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1.
You shiver awake with the sun pressing into your eyelids, your breast sputtering to life. You leave a blob-like indent in the sand as you roll to your side, and when you stand the world folds itself in half. You brush yourself off, first, which proves difficult, soaked to the bone as you are. You walk the length of the beach shaking sand from your boots. This continues for a long while, as you yell names from memory, search for a wreck, as the sun burns the top of your head.
You reach the edge of the forest where sand meets rich soil. The trees here are tall, interloping their branches with one another like little bridges for the fauna that preside above, like interlocking fingers, like two entangled bodies. The largest branch you can comfortably sit on finds you first, attached to an old fig that holds itself gracefully. The shade is kind, but the sun is replaced with the beating of your heart firing away in your chest. No wreckage. No crew.
On the Sunny, you would wake like a corpse stretched back into the living plane. The last time you’d woken from the glare of the sun you were halfway covered in bandages and Luffy, humming a shanty next to your ear, had draped himself across your cramping torso.
This time around, your wakefulness is not accompanied by an off-tune shanty or the voices of your crew, but the waves, and they are too predictable a rhythm.
In the night you hear a rustle from the forest floor, not the dripping of water or the cicada song or the foxes' shrill voices but something larger. The tiger stands still, her bauble eyes glistening in the moonlight, watery. Shusui stays sheathed, your glare is bored but your body is alert. She growls, low. If she wanted, she could easily climb the tree and claim her spot. She does not, and retreats back into the forest.
2.
You stand on the precipice and blink the wind from your eyes. You ended up here by accident, but at least you can see the map of the land. The island is lean and deep green, and cutting through the farthest edge of the forest is a river. The edge holds no shadows from here.
Two men stand in a river and take its rhythmic beating against their bodies as a challenge to stay upright. The second man scrapes his callused feet on the soft stones of the riverbed.
The first man pinches the second man's back.
“Do that again,” the second man says. The first man, short and scarred, humors him and pinches once more, the taut muscle twists between his fingers. The first man laughs.
The second man rolls the stones under his feet, back and forth, back and forth.
You find your way back down the precipice. The direction of the river has already fled from your mind, and on the flat ground it’s impossible to tell where it is. You follow along the edge of the forest once again, because the navigator had told you once that when you’re lost, it’s easier not to be trapped in the thick of it.
Sand quickly fills your boots again. You dump them out in the sea, you wash your feet with the same sandy water, you roll stones back and forth with your soles. They are blunt.
3.
Night comes quickly, and you’ve made, or sense you’ve made, little progress toward the river. Chill air collects above the land, and you make a fire on the beach. A body like yours is intimate with survival, so you know to avoid the driftwood for its toxicity. You learned this more than two years ago, before you were a pirate, when you were only a swordsman; when you only had your loneliness and your grief, when it was just you and the blade.
The sky collapses into darkness and brings with it the cicadas. He sits on the hill with his back turned to the fire pits last spitting flame. You take your place next to the captain. Sweat slides into the crease of his neck glistening in the light. When you turn your head toward the sea, a breeze flutters past.
That was the night you formed the conclusion.
You have no word for it in any language you’ve spoken or read or heard. It has outgrown your body, has laid its roots in your place. It does not have a shape to take, and so it has taken yours.
4.
You decide to cut through the forest, impatience overriding everything else. The bugs are loud, and that includes the flies biting through your sash. You aren’t sure how many days it’s been, but the first pains of hunger bring with it exhaustion. You’re nowhere pushed past your limits, but it’s not pleasant either.
The beast roasts beautifully, he would be proud.
You only wish you had some alcohol to go with it.
5.
The precipice finds you again, but this time you’ve looped back around to it from below. A waterfall, small and quick, is running beneath, streaming downhill in rivulets, parting over rock and root.
A dark shape dances beneath the waterfall, you don’t approach, but you test your voice, soft, round.
“Luffy?”
The shape keeps dancing, wiggling, no sound but water hitting rock.
You reach your hand through and are met with a wall of soil, your head goes next, it’s unpleasant and cold but you drink for the first time in days, your body has adjusted to the desperation that comes with dehydration. Soil releases beneath your feet as you press further in, your weight sinks into the mud.
You open your eyes, the sandy mixture burns, the shadow is no longer swaying, the shadow does not exist at all.
6.
Sunlight pools into the room and onto the bed. You feel it before you see it, the heat is sharp on your aching body, but not like a blade, you know that feeling well, the weight of it. When you crack your eye open, he is so close you can feel the heat from his breath, his irises are wide. For once, he’s still.
“Zoro,” he says, “Zoro’s awake.”
You say nothing, he drapes his body across yours, limbs tangled with limbs. His elbow digs into your stomach. You grunt. He laughs.
“My Zoro is awake!” He says.
Two men on an island in the East Blue. One is tied to a cross. The other man stands in front of him and speaks of freedom and from that moment he will never know what it is to be wanting.