’s tired and beat-up and that’s all. He tells himself today was a fluke and he’s not sixteen again, not losing his damn mind again. 

Sanji sets a fresh plate down in front of him like he’s not paying attention to anything except whether Zoro has eaten enough. “Try not to bleed that face over the table,” he says lightly. The lighter clicks shut and the cigarette smoke curls normal.

“Try not to burn dessert,” Zoro snaps back, default setting engaged, even as his fingertips brush his face’s newest cut. The corner of Sanji’s mouth lifts, almost a truce.

“Eight hours,” Nami repeats, like testing the weight of it. “On, what, a twenty-minute errand? That’s a new low even for you.”

“Got distracted.”

“By what,” Franky asks, fascinated. “A particularly shiny rock?”

“A map with only one road!” Usopp offers and now he’s doing voices, the fucker, making the map gasp in a falsetto: oh no, a right turn? Impossible!

The table laughs again. The sound is buoyant and Zoro rides it, letting it carry him a few feet above the floor in his head where there is mud that smells wrong and Wado was stuck in the earth like a gravestone and there was a polite pop in his jaw as if someone’d pressed a few fingers there and asked a door to open.

He reaches for his glass but when he lifts it the slice of reflection inside isn’t his face for one slip of a heartbeat. It’s a hall with tatami and summer cicadas, the air heavy with oil and dust, a girl’s shadow in the doorway, wooden sword balanced on her shoulder –

He sets the glass down a little too hard until the hall disappears, leaving his face and the ceiling and Luffy leaning clean across him to steal a dumpling.

Luffy catches his eye. “Don’t get lost again,” he says, again, and it’s not a joke the same way it wasn’t a joke the last time either.

“I’ll try,” Zoro mutters. He means it, in the same way he’s always meant it. It just doesn’t fucking matter if he means it or not: the outcome is always the same. 

“Try harder.” Nami stabs her chopsticks at him for emphasis.

“I can build a beacon,” Franky insists, undeterred. “Body-mount, low-reflective finish –”

“Absolutely not!” Nami, Sanji and Zoro snap.

Robin’s suspiciously quiet through most of it, watching in that unthreatening way of hers that still makes Zoro feel like a page under her fingertip. When the noise swells again she reaches over and turns the lantern wick down a fraction. She says to him, just to him: “Tell me if it happens again.” 

“It won’t,” he responds stiffly.

He knows it’s a lie. He knows it like he knows the ship’s weight at anchor, like he knows the taste of blood when he bites the inside of his cheek to stop thinking. He knows it because the last time it was this bad he woke up in a field with Wado stuck upright beside him and the imprint of ray-skin burned into his palm, a cicada shell crushed in his fist where a hilt should’ve been, the sky the wrong colour and no-one around to tell him how many days he’d lost.

Luffy bumps his shoulder as he fishes the last few dumplings off his plate with chopsticks, not even pretending to be sneaky. Zoro snarls out of habit, Luffy cackles out of habit and the table tips into new noise.

He can anchor himself to the crew when they’re near, he’s learned that much. He can hitch himself to their noise and their heat and their goals, to Sanji’s hand hitting his shoulder when he says something stupid and to Luffy’s whole fucking –  everything. It won’t drag him while they’re on him like this, so it gives him a bit of freedom to push the envelope in a way he couldn’t before. Not when he was sixteen and had no-one. 

There’s no harm in testing it out, in theory. Fifteen minutes out, fifteen back. If the ground wants to tilt, let it. He’ll feel for the moment it starts and catch it. He’ll mark trees, count steps, force the earth to agree with his boots the way he does in a fight, impose his rhythm until it takes.

He’ll put this bullshit back in the box it’s crawled out of and nail the lid shut, once and for all, so this can never happen again.

Around him, the crew heckles and bickers and eats like they aren’t about to sail off the edge of the world to chase some temple Robin has circled on a map. Sanji tells him to sit up straight. Nami chastises Luffy. Chopper announces he is not crying, he is sweaty. Brook plays three cheerful notes that behave themselves perfectly. 

Zoro keeps his face the right shape. He nods at the right spots. He lets the warmth of the galley soak into his bones and pretends that’s all he needs.

Next landfall, he thinks, a promise to himself. He’ll go for a walk. He’ll come back in time. 

Luffy takes his designated watch without a word left for argument, insistent in that rare way he only gets when he’s serious. Zoro feels the retort rise sharp in his throat but swallows it back, knowing there’s no winning against Luffy’s unique brand of stubborn. He’s always known when to step back from a fight. 

The cut on his head throbs like a drumbeat but he shifts until the hammock holds him steady, letting himself breathe through it. Usopp’s voice rambles in the background, bright and easy, filling the space with warmth Zoro doesn’t have to answer. 

Later, he catches the drag of Sanji’s steps across the floorboards, softer now, and his chest stutters once before finding its rhythm again, and before sleep climbs into his brain and knocks everything else out.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

He’s already standing on it when the sound starts.

It’s not a hum; it’s the pure note of a blade drawn too long, too thin, until it threads the backs of his teeth and makes his molars ache. The world’s nowhere. No deck, no forest, no sky. Just a strip of polished steel as wide as a plank and as endless as a horizon, suspended in black that isn’t night so much as absence. Wado stretches in both directions until it disappears into haze, a river of white that doesn’t remember it’s a sword.

Zoro puts one foot wrong and corrects without thinking. Ankles loose, knees soft. He’s walked ropes in storms. This should be fine.

It isn’t.

The blade isn’t still: it breathes. A slow flex along the spine, too slight to see, just enough to change what balance means from one heartbeat to the next. The hamon ripples under his boots like a pale current. His reflection is there, distorted by the curve, mouth a degree off from where it should be. 

He reaches for Wado by habit only to find nothing at his hip, because of course he doesn’t. Wado’s under him and it’s also itself. The scabbard knocks his knee anyway, a ghost weight that says you’re armed. He doesn’t look away again.

A drop tickles his cheek before another hits, rain that smells like metal and old coins, soft taps growing louder against steel, the tik tik tik building to a slick patter. The surface of Wado darks as the beads of blood skitter and merge, sliding toward the edge in little red strings. He plants his soles, feels the wet bite cold through the leather anyway. 

The ringing climbs a half step higher, almost a scream now. He can feel it in the hinge of his jaw. He hears it in a language without words. 

“Not funny,” He warns but his voice doesn’t carry, coming back from the blade instead, flat and near, as if his throat’s a scabbard. The void all around is quiet in a way that presses on the eardrums, with no wind and no damn depth cues. The wrongness of it reaches for him like altitude sickness, the awareness that there’s nowhere to fall to, which somehow makes the idea of falling worse.

The rain thickens and gums. It runs into his eye and tastes like a cut on the tongue. It makes the steel slick with red. His boots slide a fraction more so he corrects again, centre low. Arms out. Ankles talking to knees, to hips, to spine. A lifetime of balance drilled into the meat of him and it’s still not enough.

A softer sound threads the ringing. A girl’s footwork, light and precise, coming from the nowhere ahead. He knows it like he knows the pattern of his own scars and for one dumb, painful beat he almost smiles.

“Kuina –”

The blade flexes under her name and the blood comes harder, sheets. It puddles at the inscription for a breath and then slips away in a clean peel that leaves the steel shining and his hands sticky. He tries to set his stance deeper and the surface goes from friction to glass. His centre lurches. His body answers with a fast little dance of micro-movements, every muscle trying to remember how not to die.

The note peaks, a brightness in his skull. The language behind it resolves: I will take the road you won’t.

“Over my dead –”

The sword tips him off with a breath of movement that shouldn’t exist, a suggestion of a slope that becomes law. His boot loses purchase. He throws a leg, reaches for air that isn’t there, tries to drop his weight into the blade, to stick, to cheat physics like he always does with stubbornness and worse ideas.

The blade refuses him. 

There’s no rush of air. No downward. The first instinct is to brace for wind that doesn’t come, and the absence of it makes his stomach claw. The blade turns above him as he falls, slow and dignified, rotating on an axis he can’t fucking find. The rain rises past his face, a red curtain moving the wrong way. He reaches for the sword by reflex (his sword, any sword) and feels the shape of a hilt in his palm that isn’t there when he looks.

The black opens like a mouth. His mouth. His jaw aches as if something elsewhere is prying it open to meet him halfway.

He bares his teeth because, after all this, he’s learned that sometimes that’s all he can do.

The void bites anyway. 

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

He wakes half off the hammock, shoulder jammed against the floorboard, breath ragged like he’s run himself sick. The Sunny creaks in the quiet way ships do when everyone’s asleep, ribs talking to water. No rain on the porthole. No storm smell. His heart rate is wrong, looping: stutter, sprint, stall, reset.

His jaw hurts.

Crimson smears his palm, the heel of it cut open like he’s gripped something that wasn’t forgiving. Across his thighs, Wado lies unsheathed, the curve gleaming damp. Not soaked, just enough to bead and track. He wipes a thumb along the flat and it comes away clean enough but the metal remembers the touch with a low, almost-pleasant thrum he feels deep in his gut.

From the deck above, a single drop finds its way down the beam and lands on the floor beside him with a sound too loud for its size.

The ship breathes. The sword breathes back, the note settling into something like a heartbeat that isn’t his. Zoro slides it home. The sound of it sheathing is neat and final and means nothing at fucking all.

“Not a dream,” he tells the room because lying would be stupid and there’s no-one here to believe him anyway.

The next beat of his pulse resets. Starts again. He waits for it to catch but it doesn’t. He sits in the dark, tasting metal and hates how long it takes for his hands to stop shaking.

He doesn’t rest for the rest of the night, but morning still manages to find him easy enough. 

He wanders into the galley with sleep still in his eye and the smell of steamed fish and sharp citrus already in the air. Sanji’s at the stove, sleeves rolled, sun sliding off his forearms like it knows better than to stick and Zoro’s stupid and lovesick enough to let himself look for a single, long moment, before he drops into the nearest chair and gets his head back on straight. “Feed me.”

“Say pretty please,” Sanji says without looking.

“Make me.”

Sanji snorts and sets a bowl down hard enough to rattle the table. “There. Extra.”

Luffy’s hand appears like a miracle and steals daikon midair. Zoro swats him away by feel, doesn’t even glance, just eats. Usopp is narrating something about a heroic haggle with a woman who definitely didn’t cry, Chopper laughs until milk comes out of his nose, Nami threatens  them both with bodily harm for being too loud this earjly. Robin breezes in with two cups of coffee, passes one to Sanji with a smile that says thank you for keeping them alive and takes a polite sip while reading over a list.

“We should hit the archipelago tomorrow,” Nami says, back to business, narrowing her eyes pointedly at Zoro. “We restock and move. Nobody wanders.” 

Zoro stares blandly back and reaches for more rice.

Sanji slides him water, cold, glass sweating, and Zoro takes it without thinking. Their fingers brush and it’s nothing big, the way it’s been nothing big for months now. Just a beat where the morning narrows to the point of contact and then widens again and Zoro can pretend he doesn’t let it sit under his skin at all.

After breakfast, Luffy dares him to a race across the deck and Zoro bluffs being above it for a grand total of three seconds, maybe, before bolting. Luffy laughs like the wind and Zoro shoulders him into the rail at the last second until they both hit wood and sky. Franky yells at them for risking the ship, while grinning all the same. 

The ship hums underfoot, steady as a heartbeat, his favourite heartbeat. 

His third favourite heartbeat, maybe.

Slipping into his training schedule feels like rinsing his skull clean altogether. On the lawn he draws all three swords, breath slow and feet set, and lets the morning run through the blades. Enma asks for more than it’s owed, as usual, and he gives it, as usual. Kitetsu nips at his grip, which he ignores for now. Wado sits cool and sure against his palm, the old familiar weight that’s lived there longer than some of his bones.

He works forms until the sweat runs and the noise of the crew fades to a backdrop: Luffy’s whoop from the figurehead, Franky hammering something, Nami lecturing the clouds, Sanji humming around like heat made a person. Zoro counts under his breath. One. Two. Three. The cut lands where it should. The ship breathes with him. 

Everything fits.

He pivots and the edge of Wado’s blade catches the light and for a blink (a blink) the reflection in its hamon is not the sky but a hallway with summer trapped in it: tatami, dust, a shadow in a doorway. He blinks and it’s only blue again.

“Piss off,” he mutters, too soft for anyone but the steel to hear.

The grass under his boot gives like it’s tired of being real. A thin seam of brightness threads the air at knee height, a line drawn by a hand that doesn’t believe in the concept of straight. His heartbeat ticks once, stutters, then remembers itself. The lawn tilts a degree toward a door only he can see.

He means to call out to Luffy, or to Nami, or to whoever the fuck is closest but the sound stays behind his teeth like the world’s forgotten how to carry it. Wado breathes, mean and eager. The morning air smells, for a breath, like sugar left to rot in the sun.

Zoro sets his stance the way you do before a cut that really matters but it’s too late anyway: the seam opens its mouth and he isn’t falling so much as just – not existing anymore. One moment the Sunny has a swordsman on its lawn and the next it doesn’t, because he comes to standing ankle-deep in damp soil with the taste of blood in his mouth.

For a second it doesn’t mean anything, just slope, wind, a slab of stone in the wrong light. The place looks too clean, as if someone drew it from memory and forgot how the fuck shadows actually fall. The air smells like incense burned past the point of reverence, gone into something awful and stale.

He blinks. The slab resolves into a gravestone and the recognition lands like a hand on the back of his neck. 

Fuck.

He’s never been able to find this place without being led… not kid him, not the older version who should’ve known better, always taking the wrong turn, the wrong hill, the path that looped back on itself until he had to give up and pretend he wasn’t looking after all. 

And now the one place he could never find has come to meet him.

“You’re fucking cruel,” he mutters but it comes out softer than he means, not the hiss he aims for. 

The characters on the stone sit right until they don’t. KUINA, precise as a blade and then, if he looks too long, the strokes crawl and slip into a script he doesn’t know. The shadow the stone throws doesn’t fall away from him but toward him, stretching, inching, like it’s thinking about climbing his leg. The earth around the base looks freshly turned, too wet, too willing.

Wado is there where flowers should be, driven into the mound to the depth of a palm. Its grip is clean, its tsuba white as a tooth. A gravemarker marking its own damn grave.

He reaches automatically, because his body doesn’t know any answer but steel. His fingers curl on the hilt and the metal hums, low, eager, a song in a language he doesn’t know but understands perfectly. The soil grips the blade the way trees hold root.

“Zoro,” says a girl’s voice, bright as summer heat on dojo wood.

He doesn’t turn. You don’t look at mirrors. You don’t give them your eyes. “Not now,” he says and means it.

“Zoro,” the voice repeats, closer. Eleven forever, caught between teasing and scolding, the exact music he’s carried for years.

The earth twitches. A small hand pushes up from the dirt, wrist thin as bamboo, nails bitten ragged to the quick. It pats at the air, finds the fabric of his pants without looking and presses, curious and careful as a teacher correcting a stance. The touch is almost gentle. That’s the part that turns his stomach.

He lowers his weight, ready to break, to cut, to move. He does not look. If he looks it will be her and not-her and he doesn’t know which one will be worse.

“Lost again?” The voice asks, delighted.

He hates how his mouth moves without permission. “Always.”

The hand slides higher, over the crest of his hip, across the seam where Wado’s tsuba meets his palm. Fingers like a child’s slip under leather, under cloth, like they’re trying to find a way inside the lines of him. His ribs tighten.

“Stop,” he says, even, and puts his free hand down over the small wrist to pry it back.

The wrist is cold and gritty, as if the bones inside are full of sand. The hand flexes, turns palm-up in his grip and then the fingers hook, delicately, under the edge of his lowest rib like a child trying to lift a lid.

He can’t help it. His head turns.

She’s exactly where his eye lands, half-out of the earth, hair sleek with wet dirt like oil, eyes bright and wrong with too much light in them. Not a corpse, not a ghost, a reflection that’s decided to wear skin. She’s smiling the way she would when she was about to call him an idiot. There is nothing kind in it and every kindness he ever remembers.

“Kuina.” The name takes skin off his throat on the way out.

The letters on the stone writhe in answer, briefly right, then ruined. 

“Finally,” she breathes and her other hand comes up, cups his jaw with a tenderness that makes him want to bite through his own tongue. A thumb presses at the hinge to open him, testing. “Show me.”

He yanks. The hand on his rib tightens, shooting pain white and clean along the bone, intimate as a knife slid under a shirt, not to kill but to convince. His knee dips and the soil leans with him, eager as a host.

He puts Wado between them like a prayer and a threat. The hum climbs his arm to his teeth. “Let go,” he warns but it’s useless because his voice is nothing but a rule here and this place loves breaking rules.

“Promise,” she says, soft as when they were kids and she demanded a hundred more cuts. The fingers at his jaw hook his cheek and two cold knuckles slip between his teeth, pressing at his tongue, curious to see what he’s made of inside.

Rage hits and he moves, easy, making the cut short and ugly, a wedge meant to break contact rather than dignify itself as any kind of technique. The blade’s kiss takes dirt and wrist in a neat line, and the world answers by taking him.

Something catches him hard across the ribs where those small fingers were and rakes, like the soil’s grown nails. It sends heat flaring violently under his skin, not surface pain but a brand laid directly along the bone. He swallows the shout, blood and incense ash while the hand at his jaw withdraws with a smear of his mouth on its knuckles. 

He steps back but the ground steps with him. The shadow of the stone inches closer like a tongue.

He could keep cutting. He could keep refusing to say her name. He could kneel here until the earth finishes its work and, god, he could even call that devotion.

“Not now,” he repeats as the hand in the dirt snatches at him, hooks for him and misses.

He doesn’t look at her again or the gravestone. He puts his eye on the line where the sky refuses to be anything but sky, even as the air kinks and the smell of incense drops out and the ground under his boots remember – finally, finally – that it’s meant to be a deck.

He hits it hard enough to rattle the planks.

For him it’s been fifteen shitty minutes and an even shittier place, but the Sunny is unrecognisable. Lanterns strung high, signal flags up, grappling hooks coiled, lifebuoys already over the side trailing like teeth. Chalk grids scrawl the rail where Nami’s been marking search patterns. 

The Den Den Mushi on the table is still mid-blare: HAVE YOU SEEN –

“ZORO!” Luffy’s voice is a cannon. He’s there in a blink, arms tight around Zoro’s shoulders, crushing him to the wood so hard Zoro’s ribs light up. “You were gone, you were gone, you were gone!” 

Nami slams in next, hair sticking to her face, eyes red-rimmed, log pose strapped to her wrist like a cuff. She grabs Zoro’s jaw with both hands and shakes, furious and more terrified than Zoro’s seen her in ages. “Are you fucking kidding me?! I had to grid the ocean! I called three islands! I – ” Her voice knifes out, her fists trembling against his cheeks and Zoro blinks at her, startled by the visceral reaction. 

Usopp half-falls on him, babbling with a laugh that’s almost a sob. “I was about to build a trawl net the size of the Grand Line! I named it! You can’t just – don’t do – I hate you!” He claps a hand over his own mouth and cries anyway and something awful slides into Zoro’s gut, something that tells him this is worse than he thought. 

“Move!” Chopper chokes, shoving between knees and elbows, hooves scrabbling on wood. He’s already got the stethoscope in his hands. “Don’t move, don’t – Zoro, don’t move.” He plants the bell to Zoro’s chest with shaking hands, ear to metal, breath held like he’s underwater.

Robin’s there with a towel already, a hand on Luffy’s shoulder to loosen his grip without saying a word. “He’s bleeding,” she points out evenly. “Chopper?”

The little reindeer doesn’t answer from listening too hard. His pupils have blown wide, his ears flat. Zoro feels every eye swing toward him as the silence stretches a beat too long.

“Say something,” Luffy demands, voice gone hoarse. “Tell me where you went. Tell me who to hit.”

Zoro drags in air, which snags over the brand under his ribs. “Was gone a minute,” he manages and the deck reacts, the entire crew flinching as one.

Sanji’s cigarette hits the wood and skitter, stepping in fast like he’s about to throw a kick and instead sets a hand on Zoro’s shoulder so tight it might bruise. Up close he looks wrecked, ash on his cuffs, a smear of flour on his cheek he forgot to wipe, eyes gone ice-bright from too many hours without sleep. A look Zoro recognises all too fucking well: he wore it every day during Whole Cake. 

 “A minute?” Sanji hisses, soft and lethal. “You rotten –”

“His heart!” Chopper blurts, voice small and hysterical. “It’s… it keeps stopping?” 

Everything stutters.

“What?” Nami’s voice is all edges.

Chopper’s hooves press harder; Zoro hears him counting under his breath. “One-two-three, stop, one-two–stop… I don’t… heartbeats don’t blink?” He looks up at Sanji, wild. “Put your hand –”

Sanji doesn’t ask where. He shoves Luffy’s arm aside and plants his palm flat in the centre of Zoro’s sternum, exact, like he’s been practicing in secret and the loop in Zoro’s chest catches on that touch and holds, like a fucking traitor. The brand along his ribs wakes like a dog that knows this hand and no other and, god, it’d be humiliating if Zoro didn’t have bigger fish to fry right now. 

Chopper gasps. “It stabilised. Do that again.”

“I am,” Sanji growls through his teeth, like he hasn’t breathed in hours. He doesn’t look away from Zoro’s face. “Keep your eyes open.”

“I am,” Zoro lies, because the deck keeps wanting to tilt, because the chalk lines at Nami’s feet want to crawl, because every familiar thing is a half-second late and the only honest anchor in the world is the heat of a cook’s palm.

Luffy still hasn’t let go. He knocks their foreheads together, not gentle. “Don’t do that again,” he says, voice wrecked. “I was going to dive until I hit the bottom. I was going to grab the ocean and shake it out.”

Usopp nods violently. “He was! He was ! And I was going to shoot the sun and Franky was – ”

“Super ready to dismantle a sea train!” Franky chimes in, sniffing hard and pretending he’s not. “We had a whole plan!” 

Brook crouches, skeletal hand hovering over Zoro’s ankle like a blessing. “For a moment I thought I would have to play for you.”

Nami, who never cries where anyone can see, swipes her wrist under one eye. “If you ever –” She can’t finish. She slams her palm flat on the deck beside him instead. “If you ever do that again I’m docking your rations for a month.”

Zoro tries to sit up. Sanji pushes him right back down with that same precise heel of the hand, the one his stupid body obeys. “Stay,” Sanji snaps. “Chopper’s not done.”

Chopper isn’t. He’s already unwinding gauze, hands steadier now that the rhythm under his stethoscope holds. “He’s dehydrated, burned, lacerated, what happened – no, don’t answer, answer later.” He glares up at Zoro with eyes that are bright with relief and fury. “You scared us to death.”

Zoro looks past them at the mess they’ve made in his absence: the grid, the gear, the way Usopp’s goggles have left deep rings on his face and Luffy hasn’t stopped touching him, like he’s checking he won’t vanish again. The way Sanji’s hand will not move from his chest.

He hates that his voice comes out smaller than he wants. “I’m back.”

Sanji’s mouth flattens. His thumb presses a fraction harder, and Zoro’s heart, traitorous, falls in line.

Around them the Sunny breathes like a living thing relearning how: lines creak, lanterns sway, the Den Den finally gives up and collapses into a soft, exhausted pip. Somewhere, the hat Luffy threw down when he started running spins lazily to a stop.

“Tell us later,” Robin says gently. “For now, you’re not leaving this deck.”

“Ever,” Luffy adds, fierce and childish.

“Bathroom escorted,” Nami decrees.

“Leash,” Usopp suggests again.

Franky wipes his nose on his wrist and growls, “Forget leash, man, we’re building a harness.”

Chopper tugs a blanket over Zoro like he’s five. “Breathe,” he orders. 

Zoro does. Because Sanji’s palm is still there. Because Luffy’s still latched around his neck. Because the deck is solid even if it looks like it wants to be a door. Because nineteen hours of panic have carved these people raw and the only thing he can give them right now is staying put.

“Fine,” he says and it’s almost a promise, one he wishes he fucking knew how to keep. 

Usopp fusses with the blanket in a way that says he will fight anyone who notices. Franky adjusts the awning to chase the sun. Robin smoothes his hair back from the bandage on his temple and pretends she’s checking for sand.

The quiet that follows isn’t empty. It’s the kind of quiet that happens after a storm when everyone is taking inventory without saying the word aftermath. Rope swishes as the Sunny breathes. Someone (Usopp) sniffs too loud and pretends it was the wind.

Zoro’s eye drifts shut, not because he’s surrendering but because everyone is where they should be and his body finally believes it. He keeps track anyway, the way he always does: Luffy’s weight pinning the corner of the tarp, Nami’s careful voice, Franky’s shadow, Robin’s thumb tracing idle circles on his wrist she’ll claim were for circulation, Usopp whispering plans to Chopper that involve bells and nets and zero dignity. Sanji’s heat anchored at his chest like a hand-shaped vow.

“Sleep,” Chopper says, gentler now. “I’m right here.”

Zoro’s mouth twitches. “I can tell.”

Luffy maybe laughs, maybe doesn’t. “Dummy.”

Night holds the Sunny in a loose fist and later, once the noise has peeled off and dinner’s been eaten, Zoro lies on his back on the deck, shoulder to a coil of rope, blanket pulled haphazardly to his ribs, Franky and Robin to his left. The boards are warm from keeping the day’s heat and, above them, stars he can’t name pretend to be fixed points. Every so often the ship’s shadow rocks over the mast and he flinches, then breathes through it. Chopper checks him three more times after everyone drifted off (pulse, pupils, the cut under his ribs) like that’ll change anything. 

The Sunny used to be the one place he couldn’t get lost. A line of wood under his feet and the feel of his crew stitched into the air, Luffy snoring face-down somewhere idiotic, Nami’s pen rasping in the dark, Sanji’s soft clatter in the galley. If he stayed on deck, within shouting distance, it was enough. 

That was the rule he wrote over his life when he was a kid: danger is outside. You choose your path, you plant your feet, you don’t wander off alone.

But now…

He closes his eye and the deck tilts a hair toward a door that isn’t there. He opens it and makes it wood again. Alone for a breath, training on the lawn, hand on the rail, a thought too long, and the world just took him from the middle of his own ship like he was a loose nail to be pried up. Not land, not towns, not alleyways. Here.

Home.

He breathes. Counts it. The brand under his ribs prowls and then lies down. For a second he can feel the phantom weight of a palm at his sternum, the exact pressure that made the loop catch and hold. He lets the memory settle him because his stupid pride can pick another fight later, when he’s not so rattled. 

Above everything, he hates that the Sunny wasn’t enough. Might not be enough, anymore.  So he writes a new rule in the same place he keeps his sword forms: don’t be alone. Not below. Not between lanterns. Not even for a piss without someone leaning on the door, swearing at him to hurry up. 

If the mirror world wants him that bad it can choke on him.

Dawn shows up sticky and mean. The archipelago breathes humid air across the water until the decks practically sweat. Luffy wakes like he was never asleep and immediately tries to wander off the bow, only to be yoinked back by Nami like she’s done this a thousand times (and she has). Robin tucks god knows what kinds of documents into her satchel and smiles at Franky singing the ship awake. 

Chopper lights up when he sees Zoro upright and scowling. 

“Stay, like, five metres from us at all times,” Usopp warns, eyes on him.

“Closer,” Sanji snorts, not looking up as he ties back his hair. He bumps Zoro’s shoulder as he passes and doesn’t apologise, thank god. 

“Fuck off,” Zoro scowls and doesn’t mean it at all. 

They drop anchor and the gangplank thumps down into heat and noise. Zoro slots himself where he never does: the middle. He takes the heaviest bags without being told. He lets Luffy hang an elbow around his neck and drag him sideways through a crowd. He walks to the rhythm of Sanji’s cursing and Nami’s lists and Robin’s patient questions because their noise is weight and weight is what an anchor is, right? 

Zoro keeps the new rule where he can feel it: the length of an arm, the warmth of a body, the reach of a voice. He shadows them like his life depends on it because, well… who knows, at this point? 

It’s not like he thinks Kuina’s trying to play hopscotch with him. 

The archipelago itself is a wet towel draped over the world, hot as fuck and crowded beyond comfort. The market’s a crush of tarps and steam, fish stinking up the air and just. A lot of shouting. Zoro hates it on principle, like he hates every market, which is probably why it’s so noticeable that he doesn’t peel off once.

He shadows Nami through the produce rows like a very surly bodyguard. She points at a basket of limes and he picks it up without being told. She eyes him. “You’re… unusually helpful.”

“Don’t spread it around,” he mutters.

Usopp elbows Chopper, stage-whispering, “He’s broken. Somebody flipped the switch to ‘errand mode.’” 

Robin slows at a bookseller’s stall, her delicate fingertips hovering over spines and Zoro stops exactly when she does. She glances up, amused. “You’re very punctual today.”

“Mm.”

Sanji falls in beside him on the way to the grocer’s, hands in pockets, a lazy tilt to his walk. “What, you finally learned to heel?” he drawls, too light to be a jab.

Zoro doesn’t rise to it. He keeps pace, eye scanning. “Just making sure you don’t burn the place down.”

“Please,” Sanji scoffs and then, because he’s been watching, adds: “Stay where we can see you.”

Luffy loves it, obviously. He loops an arm around Zoro’s neck and drags him toward a stall with skewers. “You’re coming with me! We’re getting three of everything.”

“I’m not carrying your –”

“You’re carrying mine!” Luffy beams, already shoving two into Zoro’s free hand. Zoro takes them. He doesn’t complain. Usopp stares like he’s seen a ghost.

Franky tromps up with a coil of rope over his shoulder. “Field trip, hey? Should I weld you a stroller?”

“Try it,” Zoro snaps but Franky just grins, clearly relieved at the zest.

He carries bags, stands in doorways, waits outside changing-room curtains, leans on a post while Sanji argues about the price of saffron. Every time someone shifts, even half a step, Zoro shifts with them. When the crowd swallows Luffy for a breath Zoro’s hand snaps to empty space where a shoulder should be and when it reappears he lets out a breath. 

Half the crew heads back to the ship with their spoils while Franky and Robin forge ahead, following Nami’s map to a shrine some way outside the city sphere. Luffy disappears again to check out a game some kids are playing and then to cheat badly at it, all of which means that Zoro gets dumped with Usopp. 

Which is fine! It’d be fine if not – 

“Forgot the nails! Two seconds!” and Usopp sprints back toward a hardware stall, waving frantically. “Stay put!”

Zoro plants where he is like he’s been nailed down himself, crowd surging around him, humidity biting at his ears. The air’s a thousand scents at one but he pulls out the smell of frying oil before it starts to strip away, before the world starts to turn inside out. 

It’s just a shimmer in the corner of his vision, the sharp flex of Wado’s weight in his hand, but Zoro knows it too well by now and lets himself have a moment of dismay before he realises Sanji’s coming closer, and then he has a split second to really panic because the cook’s way too close for this. 

His stomach drops out from under him and he jerks his head, sees the other man turning toward him, cigarette burning low between his fingers, face carved in irritation at something Zoro hasn’t even heard. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter because the air’s already bending, the street  sliding sideways as the glass-rimmed horizon swallows everything whole.

“Curls!” It tears out of his throat raw, desperation blistering through him. He lunges, reaching, like if he can just get a grip on him, if he can just anchor, maybe – maybe – 

That wrong loop in Zoro’s pulse, stutter, sprint, stall, reset. The shadows at the edge of the path lean in. 

Sanji’s already in his face, furious. “What the hell are you –”

Zoro’s grip tightens around Wado and the blade answers with a thin, eager tone he tastes in his fucking heart. The math writes itself in his head and the sky cracks overhead and it’s going wrong, he’s going to lose him –

“Zo –” Sanji starts, too late, always too late: Zoro plunges Wado through the meat of his shoulder, under the collarbone where the bone slopes slick. The steel goes in like it’s meant to, even though Zoro knows it shouldn’t break the skin, not Sanji’s. It goes in singing, clean and obscene. Sanji’s mouth opens on a sound that doesn’t make it to air: it hits the blade and comes back, flat flat flat.

Zoro catches him by the back of the neck before his knees buckle. Keeps the angle true. For one held heartbeat, Wado is a needle and Sanji’s the thread and Zoro’s the stupid fucking hand that stitches them both to the same piece of nothing, out of the desperation to keep Sanji here, to keep himself here.

The folds and the colours invert and the path becomes a rip they step through without moving. Heat drops out of the air like a trapdoor. The taste of iron and smoke blooms everywhere, clotting in the back of Zoro’s mouth. 

The mirror world rises around them, too-big geometry, a not-ship made of ribs and paper, hallways that narrow when you look down them. The ocean flows upwards in silence, absolute. The whole place is howling with the sound of steel splitting glass and shards fall like snow, tinkling around their boots, glittering with a thousand warped reflections of his own face, Kuina’s face, strangers’ faces.

Zoro yanks the blade free. Sanji stumbles, swears – his breath drags once. The wound in his shoulder is a gaping, glossy thing and then it isn’t. The skin knits in a blink, closing with a soft backwards noise, like it’s been rewound. Reopens wider, worse, jagged and bloody even as Zoro stares at it.

“What the fuck!” Sanji clamps a palm over it and his hand sinks in too far, wrist-deep in himself for a fraction before the world decides that’s wrong and spits him back out. “You stabbed me?!”

“Needed to,” Zoro says and it’s half an apology, half an order: move.

Sanji’s eyes are white around the irises and he laughs, something fucking awful that isn’t a laugh at all. “You could’ve just asked, you absolute ass –”

The world groans as if the whole place’s spine is cracking and, for a moment, Zoro thinks it’s the dojo walls collapsing inward, but then the floor itself splinters under their boots. A jagged edge of glass tears upward like a wave, swallowing the not-ship whole.

Through the broken gleam, he catches it: Sanji, far off across the void, back arched, shadows of himself dragging at his clothing. His mouth is open like he’s screaming, but the sound doesn’t land right; it’s warped, stretched, Kuina’s voice tangled into it.

Zoro doesn’t think, he never thinks: he just moves. One boot slams into the rising shard, then another, Wado dragging heavily at his side like it wants to pull him down instead of forward. His balance keeps breaking, footing shifting between polished reflection and empty air. Every step could mean a plunge but he doesn’t have time to second-guess this.

Sanji sees him, or maybe doesn’t. His eyes are wide, caught in the fire that’s crawling everywhere, spilling from his legs like a flare gone feral. The whole shard he’s on is burning, cracking apart, mirrors catching the blaze and tossing it back until there’s no sky, just light.

Zoro lunges across the last gap to catch Sanji’s wrist with fingers that split open on glass edges. For a second, they’re both dangling, the void yawning beneath, mirrors shattering and reforming around them like a heartbeat out of sync.

Sanji tries to kick upward, but the flames leap higher instead and he almost lets go – almost. 

“Stop fighting me, idiot!” Zoro snarls, voice torn ragged, smoke burning in his lungs.

“I’m not –” Sanji chokes, coughing flame instead of words, “Fighting you, asshole!”

Then, like it’s laughing at them, the world folds. Shards collapse inward, smashing them together chest-to-chest, shoulders slamming, both of them bleeding and burned and half-choked on the air.

The paper bulkheads crease and increase and something with too many knees scuttles along the underside of a beam and blurs out when they look at it.  Sanji pivots, breath shifting and Zoro knows that pattern, knows what’s coming. He tries to shout, “DON’T!” but it’s too late and Sanji lights up again. 

The flame doesn’t bloom on his leg. It erupts, a column of flame punching out from his shin into the voice, a needle of heat sewing the empty air together until it hits the far horizon. The stitch catches and tears sideways and then everything catches.

The horizon peels in flame, the sky igniting in a clean, silent sheet, swallowed whole by the flashover. A beat later, the sound hits: not heat on skin but a roar in the teeth, a scream through the jaw.

Outlines burn first: the ink-lines of beams the edges of doors, the shadows of railings. They flare white and drag the surface with them into a smear of molten gold. Ribs of the ship crumple inward, catching like dry leaves, each blister birthing more fire. Above, the ocean boils and boils, rolling forward in tendrils of stream that catch and burn into ropes of light. 

Sparks split off Sanji’s thigh like shrapnel, spreading as they land, the deck buckling under heat and folding in ways no deck should and Zoro moves to haul him back, but the heat climbs inside of him as well, under his nails, behind his eye, down his throat. Wado screams in his hand; the guard goes dull red and the hilt burns like a brand, grip stuck to his palm. Fire climbs up his arm, a hungry thing working at the marrow.

“Put it out!” He snarls, dragging Sanji by the other hand, “Put it OUT!”

“I’m trying!” Sanji yells, voice shredded, wound gaping again. The flame climbs for it like it’s a lamp in a dark room, like it wants in and Zoro doesn’t think, never thinks: he slams the palm of his hand there instead, like he can keep the fire from licking its way in. 

He shoves them into motion, scanning for an out, gaze catching on the mirror image of himself through a wall of heat no human should see through, Wado point-down. The light shears sideways before it’s gone again, sky’s scream climbing a step overhead, so he shoulders them through a wall that wasn’t there until it is. The frame catches the fire and follows them in, a seam of molten thread pulling, pulling. 

Wado throbs in his grip, heat and sound braided into something unmanageable. He yanks the scabbard up one-handed and slams the blade home. The instant the mouth of the saya closes the flame on the steel snaps out, like a wick dunked. The heat doesn’t leave his arm, though; it paces under the skin, wanting a way back to Sanji.

“No fire,” Zoro pants, jaw aching. “No fire, no Haki, no anything here.”

Sanji’s chest is heaving, the last of the flames around his boot petering out. He looks white-edged and furious. “You didn’t wanna fucking warn me?!”

Zoro works at his jaw, at his teeth. He doesn’t know how to answer that without it sounding like some kind of sad, desperate confession and he’s not interested in that right now. “I didn’t know,” he settles on, a lie and not. 

Behind them, the stream of light finishes tearing the hall into a bright nothing. The world just goes on pretending there was never a hallway. Zoro doesn’t look back: he can feel the burn in his palm pulsating with raw, round blisters like the pattern of Wado’s wrap. He flexes it anyway, ignoring the way the heat in his arm flares up again, like it’s pleased as punch about all this. 

He keeps his other palm on Sanji’s shoulder, crowding him into here. The wound under his hand stutters and holds, for now. 

“So,” Sanji breathes once, harsh. “This is where you go when nobody’s looking.”

“Shut up and walk.” Zoro’s mouth is dry. He can taste the edge of his own concern, copper and old. He angles them sideways, shoulder to shoulder, pushing into the hallway that grows longer whenever he tries to see the end of it. The wound under his hand flickers, open and shut, open and shut, as if Sanji’s body can’t decide what time it is.

Zoro keeps them moving. The hall refuses to end, so he chooses not to need an end. Picks a door that isn’t there until it is, right into carnage, into a glassy field, into Kuina’s gravestone all over again, the worst kind of mockery. 

The reflection under his feet swells like a blister. It thins, goes glass-slick, and hands push through, small and pale, nails bitten short the way he remembers. They slide up his shirt and find his ribs immediately, fingers wedging into the soft seam between bone and cartilage and pull.

The first pop is quiet.

His breath stops on impact, mid-inhale, chest suddenly not a chest but a door. Cold fingers hook under the ribs on either side and pry, not vicious but precise. Another set finds the notch at his sternum and presses. A thumb slips beneath, testing the hinge. He can feel the pads of smaller fingers inside, patting blindly, counting.

They find his heart with an awful, gentle tapping, trying to match the aborted rhythm of his pulse: stutter, sprint, stall, reset. 

A heel lands just left of Zoro’s sternum, driving pain through him, clean and horrifically bright. The hands inside seize; the ones at his ribs scrabble for purchase as Sanji stomps again with the exact brutality of resuscitation. A little wrist splinters under his boot with a noise like sugar glass cracking. 

“Yo,” Sanji snarls, one arm hooking under Zoro’s armpits to haul him backward and up, away from the glass. He doesn’t light up. He plants and pulls, muscles corded, boots slipping. The ground crunches with cartilage that remembers being soft. “Get your shit together, Mosshead.”

Ribs arc up like white sails around them, cages as tall as masts and small as a child’s hands, all of them cracked open. Wind threads the hollows and makes a sound like breath through teeth. Zoro knows them by the notches: the left eighth he cracked on a dojo post when he was thirteen, the diagonal scrape he got on Arlong’s saw-teeth, the clean pair Enies Lobby left like ladder rungs. Each cage wears his history, pried wide, showing the empty place where the rest of him should be.

Sanji jerks beside him, shoulder hitching on the wound that flickers there, present, gone, present, like the world. Smoke barks in his throat and the air drinks it, a thousand little mouths opening in the ribs to taste, eyes gone blade-bright. 

“Don’t light,” Zoro warns, useless and necessary.

“I know,” Sanji hisses, mouth sparking, planting close enough that their sleeves brush. His palm finds Zoro’s sternum without looking and the loop in Zoro’s chest, already trying to stutter, catches and holds. The burn along his side prowls, settles, recognising the hand that made it.

“Left!” Sanji snaps and Zoro’s already cutting. Wado takes a white arc at the hinge, clean through cartilage. The rib falls and regrows between blinks, sharper for having been cut, points hooking back toward them.

“Roots,” Zoro grits. “Go for the root.”

He adjusts into short, ugly wedges that bite low where bone births from the black earth. The first stump shivers and collapses inward with a sound like wet knuckles cracking. The next shrieks (god, he feels it in his gut) and stays down long enough to make a lane.

“Move,” Sanji says, pressing shoulder to his, hand a hot brand at Zoro’s sternum for one exact beat. Here. The loop catches. Zoro moves.

The forest answers by making the path a throat.

Ribs on either side curl inward, slick with marrow, kissing overhead until the sky is a white tunnel. Inside each cage, something twitches; strings of gristle like harp strings, small hands testing tension. One cage opens on Zoro’s left and a pair of Kuina’s hands clap against the bars, delighted. “Zoro,” her echo croons, wrong and bright.

He doesn’t look. He cuts low and mean. The stump screams, then dies.

Behind him, Sanji stomps, no flare, no heat, heel grinding root to paste. Another cage lunges, mouth-first, and he side-steps on an angle that shouldn’t exist, shin whipping across the joint. Cartilage pops. He looks ready to burn but keeps on refusing, jaw set so hard it might crack. Smoke leaks from his mouth anyway, idea without flame, and the nearest ribcage inhales like it wants the very thought.

They break into a clearing that isn’t one until in the centre something pushes up fast. Too fast. It’s Sanji’s chest, familiar angles built oversize, ribs lacquered black, the cavity a kiln. Smoke rolls out. The wound in Sanji’s shoulder flickers in answer, present / gone / present, the garden nodding yes, this one. The cage yawns wider on a hinge, inviting.

“Don’t look,” Zoro says, hoarse.

“Not looking,” Sanji lies. His hands are on Zoro and then gone as he steps into the thing that wears his bones and kicks the hinge clean off. The cage staggers like a slaughterhouse door struck by a battering ram.

It regrows, but Zoro’s already figured that’d happen and goes for the root while it’s still deciding how big to be. Three cuts, no flourish, steel in, steel out. The stump folds in on itself like a throat swallowing wrong and the whole structure ripples, then collapses, ribs tinkling to dust like china.

The ground convulses. New ribs sprout in a ring around them, taller, thinner, closed, and the ring tightens like a belt. Zoro slashes at the nearest bar and the shock stabs his own ribs from the inside, pain mapped perfectly along that brand under his arm. The mirror world laughs with his mouth.

Sanji’s already moving: hands to bar, wrench, not a kick at all but a cook’s violence, twisting until the joint gives. The bar shears and Zoro learns the shape of it, cuts the weakness, not the strength. The cage doesn’t like that trick so it screams itself open like the petulant motherfucker it is. 

They spill through and straight into him.

Not a ribcage: Zoro entire, grown wrong from the earth. A moss-headed scarecrow of meat-stitches and steel. Three swords tucked where they don’t belong. The mouth opens and Zoro’s voice comes out, half an octave too high. “Stay,” it says sweetly, and all the cages lean closer, listening for orders.

Sanji doesn’t hesitate. He puts his foot through its knee, takes Kitetsu from Zoro’s hip without hesitation, exploding bone. The thing falls and takes too long to remember which leg it lost, and Zoro pretends his hands aren’t shaking from the lie of his own voice as he kills the thing at the spine. 

It collapses, mouth working, talking with no lungs to push it.

The floor pitches. The forest decides finesse is wasted and just goes to fucking town: ribs rising in a tidal sweep, a white wave. Zoro drags steel through the closest stumps like a reaper in a field while Sanji runs the edge, stomping roots until the ground goes pulpy under his heels, under Kitetsu. 

A ribcage shoots up beside Zoro, his height, his reach, his stance. It turns on him with a kick that doesn’t need flesh to move. He catches the brunt on Enma’s edge and still feels it in the brand, right down to bone. The second kick comes mean and low and he barks a laugh because he knows the cadence, he’s fought it a hundred times so it’s the most idiotic choice the mirror world could’ve chosen, really. He turns the angle a hair, lets the bar skim past and cuts the supporting root. The Sanji-cage snaps shut on itself, trapped in its own momentum. 

He almost says nice and then doesn't, because pride is a rope here and nobody’s looking to hang themselves today. 

He plants both feet and carves a clean line through the nearest root with everything that isn’t a scream. The tree falls away; the hands drag free, losing their grip with a disappointed pat. A laugh chases across the cages, bright and wrong. “Zoro!” Kuina sings, delighted. “You promised.”

He doesn’t give her an answer.

“Door,” he snaps to Sanji, and goes hunting for edges. The garden doesn’t have exits; it has interruptions. Where roots knot, where ribs grow too fast and forget to fit: those are seams. He finds the seam by feel, the way you find a bad stance in your opponent because you’ve made every single bad stance yourself.

“There,” he says, and Sanji is already hauling the weak spot wider with bare hands, fingers white on slick bone. Zoro hacks low and the forest screams like a whole choir having its breath taken. Air rushes wrong. The bone-wave breaks, spill of bars clattering into each other. For a blessed half-second there’s light that looks like sky instead of white.

Zoro keeps to the line of Sanji’s body, Sanji keeps his palm in Zoro’s sternum like a metronome and a threat all in one. When one bar finds that door and tries to enter, Sanji snarls and clamps a hand over it through his own flesh, stopping the give with sheer refusal. Zoro kills the root that feeds it and the bar dies in Sanji’s grip like a snake cut off from its head.

They hit another clearing and the world remembers a new cruelty.

All around, ribcages crack open not to swallow but to offer, each cavity holding a different blade: Enma, Kitetsu, Shusui, Wado, Wado, Wado, a thousand Wados, every one whispering in the cadence he understands without knowing the words.

Take me. Carry me. Promise me. Stay. 

The handles are white as teeth. The hamons are mouth-curves.

Zoro’s hand moves without permission. Sanji slaps it. “Don’t.”

“I know,” Zoro says and hates that he means it. He can feel his pulse trying to stall to listen better. Sanji’s thumb presses harder.. The loop holds.

By the time the last one collapses the garden’s gone quiet in a way that isn’t peace. It’s waiting. He can feel it in the way the brand under his ribs anticipates, in the way Sanji’s wound is a door deciding which world gets it.

Then the quiet breaks. Far ahead, bone unrolls into a bridge bright as a drawn sword. Zoro knows that shape too well. 

“Not that way,” Sanji says, immediate.

“Not yet,” Zoro answers, throat raw. Not ever, he thinks, because he knows what it leads to.

They turn away from the bright invitation and cut for shadow, trusting the stupid little rip they tore with their hands and knives more than any path the world lays out for them. They don’t stop to count their breaths. They don’t look back. The ribs keep talking, but not to them. The door in Sanji’s shoulder blinks, wanting, and he bares his teeth at it like a beast and keeps moving.

When the seam finally gives to something that isn’t this place, it’s not freedom so much as just – less wrong. Zoro doesn’t argue. He drags them through, steel last, Sanji’s hand still planted on him like command and anchor and oath.

They hit the boards crooked, Zoro on his back, Sanji on his knees, both of them breathing like the air still has teeth.

Sanji coughs smoke in broken ropes, hot and sour. Ribbons of fire tear free with the breath, licking across the air, guttering and furious, before collapsing into sparks. The burn in Zoro’s arm pulls and, for a second, the cabin smells scorched, the kind of burn that belongs in battle, not here.

Zoro stares, heartbeat jolting. “You –”

“Shut up,” Sanji bites out, jamming his hands into the pockets of his trousers. Smoke still leaks from his teeth when he speaks, just faintly now. A threat. “That’s where you go? Seriously?” 

The cut under Zoro’s ribs scowls like a clean, cruel line and he realises he’s still got Wado in his hand, and realises letting go’d feel like stepping off something far too tall. “Doesn’t matter.”

Sanji laughs once, no humour. “Are you fucking stupid? No, wait, of course you are, you’ve just been out there doing this alone!” 

Zoro sets his jaw. “My problem.”

Sanji’s on him in three steps, not hitting, not shouting: worse. He catches Zoro by the front of his shirt and hauls him half-upright until their foreheads nearly knock. Smoke curls between them, Sanji’s mouth an orange glow, a low, lethal burn. “You made it ours the second you dragged me in. You don’t get to ‘my problem’ the crew. Not with that shit.”

Zoro’s heart does the wrong thing, stutter, skip and, god, it’s like Sanji can feel it. His eye flicks down, before he presses his palm flat to Zoro’s sternum, firm. The rhythm catches, humiliating and relieving in the same breath.

“Feel that?” Sanji growls. “That’s what you’re gambling with.”

“Get your hand off me,” Zoro snaps but he doesn’t push it away. There’s no fucking universe in which he’d push the other man away. 

Sanji’s voice brooks no arguments. “You’re going to tell them.”

“Get fucked.”

Outside, footsteps pound somewhere far and getting closer, voices echoing through the hallway.

Sanji leans in, eyes bright and furious and scared in a way he’d never admit, not aloud, but Zoro knows him so well. “You say it,” he warns, quiet as a promise. “Or I will.”

Sanji’s hand stays on his chest a beat longer, keeping the rhythm honest, like he doesn’t trust Zoro’s heart to remember on its own. Then the door handles rattles, a chorus of names hits the wood and the rest of the world barges right on in.

Luffy hits first, knees skidding, hands on Zoro like he can physically keep him from vanishing. “Zoro!” His voice cracks on the name and he doesn’t let go.

Nami’s crowding the doorway, hair stuck to her temples, eyes furious and wet. “You’ve been gone for hours, you both –” She bites it off and counts Zoro’s wounds with a look like arithmetic done at knifepoint.

Usopp hovers, white to the lips, speechless as Robin’s calm slides in. “Breathe,” she tells Zoro gently, as if the word might pin him to the ship. “In. Out.”

Luffy’s gaze flicks to Sanji’s smoking mouth, to the black smear at his collar, to the new, ugly bloom of red in his shoulder, the wound back again and festering for it. “Who did this?” he demands, already gathering himself like a storm.

“Not a who,” Sanji rasps, voice wrecked, smoke threading out of him. His glare never leaves Zoro, even as Chopper eases him down to look at his shoulder. “And we’re done pretending it’s a joke.”

The wound looks clean and then looks catastrophic and then isn’t there and then is so much worse. Chopper presses gauze in place and it slide off because there’s no fucking place to press it to. 

“I’m gonna need you to pick a severity and stick with it,” Sanji tells the hole in his shoulder. He’s pale and sweating, the kind of shaky that happens when panic has nowhere to go. 

Luffy looks between their faces, catching something heavy he can’t name yet. “Tell us what?”

Zoro’s jaw locks. “Later. Let’s fix his –”

“Now,” Sanji counters furiously. He shrugs Chopper’s hooves off, leaving the wound to open like a maw. “He’s not lost. He goes somewhere that wants him dead. And it’ll take any of us it can get.”

The cabin goes very quiet in the middle of the noise and Zoro doesn’t miss the way Robin’s gaze sharpens, interest and dread braided tight.

“I think,” she says slowly, carefully, “We best get some fresh air.”

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

The Sunny’s deck feels wrong under his boots. Not bad, not dangerous, just wrong . Like the shape of it’’s changed in some way no-one else can see.

Sanji’s slumped on the grass, shirt off so Chopper can get a better look at his shoulder. The wound is doing that thing where it’s there, not-there, worse, better, gone, back again. Each time it reopens it drips a little too slowly, like the blood hasn’t decided on gravity yet.

Zoro’s arm aches. He rolls his sleeve up, slow, like if he takes his time it might not be there, even though he knows it is, can feel it move in time with Sanji’s uneven breathing.

It’s not a burn exactly (too deep, too clean for that) but the heat in it is steady, radiating up into his chest. The edges blister, smooth out, blister again. Nami catches it from across the deck and goes very still, clearly recognising Sanji’s handiwork anywhere. “When did…?”

“Doesn’t hurt,” Zoro cuts in. He keeps his voice low, flat. If he makes it sound normal, maybe it will be. Maybe then Sanji will forgive himself. He pulls the sleeve back down, Wado’s weight at his side humming faintly, like it’s pleased with itself.

The whole damn deck feels like it’s leaning toward him, everyone within arm’s reach, nobody sitting except Sanji. Even the grass seems to be standing at attention. Zoro keeps his eye on a knot in the nearest tree, jaw locked so hard it aches.

Robin folds her hands. Her voice is soft enough that he almost hates it more than shouting. “When did this begin?”

He could lie. The word jams behind his teeth, then cuts coming out because it’s Robin, and this is his crew, and he’s never, ever been a liar.  “When I was a kid. After… after Kuina.”

The word Kuina lands like a claw dragging between his ribs. Zoro keeps his face blank. His jaw tries to wire shut. The burn under his arm paces. Nami inhales hard through her nose and Usopp’s fingers go white where he’s holding his own hands, like he’s trying to keep himself anchored. Luffy doesn’t move at all, like stillness is the only way not to spook whatever this is.

Robin doesn’t look away. Doesn’t falter. “Describe it. What changes.”

He rubs the ridge of his thumb over Wado, an old nervous tick that’s suddenly embarrassing, given the circumstances. “I… stop fitting. Things shift. It feels quick, but… I guess it isn’t.”

Chopper’s ears flatten. He says, helpless: “Hours. Days.”

Robin’s tone stays even. “Injuries?”

“Sometimes.” He feels Sanji’s look land like a thrown knife and doesn’t rise to it. “Most times.”

“And when you’re not alone?”

“It used to be fine,” Zoro says and grimaces at the past tense. “Not now.”

Robin’s mouth tightens. Thinking, tallying. “So the rule has changed.”

Sanji snorts smoke. “It’s not a rule. It’s a fucking noose.”

Robin inclines her head to him, then back to Zoro. “What are the constants? Thresholds? Your swords?”

Wado’s weight is suddenly loud in his hand. “It’s worse when I’m carrying her,” he says before he can stop himself.

“Her.” Robin doesn’t blink.

“The sword,” he mutters and it’s so fucking ridiculous, he knows it is, but it’s also true. “Wado.”

Robin’s voice thins to a finer thread. “Do you hear anything when you hold it?”

He doesn’t want to give her this, wants to grit his teeth against it and stomp off into the night but he knows it’s pointless. She already knows, clearly. “Sometimes. A… song. It isn’t words. I know what it means.”

“Since Kuina,” Robin says, almost to herself. She doesn’t make it kind because that’s not Robin’s style: she makes it clear. “You made a vow and the vow made a door. Your grief anchored itself to a blade you refuse to set down. You’ve been living slightly out of phase ever since… hmm. Close enough to touch, far enough to slip.” 

Brook’s voice is soft as he bows his skull a fraction. “To carry someone is not the same as letting them rest. I know the difference.”

This is where Robin looks to Chopper, her hands pressing under her chin, eyes calculated. “His pulse. The vivre card when we were trying to find him. He’s not broken, he’s simply... misaligned. Unmoored.”

Zoro’s ears burn. Misaligned seems worse than broken. Broken you can glue or whatever. Misaligned means him. Nami drags a hand over her face. Usopp looks like he wants to apologise for every joke he's ever made.

Robin’s gentler now, catching his eye again. “How long were you planning on keeping this from us?”

“Long enough,” Sanji hisses before Zoro can answer. He plants his hands on the grass, leaning back, smoke rolling sharp from his mouth. “He was going to keep doing it alone until it closed on him for good.”

Zoro’s jaw jumps. “It’s my –”

“Problem,” Sanji finishes in a cold snap. “Yeah, yeah, we heard already.”

Robin doesn’t let the heat tip the conversation. “It’s all of ours now,” she says and the crew straightens like she rang a bell. “We should set some rules: you don’t go anywhere alone. Not on deck, not below, not for a moment. We test it in controlled conditions, watching you. We give you anchors, literal ones.” She looks at Nami, Franky, Chopper in turn. “Tethers. Vitals logging. Marks on maps that shouldn’t move.”

She returns to Zoro, gaze steady. “We’ll also need to investigate Wado. Carefully. With your consent.” 

Zoro can feel his own stubbornness like a bruise he pushes just to see if it still hurts. Shame crawls hot at the base of his skull – this is stupid, this is soft, this is mine – and underneath it, a flatter, meaner fear: he doesn’t know how to fix it and they do.

Luffy breaks it without moving. “We’re going with you. Every time.”

Zoro makes a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “Annoying.”

“Alive,” Sanji corrects, scathing. “Pick one.”

Robin’s pen is already scratching in her notebook. “Triggers, anchors, thresholds. We’ll test for mirrors and liminality, track when it worsens. And… we will talk about Kuina. When you can.”

The humiliation of it, knowing his grief will be laid out on the table next to rations and maps, makes his skin itch. He wants to yank Wado up and walk until the world stops arguing. He doesn’t. He anchors himself in the one thing that has never betrayed him: a decision made and kept.

He exhales steel. “Fine. We do it your way.”

The wound in Sanji’s shoulder opens wide in that exact moment, blossoming and empty all the way through, like someone’s taken a bit out of him and forgot to finish. Zoro can see the world through the other side hesitate, edges jittering as if unsure whether to continue so he steps in, past Chopper without thinking, palm flat between Sanji’s shoulder blades, pushing him back into here.

Nami folds her arms tight. “So let me get this straight. We think the sword’s, what, sucking him in?”

“Testing which side he belongs to,” Robin corrects. “And your trip inside has only given it more purchase. Anchors like weight. It will pull until it holds everything you use to resist it.”

Usopp goes even paler, if that’s even possible. “Oh, so it's contagious. Great. Great! This is how ghost stories start.”

Franky leans on the railing, his mouth a hard line. “Then we scrap the sword.”

Zoro laughs once, ugly, even as he forces himself to let Sanji go. “Try and you’ll lose your hands.” The words come out before he can choose better ones but he doesn’t apologise. 

Nami exhales through her teeth. “Okay, but if that sword’s going to drag us all into a fucking nightmare realm then we have to consider destroying it.”

Wado answers with a mosquito whine only he seems to hear. “Touch it and I’ll –” He cuts himself off because, god, he can hear what he sounds like.

Sanji’s thumb presses firm into his wrist. “Talk, asshole, not bite.”

The burn under Zoro’s arm paces the way a pet does when it hears a key in the door, up and down, eager. He breathes around it. “It’s not just a sword. You know that.”

Franky’s jaw flexes. “It’s still not worth all of us.”

Zoro looks at them then, because he has to. Because they’re all staring like they’re waiting for him to be the man they believe in, while they ask him to stop being the boy he was. “I made a promise,” he says finally, voice flat.

Luffy says, “Yeah, you did,” like he’s heard enough. He steps between Nami and the idea, planting bare feet. “We’re not throwing away Zoro’s sword. We fix it.”

“We don’t know how!” Nami fires back.

“We will,” Luffy says like he’s ordering the sea to part.

Robin interjects calmly. “There may be ways to bind it tighter to this world. Or to sever it. Either way costs something.”

Silence opens. It wants to be agreement. It wants to be permission.

Zoro sets his jaw so hard it clicks. “Doesn’t matter what it costs. I’ll pay it.” The line sounds right but it also sounds like someone else speaking with his mouth. His palms are slick with blood again. He doesn’t wipe them.

Usopp blurts, “And if the cost is you?”

Zoro’s throat works. “I said I’ll pay it.”

Sanji’s voice sharpens. “You don’t get to decide alone.”

Zoro turns his head just enough to meet his eyes. “Watch me.”

The burn flares at the tension between them. Sanji’s fingers twitch toward his sternum: he stops himself, then doesn’t, then he presses flat, exact pressure. Zoro’s heart obeys with immediate, humiliating relief. 

Robin continues, because she’s always been mercy shaped like logic. “If we destroy Wado outright, the binding collapses. That includes what it’s holding. Kuina’s memory is braided into it.”

The thought hits like slipping off a roof and finding no ground. He keeps his face sharp. His hands curl. He can already feel his body bracing to say the words he doesn’t mean. He bites the inside of his cheek until iron floods his mouth. He doesn’t say them.

Nami’s voice cracks. “Zoro – ”

Luffy steps closer and sets his hand on Zoro’s shoulder, firm and final in the way he always is. “We’re not breaking it. Not yet. We go where Robin says. We do it smart. You don’t go anywhere alone.”

Zoro wants to say I’m not a kid. He wants to say I had it handled. He wants to say nothing. What comes out is a grunt that could be assent if you’re generous and he fucking hopes they are.

The lantern pops. The flame steadies. The deck exhales.

Robin nods once. “There’s a shrine on the archipelago. Old rites. Names given to steel. If there’s a way to bind this back to the world, or end it clean, that’s where we’ll learn it.” Her eyes flick to Sanji’s shoulder, then to Zoro’s burned arm. “Until then: we stay inside the rules.”

Zoro forces air in. It scrapes. His mouth opens but nothing useful comes out. The deck tilts a degree and the loop in his chest catches, skips, tries again.

Luffy leans in until Zoro can see the scuffs on his hat brim. “Robin’ll figure out how to bind it. We anchor, we test. No names, right? If it goes bad you make the choice. You don’t run.”

Zoro opens his mouth to say I never run but stops himself because he’s been running from the truth of this for years now. He forces himself to nod instead, just once. 

Nami exhales like a storm breaking. “Fine. Buddy system. Head counts every ten minutes. No reflective surfaces uncovered. The rest of you, let’s figure out anchors. Sanji –”

“No leaving his side, I know,” Sanji finishes, voice awfully flat, awfully even for someone hitching his life to Zoro and Zoro – he can’t look at what that means right now. Doesn’t think he’d actually survive that kind of introspection. 

“Chain him if you have to,” Nami snaps, not unkind. Or maybe a little unkind, it’s hard to tell.

Franky grumbles something about installing bells and Usopp mutters about salt lines. Robin’s pen keeps on moving, sketching sigils that smell like dry pages and old graves.

Zoro finally looks down at Wado, runs his thumb along the tsuba and feels the almost-sound in his teeth, that mosquito whine biding its time. Sanji’s hand eases a fraction around his wrist, not away – never away now, it seems, even when he’s so furious he wants to take Zoro’s head off – but enough that Zoro can breathe without pretending he doesn’t need to. “Say it.”

The pulse holds. The burn settles and Zoro breathes but the inhale never catches. He can feel the ship under his feet, he can feel Sanji’s palm, he can feel Wado like a weight he won’t admit is fear. “Here.”

Sanji’s fingers press a fraction deeper, as if he’s heard the thought leave. “Not alone,” he says, quiet, dangerous. “Say it.”

Zoro looks past him at the sea, at the lantern rings, at the crew pretending not to hold their breath. His throat is a rusted hinge. “Not alone.”

The ship breaks to motion: rigging, tape, charts, knives in belts. Nami’s rattling off times and tides. Sanji’s hand finds Zoro’s chest, steady, until he lets go to be taken to the infirmary by Chopper and Zoro feels the absence like a drop.

Zoro watches his crew depart in a hurry, each with their own mission, Thinks of small hands trying to count his heart. Thinks of Sanji’s palm anchoring it back into place like he owns it, the forest of ribcages, the way the burn settles and unsettles under his skin, his pulse rewinding under his own touch, starting the same sequence again like someone’s dragged the tip of a sword back over a fresh cut just to feel it split twice. 

Steady, rewind.

Steady, rewind. 

He presses his knuckles hard into the floor to stop them from tightening into a fist. The wood feels real enough, sure. But the rhythm doesn’t match and for a second he swears he can feel it in everything – the deck under him, the sway of the mat, the faint creak of rope – it all resets in time with his own blood like the whole ship’s catching the loop.

His teeth grind. He’s breathing too slow, trying to match the wrong heartbeat and it makes him dizzy. He wants to pull it out of himself, cut it out, something, but it’s in there too deep. 

(And, fuck, he knows exactly which sword he’d cut it out with and that’s the problem.)

His hand drifts to Wado’s hilt anyway, the wrap cool under his palm. The pulse in his wrist stutters under his touch, then starts again. 

He isn’t surprised when Robin’s the one who stays, moving closer the way silence does, inevitable and unnoticed until it’s already across from you.

She doesn’t speak at first. Just leans against the railing, the wind playing through her hair, watching the waves. Zoro waits for the interrogation, for the patient digging she’s so good at, but instead she says softly: “It must have been lonely.”

He turns away, jaw tight. “Didn’t have a choice.”

“No,” Robin agrees. “But you carried it as though you did. As though you were meant to. Children often do.”

God, she'd know.

Zoro’s hand twitches toward Wado where it lay by his side. “I can handle it.”

“I don’t doubt that.” Her eyes turn to him, steady and dark. “But handling it alone isn’t the same as surviving it. Not anymore.”

Something in him itches, like the walls of the mirror world pressing close again. He forces out: “I don’t want any of you trapped in it.”

Robin’s smile is faint and unreadable. “And yet Sanji already has been. The rules of your world don’t seem to care what you want. But we can learn them, together. Knowledge is a kind of weapon, Zoro. The more we know, the less you’ll have to bleed alone.”

He wants to argue but all that comes out is a low, frustrated breath. Robin doesn’t press, though. She never does. She only gives him a nod, quiet and sure, before slipping back into the shadows she’s come from, trusting Franky to take the first watch. 

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

They make a joke of it at first, Luffy announcing the roster like he’s calling teams for a game, Nami rolling her eyes and writing names anyway, but by the time the light slants gold across the deck Zoro understands they’re serious. The hammock creaks when he drops into it. He stares at the ceiling until the ceiling knots turn into constellations and back again.

Usopp takes first watch, cross-legged on the floor with a scatter of tools that look like a trap and a toy had a baby. He talks to fill the air: the heroic fistfight that definitely happened, the slingshot mod that definitely won’t explode, a plan for a net big enough to capture an island if an island ever needs capturing. When Zoro’s breath hitches, Usopp’s head jerks up so fast his goggles bounce. He tries to play it off, grinning too wide. “Anyway, if you try to vanish, I will simply shoot you with a rope,” he says as if it solves physics. Zoro grunts. He closes his eye and pretends the chatter isn’t keeping him steady.

Nami trades places with a precise tap of her pen against his hammock. She sits by the porthole and does math like she’s angry at it. She doesn’t look at him much and she doesn’t have to. He can feel her keeping time by the turn of her page and the tick of a small brass watch, the soft scrape of pencil when she notes how long he’s been breathing evenly. When the boards creak under his hand she doesn’t glance up, just says, “If you sneak off, I am tying you to the mast,” like she’s discussing wind patterns. He thinks about testing it, mostly to see the ropework.

He doesn’t.

Chopper arrives with blankets and righteous fury. “Vitals,” he orders, like the word itself might bully Zoro’s body into behaving. The stethoscope is cold against his sternum. Chopper’s ears flatten as he listens, his small hand squeezing Zoro’s wrist when the loop stutters. 

“Breathe,” he whispers, and Zoro does because he’s got no armour for that tone. Chopper tucks the blanket up to Zoro’s ribs like he’s five, then fusses with the corner until it’s perfect. Zoro stares at the ceiling and lets it happen.

Luffy doesn’t wait for his slot, just shows up with the quiet of a storm that’s already broken. He flops to the floor, hat over his face, one arm thrown over the edge of the hammock so his fingertips brush Zoro’s shoulder. Zoro feels the weight of that arm like a nail through wood. Every time his heartbeat trips, the pressure changes, a reminder, a here. After a while Luffy slides his hat up and peers at him, wide-eyed in the dark. “Don’t go,” he says, serious as death. “I will be so mad.”

“Terrifying,” Zoro mutters. Luffy grins and falls asleep like he’s flipped a switch. The arm stays locked to him, though.

Robin takes the late hours when the ship gets very quiet and the ocean sounds close. She brings a book and a lantern turned low. She rarely looks over, just turns pages with that patient rustle that means she’s there. He forgets and remembers her three times in a row, heart snagging each time; on the fourth, she glances up and gives the smallest nod, like tapping a sword flat to say stand easy. When his breath catches on a bad shimmer in the air, he hears the soft, impossible scuff of extra fingers rimming the doorframe and the shimmer disappears. He doesn’t thank her – she wouldn’t want it spoken. When she leaves the blanket sits a fraction higher than it did and there’s a cup cooling on the crate within reach.

Time thins. The ship settles deeper on her lines. Somewhere a line creaks, somewhere a wave slaps gentle as a hand. Zoro doesn’t sleep so much as he goes still and listens to other people breathe. Usopp’s sighs, Nami’s steadying page turns, Chopper’s small muttered counts from the corner where he refuses to leave, Robin’s quiet that holds, Luffy’s messy joy even asleep, Brook’s soft music.It should feel like being caged but instead it feels like being lashed to the deck in a storm you survive.

He lies there and lets the heat under his skin take orders from a hand that isn’t on him, lets his pulse sync to a rhythm he didn’t choose, lets his crew measure and mark and listen.  

For now, he stays where they put him.

Dawn finally scuffs its thumb over the horizon. The lantern burns pale and the room turns the colour of old bone. Sanji checks his watch, grinds out the last cigarette, and pushes off the doorframe. “Still here,” he says, not quite a question.

“Still here,” Zoro answers and doesn’t try to make it sound like a boast.

Sanji’s mouth tilts into something that isn’t a smile but knows the shape of one, maybe. “Breakfast.”

Luffy stirs, hat sliding off his face. Chopper’s head pops up like a startled kettle. Robin’s shadow lengthens as she turns a page in the hall. Somewhere above, Nami’s footsteps start cataloguing the morning.

Zoro swings his legs out of the hammock and sits there for a breath, the ship solid under his feet, the crew’s noise knitting itself back into a net. He can feel the edge of the world out there, patient. He can feel the weight of eyes, the quiet hands ready to grab him by the collar if the mirror world opens its mouth.

He hates it. He’s grateful enough to be sick with it. He stands anyway.

“Close,” Nami calls, like an order. 

“Closer,” Robin says, brushing past. Luffy hooks an elbow around his neck and drags him toward the galley. Zoro lets him. 

They shadow him like his life depends on it.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 

When the sun’s truly up, Zoro sits cross-legged by the mast with his back to the wood, shirt bunched in one hand and Wado in the other, even as he glares up at the smattering of stars above. The burn in his arm is quiet in that fake way, sleeping with one eye open, until Brook exchanges his babysitting shift for the worst candidate possible.

Sanji’s cigarette ember ghosts closer and the quiet lifts its head. Zoro scowls. “Piss off.”

Predictable as hell, Sanji does the exact opposite. He squats in front of him, close enough that Zoro could knee him if he wanted to end this. “I’ve been wanting to ask,” Sanji starts, infuriatingly calm. “Why you get twitchy when I breathe.” 

“I twitch when you’re annoying. Which is all the fuckin’ time, incidentally.” 

“Great. Control.” He leans in close, exhaling slow and sending warm smoke skimming across Zoro’s ribs, his arm. The brand answers immediately, heat blooming, a second heartbeat pacing under skin. Zoro’s jaw knots, even as the humiliation jerks somewhere low and feral. 

Sanji watches the welt on his arm ripple like it’s a tide pool with something alive in it. He flicks ash away, snuffs the cigarette against the rail without looking and lifts his hand. 

“Curls,” Zoro warns.

“Make me stop,” Sanji says and presses the flat of his fingers just below the brand, not even on it, just… near. The burn reaches, shameless and god, Zoro has to bite down on the sound he makes before it embarrasses the both of them. 

Sanji’s mouth quirks like he’s cataloguing it anyway, shifting the angle to slide his thumb sliding a fraction higher, still not touching the scar itself. Pinning the border like he’s hemming cloth. “It follows me.”

“It follows orders,” Zoro grinds out.

“Yeah, from me,” Sanji smirks. “Here.”

The word lands and the loop in Zoro’s chest locks into rhythm like a dog snapping to heel. Rage flares, at himself, at Sanji, at the way his body keeps fucking telling on him. He grabs Sanji’s wrist, intent on removing it but the instant his fingers close the burn flares hotter and then, humiliatingly, eases.

“Get your hand off me,” Zoro hisses but he doesn’t push the other man away, not really, and Sanji takes it for the bluff it is. 

“Just testing the scope,” Sanji says mildly, lowers his head a fraction. Just a breath, feather-light, the barest exhale ghosting over the scar.

The brand surges, a clean spike that short-circuits his fucking knees. Zoro swears, palm slamming to Sanji’s shoulder to shove him back –

His hand hits the cook’s wound. It flickers under his palm: present / gone / present, like a door deciding. The world leans a degree toward a seam. Sanji stills fast, hand come to Zoro’s sternum, eyes on his.

“Don’t move,” Sanji warns, low.

“Wasn’t planning to,” Zoro lies. The edge is right there: he can feel it, the way Sanji’s shoulder tries to be an outline he could pull open if he were stupid. He presses around it instead, thumb braced in muscle, the way you stop a joint from dislocating. The Sunny’s deck remembers it’s wood. The tilt eases.

They hold like that, Sanji’s hand commanding the beat in Zoro’s chest and Zoro’s hand pinning the not-door closed in Sanji’s shoulder. Breath meets breath in a tight, hot space that would look like a fight to anyone else.

“Again,” Sanji breathes, not moving his palm. “Say it.”

Zoro wants to spit. He wants to agree. He splits the difference, growling. “Here.”

The burn organises obediently, the pain smoothing into a line of heat that behaves. Sanji’s mouth tilts, not quite a smile. “Honest body you got there.”

“Shut up,” Zoro snarls and, because humiliation is a poor substitute for control, he tests back. He shifts his grip, thumb tracing the margin where Sanji’s wound tries to blink out of the world. The flicker stutters, then steadies under his hand.

Sanji’s breathing hitches, drags. His eyes drop to Zoro’s mouth, just for a second. 

“Not just you,” Zoro says as petty satisfaction lights through him. “Your turn to be honest.”

“Congrats,” Sanji drawls, unsteady. “We’re both fucked.”

He lifts his other hand, slow enough not to spook anything and lays two fingers on the edge of the burn, barely touching. The scar leans right into him, greedy. He doesn’t press harder because he doesn’t have to. Heat moves where he tells it, when he tells it. 

A piece of him locked under Zoro’s skin. 

“This’s insane,” Zoro tries, ragged. He means it feels too intimate. He means it feels too terrifying. He means it feels too good and wants to bite his fucking tongue off for it.

Sanji’s mouth flattens like he’s fighting a smile he doesn’t trust. “We’re establishing control of variables,” he says then ruins the science with a jagged exhale. A thread of flame slips from his lips, controlled, quick, gone, and the burn replies all at once with a bright, obedient throb.

Zoro’s vision whites. When it clears, his hand is still on Sanji’s shoulder and Sanji’s fingers are still on his scar and they’re well past the point of pretending this is anything but exactly what it is, their own twisted brand of foreplay. 

“Make me stop,” Sanji reminds him, breath catching.

Zoro swallows. His throat works around too many answers, too many of them too close to begging. For less, for more: the burn throbs, white-hot. “Don’t need to.”

“You will.” Sanji’s forehead presses into Zoro’s, exhale ghosting the sharp edge of Zoro’s jaw. “When I push too far.”

Zoro white-knuckles Wado so that he doesn’t sink his teeth into the other man’s neck. “Try me.”

“Later,” Sanji breathes and finally takes his hand away, exactly slow enough that the burn doesn’t chase it like a starved thing. The absence is loud. Zoro doesn’t let go of his shoulder until the flicker under his arm stays gone.

They sit for a breath that feels like a truce.

“Data point.” Sanji’s voice has roughened to something private. “I can steady you. You can keep the door shut on me.”

“Not a door,” Zoro says even though it feels like one. A hell of a lot like one. He wants to kiss the other man so badly his teeth ache, the burn aches, his pulse pulls. 

Sanji looks at him like he’s tired and fond and furious in equal parts, the way he’s always looked at him. “We won’t tell Robin we did this part without her.”

“We’re not telling anyone,” Zoro says. What the fuck would he even say? That the burn in him is fine-fucking-tuned to Sanji, tracks him like adoration?

“Wrong.” Sanji stands, offering a hand he knows Zoro won’t take. “We’re telling them what they need to keep you breathing. The rest is…” He searches for a word, fails, settles on, “Ours.”

Zoro doesn’t take the hand. He pushes to his feet on his own, every line of him bristling with something that isn’t quite anger.

“Here,” Sanji says, last time, soft enough to be a habit.

“Here,” Zoro answers, because it’s all he can say.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 

By the late afternoon the deck doesn’t look like their deck anymore. They’re anchored close enough to a stone causeway that runs the beach to a half-drowned shrine, barnacled steps leading into a doorway that opens onto nothing. Water caresses the rocks before drawing back. Above, the sky can’t decide on a colour. It’s liminal enough to make Robin satisfied and Zoro’s skin crawl.

Robin has drawn a geometry across the planks, thin chalk lines married to salt so fine it looks like frost. Lanterns sway from the rigging, low and steady, warming the white into honey. The air smells like sea and metal and a whisper of ink. It feels like a place you’re supposed to whisper in.

What matters isn’t the pattern. It’s what sits inside it.

Franky polishes a wrench and places it teeth-out, like a promise. Brook rests his bow across two intersecting lines, hair-thin horsehair glinting like a bridge. 

Luffy’s ribbon off his hat is tied to Zoro’s wrist, warm with sun. Nami’s compass bumps around the other like a heartbeat that knows where it’s going. Usopp’s charm is lopsided and fierce. Chopper’s gauze has neat little teeth. Robin sets a pressed blue flower on top of it all and says, “For memory,” like a benediction.

Sanji doesn’t bring a thing. He steps in close instead, eyes bright and mean with determination. “Guess I don’t carry trinkets,” he tells no-one in particular but he’s staring at Zoro. Zoro opens his mouth to say absolutely not but Sanji catches his jaw in one hand and kisses him.

The burn erupts under his arm, under his ribs, heat flaring bright enough he swears he sees the deck tilt white for a blink. It’s not surface pain; it’s a brand waking and choosing. Sanji’s mouth tastes like smoke and citrus and Zoro’s burn claws at the heat to find it answering back, obedient, greedy, alive. Sanji’s palm slides from Zoro’s jaw to the centre of his chest – here – and the loop locks obediently into place.

Sanji pulls off him, smoke still curling thin from his mouth like proof, a lick of flame dancing in the space between their mouths before it fizzles out. 

“There,” he says, voice rough. “That’s your anchor. Don’t you dare lose it.”

Usopp makes a strangled oh come on sound like he just lost three years of a private bet. Nami pinches the bridge of her nose and mutters, “Of course that’s your contribution.” 

Luffy whoops and claps Zoro on the back hard enough to dislodge a lung, probably, if his lung didn’t feel like it’s already on fire. 

Zoro stands there with everyone’s offerings heavy in his hands and Sanji’s heat stamped under his skin, furious and rattled and, unhelpfully, steadier than he was a breath ago.

Robin clears her throat, her smile small and dangerous. “Anchors set,” she says. “Shall we begin?”

Zoro tightens his fist around compass, charm, string. The burn listens like a pet straining at a leash, tuned to the heat that just named it.

“Here,” Sanji says, firm.

“Here,” Zoro answers, and this time he doesn’t hate that his body obeys. Wado hums in his palm, bright and possessive, as if to say don’t forget why we’re here. Another anchor, he tells himself. Like a rope on the mast. Like a hand at your collar when the sea gets rough.

Sanji hasn’t moved far. Too close, but not touching. Smoke curls off him in slow ribbons. Zoro can feel his own pulse try to sync to it and hates, quietly, privately, how easy it is.

Nami starts checking the chalk lines. Zoro rolls his jaw and catalogues the facts like stances: the room, the chalk, the anchors from his crew, the sword in his hand, the heat at his side. He files the kiss where it belongs, under useful, because anything more sentimental than that might get him killed. 

Robin steps into the circle and nods once. The crew tightens around the edges. The air changes, just a hair. The world tilts the way it does before it opens its mouth.

Zoro hitches his hip, finds Sanji’s presence like a reference point and plants his feet.

“Thresholds invite,” Robin explains. Eight sigils mark the perimeter, spare and elegant; her extra hands bloom to hold the lines steady while the tide licks in and out. “We’ll compress the field around Wado, bind, not extract. Extraction tears.” Her eyes glance up to Zoro and flick away. “You won’t like tearing.”

“I don’t like any of this,” Zoro snorts.

“You’d like it less if you try it alone,” she replies, mild, and starts writing in a script even the water seems to avoid.

Franky and Usopp work the edges: rope lines to the Sunny, weighted pulleys. “In case this goes rogue,” Franky explains cheerfully. He’s taped every shiny surface on the deck behind them. Even the Sunny’s figurehead is wearing a cloth hood. Brook hums a low note that makes the tide hold its breath. 

Nami is all angles and command. “We’ve got a twenty-minute window before the current turns. We do not run over. Sanji, Zoro, you two don’t break contact. You break, I rope you together.”

Robin checks the circle one last time. “This is a frame,” she says, not lecturing so much as inviting. “The lines give us edges. You give it weight. Name where you are.”

Zoro’s mouth is dry. He bristles at the way everyone’s watching him and at how much he wants it to work. “Deck,” he says. The word lands like a heel.

“Again.”

“Deck.” He keeps his voice flat, steady.

Robin lifts her left hand. “On my count, breathe together. Luffy?”

Luffy grins, all teeth and certainty. “Stay,” he says to Zoro, like it’s the easiest order he’s ever given.

They pull together like a crew hauling a line. Inhale. Exhale. Zoro feels the ship answer, wood under his boots, rigging whispering above, the low animal hum of the Sunny that always tells him where home is. Sanji’s palm settles on Zoro’s chest, precise. The loop in Zoro’s heart flirts with the skip it loves and then catches, steadies. He swallows the relief like it’s a sin.

“Count,” Robin says.

Nami counts bearings: “Zero. Ninety. One-eighty. Two-seventy.” The compass needle trembles, then stills under her fingers.

“Mark,” Usopp adds and taps a chalk X every time Zoro exhales. Little stars bloom at Zoro’s feet, ridiculous and oddly comforting.

Brook draws one clean note. It hangs in the warm air like a line cast out to sea. Wado hums, wanting to rise and split the sound in two. Zoro tightens his grip and the blade settles in his teeth. 

Robin’s voice threads through all of it, soft and exact. “Say your name.”

He hates that this part is hard. “Zoro.”

“Say where you are.”

“Deck.”

“Say who holds you.”

He glances left. Sanji’s profile is cut clean by lantern light, eyes half-lidded, mouth a mean line of concentration. The hand on Zoro’s chest presses a fraction firmer, not a question. Zoro feels the burn under his skin wake, stretch, then heel.

“My crew,” Zoro says and it doesn’t even sound stupid.

The world, for once, does nothing clever. The lantern flames behave. The salt lines don’t clump or crawl. Chopper’s shoulders drop. Franky exhales like a pressure valve finding the right notch. Usopp’s shaky grin shows up, skittish but real.

“Again,” Robin says gently.

They do it again. Breath. Count. Note. Name. Zoro can feel the place that wants to open, thin as a slick of light at his knee, defer. It isn’t gone. It just waits. Sanji’s palm is heat and command and a topic Zoro will never discuss. He leans into it because his pride can die later.

Chopper whispers, almost reverent: “It’s holding.”

Zoro almost believes it. He lets his shoulders relax a fraction. The weight of eyes stops feeling like a trap and starts feeling like ballast. The Sunny hums, pleased to be useful. 

Robin watches all of it, eyes narrowed the way they get when a hypothesis starts to purr. “Good,” she says. “Again. Zoro?”

“Deck.”

“Name your sword.”

He doesn’t want to. He does anyway. “Wado.”

Wado’s hum leaps, eager, then finds the bow’s note and hums to it instead of sawing across. Sanji makes a sound that could be a laugh if it weren’t so wrecked. Luffy rocks on his heels and says, “Stay,” under his breath like a spell he’s invented. Nami’s compass needle lies still as a sleeping animal.

Zoro thinks – wildly, stupidly – that maybe this is it. Maybe the rule is just don’t be alone. Maybe the circle and the hand and the hat and the bow are enough. Maybe he can let go of the tight, mean line he’s held since the dojo and let the ship carry some of it.

The lantern nearest the rail flickers. Just once – too long, like it forgets what fire is – and then steadies.

Robin’s gaze ticks to it. Her tone doesn’t change. “Again.”

They go again. Breath. Count. Name. The seam at Zoro’s knee seems to think better of itself and dissolves. Chopper wipes at his eyes and pretends it’s sweat. Usopp sniffs, triumphant and damp. Franky whispers, “Super,” like he’s afraid to spook it. Brook’s note wavers for a heartbeat, splits like light through glass and then resolves back into one true line.

Zoro feels the world fail to open. He feels his heart choose a rhythm and hold it. He feels Sanji’s thumb, by accident, trace the tiniest circle against his sternum to keep him on the beat.

It almost feels easy.

Robin lets them float there a breath longer than necessary, as if giving their bodies time to remember what safety feels like. Then – gentle, pleased, wary at the edges: “Again.”

They answer. The crew’s chorus builds into something that sounds like faith. The chalk holds. The salt holds. The deck stays a deck.

Zoro watches the lamp turn Sanji’s lashes gold. He watches Luffy grin without shaking. He watches Robin’s shoulders loosen, a fraction, as if a door in her also just closed the right way.

“Say her name,” Robin says, once, and Wado sings. 

The air tightens to a wire. The deck tilts by a degree without moving. The chalk circle decides it’s a ring of wet light.

“Kuina,” Zoro breathes, the real test, and the temperature of everything drops without getting cold. The world pulls like a hook set behind his breastbone. The ship exhales and becomes a ribcage.

Sanji’s thumb digs in and the burn weeps. “Here, Moss.”

A hair-thin seam opens in front of them with the soft sound of a paper cut. Chalk crawls uphill like an insect.

“Pick,” Sanji continues, calm like knives laid out straight. “Me or it.”

Zoro keeps his eye on Sanji. The seam wants the look: he can feel it, the tug in his socket. The loop in his pulse jumps, tries to restart the last ten seconds. Sanji’s thumb presses into his sternum with measured pressure. 

“Don’t be stupid,” Zoro says which means you or them or us.

Kuina, Wado whispers, a note only he can hear. 

Robin’s voice deepens, layered by echoes not her own. Each word she spoke bled into the earth, scrawls of ink-dark shadow spreading from her circle. The runes began to hiss, faint at first, then rising like a chorus.

Zoro’s grip tightens on Wado. His palm prickles, blood wetting the hilt where the curse tugs sharp against him. He thinks for a moment he can hear laughter – thin, girlish, too young – and his chest locks up.

Then the ground yawns open like a mouth, slow and deliberate, soil dragging down into black glass. The circle Robin had drawn holds for a breath, two, then warps, lines peeling up like torn skin.

Sanji swears under his breath. “Here, Zoro!” 

“Stay in the circle!” Robin barks but Zoro can already feel it: the pull, the tilt of the world shifting towards that wound in the ground. His pulse stammering into its wrong rhythm, doubling back on itself until he thinks his heart might seize entirely. 

And then the hands come. Small, pale, too many of them. Fingers scrabbling up from the black, nails sharp as glass, clutching at his boots, his ankles, the fabric of his pants.

“Sanji,” Zoro tries but the word breaks when he realises the hands aren’t just reaching for him this time. One hooks around Wado’s guard, tugging with uncanny strength. Another presses flat against his chest, cold and clammy, and for half a heartbeat he thinks he sees her face in the glass below – Kuina, or the echo of her, eyes hollow and wide.

Robin’s eyes flash, every hand she’s bloomed around the circle straining to keep the runes intact. “Hold it! Don’t let it pull you under!”

The mirror world buckles like a hull taking on water. The tide breathes in and forgets to breathe out.

Usopp yells once, grabs for the rim, and jaws of glass fold down around his hands, gentle at first, then harder, chewing cords at his wrist until his goggles pop free like an eye. Zoro leaps for him and the floor bucks, lifting him just enough that his fingers close on air and a spray of glitter that was Usopp a breath ago and now is only reflections running. 

Nami explodes into ribbons, into scrolls, ink biting at the air like leeches. The compass needle at Zoro’s wrist snaps toward Wado so hard it nearly snaps his wrist in half and Luffy’s ribbon burns, trying to pull his head down into the blade like a magnet and a nail.

Robin steps between the lines with both palms raised. “Cien Fleur –” is all the world lets her have. Her extra hands bloom and then flower for real, skin to petals, petals to paper, until the ring of Robins is just a drift of pages that flutter apart, each printed with a different sigil that crawls off the page and into the stone. 

The circle’s a slaughterhouse where geometry comes to die. It collapses inwards and outwards all at once. The shrine door grins. The tide remembers the way back out.

“Stay with me!” Sanji snarls, yanking Zoro back. His palm slams to Zoro’s sternum – here – and the burn obeys for one blessed second. The world spits instead of swallowing.

Luffy’s the last one between Zoro and gone, always the final stand. He’s all movement, all certainty, arm already stretching but rubber snags on a shard’s edge and pulls thinner, like taffy ready to snap. His grin is feral, bright as combat: he looks like the one person gravity can’t argue with.

“Zoro! Don’t you dare – ” 

The mirror flips. Luffy’s stretched arm threads itself through the glass, wrong-side-out until his hand’s waving from the back of the reflection. His voice doubles, one version right side up, one mirrored, one laughing, one breaking. Zoro lunges and hits a wall that isn’t there. His fingers smear down Luffy’s palm from the wrong side and catch nothing. 

Zoro’s vision tunnels. The hum of Wado in his teeth spikes; a hundred shards show a hundred Sanjis, bloodied shoulder, bright eyes, fists up, fire ready and each one is stepping back without moving.

“Don’t light up,” Zoro begs.

“I’m not – ” Sanji’s wound opens like an eye and winks closed and the world grabs that blink and pulls. Smoke curls from his mouth with no flame, like the very idea of fire’s enough to draw ten thousand mirrored mouths yawning open around him to eat it.

“Here,” Sanji says, low and lethal, pushing his palm harder into Zoro’s chest. Here here here. The burn yearns under it, but the mirror world hates cooperation and lets them know it, quick smart.

Hands stretch, lengthen, wrists spooling out in wet strands that don’t bleed, still attached to the reflections. The ones under Zoro’s ribs hold harder, prying wider, hungry for that steady place inside. A finger finds the pericardium and taps like it’s knocking to be let in.

“Eyes on me!” Sanji barks, already shifting, bracing both arms around Zoro’s chest from behind, compressing hard. It’s a bear hug that hurts, and crushes, and works. The last of the hands inside are squeezed out, skittering across his ribs like spiders evicted from a crack.

Zoro chokes. Mud and something sweet-rotten flood his mouth; he spits, gags, spits again until there’s air. Kuina tries one last time, two fingers hook his lower ribs and feel for the beat, but Sanji’s grip tightens and the place decides to let go.

The surface collapses, sulking. In one patch of glass, Kuina looks up at him, older than she ever was, calm in a way that hurts and lifts her palm from the inside, a faux surrender. 

“Up,” Sanji demands, voice fast. “We move. Away from glass. Keep your fuckin’ eyes on me, Moss.”

Zoro gets his feet under him and his ribs complain, throb in time with the loop of his pulse that tries once to reset and fails miserably. He keeps his eye on Sanji and away from the reflections that want to meet him halfway. When they stagger forward Wado makes a sound like a smile and then pretends it didn’t.

Sanji counts under his breath, pacing, breath, the mild insult cadence he uses when he’s soothing a souffle or an angry marine. “Five forward, pivot left, don’t decide until I do.” His palm finds Zoro’s chest, a goddamn metronome for a heart that won’t behave. Zoro’s returning grip on Sanji’s wrist is iron, confirming the pulse under his fingers is human, clean.

They walk. The hallway wants to lengthen – Sanji’s voice shortens it. The air tries to substitute itself with something sweet and rotting – Sanji says here and Zoro’s body listens to here.

“See?” Sanji says, breath steady. “Not so –”

The floor decides to be a mirror, a sheet of black water that only reflects them. Zoro doesn’t look down on purpose because he knows better but he sees it all anyway: two men, close enough to be the same balance. His reflection’s mouth is a half-second late. Sanji’s reflection – no, Sanji’s reflection’s on time.

“Zoro, here,” Sanji says, rough.

The mirror floor ripples. The delay in Zoro’s reflection catches up, then overshoots. The Sanji in the reflection moves half a beat before the Sanji in front of him does.

Zoro’s grip tightens. Squeezes, hard.

“Yeah, got you,” Sanji says automatically and that’s when a seam snaps open down the centre of their reflection, a hairline cut from their joined hands to their joined feet. The light bends toward it. The seam widens. It’s not in the floor. It’s in them.

Sanji’s palm is still at Zoro’s sternum and Zoro can feel its heat, the human steadiness, the real pulse under his hand. But when he blinks, it’s reversed the pressure is there, the shape is right but the sensation is a degree off, like someone’s tuned a copy on an instrument he doesn’t play.

“Zoro,” Sanji says – close, real, here – and his lips move a heartbeat after the voice.

Zoro’s stomach drops. There’s no lurch or tear: the Sanji in his grip stays in his grip, weight correct, heat correct, and the wound in his shoulder gone.

In the mirror, a half step away, Sanji’s mouth shapes Pick me and the wound in his shoulder opens like an obscene flower. Zoro lunges for that one. 

The floor adds an inch to the distance and then another and then it’s a whole fucking hallway away and Zoro doesn’t stand a chance. 

Wado hums, sharp with approval and hunger.

“Don’t,” Real Sanji says from the mirror, voice flattened by glass. “Zoro. Eyes. On. Me.”

The not-ship chooses a Sanji.

Zoro feels the choice like a cold hand on the back of his neck, the warmth in his grip cooling to nothing. The pulse under his fingers turning into a memory of a pulse, the pattern of a drum someone’s forgotten to keep beating. The wrong Sanji smiles with all of Sanji’s teeth and none of his bite. The wound in his shoulder stays closed like a secret.

“Here,” Real Sanji gets out, palm slamming flat to the invisible glass on his side, fingers splayed wide and desperate, and then the sound shears into silence. He’s gone, peeled off into the infinite.

Zoro’s pulse loops so hard the edges of his vision blacken, the whole fucking world trying to restart the last ten seconds for him. 

“Sanji?”

The not-ship turns its head to listen as he steps toward where the reflection vanished. The floor offers him a different door entirely, a polite, impossible rectangle cut into nothing.

He doesn’t look at it. He looks at the memory of Sanji’s hand on his chest instead, at the place his own hand can mimic the pressure. He feels the stutter in his pulse try to become a map. The burn leaps for the absence and finds only air, then paces under his skin, rabid.

All around, the crew’s echoes are already dimming. Luffy’s laugh haunts a seam like a heartbeat and then is gone. Chopper’s thread ends in a neat knot where a doctor should be. Usopp’s goggles catch in Wado’s hamon for half a second and then slide off, smiling upside down.

The world turns its full face to Zoro. The shrine door grins wider. The blade-bridge unrolls ahead, bright and cruel.

Fine.

He understands it now. 

He doesn’t look back. He can’t. If he does, he’ll stop, and this world eats what stops.

Forward, then.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 

He lands on Wado again, a mimicry of his dream but worse, infinitely worse. White and narrow, blade-flat, running under his boots into a horizon that won’t pick a fucking distance. The hum starts at once, thick and eager, threading up his calves into the bones of his jaw, the backs of his teeth until it sits there like a scream he isn’t making. Can’t make. 

He spreads his weight as the sword flexes along the back, just enough. His pulse tries to match the hum then doesn’t, then loops around again anyway. Stutter, sprint, stall, reset, until his chest forgets what to do for a second. 

The whole world sways.

This time, there’s no black void below, just a moving river of glass, each pane a memory caught mid-breath. Kuina’s stance, exact and merciless. The dojo rafters sweating summer heat. Luffy laughing around a fire. Sanji’s shoulder opening and closing like a mouth. Mihawk’s eyes, bored and bright. He feels gravity pull toward each one when it passes under him, like they’re hands on his shins, tugging.

The rain starts again, red mist, beading and skittering before becoming thicker, sizzling wherever it lands, hisses of blood. The blade shudders under him as if it’s remembering wounds and the note climbs, half a step then further.

At his hip, Enma pulses black joy like a leech. Kitetsu vibrates hungry as wire. He lets both go. Only Wado stays, under him and nowhere else, the world pretending there’s just the one sword and he’s standing on it.

The blade tilts enough for him to need to move and the tilt answers by deepening in turn, infinitely pleased. He breaks out into a run because the sword says run, boots slapping a surface the width of his foot, rain hissing, hum in his skull chasing his pulse into a stutter. The reflections below keep pace, a strobing film of his own life cut wrong. 

He slips, because of course he fucking does. The blood’s made the blade slick as glass and his heel just – goes. He drops hard, hands scrabbling until his fingers catch the edge and the reflections under him have the kindness to pause on a face he knows too well.

Kuina. Not eleven. Not anything he ever got to see. Older, steady, mouth set the way it goes when she’s already decided to win. She looks up at him through the glass and grins like they’re kids. Don’t drop me, she says without moving.

The blade hums like it agrees. The edge under his fingers vibrates into bone; he feels it looking for a way in. Not to cut, never to cut. To keep. If he lets go, he knows he won’t fall past Wado. He’ll fall into it.

He hauls his ass up, ignoring the way the steel warms under his palms with the heat of a brand, the way the grip prints into him, those neat oval blisters the same pattern as the ray-skin wrap. He gets one forearm up, then the other. The sword flexes. The tilt becomes law. He’s crawling up a white horizon that wants to be his last decision.

“Here,” someone says, too far away, too thin to be real. Sanji, the sound of fire made wrong.

The ground breaks under his boots, clean as a plate snapped in two and light slips into the crack and doesn’t come out. Glass rises where the path should be, slabs hung in the dark on nothing, slick and cold, catching a hundred versions of him.

No, not him.

Her.

Kuina stares out from every angle, too young in one shard, older than she ever got in another, hair different lengths, stance perfect in all of them. In a long blade of mirror at his knee she’s got his eye instead of hers, brown and scarred, in one above his shoulder she’s smiling like she just scored a point on him and wants him to keep up.

He doesn’t move. Half of her do anyway.

“Zoro,” says a shard near his hip, the sound crawling up through the hilt of Wado and into his teeth. Another laughs, a clean, high note he hasn’t heard since he was ten and a third opens her mouth wide but the sound doesn’t make it out, just fogs the inside of the glass like breath caught in winter.

“Stop,” he rasps, to the sword, to the room, to the memory.

It’s not a sway, not a trick of bad depth. A tall pane leans forward like a door tested by wind and then rotates, planting an edge into the dirt with a quiet, deliberate thunk. The next pane copies it, then the next. They come down like blades setting a perimeter.

He shifts his weight. The shard at his ankle slides closer, too smooth. Kuina’s bare foot in that piece is bleeding. The blood does not fall; it climbs the glass in neat red lines and writes his name.

“Race you,” says one, cheerful and wrong.

“You promised,” says another.

“Again,” says a third, and the word lands like a blow to his his chest.

Hands. His size, her shape, come through first, fingers faceted and wet with something that isn’t glass. The arm follows, then the shoulder. Kuina steps out of her reflection like a diver breaking the surface, bringing the mirror with her as skin. She’s not flesh and she isn’t not. Her edges are sharp. She grins like they’re kids and there’s a hill to sprint.

He takes a step back. Another Kuina, twelve and rotting, slides out of a waist-high shard on his left. Another, taller, with the line of a woman he will never meet, steps down from above and hits the ground without sound. They move too well. Too fast.

The first one cocks her head. Her reflection in the shard she left behind doesn’t move. It keeps smiling and the smile keeps getting larger until it shows too many teeth.

“Zoro,” says the tall one, and the glass in her throat gives the syllables a clean, ringing edge. “Let me in.”

Her hand comes up light and precise for his jaw. He jerks back as her fingertips find the opening anyway. Something slides under his skin just there, cool and testing, like a blade laid flat. Every Kuina in every surface copies the motion a half-beat late and then a half-beat early and then all at once until the air shivers with the repetition.

He bares his teeth. She bares hers back. The shard-girls answer, a field of smiles that can’t all be hers. The burn on his forearm wakes up like hearing footsteps. Heat races along the blistered track left by Sanji’s fire, too fast, delighted. The note in Wado climbs. The room leans toward a keyhole he can’t fucking see.

He moves first. Wado snaps up and the older Kuina’s palm meets the flat of the blade. She doesn’t flinch because the steel doesn’t cut her. It enters her the way a mirror takes a face, clean, total. Her eyes widen like she’s swallowing and he feels a drag in the hilt as if the sword wants to go with her.

He yanks it back. The blade comes away with a sound like a breath unspooling. The cut she should have doesn’t exist. In the glass behind her, his reflection bleeds for her instead, mouth full of red, teeth slick, eye calm.

“Don’t,” says a small shard at his knee, Kuina at eleven, firm, teacher-sharp. “Again.”

Wado rings in joy and the nearest pane shatters into a cloud of glittering knives. It’s a clean, stupidly satisfying movement, muscle memory singing down bone, but the pieces don’t fall. They drift, slow and curious, sinking toward the heat of his breath.

He slashes again, and again, carving a path that doesn’t hold. Every break births more edges and every edge remembers being part of her until the air’s a throat stuffed with memories of her, real and not-real. 

A long strip of mirror peels from the ceiling and drops like a banner. Kuina in that ribbon is older again, hair long, face lined at the mouth with a life he stole by surviving. She is very calm. “You don’t have to go back,” she says. “There’s nothing to prove there. Stay and finish this.”

“Finish what?” He grinds out.

“Me,” she says and her smile is cruel, loving, both and nothing. “Or let me finish you.”

Her hand is on his jaw again. A dozen other hands are too. Another dozen find the burn and begin to open it with the neat curiosity of a surgeon. The blister pattern parts under their glass nails without breaking skin, no blood, and yet he feels something come loose that he knows he needs.

He clamps his teeth shut until his gums complain. The youngest Kuina, grave, seven, perfect stance, leans in. “You said you’d walk for two,” she whispers. “Why are you walking away?”

He doesn’t answer because there isn’t an answer that isn’t fucking begging.

He drives Wado point-down until the blade bites the black between slabs like earth and keeps going, deeper than the length he’s holding. The hum spikes into a scream that isn’t in the air so much as in the bones of his face. The glass Kuinas all flinch the same heartbeat, not in fear, just in recognition.

Every shard-Kuina reaches at once, mouths and hands and clean, efficient fingers, and so he tears the blade free and cuts the first, the second, the tenth, hating the way the breaks are so beautiful. Fragments drift, turning to catch him, and every piece that turns shows her and every her is looking at him like he’s the answer to a question he can’t remember.

“Zoro,” they chorus and his name has never sounded so kept.

He picks a direction no map would call real and runs. The shards follow. Some stick to his skin like dew. One kisses the burn and disappears inside it like a fish slipping into water. His stomach heaves but he doesn’t stop because he can’t. 

Something tall and thin and made of doorframes tries to be a hallway ahead and he goes for that one, because the mirror world hates being chosen. It tries to snarl and reposition its teeth but he breaks through it anyway. 

Behind him, a hundred Kuinas keep pace in the glass, not quite in time. One of them, older, impossible, steady, doesn’t move at all. She just watches him go with a look like mercy and disappointment braided together and lifts two fingers from the hilt of a sword he can’t afford to name.

He doesn’t look back again.

He can feel the cuts he didn’t get opening and closing along his body where the reflections bled for him. He can feel the burn purring like a fed thing. He can feel Wado singing like it wants to be broken or used, it doesn’t care which.

He keeps running until the mirrors thin to knives, until the knives thin to dust, until there’s nothing left to reflect him but the wet black of the world itself.

“Sanji!” He shouts, the air tightening to wire around him. 

Stone. Ribbed beams overhead. A hallway that wants to be longer when you look at it. The not-ship snaps around him like a jaw that’s missed its bite. 

The loop in his pulse tries three times. On the fourth, it catches.

Somewhere down a different throat of a hallway something screams like fire learning a new language to be wrong in. He knows that sound, so it’s the only way he can go. Behind him, far above, the endless white line of Wado’s back keeps going into a horizon that isn’t here. The rain up there hasn’t stopped. He can feel it in the crux of his chest, his heart, the valley of his throat.

He doesn’t look back. He doesn’t say her name. He tucks bloodied hands on the saya he brought with him from the other kind of world and lets this wrong place hate the way he moves.

“Here,” he says to no-one, meaning to someone.

Zoro inhales, feeling it refuse to settle in his chest. Forces his palm against his sternum until he can breathe again. Closes his eye. He’s ready. 

He’s ready. 

He lands on steel again.

A white bridge, narrow as truth. Wado stretched too long, too bright, running to a horizon that doesn’t exist the same way nothing exists here, not really. The blade hums mean and eager under his boots. Every pulse asks a question his chest keeps answering wrong, every choice has looped him back here again and again and he knows why, he knows it down to the quiet work of his soul. 

It’ll keep dumping him back here until he does it right. His crew won’t be his until he does it right. 

The world around them is noise: the tide clawing at stone, the shrine turning itself inside out, the crew’s voices smeared thin by distance. Sanji’s there and then he’s not, dragged sideways by a geometry that wants to split them. “Eyes on me,” he’s saying from a place that isn’t this place. Zoro hears it like a whisper.

He doesn’t look at him. He can’t: Kuina’s on the blade ahead of him. Barefoot on the steel. Calm like a lesson.

Eleven. The girl who beat him, the girl he promised for, the girl he turned into a weapon so he wouldn’t have to sit down and cry.

Kuina lifts one hand in greeting like they’re about to start from ready stance.

The reflections scream around them: the wrong Kuinas, the fractured ones, the hands that tried to pry him open, the butchered laughs. They claw at the edge of the blade and can’t climb. 

The bridge hates them. It was built for this version only, this ending only. 

The blade breathes under him, tilt changing heartbeat to heartbeat, demanding he keep choosing his balance. Blood dots the steel where the red rain finds it. It melts into the hamon like writing.

He doesn’t read it. He reads her.

“Zoro,” she says. Not through the sword. Not through glass. Her mouth moves with the sound that crosses the air like a soft cut. It’s wrong that it’s so fucking gentle. It’s right, too.

He stops with a sword-length between them. His lungs breathe in and out like he’s run uphill. His eye burns. He doesn’t put his hand on the hilt because he’s already holding it too tight.

“It’s eating you,” she says.

He makes a sound that chokes halfway. “Yeah.”

“You kept your promise.”

“Not the way I was supposed to.”

She nods as if that’s the answer she expected. The world breaks wider somewhere to his left; a shard flips, shows Luffy reaching into a collapsing circle, Sanji’s shoulders braced, wound at the wound flickering like an eye. Zoro’s head turns on reflex, but he drags his gaze back to Kuina like he’s lifting a weight.

“Look at me,” she says and, for once in his life, he obeys.

He’s shaking. He can feel it in his forearms, in the split lines of his palms where the ray-skin pattern has branded itself into him. He has not allowed himself to be ten since the day she fell. He’s twenty and he feels ten standing here anyway.

“I should have –” He stops. The words tangle. “Back then. I should’ve –” He gestures, useless, the blade shivering under his boots.

“Cried,” she supplies and her mouth does the almost-smile it used to when she was being cruel and kind in the same breath. “You were busy turning it into something else.”

“I didn’t know how,” he says. It sounds small. He keeps going anyway. “I put you in the steel and carried it until I didn’t remember what it felt like without you. I… I guess I thought that was respect.”

“It was love,” she says, simple. “It was also a shutting a door.”

A crack splits the horizon. The bridge throws a shudder through his ankles, inviting him to run or fall. He does neither.

“I can’t keep you,” he says. It comes out like someone else speaking with his throat.

“No,” she agrees. “You can’t.”

He swallows. The world is a roar around him: the only quiet is space between her and him. His eye is stinging too hard now to pretend it’s the rain.

“Tell me I did right,” he says, low. The request sounds like begging. He doesn’t care.

“You did,” she breathes. “Every day you swung it, you did right. Now you do right again.”

He takes a step. He makes it without looking down. The blade likes when he moves forward. It tilts to make it easier. He makes it anyway, and stops a stride away, breath shaking.

“Last time,” he says and his voice breaks cleanly on the words. 

Kuina lifts her hands. They’re small, scarred the way training scars hands. When she wraps them around Wado’s hilt, their fingers overlap and her skin is warm, so warm. 

It’s the worst mercy.

“Goodbye,” he says. He doesn’t have a big speech. God, he wouldn’t even know how to make one. He’s never been good at this part, at the heartwork of it. The tears are there now, shameless and hot, and he lets them come because there won’t be another time.

Her eyes shine the way mirrors don’t. She leans forward and puts their foreheads together, pulling him down to her, childish and solemn, and for an instant the training hall smell comes back: the dust, the oil, the summer heat. He can hear the ha! of her breath at the end of a clean cut. He can hear her laugh, not the broken loops, the real one. He lets himself want to keep it. He lets it hurt.

“Thank you,” she tells him and the gratitude ruins him more than any accusation.

He releases his own grip on Wado and she takes the weight, and in that motion he feels everything he has been since ten years old unhook. The hum in his teeth stops.

The bridge begins to shatter along the line where steel meets steel.

It goes like ice breaking under  skates: a neat radiating web, then a roar. The reflections on either side howl as the smooth spine fractures. Kuina’s wrong faces tear apart into dust, the little hands reach and can’t find purchase. The world screams because he’s denied it a meal it planned on, because he’s given the sword to the only person who could carry it out of him.

She steps back with Wado and the blade splits itself under her feet and she does not fall.

“Go,” she says, soft as a parent to a child who’s finally finished a hard thing. “Keep walking.”

He cries like he’s never let himself. He’s old enough to know that grief isn’t weakness but, god, young enough to hate it anyway. The tears lift, silvery, evaporating into the shimmering air where the sword’s song used to be, like the world’s drinking them as payment.

He watches her turn until her shape blurs at the edges, not like a monster, like heat and for a moment he sees her as she was: the exact tilt of her chin when she didn’t want him to see she was proud. Then she walks into the white and the white eats her, and Wado goes with her like a knife returning to a sheath he can’t follow.

He doesn’t know how long he stands there with his hands empty, sobbing like his chest has finally remembered how. The bridge tears under him and keeps on tearing; the world comes apart in plates of mirror and dark. Somewhere a voice is yelling his name in fury and fear and he knows it. 

He steps off the breaking and into whatever the world decides is an exit.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 

He hits the deck on his knees and the world stays put.His chest feels hollowed, ribs aching as if something’s been scooped out of him

Everything hurts in a way that doesn’t make sense – salt in his mouth, ash in his throat, his eye stinging like he’s been crying – except he hasn’t, right? He palms his face and his hand comes away wet, slick with blood. Everyone’s staring at him like he's brought a bomb aboard.

“Zoro,” Robin says, soft and surgical. “Where is Wado?”

He blinks down at his hip. Two swords knock against his thigh: Enma, Kitetsu. The third loop on his sash hangs empty, obvious as a missing tooth. He frowns and reaches for nothing out of habit. His fingers close on air so many times it feels like a joke he isn’t in on.

“I –” His voice scrapes. “Must’ve… dropped it?”

Sanji makes a sound like a match striking and going out. Luffy’s hat is off his head without him noticing; he’s twisting it in his hands, eyes huge and glossy.

Robin doesn’t look away. “And Kuina?”

The name scrapes around in his head like a whetstone across a blade, too sharp to ignore, too unfamiliar to hold. Every time he reaches for it he finds nothing. A ghost of a ghost. 

“Who?” he says and the word is nothing but truth, but it detonates the room.

Luffy’s breath breaks on a tiny noise. Nami’s hand flies to her mouth. Usopp goes hard and still, like a rabbit watching a hawk. Chopper’s ears flatten all the way.

Sanji is on him in two strides, fists in the front of Zoro’s shirt like he’s about to shake a person back into him. He doesn’t. His hands tremble and then fall to Zoro’s chest, flat, exact – like always – right over the spot that used to catch and stutter.

“Here,” Sanji says, voice wrecked and furious.

Nothing happens.

No second heartbeat kicking itself straight. No obedient heat smoothing under the ribs. Just his pulse, steady as a drum. Chopper flinches, stethoscope jamming hard against Zoro’s heart to make sure. “It’s… normal,” he whispers, disbelieving. “It’s just… normal.”

Sanji stares at Zoro’s chest like he can will the brand back into existence. He exhales, the kind of breath that should pull a flame after it, and there’s only smoke. He presses harder – gentle, then not – and the world doesn’t tilt, doesn’t listen, doesn’t do anything but be cruelly ordinary.

Zoro can’t stand the look on his face.

“What’d I do?” he asks, because everyone’s grieving like he dropped someone overboard and he’s trying to count heads but everyone’s right here. His nakama, his crew.

“You came back,” Luffy says, kneeling fast, knocking their foreheads together like he’s checking the fit. His voice wobbles and steadies. He drags the brim of his hat down Zoro’s brow, gentle as placing a promise. “We’ll help you remember. Even if it takes forever.”

Zoro flexes his hands, stuck. There’s an ache in his palm where a tsuba should have left its old familiar bite. The calluses along his fingers feel wrong, like they were grown to fit a grip that isn’t there. He looks down at the empty loop on his sash again and his stomach drops like he’s missed a step on stairs he’s run his whole life.

“I didn’t mean to –” he starts, but he doesn’t know what the fucking verb is. Lose? Give? Break? 

Robin’s hand hovers and doesn’t touch. “You made a choice, Zoro,” she says, voice very gentle. “The cost is… here.” Her gaze flicks to the two scabbards at his hip, the third loop, his face. “We’ll bear it with you.”

“Don’t talk like a eulogy,” Sanji snaps, but it’s shredded at the edges. He rakes a hand through his hair, shoulders hunched like he’s holding himself together with his teeth. His fingers go to his own shoulder as if by reflex, pressing where his wound used to flicker but nothing answers his touch there either. 

He looks like someone took a lifeline out of his hands.

Zoro hates that he can’t make it make sense for them. He hates the hollow in him that keeps insisting something should be there and isn’t. He hates that the two swords at his side feel like he’s walking uneven. He hates the clean skin under his arm where he knows ought to be a line of heat.

“I’m fine,” he says, automatic and absurd. “I’m okay.” He tries to stand but his knees don’t quite get the order right. Sanji catches his elbow without looking, grip bruising.

“Sit,” Sanji says and Zoro does, because fighting this is suddenly too much like pretending he hasn’t lost a word he was built around.

Chopper is talking numbers, vitals, the miracle of normal. Robin’s eyes are very, very kind in a way that makes him want to pick a fight just to have something sharp to hold.

Luffy tips his own hat back on Zoro’s head, so Zoro can see his face properly. “It’s okay,” he says, and means it with terrible, simple certainty. “We’ll go find it. Or we’ll make a new one.”

“Find what?” Zoro asks before he can stop it, because he needs someone to put a shape in the hole.

“Her,” Luffy says. “Whatever she left with you.”

The word her skims across that missing door and for a second he feels the ache of it so strong his eye stings again. He doesn’t know the story but his body clearly does. He presses the heel of his hand into his chest and feels a beat that belongs to no-one but him.

Sanji’s hand hovers, then lands over his, not pushing, just there. No heat answers. No curse obeys. It’s only a palm, warm and shaking.

“Still here,” Sanji says, vicious, as if daring the world to argue.

Zoro nods even though he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s agreeing to. He looks at the empty loop on his hip. He looks at his crew like a line he can still follow. The missing thing yawns, patient.

“Close,” Nami orders, voice thick. “All of you.”

They close. He lets them. 

He sits on the deck, blood on his shirt and a hole where a thought should be, and tries to pretend the ache is just bruising and not the shape of a promise he can’t remember making. 

Sanji’s hand stays at his chest until the ship feels like a ship again and until the sea sounds like the sea, and if there’s a name-shaped space in the middle of him, he pretends he can’t feel it. 

“Stay close,” Sanji breathes, quiet.

“Okay,” Zoro says and the answer fits the hole perfectly, like a blade sliding home.