Archive of Our Own ^beta

Zoro’s apartment isn’t quiet so much as stalled, like someone’s hit pause on a life that never had much going on to begin with and then walked away. The fridge hums in the kitchenette, rattling a little every time it kicks on or his neighbours take another lap around their floor and, somewhere above him, water thunders briefly through the ceiling before folding back into the building. It’s the kind of soundscape you stop hearing once you’re living in it, unless you’re trying very, very hard not to think. 

Rain leans against the window, steady and thin, just enough to smear the city’s lights into soft, bleeding streaks. The glass is fogged already, right along the bottom where the heater tries to breathe, reducing the outside world to just the concept of colour and movement. The only bright thing is the laptop screen — the cheap, shitty ring light he uses for talking head segments is dark on the couch, half-buried under a tangle of cables. The tripod’s leaning in the corner and their silly little logo sticker is peeling off the side of the camera case by the door.

Zoro’s hunched on the couch in boxers and an old hoodie, one leg bouncing, sleeves shoved up over his forearms. He’s chewed one of the hoodie strings down to a fuzzy, damp mess and the bitten fibres rasp against the edge of his teeth as he worries it further, back and forth, back and forth, like if his mouth stops moving his brain will start. 

The laptop’s on the battered coffee table, a mishmash of plastic milk crates, in front of him, the timeline sprawled across the screen in pale bands of colour, its tiny waveform peaking underneath. The project’s labelled in Sanji’s writing – typed, technically, but the naming pattern is all his. 

ZS_RAW_FINAL_FINAL_I_MEAN_IT_FINAL2

It’s the flood control tunnel’s third pass. The night everything went sideways. 

Zoro keeps the cursor hovering over a familiar cluster of clips, the timecodes memorised without authorisation, without him even wanting to. 01:13. 01:14. 01:15. The part where the jokes were still flowing, where the water was only at their shins, where Sanji’s voice was still bright and cocky and pissed off only at how bad the water smelled.

He tells himself he’s being thorough. That he’s checking for anything usable for the final cut. That this isn’t about anything else. His phone’s face-down on his thigh, the backlight flaring underneath every few minutes when he taps the screen with the edge of his knuckles, checking for nothing. There’s no text bubble from Sanji, no DenDen notification, no silly insult or a thumbnail or edit this moss i don’t want to look at my face right now.

There’s been nothing for three days.

Zoro takes the hoodie string out of his mouth long enough to drain the last inch of his energy drink, which has gone warm and metallic in the apartment’s warmth. His tongue feels scraped but he finds the hoodie string again anyway, because on the screen Sanji’s talking.  His voice’s pitched up for the camera, the way it always is, playing to their invisible audience, adding his usual theatrical scare. On-screen, the tunnel shudders around them in grainy greyish green, the edges too dark where their torches didn’t quite reach. 

“Urban myth says they built this place to survive a hundred-year storm,” Sanji’s saying, words echoing. “Turns out, they didn’t account for the fact that people leave trash everywhere and drains clog really easily, so.” He sweeps his arm out of the frame, sending sludge rippling. “Welcome to the city’s most clogged artery.” 

Zoro scrubs back, listening to it again. Not because the line is good – it isn’t – but because that’s the last part where the sound of Sanji’s voice doesn’t make his chest feel like it’s been packed full of broken glass. He knows exactly how this clip ends. Where he cut the file. Where the light swung back and caught Sanji’s face too close, too pale, soaked to the bone and adrenaline turning the edges of his laughter sharp. Where Zoro’s hand had slipped on the railing trying to steady him. Where Sanji’s fingers had closed around his wrist and for stupid, slamming second everything had narrowed to the warmth between them, to how close they were and how their breaths wove together and how Zoro had pulled him closer instead of away, hard and desperate and stupid. 

Where there was nothing but was the shock of skin on skin and a kiss born out of slipping footing and nearly drowning and the raw, animal relief of we made it twisting into something else entirely. Where Sanji had made a broken sound against his mouth and then pulled back too fast, eyes wide like he’d put his hand in a fire.

He has that segment muted in the timeline now. The part after the almost-collapse. The part after the tunnel sirens had glitched and the water level had jumped. The part where they’d caught their breath on the landing, wet and shaking, and the camera had slid sideways, just for a second, because Zoro had needed both hands to pull Sanji closer.

Sanji’s voice isn’t bright in that section. It’s raw.

He forces his attention back to the earlier clip, to the safer part, dragging the frames back to 01:14, clicks, hitting the spacebar to where Sanji was walking ahead of the camera, his boots sloshing through, the back of his jacket reflecting a dull sheen. The beam of his torch swings around on-screen, catching snatches of the wet cement walls, the metal rungs of ladders, the slick surface of the water stretching ahead. Little droplets splatter the lens whenever they hit a ripple wrong. 

“Keep up, Moss,” Sanji had called over his shoulder and Zoro snorts now despite himself, sounding too loud in the quiet apartment. He chews harder on the string, the cotton gone soft and feral between his teeth. 

He scrubs back. 

Plays the line again, just to hear the cadence. 

He tells himself he’s analysing audio levels. That the echo might be useful to balance the rest of the track. That he’s paying attention to the ambient noise behind Sanji’s voice, listening for… something. Anything.

At 01:14:20, Sanji laughs. The sound bounces off the cement, coming back smeared. The camera shakes slightly with Zoro’s uneven steps, drip falling directly onto the lens and catching the orange light overhead. 

At 01:14:22, Zoro clocks it: a strange little hitch in the motion of the water behind Sanji. A dip in the surface that doesn’t quite match their footsteps. He frowns and leans in to see it better and, at 01:14:25, the dark behind Sanji pinches forward. 

Not much. Just a subtle swallow, the way liquid moves around something dropped into it. 

Zoro pauses, freezing the image on screen to show Sanji mid-step, his mouth open, one hand thrown out to emphasise whatever point he’s in the middle of making. Behind him, shadow and water and more shadow.

Zoro’s hand finds his trackpad and drags back a frame. Forward again. Back. The pixels shudder and there, on the third pass, he sees it. No, that’s not quite correct: its not that he sees something appear. It’s that he sees something cohere. The darkness behind Sanji thickens, coalescaling into a deeper shade. Not a shape, not yet. Just a density, like the air there is under pressure, like the tunnel there is folding in around an invisible centre point.

A slow prickle walks up the back of Zoro’s neck, raising goosebumps under the worn cotton of the hoodie. It’s the same feeling he gets in the field sometimes, when the EMF jumps and the air goes thin, when Sanji’s voice drops and he says, on camera, that something is watching them. 

“Don’t be stupid,” he mutters to himself, because there’s no-one here to hear him, and talking out loud makes the room feel less like it’s holding its breath.

He nudges the clips forward again. At 01:14:24 the density leans. Not down, not up, but forward, towards Sanji and Zoro’s pulse kicks, sharp and uncomfortable.

He freezes the frame and zooms in, dragging a box around Sanji’s shoulders and the stretched black water behind him. The pixels blur a little, but the impression’s still there, a darker deepness pressed against the normal dark, like a bruise under skin. 

The apartment feels smaller. The rain feels louder and, on the screen, the frozen Sanji’s still turned half-away, mouth open, eyes crinkled at some joke Zoro can’t hear yet. The distortion looms, a heartbeat away from touching him.

At 01:14:28 Sanji’s head turns to look back over his shoulder, past the camera, straight at where Zoro was standing in the tunnel. His smile softens, briefly unperformed. Something in his face is open in a way the camera doesn’t usually catch, like he’s about to say Zoro’s name the same way he does in private, instead of hamming it up for the audience. The distortion behind him twitches, not away from Zoro but away from Sanji.

That can’t be right. Zoro slows the clip down, drops it to a quarter speed, watches the frames crawl by on the screen. The darkness doesn’t recoil so much as shudder in reaction, like that glance back altered something in the water around it. 

The tiny muscles at the base of Zoro’s skull tighten. He pushes in closer, right up until his forehead nearly bumps the screen, the ghost of his own reflection hovering over the footage. His hand lingers over the spacebar.

He should close the project.

He should delete this section.

He should be asleep, or drunk, or outside punching something that won’t break.

Instead, he stares at the frozen frame long enough for his eyes to sting. Sanji, mid-turn, caught between breaths, mouth just beginning to shape a word that never makes it out. Hair soggy, water beading on his jaw, eyes crinkled in that half-laugh he uses when he's saying something stupid on purpose. Behind him, too close, the darkness has weight. Zoro's own reflection hovers faintly over all of it, one ghost laid on top of another. Bruised-looking eyes, hair a mess, the hoodie string hanging from the corner of his mouth like a chewed-up apology he never got around to saying out loud.

He slaps the laptop shut, the crack of it richocheting off the walls, too loud for a place this small. For a sceond it sounds like firing a gun in a concrete hallway. Then the apartment rushes back in all at once and his hand moves before his brain catches up, reaching for his phone. The burst of its screen lighting up makes him wince, until he finds the time, confirms there are no new notifications. No missed calls, no messages. The last message in their thread sits right there at the bottom, from three days ago: you alive or what. No reply beneath it, just the bubble hanging alone, something small and stupid and hopeful that he'd left there, waiting for a bite that never came.

He could close it, should close it, but he scrolls up instead to where the conversation stretches back, a breadcrumb trail of their lives rendered as coloured bubbles and tiny timestamps. Blurry photos from cursed basements, mould blooms, handprints in dust, a shadow that might be a trick of the light or might not. Links with filenames like pls_listen_this_time_im_serious.mp3. Sanji's texts peppered throughout, relentless:

this thumbnail amkes u look less dumb marginally.

send me ur audio or i stg

if u tilt the camera like that agin ill tilt ur whole life moss

Zoro's replies, shorter, deadpan:

They all look the same

The audio's fine

Tilt these nuts

Voice notes sit in between the texts, orange bars he recognises at a glance and he taps on one on instinct, inhaling sharply when Sanji's laugh pours into the quiet apartment, background bar noise roaring and clicking around the edges.

“No, shut up, listen, listen — we do a drunk Q&A episode. Viewers'll send in questions and I'll answer, you'll grunt. It'll be great content. Oh, wait, you're a boring drunk…. maybe we roofie you with espresso?”

Zoro fumbles the pause button, shutting him up mid-ramble. His chest feels too tight, like someone's wedged a hand between his ribs and is just… holding them there. Little habits, stupid jokes, footage links, grocery lists. Time stamps for shoots, arguments about whether or not something in the background counts as evidence or lens flare. A life. A whole fucking life, right there.

His thumb drags back up again to find the cluster of messages from the night of the flood control job, the last time everything was still almost normal. The screen light traces the lines of his knuckles where he grips the phone, his thumb hovering over the keyboard before it shifts and taps the little phone icon, before he can talk himself out of it.

The dial tone's thin and far away, like it's coming down a long hallway, through heavy doors. Once, twice, three times. Voicemail kicks in, neat and merciless. “Yo, this is Sanji. If you're heading this I'm busy, bored or dead — if it's Zoro, I'm definitely bored. Leave a message.” He left that greeting months ago and they'd argued about it on camera for nearly five minutes. It'd been funny, then. Now the sound of his own name in Sanji's mouth punches clean through him and the beep that follows feels like a gunshot.

He listens to the hollow, empty line until the system gives up on him and drops the call. He tries again, the voicemail picking up, a little more mocking everytime he hears it. “Yo, this is —”

He hanfs up before the beep can land. His jaw's throbbing; he only notices he's been clenching his teeth when a flash of pain runs up into his tempes and forces his molars apart, tongue darting out to hook the shredded hoodie string back in, needing something to grind against that isn't his own bones.

The third time, he knows better but he presses it anyway and stabs the red button the second the voicemail starts.

“Coward,” he mutters to the room and he's honestly not sure if he means Sanji for not picking up or himself for never saying any of the things he actually wants to say when the beep comes. He scowls and changes track, finding Usopp's name in his list. The line clicks almost immediately, Usopp's voice coming through a little fast, the way it does when he hasn't slept and every nerve in him is standing on end. “Zoro?”

“Where is he?”

On the other end, Usopp goes quiet. Zoro can hear things in the silence: the soft buzz of a TV left on low, the distant rush of traffic, the creak of Usopp's rickety-ass floor as the other man shifts his weight. The kind of background noise you hear when someone's holding their breath.

“Okay,” Usopp says finally, voice going high. “Okay, so. I need you to not freak out —”

“Too late,” Zoro cuts in, free hand clenching in the couch cushion. The fabric bites into his palm; his pulse is loud in his ears, a dull roar under everything else.

Usopp swallows. “He, uh. He went back?”

Zoro closes his eyes for half a second, the words fitting together too easily. There's only one place back could mean. “Back where?” he asks anyway, because some part of him's hoping he's wrong, that Usopp will say something normal like the store or his shitty ex's place.

“The tunnels? That underground system you… anyway. He went back.”

Zoro's jaw throbs sharply. “When?”

“Yesterday.”

The whole room tilts. Zoro straightens without meaning to, spine snapping taut. “Yesterday.”

“Y-yeah.” Usopp's words trip over themselves in a hurry to get out. “Like, late afternoon? I thought you — he said you —”

Zoro's voice comes low and dangerous. “Why am I just hearing about this now?”

Usopp chokes on whatever he's trying to say. “Man, listen. I wanted to call, I almost called like, ten times but he — he told me not to. He said it'd just make things worse and I didn't — I didn't want to… well, you know.”

The phrase hits like a punch exactly where the breath lives and, for a moment, Zoro can't get any air past it. He sees Sanji in his mind's eye: jaw set, eyes too bright, hands already moving when he talks. That tight, brittle seriousness he gets when he's decided on a thing and dug his heels in.

Don't tell Zoro.

He bites down on the hoodie string hard enough to taste the metal tang of the aglet where the plastic's worn off. “You listened.” He doesn't mean for it to sound like an accusation but it hits that way anyway.

“What was I mean to do?” Usopp blurts, panic fraying the edges of his voice. “He said it was a follow-up, just a quick check. He took gear, he sounded — he sounded manic, sure, but focused, you know? You know how he gets, man. It's not like he sounded like he was gonna walk into a meat grinder. Pretty sure he asked Koby to tag him in.”

“Usopp.” Zoro's hand's moved to his field bag without him noticing, fingers already checking for weight, for familiar shapes. Torch. Recorder. Salt. Knife. He's already standing. “How long’s it been?”

The phone rustles as Usopp moves, probably checking the time. “Uh… twenty hours, maybe? I thought he'd crash here after or call or… something. I've been trying his phone all day and I kept telling myself he was just ignoring me because he didn't wanna admit I was right about it being a bad idea but now you called and I —”

Zoro doesn't even realise he's walking until he trips over his coffee table. He scrambles back and starts grabbing things on autopilot, jacket off the hook, bag strap over his shoulder, keys out from the bowl by the door. The apartment blurs into a collection of objects he may never see again and an't bring himself to care about right now.

“You should've called,” he says and his voice is so calm he knows it makes Usopp flinch.

“I know! Okay, I know! But you weren't talking to him either and I thought… I dunno what I thought. That you guys were having some kind of thing and I didn't wanna make it worse. And he said your name like you were fighting, man, and I —” he cuts himself off with a strangled noise. “This isn't my fault.”

Zoro stops with his hand on the doorknob to make himself breathe in once, properly, in through his nose and out through his teeth. no, he thinks viciously, it's mine.

He's the one who had grabbed Sanij on that slick concrete landing, who kissed him like the world was ending, who let that shocked sound spill out of Sanji's throat before pulling back to a face stricken, terrified, saying, “I can't, I can't —”

He's the one Sanji's been running from. He's the one who wasn't there when Sanji decided to walk back into the dark alone.

“I'm not saying it's your fault,” he says, quiet. “I'm saying you should've called me anyway.”

There's a shaky inhale on the other line. “Yeah. Yeah, I know that.”

Zoro wrestles his arm through his sleeve and shoves his feet into boots without bothering with socks. Everything feels too slow and too fast at once, like trying to run underwater. “Send me his last location. Pin, map, whatever you've got.”

“I — okay. Okay.” Usopp fumbles around. “He sent me a shot of the entrance when he got there. Said, uh, he bets me five grand you get more views than the asylum video.”

Zoro presses his tongue against the back of his teeth and leans into the jaw ache it brings, phone buzzing with the incoming message from Usopp. A photo fills the screen — yawning concrete mouth, graffiti scralwed, the slope leading down wet and feral with runoff. The warning sign at the side reads DANGER: FLOOD CHANNEL. NO ENTRY DURING RAIN. Timestamped yesterday, 16:32.

Zoro's vision narrows. He tucks the phone between his shoulder and ear again. “You got a map of what's down there? He had all the… I didn't see it.”

“Yeah, rough one. City plans are out of date bit I cross-referenced with some explorer forums. I'll send everything. Zoro? Don't go in alone. Wait for me or — Nami's on a night shift, but she could meet you in, like, an hour or — just don't do the thing where you charge in like some kind of idiot and —”

“I'll share my location with you.” Zoro glances back at the dark apartment, the closed laptop, the faint ring from the coffee can pyramid, Sanji's absence in his life sitting like a third body. “If we're not out in three hours call Luffy.”

“Zoro —”

He hangs up, already jogging outside, down the stairs to where the air is heavier, thick with rain, the hiss of tyres on slippery bitumen.

x

The first steps towards the tunnel steal the city from him. Not all at once — there's no dramatic severing, no clean cut. It's more like the tunnel closes its teeth around the sound behind his back and chews. Rain still hisses at the mouth of the entrance but the moment Zoro crosses the lip it turns distant and wrong, filtered through concrete and distance until it sounds like it's happening in someone else's life. Like the world up there has already deiced to forget him.

The air changes instantly, colder by a few degrees, enough to make the inside of his nose sting. Dampness settles on him like a film, clumping his eyelashes, sliding into the hollow of his throat and it smells like mineral rot: wet dirt, algae, rust and a sour living tang that makes his stomach tighten, like the tunnel is breathing him in. His boots splash into the shallow runoff and the water isn't deep, yet, but it's fast, sheeting over the sloped floor in a thin layer that never stops moving, always leaning downhill, always tugging. He angles his torch and sweeps the beam across the tunnel's curve, clocking the arched walls and layers of graffiti. The rust streaks bleeding from bolts and the ladder recessed into the wall, its rungs vanishing upward into darkness.

He glances back, just once, to confirm the entrance is still there before the wold narrows again. His phone buzzes once in his pocket — probably GPS, probably Usopp — but even the vibration of it feels warped down here, like a heartbeat in another chest.

After twenty metres the slop levels out and the tunnel widens into a broader channel, where the water runs faster. His footfalls come back delayed, doubled, like something's walking a half-second behind him, matching his pace imperfectly as his boots splash louder.

He clicks his second torch on and keeps it in his off-hand, beam angled behind him, an old trick he picked up from Usopp because he hates not knowing what's at his back. As he gets deeper the taste in his mouth changes, shifting into something that resembles old brine and that, at least, is familiar, something he recognises from the last time they were here. Maybe it's not even brine — maybe it's just fear rising in his throat and pretending to be a flavour.

The map Usopp sent sits in his head like an itch he can't quite scratch. He's never been as good at following directions as Sanji and definitely not when the layout's a labyrinth. Left branch, ladder down, maintenance catwalk to the main spillway, where they had filmed. That’s where the distortion had showed up behind Sanji's shoulder like a bruise in the water.

The light changes as the tunnel bends, the torchlight flattening against the curve and sending shadows sliding sideways in slow sheets that make the walls look like they're breathing. Water runs along the edge in thin streams, pooling in cracks, feeding dark moss that clings to the walls.

Something clinks ahead and Zoro stops so hard his boot skids, ears registering the soft, metallic knock before his brain can. The silence after it is almost worse than the sound itself; he goes still the way he does before a fight, with his weight balanced and shoulders loose, breath cut down to the smallest possible amount. He sweeps the torthlight froward again, slow and searching, like he expects the dark to glitch.

“Sanji,” he calls, voice rough. The tunnel takes the name and gives it back wrong, stretched thin by echo and distance. Sanji — nji — ji like the walls are tasting it.

There's no answer. He tightens his grip on the torch until his knuckles ache and forces his feet to move again, finding the pressure door exactly where Usopp said it would be: a thick, metal slab set into the wall, hinge bolts rusted, warning paint flaked away. A wheel latch sits at its centre, crusted and labelled by faded stencilling: SECTOR B — FLOW CONTROL.

The wheel gives with a groan like something half-asleep being dragged upright. The metal complains, vibrating under his palm. The door doesn't swing so much as reluctantly peel away from its frame, as if the seal has to be convinced. Cold air breathes out through the gap, colder than the tunnel behind him, staler and denser and carrying a different scent altogether. He slips through and pulls it behind him, the sound dying fast and the world becoming smaller. This section is narrower and older, the concrete rougher and pitted, like time's being chewing on it. The ceiling's lower and his torch catches on exposed rebar jutting through, the water coming ankle-deep and cold enough to bite through his boots.

He regrets not wearing socks.

It takes him a few minutes to see it: a strip of neon tape stuck to the wall, half-peeled, Sanji's tape. His habit, his mark on the world, the way he's always tracked their movements and Zoro's heart lurches so hard at the sight it almost hurts. The tape's fresh, tacky at the edge, glowing like an accusation. A breadcrumb thrown down in defiance of the dark which is so horrifically Sanji that it burns, a little.

He follows the markers further into the gloom, the tunnel curving and the water changing into something heavier ahead. Damp cold presses in until his hoodie's nearly soaked through, clinging to his back like a second skin. He's so distracted by that that it takes him a moment to pick up the sound building beneath everything else, beneath the rushing water and the distant city.

A… hum?

It's so low he feels it in his teeth before he properly hears the way it vibrates up the soles of his boot, through his shins, into the soft places behind his eye. The kind of frequency that makes the air itself feel dense, makes his thoughts stutter, his stomach turn.

Before him, the tunnel opens into a wider chamber, the maintenance platform jutting out over the water, its metal grating slick with moisture. The channel below is darker here, deeper, the water moving in a broad, steady sheet toward a spillway grate at the far end, roaring faintly as it disappears.

And there, on the platform, is Sanji’s torch, lying on its side with the beam still slicing a harsh white line across wet metal. Next to it sits a camera case, lid open, foam lining exposed like ripped flesh.

Zoro’s stomach drops so sharply he feels it in his knees. “Sanji,” he says again, louder.

There’s no viable answer, but the hum around him deepens as he steps onto the platform, boots ringing hollow on the metal. He keeps both beams trained ahead, behind, below. When the torch stabs into black water there’s nothing for a second… but then the light catches a shape beneath the surface, not a body, not a fish, not anything with edges he can name. A shifting darkness that seems to eat light instead of reflecting it, like the water’s deepened into absence. It slides away from the beam with deliberate patience, unhurried, as if it knows he can’t follow.

Zoro’s mouth goes dry. He backs up a step, boots scraping on wet grating. He stills when a voice drifts across the chamber, not echoing like this. Too close and too clear.

“Moss?”

Zoro’s head snaps up, heart slamming against his ribs so hard it hurts. Heat rushes up his throat, stupid and fierce and immediate.

“Sanji!” he calls back, stepping forward but the torches flicker, cut, plunging the chamber into darkness so complete it feels physical, like someone has thrown a wet blanket over his head. And in that half-second, Zoro feels it, not in his ears, not in his eyes, but in his bones: space shifting. A subtle, hungry rearrangement, like the tunnel has taken a breath and moved its ribs.

When the torches flare back to life, the platform’s the same. The water is the same. But the voice comes again from a different direction, closer somehow.

“Zoro,” Sanji says, softer now, coaxing and Zoro freezes because the sound is wrong in the way that matters. Not in tone, not even in words but in placement. It's not travelling through the air, it's coming from everywhere at once. From the concrete, from the damp metal, from the walls themselves. And Zoro realises, with a cold drop in his gut that feels a hell of a lot like sinking, that Sanji's not speaking to him but the tunnel is.

He doesn't move for a couple of heartbeats, holding himself very still, the way he does when a blade passes too close in sparring. The word Zoro hangs in the air like a hook caught in flesh, tugging, testing, waiting to see if it can sink in deeper. His torch beam jitters as his grip tightens, sending the light skating over the rusted railing.

“Sanji,” he says, lower. Careful. “Stop fucking with me.”

The damp swallows his words and gives them back smaller, the voice leering closer again in a way that makes Zoro's skin prickle.

“Please.”

It's the word that ruins it, because Sanji can be cruel. He can be furious. He can be terrified and still spit venom like it's oxygen. But please — stripped down, no flourish, no performance — belongs to the version of him that Zoro's only ever seen in the worst moments. The version that asked, once, barely audible, for Zoro to hold the light steady while he stitched his own skin back together. The version that didn't say don't leave me but somehow said it anyway.

The tunnel uses it like a knife and slips it between Zoro's ribs with practised ease, want and panic twisting together sharp and bright. His body leans forward before his brain catches up — one instinctive step, the stupid reflex of reaching for someone he's trained himself not to reach for —

And the hum in the walls deepens, pleased. The water below the plaform ripples again, slow and heavy, a shoulder turning in sleep. Zoro forces his weight back onto his heels until his calves burn with the effort of not moving.

“Fuck you,” he says to the dark, the walls. To the voice that isn't a person.

The voice arrives smoothly, dressed as a warm breath, right against the back of his neck. “You left me.”

Zoro goes ice-cold because that line isn't from the tunnels. It's from after. From the empty space of the past few days, from missed calls and unread messages and the kiss that should've been a beginning but became a fracture instead. From the wound that's never scabbed because there was nothing to stitch it shut.

He turns too fast, beam slicing through the air like a weapon, landing on nothing but concrete and dripping metal. He pulls out the recorder with fingers that want to shake, but he doesn't let them. The little red light blinks when he turns it on and its steadiness, its familiarity, is so stupidly calming he almost snorts.

If it's really Sanji, the waveform will show it. And if it's not — if it's the tunnel using the acoustics of the place and the soft, vulnerable machinery of his brain — then the record might catch what his ears can't. He sets it down next to Sanji's abandoned torch and keeps his own voice flat. “Say it again. Where are you?”

There's a pause before the hum rises again, water below whispering against concrete. Then the voice comes from the wall to his right, startlingly clear. “Right here.”

Zoro stares at the recorder's light, waiting for the screen to spike, waiting for proof, any kind of logic to meet him halfway but there's nothing, like the recorder didn't hear a thing.

“Okay,” he mutters, almost to himself. “So it's in my head.”

The tunnel hums with delight, like he's given the right answer to a question it asked with teeth. And then, so close it scrapes against his ear, it whispers: “Not just.”

It feels like there's a presence leaning into him from inside of the space.

He straightens slowly, torch trembling as the beam lifts. The shadows are thicker, the distance across the water longer than it should be. Even his breathing sounds wrong: too loud then too quiet, like the tunnel’s deciding how much of him to allow back to himself.

This isn’t just mimicry meant to lure him, he realises. It’s measurement. It’s a hand pressing gently into bruises, cataloguing pain with clinical interest.

The voice returns, gentler now. Almost coaxing. “You can find me,” it says, wearing Sanji’s mouth like a glove. “You always do.”

Zoro bares his teeth as a bitter laugh tries to claw its way out and fails halfway, turning into something harsher, uglier. “Yeah? Then show me.”

The hum pauses. Somewhere in the chamber, a metal door clunks, a pressure hatch engaging, distant but unmistakable because the sound has a distinct weight to it, like a lock turning in a skull.

Zoro snaps his light toward it to where the hallway mouth open at an impossible angle, making a doorway that wasn’t there when he stepped onto the platform. Old yellow hazard paint frames it, flaking in strips. A half-hanging sign swings slightly, squeaking on a single bolt:

MAINTENANCE ACCESS — AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY

A trap with its teeth showing.

Zoro stares at it, heart hammering so hard he can feel it in his throat. This is what the place wants, he realises: for him to walk into that mouth chasing a voice, chasing his own guilt, chasing the taste of salt and panic on Sanji’s mouth. For him to volunteer his attention. His fear. His love.

He takes one step toward it anyway, not because he believes it for a single second but because Sanji’s torch is still on the grating, because Sanji’s somewhere in this concrete lung and Zoro can’t afford to be clever at the expense of time. His hands are steady now: anger will do that. Purpose. The familiar shape of a fight. The hum shifts with satisfaction and Zoro steps over the salt line, the temperature dropping immediately, to the point where his breath fogs. And then the voice whispers, right in front of him: “Good.”

Not Sanji’s cadence. Not Sanji’s rhythm. Just Sanji’s sound stretched over something else’s hunger and Zoro’s skin crawls. He keeps moving anyway because beneath the mimicry, beneath the pressure, beneath the tunnel trying to rewrite itself around him there’s one thing Zoro has always done better than anything else in his life: walk into the dark and refuse to die.

x

It doesn't take long for the smell to hit him, truly sink into the air around him and it's not rot or sewage or the usual stink of storm drains but sharper and warmer, human in a way tunnel air is never supposed to be. Cold sweat that's dried and re-wetted, breath trapped in cloth, panic turned metallic, the scent of someone who's been down here for too long and had nothing to drink but adrenaline, nothing to swallow but the taste of their own throat closing.

He's only just adjusted to that when he stumbles across the man slumped against the wall ahead, skin pallid under grime. Lips cracked, lashes clumped with moisture, pink hair soaked, knees hauled tight to his chest like he's trying to hold himself smaller than the hallway will allow.

“Koby?” Zoro steps closer, watching the way the other man flinches, the way his eyes reflect back animal-bright in the light. Like he's been staring into dark for so many hours his pupils have forgotten how to be anything else.

“No,” Koby croaks, voice shredded. “Zoro, no, don't — don't listen to it.” The words tumble over each other, panicked and Zoro gives him space the way he'd give a cornered dog space, stopping just outside of arm's reach.

“Hey.” He keeps his voice gentle, steady. He doesn't know Koby that well, but he knows enough to be aware that Sanji bringing him down here was a massively stupid fucking call. Which goes to show how desperate Sanji must have been. “I'm not with it, Koby. I'm here to get you out, yeah?”

Koby laughs, high and loud and it doesn't match his expression at all. It's the laugh of someone whose nervous system is misfiring because it doesn't know what the hell else to do.

“That's what it said too. Said it was help. Said it was — said it was Luffy.” He makes a strangled sound and digs his fingers into his own hair. “It sounded so real.”

Zoro's jaw tightens. “You know Luffy'd never — how long have you been down here?” He keeps his voice calm, all too aware of the hum under the floor, like a distant machine turning over.

Koby stares at him blankly. “I… came in yesterday?”

Zoro can't help the horrible thought that if Koby's been here for hours and is still alive it means whatever thing lives down here doesn't need him dead. Just needs him softened, marinated in terror, used as proof. He swallows that down. “You came with Sanji, yeah?”

Koby's breathing stutters. His eyes dart somewhere past Zoro's shoulders. “He went deeper. He told me to stay… to stay. Told me not to follow the voice.”

Zoro exhales through his nose, bleeding pressure out of himself so he doesn't fucking explode. “Good advice.”

Koby makes a tiny, desperate sound before he lunges fast and sudden, pure animal panic, to clamp his hand on Zoro's forearm. His fingers are icy cold, stiff, but the grip's hard enough for Zoro to feel the bite of nails “It doesn't want me. It kept saying your name.”

Zoro pries Koby's fingers off with care, keeping his own hands loose and steady because he knows someone — something — down here is taking notes on every reaction. “Yeah. I get that a lot.”

The hum in the walls deepens at that, a low velvet vibration that feels too much like a laugh, like a swallow.

He doesn't let himself look away from Koby long enough to listen for anything else because he's done this long enough to know that's how you get led, split open — not by claws or teeth but by the soft stupid reflex of hope. By the part of you that hears a familiar voice and reaches before it thinks and, down here, reaching is too much of an invitation. He crouches instead, deliberate, keeping his centre of gravity locked low. “Hey, Koby. Look at me.”

Koby does, too wide in the torch, watching while Zoro digs in his kit for rope, one of the first things he learned to carry. Sanji had pointed out, early, that the most useful tool isn't the one that fights monsters but the one that keeps bodies attached to the world, that keeps a panicking human from turning into a sprinting offering. When he shakes a length loose the hemp's rough against his palm, fibres swelling but it feels real. Honest.

“I'm gonna tie you to the ladder rail,” Zoro nods at the recessed rungs he passed on the way in. “Not tight enough to hurt but just so… so you stay put. We can't have you running off after a voice like an idiot.”

“I'm not — I'm not — it's not… it was Luffy, I swear.”

Zoro's mouth tightens again. “Yeah. They do that. Give me your wrist.”

Koby stares at him, distrust warring with desperation on his face — fear wants to run but the part of him that's exhausted and knows Zoro wants to be held still. His gaze drops to Zoro's hand like it might bite him, too, before the hum in the room deepens so sharply they both freeze.

Sanji's voice slides into the room. “Zoro.”

His body tries to pivot on instinct. The compass needle in his ribs swings hard, craving north but Zoro doesn’t turn. He doesn’t even blink. If he turns, he loses their friend in front of him. If he turns he gives the tunnel what it wants: his attention, his body, his reflexive devotion to that voice like a dog snapping its head toward a whistle.

“Moss,” it murmurs, warm and intimate as a kiss in the dark.

Koby whimpers, a thin, involuntary sound as his eyes flit, searching the empty space around them like he expects to see Sanji standing there, smiling.

Zoro’s throat tightens, but he forces his hand to stay open. Steady. “Wrist,” he repeats, sharper now.

“There’s… there’s someone behind you,” Koby whispers, voice cracking on the word someone, like even saying it might summon it.

Zoro lets out a quiet, humourless breath. “No. There’s sound behind me.”

The voice laughs: Sanji’s laugh, almost perfect, bright and biting, the exact cadence that used to make comment sections explode with hearts and jokes and god, your presenter is insufferable.

“You’re being so cold,” it says and there’s a lazy smile tucked in the syllables. “After what you did.”

Zoro’s fingers curl slightly, nails pressing into his own palm; he remembers what he did, every frame, every fucking second. Wet metal. Sudden breath. The sound Sanji made like surprise swallowed whole. He refuses to let the tunnel hold it like a weapon.

“Don’t,” he says, low, not to Koby but to the air. the hallway swells, irritated and amused all at the same time.

Koby's wrist finally drops into Zoro's waiting hand, skin cold and pulse rabbit-fast under Zoro's thumb, frantic as a trapped bird.

“Good,” Zoro says, voice roughening with something that might almost be kindness. “Stay with me.” He moves fast, hauling Koby up by the forearm and steering him to the ladder, catching him by the collar when the other man's knees fold. He wraps the hemp around the ladder twice, fibres rasping, before he loops it around Koby's torso, locking him to a single point in reality. A tether against the urge to chase.

Behind him, Sanji’s voice softens into something that makes Zoro’s stomach flip. “Zoro, please.”

It’s the same word the tunnel used earlier, the same stripped-down intimacy except this time it’s laced with a tiny hitch, a familiar rasp, the way Sanji’s throat sounds when he’s tired or scared and trying not to show it. Like it’s learned a finer blade.

Zoro’s hands pause for half a second on the knot and Koby sees it. His eyes widen, hopeful and horrified all at once. “That’s him,” he whispers, hoarse. “That’s real.”

Zoro finishes the knot anyway. Tightens it with a sharp pull that makes the rope bite into his palm. “No. That’s just smart.”

The voice shifts immediately, sharpened by being denied. “You always were an asshole,” Sanji snaps and it's so perfectly him that Zoro's chest aches like someone's pressed a thumb into it. He rummages in his bag and tears a new packet of salt with his teeth, pouring it in a thick circle around Koby's soaked shoes. The crystals scatter across the wet concrete, some dissolving immediately but some clinging stubbornly to the grit. A crude boundary. A petty little human shape drawn against a place that doesn't respect lines. A nothing barrier against a monster and some 500 million litres of water waiting to drown the three of them.

“You'll come back?” Koby asks, voice cracking on the question.

“Yeah.” He makes it sound like an order to the universe. “Don't move, don't answer anything that isn't me, not even Luffy. Actually, don't answer me either. If you hear someone you love — especially if you hear someone you love. You keep your mouth shut.”

Sanji's voice laughs again, crawling along the walls like smoke. “So you do love me.”

Koby makes a small sound — confused, caught — and Zoro's face goes still. “Shut up.”

“You kissed me,” Sanji sighs, an audible pout. “Then you left me anyway. You've good at leaving.”

Zoro's teeth grind, the memory flaring hot, Sanji's mouth against his, the shock of it, the moment of yes before fear cut it clean in half.

The tunnel pushes at that memory, not like a thought, but like a thumb pressing on a crack in glass, patient and persistent, trying to widen it into a door.

He stands, slow, shoulders rolling back under the weight of his bag and angles his torch down the corridor ahead where the tunnel slopes deeper, where the air smells more stagnant, where the hum thickens into something almost physical. He points his other torch behind him for a brief check: Koby’s still there, still real. Eyes huge, lips moving soundlessly like prayer.

The voice shifts again into Sanji on his best behaviour, honeyed charm, soft coaxing like it’s trying to lure a dog with a treat. “C’mon. You know where I am.”

“Yeah. No shit.”

He moves deeper, the maintenance hallway narrowing until his shoulders almost scrape the walls. The air gets colder in slow stages, like he’s descending into a refrigerator someone forgot to turn off, each few metres a fresh bite of chill that finds the wet seams of his clothes and settles there. 

His torch beam catches streaks down the walls that look like long fingers dragged through grime. Dark wet trails, uneven, too organic, the kind of marks that make your brain insist on a story even when you know better. The hum’s louder here, no longer a distant vibration but a pressure behind his eyes, in his teeth, in his sinuses, like the tunnel’s trying to rattle his thoughts loose from their hinges. 

Behind him, the mimic keeps talking, Sanji’s voice, syrupy and sharp by turns. A perfect little weapon, polished with familiarity. “Zoro,” it calls again, petulant now, like an impatient lover tugging at a sleeve. “C’mon, I’m bored.”

Zoro doesn’t answer because if he does it learns what gets a response. It gets to put its hooks in his throat, to borrow his breath, to teach itself how he sounds when he’s scared.

He follows the neon tape markers instead, faint and intermittent, placed with Sanji’s familiar irritation at the world: crooked, practical, always at eye level for Zoro’s camera, not his own. There’s a kind of furious care in that detail that makes Zoro’s chest tighten until it aches. Sanji did this alone. Sanji did this while scared enough to bring fucking Koby down here and still not tell Zoro.

Usopp’s map matches up with the fork in front of him, left to the old pump room and the right path to the spillway hatch. The right branch looks…wrong. Not just darker. Thicker. Zoro’s torch doesn’t cut into it cleanly; it seems to flatten and smear, like the air has turned viscous, like the darkness there is less an absence and more a substance. 

Zoro inhales and goes left. The hum spikes, irritated, a quick upward lash of frequency that makes his molars ache. Sanji’s voice snaps, too sharp to be charming. “Wrong way, Moss.”

Zoro bares his teeth. “Good.”

He only gets three steps into the left branch before the air shifts, like the concrete here’s rougher, older, scarred by decades of water. His boots sound duller. The tunnel feels heavier, less theatrical. Then… a sound? Not from the walls, not from inside his skull but a human sound, traveling through air and distance.

A small, strangled cough.

For a split second he forgets to breathe, paralysed, listening the way he’d listen for footsteps behind a door, his whole body turned into ear. There it is again: ragged, suppressed. Followed by a muttered curse that doesn’t have the polished cadence of the mimic.

“Fucking…” Sanji’s voice breaks on the word like he’s trying to keep it quiet and failing. “Shit.”

Zoro’s chest goes hollow before a cold rush of relief and dread hits him at the same time, relief, because that voice has breath in it and dread, because it sounds like pain wearing a familiar mouth. For a second he forgets the tunnel. For a second the entire world narrows down to the fact that Sanji is alive.

The mimic tries immediately, lunging for his attention with honey.

“Zoro,” it purrs, right at his ear, warm as breath. “Don’t you want to hear me say your name again?”

Zoro doesn’t even turn his head; the real voice has friction, saliva, breath that catches and restarts. It has that faint rasp on certain consonants when Sanji’s been smoking too much, the way his words snag when he’s holding his body still so he won’t make noise. It has distance, a muffled edge, the honest physics of sound traveling through pipes and grates and metal.

Zoro moves fast now, splashing through ankle-deep water, beam bouncing. His heart’s a furious animal in his chest, kicking at his ribs. The hallway curves, then widens into a pump room half-flooded with runoff. Old machinery rises out of the water like rusted skeletons: huge pipes that vanish into the ceiling, control panels crusted with mineral deposits, warning labels peeled and swollen. A ladder bolted to the far wall leads up to a grated catwalk slick with moisture. Everything down here looks like it was built to survive drowning.

And there, half-hidden behind a bank of control boxes, is a metal service hatch.

Sealed. Bolted shut. A faint strip of neon tape marks it, slapped there like an afterthought. Like a last breadcrumb tossed down with a shaking hand.

Zoro’s torch beam lands on the hatch and holds. From behind it, Sanji speaks again, and this time the sound is clearer, muffled by metal, but unmistakably human, unmistakably a bunch of particularly creative swears.

Zoro takes two steps and plants his palm against the cold metal, the chill nipping through his skin right down to the marrow of his bones. The hatch is slick with condensation, sweating like skin. “Sanji.”

Behind the hatch, everything goes still. For a beat there’s only the low rush of water and the distant groan of pipes. Then, very softly, Sanji tries: “Zoro?”

It isn’t the tunnel this time: there’s no syrup in it, no taunting, no performance. Just shock, anger hot on its heels.  “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Zoro closes his eyes for half a second, forehead almost resting on the hatch. The metal is cold; it steadies him. somehow. “Getting you.”

On the other side, Sanji inhales, shaky and tight, like he’s trying not to let it turn into something worse. “I told Usopp not to…” He cuts himself off with a hissed breath, the sound of teeth clenched.

“Are you hurt?” Zoro asks and the question comes out too sharp, too urgent, too much like pleading.

“I’m fine,” Sanji snaps automatically. 

He tightens his hand on the hatch. “I’m opening this.”

“Don’t,” Sanji says immediately, too fast. Too alarmed. “Zoro, listen to me. Don't — just — don't touch the bolts.”

“Why?”

On the other side of the hatch Sanji hesitates like he's weighing a confession against a disaster. Then he says, very quietly and very urgently: “Because it's listening.”

Right behind Zoro Sanji's voice echoes again, sweet as rot, perfectly matched, perfectly wrong: “Because it's listening.”

Sanji's real voice tight with fear, snaps through the hatch. “Don't turn around. Don't look at it.”

Every muscle in Zoro wants to pivot, a reflex carved into him long before this, before cameras and cursed tunnels and the particular hell of hearing a familiar voice bloom out of concrete. His body wants to snap the beam toward the hallway, to put eyes on the threat the way he always has, to name it so it can be fought. Light, target, strike. Simple. Clean. A problem with edges. But Sanji’s voice has that edge that means he isn’t guessing, isn’t dramatising, isn’t being a stubborn bastard for the fun of it.  It’s fear, focused and ugly and contained by force and Zoro has always been helpless to that.

He stays facing the hatch, palm pressed flat to cold metal like he can anchor Sanji to the world through it. “Okay,” he says, quiet. “I’m not looking.”

The hum in the walls deepens in answer, like it heard the agreement and approved. The vibration slides into his bones, a low purr that makes his molars ache and his stomach feel hollow. Behind the hatch, Sanji exhales shakily. Zoro can hear it muffled through metal, his breath hitting steel and coming back dulled, human. “Good. Don’t. Whatever you do, don’t give it… your attention.”

Zoro swallows and keeps his forehead angled toward the hatch, like proximity to iron and bolts will keep his thoughts from wandering. “It’s been talking with your voice.”

There’s a pause before Sanji’s version of a laugh arrives, small and bitter, the sound he makes when there’s no humour left and he refuses to beg for comfort anyway. “Yeah. It did that to me too.”

The tunnel, ever eager to be included, whispers behind Zoro in Sanji’s cadence, soft and intimate, close enough to brush the skin at the back of his neck: “Yeah, Zoro. It did that to me too.”

From behind the hatch, Sanji’s real voice tightens. “Ignore it. It’ll… it’ll get worse the more you react.”

Zoro’s mouth twists. “Hard not to react when it sounds like you.”

“Then don’t let it be me,” Sanji snaps, immediate and sharp, then the edge drops away like it costs him. His voice comes lower, strained with focus. “Look at the metal. Focus on my voice through it. The muffle. The distance. Anything it can’t replicate.”

Zoro nods once even though Sanji can’t see and the motion feels heavy, like his neck is full of cold water. He presses his forehead even more into the hatch, letting the chill seep into his skin until it steadies him. The dull pain of it him something physical to cling to. “Tell me what happened.”

The silence stretches long enough that Zoro hears the water behind him shift with a lazy lap against concrete, hears pipes groan as if the building is settling around them. Hears his own heartbeat climb, impatient and too loud, thudding in his throat like it’s trying to escape.

Behind him, the mimic goes quiet for once.

Sanji inhales on the other side of the hatch like he’s about to swallow glass. He starts then stops, breath hitching. Zoro can picture him in there: back braced against something, shoulders hunched. Cigarette ruined or clenched between fingers out of habit. Hands — god, his hands — busy even when he’s scared because Sanji doesn’t know how to be still in pain. He always turns fear into motion. Turns helplessness into work. “I went back because I saw… something in the footage.”

Zoro’s eyes close. “Usopp didn’t mention that.”

“I told him it was for B-roll. For extra angles. He wanted to come with me and I…” There's a sharp exhale, frustrated at himself, at the world, at the fact that this is the kind of responsibility he takes on automatically. “I couldn’t risk him. Not with…”

Zoro’s fingers curl against the hatch, knuckles whitening. His palm feels too big against the metal. Too useless. The tunnel, greedy, slips Sanji’s voice into the room like a hand into a pocket, warm, knowing, almost gentle:

“Not with you,” it whispers. “Not with what you did.”

Sanji's voice cuts through fast, furious. “Don't listen to it. Listen to me, not it.”

“I am,” Zoro says and the words come out rougher than he expects because it's true. It's the only thing keeping him from turning around and feeding the tunnel his attention like meat. On the other side, Sanji breathes in, out, voice shifting into something steadier, the way it gets when he's decided on a plan and gone and shoved terror back into the cupboard. “The thing in the water wasn't… active, not like this. The flood tunnels have residual crap, sure. Drownings, accidents, the kind of imprint you can pick up if you're sensitive or stay too long. But this’s… intelligent. It learned, I guess.”

Zoro's pulse thuds as he asks: “From what?” but he feels the answer before it's spoken — like memory of heat on his mouth. Like the aftertaste of salt and adrenaline. Like the second when fear and relief tangled into something brighter and more dangerous.

Sanji says it anyway, blunt as a confession. “From us.”

For a second Zoro's fingers slip on the hatch, the room tilting. He forces his voice level with sheer effort. “That's… so, what, you came back because you think it's your fault?”

“No,” Sanji snaps. “I came back because I know it is.”

Zoro's eyes snap open. “Sanji —”

“Don't. Don't do that thing where you try to make me feel better with logic. I'm not — this isn't — Zoro, it reacted when I looked at you. I saw it.”

Zoro's grip tightens until his fingers spike. He tries to imagine Sanji saying this to anyone else and just. Can't. The shame in it is too intimate. The fear too private.

“I watched the footage,” Sanji whispers. “Over and over. In every framåe where I turned to you it moved. In every frame where you were close — whenever we touched — it sharpened. Like it… like it was tasting something.”

The tunnel answers with a faint ripple of water behind Zoro, like a throat clearing. Sanji's voice drops even lower, like he's ashamed of how it sounds. “And then… and then we…”

“We kissed.” Like Zoro's saying a name into a room full of ghosts and hoping it doesn't summon the wrong one.

Sanji doesn't deny it — how could he? He lets out a shaky breath that sounds too much like a laugh strangled into silence. “And after that I could feel it. Like… pressure in my bones.”

“So you came back to… what, kill it?”

“Contain it? I don't know. Close the door before it opened wide. If anyone else gets down here and it's… it feels too big, Zoro. We need to shut it down.”

Anger flashes hot in Zoro's chest, bright and utterly, completely useless. “And your plan was to do that alone?”

“My plan was to keep you out of it.”

The tunnel slips in again, sweet as silk: “My plan was to keep you out of it, Zoro.”

Zoro's teeth grind down on each other, hard. There's a beat where neither of them speaks and in that beat the pump room feels like it leans closer, metal and water and concrete all drawn in around them. The hum deepens. The water shifts under the catwalk like something rolling again. Zoro exhales, forcing the anger into something usable. “Okay. What the hell am I standing in?”

Sanji's relief is audible — a tiny loosening. He's always clung to the practical like a lifeline. “This hatch's sealed with more than just bolts. There's… there's a line of iron in the seam. Old construction. You know it disrupts manifestations, that's why I got behind it.”

Zoro's gaze flicks to the bolts. “And if I open it the barrier breaks.”

“Yeah. It'll be able to cross.”

Zoro's mouth goes a little dry. “Great. So how do I get you out?”

“I don't know,” Sanji admits and the honesty in that is worse than the fear. “I've been trying for ours. Nothing will budge. The water's rising and it keeps — it'll keep rising. And it keeps trying to use your voice, too, telling me you're pissed and you'll leave me here.”

Zoro presses his forehead harder into the hatch, eyes squeezing shut again and for a moment he feels twelve years old all over again — hands too big, edges too blunt, no idea what to do with tenderness except protect it by refusing to touch it.

“Sanji,” he says quietly. “Listen to me. I'm not leaving.”

On the other side, Sanji makes a sound caught between relief and fury. “You shouldn't be —”

“Stop,” Zoro cuts in because he can't let Sanji turn this into a fight they don't have time for. “Just. Tell me what you've got in there.”

“A flare. Iron nails. Salt, lighter. My knife.”

Zoro's mind snaps into place around inventory; it's familiar, manageable. Something he can do without bleeding feelings all over the place. “I've got salt, iron fillings, recorder, torch. If we can reinforce the seam —”

The tunnel behind him whispers, almost fond, like it's learning Zoro's cadence now, too. “If we can reinforce the seam, Zoro.”

Zoro ignores it.

“We can't just patch it, idiot. It's not a crack, it's… listening to intention. It wants you to open it.”

“Then we don't give it what it wants.”

Sanji laughs, breathy and abjectly miserable. “You're gonna have to do better than that, Moss.”

Zoro's mouth twitches, almost. A ghost of a smile in the dark. “Yeah, no shit.” His hand slides into his bag, fingers finding the tin of iron fillings by touch alone, cold metal against his skin. “I need you to do exactly what I say for once.”

On the other side, Sanji goes quiet before he says: “Okay.”

Zoro anchors himself to that like it’s a blade sunk into stone.

“Okay,” he says again, slower this time, like he’s laying planks across a chasm. Like the words themselves are structural support. “Here’s what we’re doing.”

The tunnel hums, curious now, attentive. The vibration rises and steadies, like it knows a trick is coming and wants front-row seats. The water in the channel behind him makes a small, deliberate lap against the wall, like it shifted to hear better.

Sanji breathes once on the other side. Just once. “I’m listening.”

Zoro pulls the recorder out with his free hand and sets it on the grating directly in front of the hatch, close enough to catch Sanji’s real voice through the metal but far enough that if something moves toward it, it won’t brush Zoro first. He switches it on and the red light blinks, steady and patient and stupidly brave, like a heartbeat that doesn’t know it’s being watched.

“I’m gonna make it loud. Not sound. Presence. You said it reacts to attention. To intention.”

“Yes,” Sanji answers immediately and even muffled through the hatch Zoro can hear him gripping the fear by the throat and forcing it into focus. “It mirrors focus. It wants… context.”

Zoro bares his teeth. “Good. I’m gonna give it some.”

The tunnel answers with a pleased shiver through the concrete, like a body leaning forward. The hum thickens, syrupy, and Zoro feels it settle behind his eyes. Water ripples in the channel behind him, not a current shift but slow, purposeful disturbance, like something repositioning under the surface.

Sanji’s voice tightens. “Don’t antagonise it.”

“I’m not,” Zoro says. “I’m lying to it.”

He reaches into his bag and pulls out the tin of iron filings, popping it open with his thumb. The filings glitter dully in the torch’s beam: dark, coarse, heavy as grit. He scatters them deliberately around the recorder, then pours salt over them, white crystals catching on the black specks like frost on ash. He grinds the mixture into the grating with the heel of his palm until it rasps, crystalline and metallic. The salt bites at the raw nicks on his knuckles, the filings clinging to the dampness like they’ve been waiting for skin.

It’s almost instant, how quickly the air thickens, like the room’s been holding its breath and now doesn’t like what he’s putting into it. The hum wobbles, its pitch dipping before it climbs again, losing its balance on a slick floor.

Behind Zoro, the wall exhales and Sanji’s voice slithers out of it, too smooth, too pleased, an imitation of care. “Careful, you’ll hurt yourself.”

Zoro drags a line of salt from the recorder to the hatch, careful not to smear it across the iron seam. Reinforces the edge of the metal door with a second line, thicker, uglier. “You said you’ve got iron nails, yeah?”

“Yes.”

“Drive them into the seam, every place you can reach. Don’t make patterns. Just… interrupt it.”

On the other side there’s the scrape of metal amongst the sounds of Sanji shifting and rummaging. Then a sharp clang as the first nail bites into concrete and then the tunnel screams. Not with sound, not exactly, but with pressure. The hum spikes so hard Zoro feels it in his teeth, a shockwave that rattles his jaw and makes his vision blur at the edges for a half-second. The lights flicker. The water slaps once, hard, as if the whole channel flinched.

And the voice erupts behind him, furious now, stripped of sweetness. “STOP.”

Zoro’s body jerks despite himself. Instinct tries to pull him around – threat, voice, target – he forces himself still. Palm welded to the hatch.

The mimic barrels on, words fast and sharp. “You’re hurting him. You’re cracking the seal. You don’t know what you’re doing –”

Sanji’s real voice punches through the metal, strained but defiant. “Keep going.”

The contrast is brutal: the real voice has effort in it, breath. Metal vibrating with the force of his words. It’s not made to charm. It’s made to survive and Zoro’s chest tightens like something has grabbed his lungs. He answers that voice. “Good. Don’t stop.”

The hammering continues behind the hatch, irregular and frantic. Iron into concrete. Nail after nail. Each strike sends a tremor through the room and the tunnel responds like a living thing being pinned down: the hum climbing, flattening, warping, like it can’t decide whether to thrash or to retreat. The mimic laughs suddenly, wild and breathless, delighted at the struggle. “You think this helps? You think you can keep him from me?”

Zoro’s fingers tighten on the recorder. He turns the volume up to the maximum, until the tiny device feels ridiculous in his hand. Then he leans down close to the mic and speaks—not shouting, not performing. Just… present. Planting himself into the air like a stake.

“This is Zoro,” he says into the mic. “Timestamp unknown. Location: flood control, Sector B.” His voice’s flat and controlled, the way it gets when he’s taking a vow he can’t afford to break. The tunnel recoils. The hum stutters, fracturing. A dissonant wobble runs through it like something stumbling mid-step.

Behind him, Sanji’s stolen voice howls, venomous and raw: “Don’t ignore me!”

Zoro doesn’t turn. “Watch me.”

The recorder’s red light blinks faster, jittering, like it’s straining to keep up with the vibration in the air. The tiny speaker hisses with static. The water below the platform surges, slapping harder against concrete. Something moves beneath the surface now, unmistakable. A dark mass sliding against the current like it’s swimming upstream on purpose, like it’s coming.

Sanji’s real voice cracks through the hatch, sharp and urgent. “Zoro, it’s manifesting.”

“Good,” Zoro says, heart hammering. “That means it’s not listening anymore. It’s coming.”

He reaches into his bag and pulls out the flare, the plastic tube obscene in his hand, bright and  fragile and human. His fingers are so damp he nearly drops it.  The mimic screams his name in a hundred overlapping cadences, trying every tone it owns. Rage. Fear. Desire. The echo of a kiss. The promise of forgiveness. The threat of abandonment. It throws them at him like knives, hoping one will stick.

Zoro twists the cap and red fire explodes into the room. The light’s violent and absolute, painting the concrete in blood and shadow. It makes the rust look like fresh wounds. Smoke curls thick and choking, stinging his eyes, burning his lungs. The heat blooms against his skin like a slap.

The hum shatters, splits into discordant pitches that claw at the edges of hearing as the thing in the water rises, pulling itself up against the spillway wall, wrong and incomplete. It’s a dark mass clinging to wet concrete, edges blurring like smoke trapped underwater. In the flare’s red glare it looks less like a body and more like a tear in the world where light can’t decide how to behave.

It recoils from the iron filings like they’re teeth. It thrashes, soundless and furious, and the water beneath it boils with motion.

Zoro backs toward the hatch, never breaking eye contact with the thing, flare held high. His other hand slams flat against the metal again, as if doubling down makes it truer.

“Sanji,” he barks. “Now.”

On the other side, the hammering stops and there’s a heartbeat of silence so clean it feels like the world paused.

Then Sanji says, voice shaking but furious and alive: “Brace.”

Zoro plants his feet wide on the slick grating. Knees bent. Core tight. The stance of a man about to take a hit. The hatch flexes as iron and salt and nails bite deeper into the seam, the metal shivering under Zoro’s palm. The air snaps cold, then hot, then cold again, like the room can’t decide what temperature reality should be.

The entity shrieks – not in Sanji’s voice now, not in any human cadence. The sound tears free of walls and water alike, a raw pressure that makes Zoro’s eyes water and his gut twist. The recorder screeches as the waveform spikes violently—finally catching something.

The flare burns down fast, the heat blistering the skin beneath Zoro’s glove. Smoke rolls thick, swallowing the ceiling. His lungs feel scraped raw. “Again,” Zoro growls.

Sanji hammers once more and something breaks – not the hatch, but the pressure around it. The air snaps like a held breath released. A rush surges inward, tugging at Zoro’s hoodie strings, dragging smoke toward the seam as if the tunnel itself is inhaling. The dark mass in the channel convulses and folds backward, collapsing into the water with a sound like something being dragged under unwillingly. The blackness vanishes downstream in a violent pull, retreating like a tide forced back by a door slammed in its face.

The hum drops to a low, wounded throb.

The flare dies like a throat closing, its red light guttering with one last violent pulse that paints the pump room in arterial colour before it sputters into nothing. The darkness rushes back in so fast it feels physical, like a hood yanked over his head: smoke coils where the light used to be, thick and stubborn, hanging in the air. For a few seconds Zoro can’t see anything except the afterimage burned into his eyes: blood-coloured concrete, the wet shine of the hatch under his palm, the thing in the water folding away like a nightmare retreating into a drain.

Silence pours in where the hum used to be, so complete it makes his ears ache, like the world’s been emptied out and sealed.

Zoro keeps his hand on the hatch anyway, palm flat and fingers spread. Pressure steady. There’s a slow crawl up his spine, the warning his body gives him right before a blade swings and he straightens a fraction without lifting his palm, keeping that point of contact like a nail hammered into reality, and angles his second torch toward the spillway.

The surface is a flat black sheen, barely rippling. The salt lines shine pale on wet metal. Iron filings glitter dull and heavy around the recorder, little flecks of darkness pinned to the grating. Everything looks like it should after a fight where you won a round: mess. residue. proof.

Then the recorder’s red light – steady, blinking – stutters. The screen flashes. The waveform spikes.

Zoro doesn’t step back; he sets his feet harder, bracing like he’s on deck in a storm. He keeps one hand on the hatch and lifts the torch’s beam, forcing the light to hold steady even as his pulse tries to shake it loose. The darkness in the channel thickens again, coalescing into a dense patch of absence that swallows reflection. 

Behind the hatch, Sanji’s voice tightens. “Zoro?”

“Stay behind the hatch,” Zoro says, clipped. “Don’t talk.”

“What –”

“Don’t,” Zoro repeats, sharper. “It listens.”

The word listens lands in the room like a bell struck. The pump room seems to lean in. Pipes and concrete and water all angling closer, hungry for whatever comes next. The mass in the water rises another inch and then another.

And then –

“Sanji,” it says softly.

The hair on Zoro’s arms lifts straight up, shocked into silence by how perfectly the tunnel’s using his own voice. Behind the hatch, Sanji sucks in a breath that sounds mostly sharp and entirely involuntary: the sound of a man grabbing at hope before he can stop himself.

The entity speaks again in Zoro’s voice, gentle as a hand at the nape of the neck. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

Sanji’s real voice, muffled and panicked: “Zoro, that’s not —”

“I know,” Zoro snaps, too loud and the words ricochet. The echo comes back wrong, stretched thin, like the tunnel is tasting it. He clamps his jaw shut immediately, furious with himself for giving the room anything to chew.

The water heaves, the mass sliding up the spillway wall like it’s learning how to stand. It doesn’t have edges. It doesn’t have a face. It’s wrong in the way deep water is wrong when you realise you can’t touch the bottom, when you realise the dark beneath you isn’t emptiness but just. Weight.

The recorder shrieks, feedback tearing through the tiny speaker. For a second the world goes thin and bright, like all the oxygen got pulled toward the channel. Then it’s just — cold. Zoro’s breath fogs hard, white plumes spilling from his mouth like smoke. The torch beam shakes no matter how hard he steadies his wrist. The salt line closest to the water begins to dissolve faster, crystals popping and melting, the iron filings trembling in place, skittering in tiny, agitated arcs, pulled by an unseen magnet.

Zoro feels it at the back of his skull, an itch right at the seam where thought meets instinct. A pressure behind his eyes. He grits his teeth and locks his gaze on the hatch.

Metal. Bolt heads. Rust blooms. The seam where iron is laced into old construction. Tangible. Measurable. Real.

Sanji’s behind that.

From inside Zoro’s head, right behind his thoughts, intimate as memory: “Zoro.” It says his name like the kiss did. Like heat and panic and yes. The pressure behind his eyes intensifies, a slow, relentless shove, like deep water pressing on a diver’s mask, something trying to force its way into the soft places and make a home.

The room blurs at the edges, the pump room sinking of rain and rust – then it smells like that night. Floodwater. Wet concrete. The half-drowned stink of cigarette smoke. That sharp, stubborn clean note of Sanji’s shampoo clinging to his hair like defiance. The catwalk slick under his boots. The siren glitching into nonsense. Sanji’s hand clamping around his wrist, too hot, too real. Zoro’s breath coming too fast. The raw relief of alive twisting into something he couldn’t hold back. Sanji’s mouth. A broken sound swallowed between them.

Zoro’s fingers flex on the hatch. His grip tightens like he can crush the metal.

No, he thinks, furious. No. That’s mine.

The pressure inside him laughs, a ripple through his nerves like a finger run down a spine, a cold thread slipping into the crack the memory made. Zoro feels it like fingers under his ribs, like a hand testing the shape of his heartbeat. He sucks in a breath but it catches, his lungs locking for a split second like something’s squeezed. The torch drops a few centimetres, its beam wobbling. His thoughts stutter, lagging behind themselves.

Somewhere far away, behind metal, Sanji’s real voice becomes frantic. “Zoro, talk to me. Zoro!”

The entity answers through Zoro’s own mouth. “I’m fine,” it says, flat and calm, a line read off a script.

Zoro’s jaw snaps shut. He tries to move his tongue but it feels heavy and delayed, like his mouth is a room the entity stepped into first. He tastes iron or blood or fear, he can’t tell. The filings around the recorder lift in a tiny, shivering wave and then slam back down like something struck the platform.

Zoro’s vision flashes with the tunnel, endless and slick, water rising, walls breathing, the sound of Sanji’s laugh ahead like bait. The shape in the water beneath him, huge and patient.

And then — cruelest of all —

Sanji turning away after the kiss. His eyes wide and terrified. Sanji’s voice, shaky: I can’t. I can’t.

Zoro's knees buckle, fingers slipping on the hatch and for one horrifying second his palm lifts off the metal, the cold inside him tightening with delight. The room jerks, the hatch receding even further and the hum back, this time inside Zoro's skull, a macabre tuning fork.

“Zoro!”

The sound yanks Zoro back like a rope around his chest, an anchor, and he snarls, slamming his palm back down onto the hatch so hard it hurts. It's like touching a livewire: the cold inside him recoils with a furious hiss as he forces air back into his lungs, harsh and shaking. He coughs, swallowing it down forcefully until his throat burns.

The salt line sizzles and dissolves in sudden forth as the dark mass on the spillway wall writhes, lashing forward, smearing across the platform in a wave of cold. The cold thread inside his skull tries one last time, vicious and desperate, sliding towatd the softest memory it can find: Sanji;s mouth, the split second of yes, everytime Sanji's looked at him over the past two years, everytime they've touched, the three days of silence that it tries to make into a coffin.

Zoro digs deep — past pride, past anger, past the old belief that he only matters when he's bleeding and finds something stubborn and incandescent.

I want him alive.

Not for the channel or for closure, not to be right, but alive because Zoro can't stand a world that swallows Sanji and calls it payment. He presses his hand harder to the mteal, hears his voice crack. “Sanji.”

“Yeah, yeah. I'm here.”

The — whatever — shrieks, cold snapping taut before it rips free like a hook tearing out of flesh. Zoro gasps and stumbles forward as much as he can, shoulder hitting the hatch so hard white spots bloom behind his eyes. He swallows bile and still keeps his hand planted. The water in the channel surges violently, mass slamming back beneath the surface like it's been yanked by an unseen chain.

The hum collapses into a low, wounded throb that drags itself towards the deeper tunnels. Zoro's mouth tastes like blood and his heart's hammering hard enough to hurt. Behind the hatch, Sanji's voice comes fast and breathless. “What did it do?”

The pump room still reeks of flare smoke and wet rust and old water. His lungs feel scraped raw from breathing too hard too fast. His breath comes ragged for a beat too long before he forces it back into rhythm, counting in his head like he’s timing a strike: in, out, in, out, stay here, stay in your body, don’t let the tunnel find the seam again. He swallows. “It tried to get in.”

Somewhere deeper in the tunnel is an answering ripple, resentful and patient.

“What?”

“It’s fine,” Zoro snaps back, too fast. Too sharp. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine,” Sanji says with the familiar bite, anger used as scaffolding because if he builds rage he doesn’t have to build fear. “If it touched you —”

“It didn’t take me,” Zoro cuts in.

“That’s not the point! You’re acting like survival is the only metric that matters. That thing —if it can get its hooks in —”

“I know,” Zoro says, jaw clenched so hard it aches.

“Then why the hell are you still standing there like it’s nothing?”

Because it’s you, Zoro thinks. Because you’re behind this metal and I need something real to hold onto before the tunnel rewrites my head again. He doesn’t say it. He can’t afford to, not with the air still thick and listening. Instead he lets out a breath that scrapes. “We don’t have time for this.”

“I know,” Sanji says immediately, and the sudden softness is worse than the anger. It’s the sound of someone trying not to break in a place that feeds on fractures. “I know.”

The hum has faded, wounded, but it hasn’t died. It sits under the room like a migraine, listening to every breath like it’s learning how to breathe. Zoro opens his eyes and forces himself back into logistics, the only thing he can hold without shaking. “We reinforce the seam. We keep the barrier up. We find another way to get you out. Is there a – maintenance release on your side?”

“I’ve checked,” Sanji says. “It’s not… this hatch wasn’t designed to be opened from inside. It’s a service access. You open it from out there or you don’t open it at all.”

“Great,” Zoro mutters.

Sanji exhales, thin and controlled. “We can try to route you through the secondary intake. There’s a ladder well on my side, but—” He pauses. “Wait. Do you… is the water higher than it should be?”

Zoro blinks. “What?”

“It’s louder,” Sanji says, clipped. “The flow in the pipes. Like the system’s under load?”

Zoro turns his head slightly, not taking his hand off the hatch, and listens – at first it’s just the steady rush he’s been hearing since he entered, the constant wet breath of the place. Then he catches it: a deeper note under it, a strain, a low pressure roar that wasn’t there a minute ago. The sound of water hitting a wider surface. The pitch of runoff shifting from sheeting to surging, like the tunnel’s swallowed and is trying to swallow again.

He glances down at the water around his boots, not ankle-deep but creeping, relentless, licking higher against metal supports. The last of the salt line is bleeding away, crystals dissolving into chalky milk that the current drinks without slowing. The iron filings are beginning to drift, tiny dark flecks caught in spirals, pulled by a current that wasn’t strong enough to move them before. 

Zoro’s skin goes cold in a different way. “This isn’t just rain runoff.”

Sanji’s voice tightens on the other side. “No.”

Zoro sweeps his torch across the pump room with a sudden urgency: pipes, valves, drowned control panels crusted in mineral deposits. A wheel-latch on a pressure gate half-submerged. An emergency lever bolted to a support post, paint flaking, stenciling barely readable:

MANUAL RELEASE — DO NOT ENGAGE DURING ACTIVE FLOW

The lever isn’t moving, not here, but the water’s behaving like something upstream just got told to stop obeying. He hates how flat his voice goes when fear starts chewing at the edges. “Someone must’ve opened something. A gate?”

Sanji’s breath hitches behind the hatch. “That’s not possible.”

“It is if someone’s in there,” Zoro says, and the words come out like a curse.

Silence.

Then, smaller, sharp with dread and guilt so immediate it tastes like blood, Sanji whispers: “Koby.”

“No, that doesn’t — I tied him.”

The water slaps harder against the spillway wall, the pump room vibrating with it now. The sound’s no longer a steady rush but it has violence to it, a harsh pushing roar that feels like it’s coming from the structure itself. There’s a thin, echoing sound threaded through pipes and concrete, bouncing down the tunnel system like it’s traveling on the water, high and frightened.

“H-hello? Zoro?” 

A horrible, immediate relief sparks in Zoro — alive — and then dies as fast as it came, drowned by the tone beneath it because Koby doesn’t sound confused. He sounds apologetic, like he’s already decided he’s done something wrong and the only question left is how much it will cost.

“I… I didn’t mean to,” Koby’s voice echoes and it breaks on the word like his throat is tight with tears. “He said — he said it was okay if I just — if I just held it?”

Sanji’s voice slips through the hatch, barely audible and it isn’t anger now, it’s fear stripped down to bone. “That’s not him.”

“It is him,” Zoro whispers back, because that’s the worst part. “It’s his voice.”

The water continues rising, fast enough to notice now, fast enough to make the remaining salt smear and vanish. Koby’s voice cracks again, distant and panicked. “I keep hearing Luffy and I thought if I listened, I’d…” His words dissolve into a sob, distorted by echo until it sounds like water choking.

Somewhere deeper, metal shrieks, an unseen gate shifting under pressure, a long tortured sound like a hinge being forced past its limit. The pump room water surges, pushing against Zoro’s boots hard enough to shove him a half-step. His torchlight breaks off across the hatch and the iron seam and for a sick second he imagines the seam giving way like skin.

Sanji’s voice is sharp now, fear cutting clean through everything else. “Zoro.”

Zoro stares at the rising water, the dissolving salt, the iron filings beginning to drift. He doesn’t have to be an engineer to understand this: concrete lungs fill, people drown, hatches become coffins. The water pushes against his shins, cold pressure that finds the seams in his clothes and pushes, pushes, pushes, like he tunnel’s decided his legs are something it can climb. The current is stronger now, too: it combs around his calves in hungry, directional streams, tugging at him like it’s trying to pick a favourite path up his body.

Behind the hatch, Sanji’s breathing is a tight, rapid thing, the sound of a man trying to keep panic from becoming oxygen. “We don’t have time. Zoro. We do not have time.”

“I know,” Zoro says and he does: his body knows in the oldest, ugliest way. The water surges again as another gate screeches somewhere, slamming into Zoro’s knees hard enough to shove him into the hatch. Cold splashes up his thighs, punches the air out of him. The impact makes the metal shudder under his hand like something struck it from the inside.

The hum in the walls sharpens, eager and awake.

Sanji inhales sharply behind the metal. “Careful.”

“I’m not opening it like a door,” Zoro says, breath harsh, teeth clenched against the push of water and the push of fear. “I’m opening it like a wound. Get your hands on the seam, not the bolts. When it cracks, you stay pressed to it. You don’t step back. You don’t breathe toward the gap.”

“Why —”

“Because if it crosses it’ll ride your breath.”

Sanji’s silence is instant. Then, steady as he can make it: “Okay.”

Zoro gathers the last of the iron filings in the tin, salt. His fingers feel clumsy, swollen with adrenaline. He tears a salt packet open with his teeth and spits the plastic away into the water where it’s immediately swept off like trash.

Then he starts working the bolts, wedging his knife under a rusted bolt head to lever. Metal groans like an old joint and his hands slip once, twice, blade skittering off the slick head with a shriek that makes the hairs on his neck lift. He curses through his teeth and tries again, shoulders braced, breath measured. The water’s at his thigh now, pushing and it makes every movement heavier, slower, like the tunnel itself’s trying to hold his wrists down and keep him from finishing. The current knocks against his legs in impatient pulses.

Behind him, Koby’s voice wails again, higher, cracked.  Sanji makes a strangled sound behind the hatch, a tiny involuntary gasp that gives the tunnel exactly what it wants: proof the bait is working.

“Don’t listen,” Zoro snaps. “Sanji. Don’t listen.”

“I’m not,” Sanji breathes. “I’m not!”

Zoro feels it then: the subtle shift in the room, the way pressure seems to gather in the corners like a body leaning in. The entity’s attention, sharpening. Waiting for a crack, any crack. The first bolt breaks loose with a screech, the metal giving so suddenly that his knife almost slips. He catches it, breath harsh.

Second bolt. Another scream of rust, then release.

The third fights him like bone: rust has fused it into the hatch like a tooth into jaw. Zoro braces his shoulder against the metal and hauls, muscles burning, water slamming his legs sideways until the sudden release nearly sends him off balance. The current shoves, his boots skidding on slick metal grating. He catches himself with the hand that’s been on the hatch, palm smearing across sweating steel — and the hatch pops, a hairline gap along the seam.

The hum spikes so sharply Zoro sees white for a fraction of a second, vision ringing like a bell struck too hard.

“Now!” he barks, and his voice cuts through the room like a command and pours the last of the iron filings into the gap. They cling, impossibly, to the seam like they want to be there, like the metal’s thirsty and the filings are feeding it. He follows with salt, packing it in with his thumb until the seam looks crusted, frosted, all white and black grit jammed into the crack like a makeshift scab.

The hatch trembles under his hand like something is pushing from the other side.

Sanji whispers, strained, right against the metal. “It’s pressing.”

“I know.” He cracks the hatch wider, two fingers then three. Water immediately tries to shove into the opening, slapping against metal as the gap breathes cold into his face. Zoro braces his body against it like a dam, shoulder wedged, knees bent, absorbing the shove of the current and whatever pressure is building behind the hatch. “You’re coming through first.”

Sanji’s laugh is short and broken, half disbelief, half fury, half gratitude he won’t name. “Of course I am.”

“Put your hands through.”

Two fingers appear in the gap, pale in the torch beam, trembling with cold and effort. The sight of them hits Zoro like a punch. Human skin in a place that eats humans but Zoro grabs them anyway, his chest burning with the sudden violent need to hold on.

Sanji wedges shoulder-first into the gap, gasping, scraping, fighting metal and current. The iron filings smear across his sleeve and salt grinds into fabric, the hatch biting at his jacket like teeth. Zoro hauls with both hands, muscles screaming, boots sliding as the water tries to peel him away.

The tunnel hums like it’s purring, enjoying the scrape of skin against metal. Enjoying the desperation. And then, from the corridor behind them, Koby’s voice yells, too close now, too near the pump room: “Help me!”

Zoro’s whole body reacts, heart punching, head snapping halfway before he stops himself, violently. He can’t turn, he can’t look. 

Sanji’s voice, right at the seam, shaking with rage, cuts through like a blade. “Don’t you dare look.” Water slams into him immediately as he emerges, soaking his hair, choking him. He coughs, violent, sputtering, spitting out tunnel water and breath and terror – but he’s out. He’s in Zoro’s reach. He’s here.

Zoro yanks him fully into the pump room and slams the hatch back as much as he can, Sanji clinging to Zoro’s arm like he’s anchoring himself to a wall in a storm. His eyes are wild, pupils blown, breath tearing and Zoro grips him back just as hard, fingers locked around his sleeve like a promise made with bone instead of words.

The floodwater hits their hips with cold that feels like teeth closing around him, current using his legs as obstacles, using his weight as something to lean against. The pump room’s become a violent lake, and the floor under it might as well be gone; footing is a rumour now. Everytime he shifts the water grabs at his knees like hands trying to pull him down into the same level as everything else.

Koby’s voice shrieks from somewhere deeper, warped by pipes and distance, carried on the water itself like a message tied to a drowning thing. “Zoro!”

Zoro’s whole body locks and surges in the same motion, like someone yanked a chain in his chest and his spine obeyed. The sound of it makes his ribs feel hollow. Alive, his brain screams and then immediately: dying.

Sanji catches his arm, fingers hot through soaked fabric. “Zoro.”

“We’re going,” Zoro says, already turning, already pushing into the corridor. His voice comes out flat and brutal because anything softer will break. “Now.”

Sanji’s jaw tightens. The argument flashes behind his eyes, bright and immediate and practised: don’t you dare leave me, don’t you dare go back, don’t you dare die but Koby’s voice slices through all of it and turns it into something worse: guilt with teeth. “Okay. Lead.”

They wade, then stumble, then half-swim.

The hallway’s a funnel and the tunnel uses it: the water here is higher, meaner, choking itself through narrow space, making their bodies into dams. It presses against their thighs, their ribs, their throats. Every step forward is work. Every lifted foot feels like prying it out of a grip that doesn’t want to let go.

Their torches shake with movement, beams jittering over curved concrete and slick metal and the oily surface where the water reflects everything wrong. The light throws their shadows in warped fragments, like the tunnel can’t decide how many of them there are.

Zoro’s thighs burn. Sanji’s breathing is harsh and wet beside him, choked with cough, dragged through teeth. Neither of them speaks; talking is for people who aren’t counting seconds in their bones, for people who have spare air.

Then the first hand appears, rising out of the water right in front of Zoro, pale and long, fingers splayed, the perfect silhouette of human desperation. For half a heartbeat it looks real enough that his stomach drops but the beam catches it fully and the illusion collapses. It’s water pretending to be flesh, surface tension pulled into a shape, edges wavering like smoke trapped underwater. No nails, no joints, just the idea of a hand, assembled out of current and hunger.

When it reaches Zoro jerks back, the hand splashing apart only to reform immediately, then multiply. Two hands now. Then three. Then a whole cluster of them, rising in a bouquet of drowning, fingers grabbing for anything warm enough to count as alive.

Sanji makes a sound low in his throat. “Oh, fuck.”

The water around their legs surges, trying to buckle their knees, hitting behind Zoro’s calves like a shove and the current wraps his ankles, dragging sideways like it wants him down. Zoro snarls and drives forward anyway, shoulder-first into the reaching shapes. The hands slap his jacket, cold shock through fabric, and for a split second there’s pressure under the touch, fingertips not just contacting but searching, sliding like they remember the shape of him. The old thumbprint behind his eyes flares, a phantom ache that tastes like deep water.

He yanks his arm free and keeps moving.

“Don’t let it touch your face,” Sanji pants, breath ragged. 

“I know.”

Luffy’s high, breathless giggle skitters down the hallway like rats in the walls.

Sanji’s face twists. “That’s not —”

“I know,” Zoro snaps, sharper now, because hearing their friend’s voice shaped around cruelty makes his stomach flip.

The hallway bends, then bends again, too many bends too quickly, trying to confuse their internal map, trying to make direction meaningless. Their lights carve frantic cones through the dark; the water turns them into shaky mirrors and throws the beams back wrong, splitting light into tremors. A sign flashes past half-submerged, letters smeared: PUMP ACCESS — AUTHORISED PERSONNEL

Zoro’s lungs tighten, reflexively. Panic flickers bright and ugly. He shoves it down. He shines his torch ahead and sees the hallway narrowing into a choke point where the ceiling dips low, where the water’s already kissing the underside of concrete.

A submerged throat. If it fills completely, they’ll have to dive. If they dive, the tunnel will have them in its element.

Sanji’s breath comes out in a broken hiss. “Zoro.”

“Not here,” Zoro says, and his voice sounds like he’s talking to the tunnel now. “Not like that.”

The water surges in response, a wave slapping into them hard enough to slam Sanji into Zoro’s side. Sanji coughs, choking and Zoro wraps an arm around him without thinking, holding him upright against the current. Sanji yelps as they’re swallowed by water for a second before fighting back up, coughing, sputtering, eyes wide and furious. Zoro snarls and grabs the railing embedded in the wall, fingers scraping for purchase. He holds on, arm shaking with strain as the current tries to peel him off like a sticker.

Through it all Koby’s voice drifts closer, right around the bend ahead now, echoing in short frantic bursts before Luffy’s voice answers, bright and warm and impossible: “Koby! I’m here!”

The water surges again, furious and delighted, hands erupting — dozens, a forest of grasping — slapping and clinging at their arms, their shoulders, their hair, trying to turn their heads toward the sound. Trying to make them look, trying to make them believe, trying to make their attention into a doorway. Zoro hauls Sanji forward by sheer force, dragging him through the grasping water as it tries to keep them, the tunnel spitting them into a narrower run that feels less like a corridor and more like a vein.

The water here is louder and angrier, shouldering past them in a hard, cold rush that slaps their ribs and steals their breath. Zoro’s boots don’t find floor so much as they find slick absence, algae-smeared concrete that gives and slides, toes skimming, knees jerking high as the city’s lung tries to inhale him. Sanji stays at his shoulder, half-swimming, half-wading. He doesn’t complain; he only breathes hard through his teeth, hands cutting the water with impatient efficiency. Every so often his elbow knocks Zoro’s arm and the contact is a jolt, human and real, against the water’s constant faceless touch. It keeps Zoro from forgetting where his body ends and the tunnel begins.

The roar of flow gets threaded with something mechanical: a deeper groan, metal under stress, the long drawn-out complaint of a gate forced against its own design. It comes in pulses, like the whole system’s flexing. Zoro’s stomach turns as he swings his light forward to catch an alcove carved into the left wall, an old maintenance pocket, half-flooded. A rusted control assembly bolted into concrete like a joint. A waist-high lever with a red handle. A wheel, its gauges drowned in mineral crust. Above it a ladder well leads to a grated opening, water pouring down in a constant flow from the city above, like the sky's bleeding straight into here.

And there — braced inside the alcove like a small body trying to hold back a river — is Koby. Zoro’s rope is still looped around his torso under the arms, cutting into wet fabric to bite at skin, leaving raw red grooves where it drags. His shoulders tremble with the strain of staying upright, half-bent like he’s been stuck in this posture too long. His hands are clamped around the red lever with white-knuckled desperation, fingers slick and shaking as water lashes at his wrists.

His face is tilted up toward the ladder well, toward the thin slice of falling water and darkness above, like  he’s staring at the idea of rescue and trying to will it into existence. He chokes. “I’m holding it, Luffy, I’m holding it.”

Sanji’s hand hits Zoro’s forearm so hard it hurts. “Koby!”

Koby flinches at his name like it’s a strike, eyes dragging toward them, pupils too steady despite the panic on his face, like a camera lens has locked focus and refuses to shift. Like something behind them is watching through his eyes. His lips tremble. “Don’t take me away from him.”

“Koby!” Luffy calls, cheerful as sunlight. “You’re doing great! Just a little longer!”

Koby’s face crumples with relief so immediate it’s obscene. His grip tightens on the lever like a lifeline. “Yes, yes, okay. Okay. I can do it.”

Zoro forces his body forward to wedge himself into the alcove shoulder-first, the water immediately turning on him in the form of pressure slamming against his side, trying to peel him back out into the main flow like he’s nothing but debris. The current wants him where it can carry him. It doesn’t like him choosing.

Koby looks at him with wide, terrified eyes, human for a flicker, just long enough for Zoro to see the kid inside the wrongness. “Zoro,” he says, voice cracking. “I messed up.”

“You didn’t,” Zoro says and he doesn’t soften it; he can’t afford softness right now. “You didn’t do anything.”

Koby shakes his head, frantic. “It said — it said if I held it open the water would stop.”

The water beneath them surges, impatient, like it wants to swallow the conversation. Sanji crowds into the alcove behind Zoro, cusses spilling from his mouth like smoke. His hands are already moving, checking the knot around Koby’s chest, seeing how tight the rope has bitten, gauging where he can cut without the kid sliding under.

“I’m gonna untie you,” Sanji says, sharp. “D’you hear me? You let go of the lever.”

Koby’s gaze flicks past Sanji’s shoulder, past Zoro’s, toward the water as Luffy’s voice laughs, low and delighted. “No, no, don’t let go, Koby! If you let go they’ll drown!” Koby’s breathing turns ragged. His grip locks. His whole body shakes like a tuning fork.

Sanji’s jaw clenches. “That’s not Luffy, that’s not him. You know that’s not him.”

Koby whimpers, tears mixing with tunnel water on his cheeks. “I can hear him.”

Zoro doesn’t waste time arguing with a kid drowning in sound, there’s no damn point. He reaches for the lever but moment his fingers touch the red handle, the water reacts like it’s been struck. A hand erupts out of the current and slaps against Zoro’s wrist, cold shock detonating up his arm. Another hand rises and clamps his forearm. Then another. Then another. Water pretending to be flesh, pressure pretending to be fingers.

Zoro braces, teeth bared, digging his boots for traction that isn’t there. The current tears at his legs, trying to straighten his knees, trying to unmake his stance.

Sanji swears viciously and grabs Koby’s shoulders, trying to turn him away from the water. “Koby, look at me. Look at me!”

But Koby’s gaze doesn’t move. His eyes are locked on empty space where the voice is coming from, pupils blown with devotion. “He’ll leave you again,” the tunnel says in Koby’s voice and the cadence is almost Koby’s… except for the way the words land too perfectly, like a key sliding into a lock.

Sanji jerks like he’s been struck and Zoro feels it hit too. He gets a flash of the catwalk, the kiss and it’s enough to throw him off balance, for the water-hands to tighten, for the phantom pressure to flare behind his eyes again, eager. You’ll drown here for him, won’t you. Like you always do.

Zoro snarls and shoves the thought down so hard it hurts. “Curls! Cut him loose from the lever. Tie him to you.”

“What!”

“Do it,” Zoro says. “Now.”

Sanji’s eyes flash with furious, terrified, understanding too fast. He yanks the knife from  his pocket and saws at the rope around Koby’s ribs, careful not to cut skin.  Koby fights it,not with skill or any measurable strength but with desperate conviction. He flails his elbow, tries to twist away, tries to keep his hands on the lever like his life depends on it. “Stop! I’m holding it!”

Zoro reaches across him and grabs Koby’s hand, forcing his fingers to loosen on the red handle, bones too small under Zoro’s palm. “That voice is lying. That’s not Luffy.”

The water surges hard in answer, the alcove shuddering and metal deepening into a scream. Zoro feels the pull instantly, the current grabbing at his hips, his ribs, his knees. Water-hands latch around his waist, cold and insistent and yank like a pack of drowning men. 

He plants his feet and for one single second — just one — he holds. Then the water takes him in a single violent gulp and Zoro’s breath punches out; cold black water slamming over his face and down his throat and into his nose like a fist.  The roar becomes muffled and enormous, a distant thunder trapped behind cotton as pressure crushes in from all sides, thick and relentless. 

The world’s nothing but ink and weight and moving hands. Water fingers tighten with awful specificity, pressing into tendon, learning where bone ends and flesh begins. Another hand slides up his calf, cold suction that feels like a mouth and tries to hold him in place while the rest of the flow hammers past, trying to make him a snag. Trying to make him drown slowly, deliberately, like a lesson.

Zoro kicks but the grip holds, the water-hand simply reforming and clinging back on with infinite patience. The pressure starts to feel wrong, like something is pressing from the inside of his skin, not just outside. Like the water is trying to crawl into the pores, into the seams the entity already found behind his eyes.

His lungs burn. His chest spasms. He thrashes toward where he thinks the surface is, toward air, toward light, but the water gives him nothing. No up. No down. Only motion. Shapes drift in the black around him, just at the edge of sight, bodies that aren’t bodies, shadows that hold their form a second too long. The outline of a hand. The suggestion of a face. Then it dissolves, then it returns, then it’s closer, as if the water’s growing organs. His mouth opens involuntarily, trying to gasp or scream, and cold floods in, panic detonating bright and ugly in his ribs, an animal clawing for air. For a horrifying heartbeat, he feels his own body begin to misbehave, hands tingling, fingers stiffening, like they’re not quite receiving the signal to move. As if the tunnel is trying to rewrite the wiring. His vision swims with black spots. The edges of the world pulse before something grabs his ankle, impossibly warm in this cold, and  Zoro’s eyes blow wide in the dark. He sees Sanji as a pale smear in the gloom, hair streaming, cheeks hollow, eyes furious even underwater. Sanji  yanks hard and pulls Zoro up, up, up until they break the surface in a violent gasp.

Zoro drags in air like it’s a weapon, like it’s the only thing keeping him human. He coughs, choking, water spilling out of him in ugly heaves and hands scrabbling for purchase on anything solid.

Sanji pulls him into the alcove by brute force, rope yanking at his waist, muscles shaking with strain. 

“Don’t,” Zoro manages, coughing.

Sanji’s face is centimetres from his, eyes wild, breath tearing. “Shut up,” he spits, blood on his lip, maybe from biting it, maybe from the hatch, maybe from refusing to be gentle when gentleness gets you killed.

“Koby?” Zoro rasps.

Sanji jerks his chin to where Koby’s half-sagging against the wall, rope now looped around his torso and anchored to the ladder rail, Sanji’s knots tight and ugly and effective. Koby sobs, head bowed, whispering apologies like prayer.

Zoro’s stomach turns. The taste of tunnel water comes back up his throat like bile even as Sanji’s hand squeezes his wrist, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to say I’m here, I’m real, don’t you dare slip away again.

Zoro looks at him, water streaming off his lashes, lungs still burning, skull still ringing with the echo of that lie and ind in the split second before they have to move again – before the water climbs higher, before the current turns murderous — he’s shaking and furious with the universe and he has no patience left for almost. He leans close, mouth near Sanji’s ear, voice a rasp dragged up from deep. “I meant it, that kiss. Now move,” he snarls, and they do.

They don’t get a clean escape. The tunnel doesn’t hand them a hallway and wish them luck: it fights like a living thing the moment it realises they’re not just trying to survive it, they’re trying to take its throat away.

Zoro keeps one hand locked around Sanji’s wrist for three more steps before he forces himself to let go, hating the way his skin immediately feels too empty without that grip, like warmth was a bolt holding him together and someone just yanked it out. Sanji keeps Koby close, rope harness taut over his shoulder, Koby’s eyes glued to the moving black surface. 

They hit a bend and the current punches them sideways into a row of pipes, Zoro’s shoulder cracking hard against the wall. Pain blooms hot and immediate, stars bursting behind his eyes. Sanji grabs the back of his jacket and yanks him upright with a snarl. “Don’t you dare go soft on me now.”

“I’m not,” Zoro grits and he isn’t. He’s just trying not to picture what a flood tunnel does to a city when it backs up.

Ahead, the sound changes again, louder, more hollow, a wider space, maybe. The roar becomes an echo that bounces back too many times, like the chamber’s big enough to remember the sound of drowning.

Zoro sweeps his beam forward until he finally sees it: a control bay. A waist-high catwalk spanning a channel turned into a river, old control panels bolted to the wall, lights dead, gauges drowned. A massive wheel assembly and an emergency lever mounted to a post, painted red once, now flaked to a sickly pink, connected by thick rods into the concrete like tendons into bone. A sign above it, half-submerged, letters smeared: FLOW REGULATOR — MANUAL OVERRIDE

And braced against the lever, back pressed to the post, feet scrabbling for purchase, is Luffy. Human outline, human posture, human desperation, wearing Luffy’s silhouette as bait. The entity’s favourite trick: look, another person you can’t leave behind.

The fake Luffy turns its head and smiles with no teeth. “You’re too late.”

Sanji swears and lunges, but the water between them erupts, arms and palms and fingers rising like a barricade, a wall of drowning that slaps against Sanji’s chest and forces him back. It doesn’t hit like a wave but more like a shove, like a hand on a sternum, like the tunnel itself decided Sanji doesn’t get to choose where he goes.

Zoro does the only thing he can do: he ignores the lure and looks for the mechanics, following rods and bolts and geometry because metal has rules and ghosts don’t. He traces the linkage with his light, finds where it disappears into concrete, finds the joint where pressure becomes movement before he finds it, half-hidden behind a panel, submerged almost to the top: the actual manual release wheel is jammed by a wedge of awfully-familiar looking rope.

Sanji sees it too, face crumpling with irritation. “Dick move.”

Koby whimpers and tries to turn, tries to look at the wheel, at the rope, at the consequences of his own hands, like he can’t bear seeing proof that his actions have been made into a threat. “I thought…”

Luffy’s voice pours out of the water beside his ear, impossibly kind. “It’s okay, Koby. You’re helping.”

Koby collapses into that kindness like it’s a life raft, shoulders sagging until his grip loosens on his own reality. He looks like he’s about to disappear into apology. Zoro ignores all of it and plants his feet on the catwalk to shove, into the flood, snarling at the way the water tries to take him immediately. Hands grab his calves, his thighs, trying to wrench him sideways, trying to tilt his head, trying to find his face but he keeps his gaze on metal. On the jam.

“Sanji,” he calls without turning his head. “Keep Koby breathing.”

Sanji’s voice cracks with fury. “Don’t you —”

“Please,” Zoro says, and it slips out like a shard of the truth. Raw, unpolished; he doesn’t have breath for pride. “Don’t lose him.”

He crouches into the flooding, grabs the jammed rope with numb hands and yanks but it doesn’t budge, too caught in the wheel’s teeth like a deliberate bite.

He yanks harder, until the rope cuts into his palms, wet fibre burning against skin. Old callouses don’t matter; pain always finds a way in. He grinds his teeth and pulls until his arms shake, until his shoulders scream, until the tendon in his forearm feels like it’s about to snap. Something cold slides along the back of his neck, water pretending to be a hand, almost gentle, almost affectionate. It lingers where skin meets hairline like a lover’s touch.

Sanji’s stolen voice whispers from the current: “Let go, Zoro. It’s okay.”

Zoro doesn’t look. Doesn’t answer. Doesn’t give it his mouth. He keeps pulling until the wheel groans and the metal protests. The rope shifts a fraction, stretching with a sick sound like flesh being torn before a wave surges from upstream and slams into his side so hard it knocks him into the panel. His head cracks against something, white flashing behind his eyes and for one awful second the world smears sideways and his own thoughts lag like a bad recording.

He hears his own voice in his skull, soft as breath: stop fighting.

The rope tears free with a wet snap that sounds too much like something breaking in a body and he nearly falls backward, saved only by his grasp on the sodden rope. He shoves aside and slams both hands onto the wheel, heavy and rusted and fighting him like it’s alive. He cranks, throwing his whole weight into it, muscles screaming, boots slipping on flooded grating. Water hammers his ribs, tries to pry his hands loose, tries to peel his fingers one by one like a child picking petals but he grunts and turns anyway. The system answers with a long, aching scream of steel, a sound that travels into the bones of the building like a pain response.

The pitch drops, less frantic turbulence, more directed flow. The current stops pushing into this branch and starts pulling past it, as if the tunnel finally remembers where the water is supposed to go. The river chooses a path, the pressure easing by a hair.

The hands in the water falter, shapes losing cohesion, fingers dissolving back into meaningless current. 

Sanji’s still braced around Koby’s shoulders, holding him upright against the flow like he’s a human railing. His eyes are wild, furious, wet with something he won’t name. “Zoro,” he says, awed and terrified. “What about the city?”

As if on cue, a distant sound filters down through the ladder well: a siren, muffled, dopplering away. Another. Then a low rolling roar, like a manhole erupting somewhere above, water finding an exit point the hard way.

The city’s coughing, sure, but at least the tunnel’s no longer trying to swallow them whole.

Zoro’s chest heaves. He keeps his hands on the wheel for one more second like he doesn’t trust it to stay closed unless he wills it, fingers shaking, wrists burning. A faint whisper threads the water at their ankles, not Luffy this time, not Sanji, not anyone human. Just pressure shaped into syllables, like something speaking through drainpipes and rusted teeth: “You can’t close every door.”

Zoro’s eyes narrow as he looks at Sanji — really looks at him, soaked and shaking and alive — and something in his chest locks into place with brutal clarity, heavier than fear. “I don’t need every door,” he says, low enough that only Sanji hears, the words dragged up like a vow from deep water. “Just you.”

Sanji’s breath catches. His mouth opens on an argument, on a retort, don’t say that here but the tunnel swells again, impatient, and the water keeps moving. Zoro hooks Koby under the arm and Sanji gets the other side so together they haul the kid toward the ladder well, boots slipping, water tugging at their hips like it wants to keep its chosen mouth.

Above them, the city’s rain roars. Below them, the tunnel listens. And behind them, deep in the concrete lung, something wounded and intelligent sinks back into the dark, carrying their voices with it, carrying the taste of a kiss and a vow, waiting for another storm.

x

The ladder out is slick as bone.

Not metaphorically: it’s literally slick, a film of algae and stormwater and city grit coating each rung until it feels like climbing the inside of a throat. Zoro’s hands don’t feel like hands anymore. They’re numb hooks that keep finding rung after rung because stopping means the water wins, and the water doesn’t fight fair. The metal’s cold enough to sting through his gloves; it bites into the raw spots where the rope burned him, salt in open skin. Below, the channel roars and slaps, still angry even as the flow reroute, still eager to yank at ankles, to punish any pause with a swallow.

Koby’s between them, half-carried, half-climbing. His limbs are shaking so hard he’s barely coordinated, body stuttering on the rungs like a broken marionette. Sanji keeps one arm locked around his waist like a seatbelt, dragging him upward with the same ruthless care he uses when he’s feeding a stubborn needle through a stubborn cut: no gentleness, no hesitation. Just done. Just survive.

“Up,” Sanji snarls, voice shredded raw. “Don’t you dare go limp on me now.”

Koby makes a wet, broken sound that might be a sob or a laugh. He keeps moving because Sanji won’t let him stop.

Zoro climbs first because that’s how his body is wired: go up, go ahead, take the hit first. He forces himself to pause at each rung long enough to glance down, to make sure Sanji and Koby are still there — still attached to the same reality, still not being rewritten by shadow and water and voice. Every glance costs him breath, every breath tastes like rust and river water and fear.

The grate overhead's a faint square of darker darkness at first. Then it becomes visible — iron bars slick with rainwater pouring through. Open air, almost.

Zoro wedges his shoulder under the grate and shoves but it doesn’t move. Of course it doesn’t: it’s bolted or jammed or just refusing out of spite. His arms shake. His shoulders burn. He pushes again, teeth bared, and the grate groans like it’s offended at being asked.

Sanji’s voice from below, ragged and furious: “Don’t you dare get trapped under a grate, Moss!”

Zoro almost laughs; it comes out as a cough that tastes like silt. He heaves, the grate shifting a few centimetres, just enough for rain to pour through in a colder spray, splattering his face. It feels like being slapped awake, like the sky itself is telling him to just fucking move. He shoves again until the grate finally gives, scraping up and away with a shriek that echoes down the ladder well like a scream. Night air rushes in, wet and cold and alive.

Zoro hauls himself up through the opening and rolls onto the ground. Rain hits him full-force, so hard that the drops sting his scalp, soak his hair, plaster his clothes to his skin like a second weight. Streetlight turns everything silver and smeared and, honestly, the city sounds wrong after the tunnels: too open, too many directions, too much space for bad things to hide. Sirens wail in the distance — real sirens, human sirens, not the tunnel’s throat trying to sing.

Zoro drags in a breath so deep his ribs ache. Then he’s on his knees at the opening, hands braced on slick curb, reaching down. Sanji appears first in the square of darkness, hauling Koby up in front of him. His hair’s a wreck, dripping into his eyes, jaw clenched so hard the muscles jump. He looks like someone who crawled out of the mouth of something that wanted him and decided to bite back.

Koby’s hands scrabble at the edge of the opening, slipping in rain. Zoro grabs him by the forearm and yanks, spilling him onto the ground. Koby immediately starts coughing, whole-bodied and violent, water and air and panic tearing out of him in ugly bursts. He tries to speak and can’t, just chokes and sobs and clutches his own chest like he’s checking his lungs are still his.

Zoro doesn’t let go of him until Sanji's out too, until he's hauled himself up and out with a grunt, shoes slipping on the wet curb. He stands for half a second like he’s about to collapse, swaying under exhaustion and adrenaline and a dozen things he’s going to refuse to name. Then he straightens anyway — because he’s Sanji — and kicks the grate back down with a vicious clang, like he’s sealing a coffin.

The sound lands heavy. Final.

Zoro’s ears are still ringing, head still aching with the phantom pressure behind his eyes. He can’t tell if he’s shaking from cold or from the fact that he is finally out and the world didn’t end.

Koby hunches over on the ground, coughing, sobbing, repeating the same word like it’s the only one he owns: “Sorry… sorry…”

Sanji drops into a crouch beside him immediately, rage draining into motion like it always does. He checks Koby’s pulse with two fingers, presses a hand between his shoulder blades, grounding him. “Just breathe. Don’t talk yet.”

Koby tries to nod and it’s sloppy but, god, it counts.

Zoro watches Sanji’s hands — always hands, always the way he touches like it matters, like bodies are worth keeping intact. That tenderness inside all that sharpness is what almost kills him. It’s what the tunnel tried to use like a door.

Sanji glances up at Zoro, rain running down his cheek in a line that looks like a tear until it drips off his jaw and for a moment his expression's unreadable, just anger and relief and something brittle all tangled together. Like his face is trying to decide what emotion is safest to wear in public. Then his mouth twists and he does what he always does when he’s about to crack: he makes it a joke. “Bet the channel will love this one.”

Zoro scowls at the reference, at the stupid little thread that brought them here. The footage, the algorithm, the kiss at the end of the last job that turned into three days of silence and a haunted tunnel that learned the shape of their mouths.

Zoro’s hands curl at his sides, fingers still half-numb. “Shut up.”

Sanji’s gaze flicks to him. “What?”

“You know what,” Zoro says, low. Rain runs into his mouth. He tastes metal and river water. “Don’t hide behind that.”

For a second the familiar fight sparks, easy and practised, safe. Sanji’s eyes flash but then he falters, because they're out here under open sky, alive by the skin of their teeth and there’s nowhere for the truth to echo except between them. There are no walls to swallow it. No tunnel to make it safer by making it muffled.

Sanji’s hand stays on Koby’s back. He looks at Zoro like he’s trying to decide whether to bite or bleed. “What d'you want from me? A thank you? A medal for heroic dumbass of the year? Because I’m fresh out.”

“I want you to stop running,” Zoro answers, simple because he’s too tired for anything else. Too raw. Too close to losing him to dress it up.

Sanji flinches like Zoro stepped on something exposed. His voice drops, and there’s real fear there now, not the tunnel kind, the human kind. “Zoro… if we… if we fuck this up — ” He gestures, helpless and angry, at nothing and everything: Koby sobbing on the ground, the rain, the streetlight, the grate they just kicked shut, the city with its sirens and its wet bitumen and its oblivious city. The world that'll keep spinning whether or not their hearts do. “The channel. Usopp, Nami, the schedule. The sponsors. We built this and if we… if we break up then it falls apart.”

Zoro’s chest tightens; it’s so painfully Sanji it almost hurts, worrying about the channel, the crew, the livelihood, the structure, anything he can call practical so he doesn’t have to say the real thing. He takes one step closer, keeping his voice steady, his face gentle, his hands calm. “It won’t fall apart.”

Sanji laughs, short and bitter. “You don’t know that.”

“I do.” And he does, truly. He’s seen Sanji make meals out of nothing, seen him keep people alive with spite and tenderness, seen him build a family from scrap wood and cigarette smoke. And because this isn’t about the channel, it never was.

Sanji’s throat works. He looks away for half a second, jaw clenched, then back again, eyes bright with exhaustion and fury and something that looks too much like fear. “Kissing you was a mistake, not because I didn’t want it.”

Zoro stills; the rain drums on the ground. Koby coughs wetly beside them and Sanji’s gaze drops to his hands on his back, as if he can’t look at Zoro and survive it. His fingers flex once, restless, like they want to grab something and don’t know what’s safe.

“I pulled back because I panicked,” Sanji admits, low. “Because I — because you don’t just… do that to your partner. You don’t kiss your partner like it’s the last breath you’ll ever get and then — and and then watch him look at you like he’s gonna stay.”

“I didn’t expect anything,” Zoro says, honest. “I just… I couldn’t not.”

Sanji’s eyes snap up. Zoro meets them and holds them and refuses to look away. His breath trembles and he hates that it does. “I meant what I said. I just need you.” His voice catches and he hates that too. He pushes through anyway, because if he stops here then silence wins. “I love you. I’ve loved you. And I’m done pretending it’s not true because it makes you scared.”

Sanji goes so still that for a second Zoro thinks he’s broken him. Then he lets out a breath that shakes like it’s been trapped under his ribs for years. “You idiot.”

It isn’t an insult; it’s a confession in his language.

Zoro’s mouth twists. “Yeah.”

Sanji looks at him, rain sliding down his face, eyes too bright, expression stripped of performance. “I thought if I let myself want it, I’d ruin it.” He laughs, small and miserable. “I thought I’d make it ugly. I thought I’d ruin the channel. Ruin the crew. Ruin you. I thought you’d regret it and I wouldn’t survive that.”

Zoro’s chest aches so hard it feels like pressure. He steps closer, slow and careful, like he’s approaching a frightened animal — like he’s approaching Sanji. “You won’t ruin it. And if the channel can’t survive us being honest then maybe the channel wasn’t worth what it cost.”

Sanji’s eyes flicker, wet and furious and soft in a way that looks like it hurts him, gaze dropping to Zoro’s mouth so blatantly that Zoro’s pulse punches hard. Sanji lifts one hand off Koby’s back and, very slowly, grips the front of Zoro’s hoodie, fingers curling into the soaked fabric like he’s claiming something solid. Like he needs the proof of Zoro’s body there to believe any of this.

“Don’t make me say it nicely,” Sanji whispers, voice shaking. “You know I can’t.”

Zoro exhales a breath that might be a laugh. “Wouldn’t believe you if you did.”

Sanji’s mouth twitches, pain and amusement tangled, before he leans in and kisses Zoro, shaking and rough at the edges but chosen. Zoro’s hands come up and settle, one at Sanji’s jaw, one at the back of his neck, steadying, anchoring, holding like he promised he would.

Sanji pulls back just enough to breathe, forehead bumping Zoro’s. His eyes are half-lidded, expression wrecked and stubborn. “I love you too,” he says, quiet and fierce, like it’s a threat to the universe. Like he’s daring anything — ghosts, tunnels, fear — to take that from him.

Zoro’s chest caves in with relief so hard it’s almost pain. “Good, because I’m not doing the silence thing again.”

Sanji’s laugh is wet and shaky. “Yeah,” he says. “Me neither.”

Behind them, Koby makes a small, exhausted sound and looks up, bleary and confused, catching the tail end of it. He blinks hard, then promptly looks away with the politeness of someone who has almost died and doesn’t want to witness more trauma.

Sanji clears his throat, returning one hand to Koby like responsibility snapping back into place.

Zoro keeps his body close anyway, shoulder brushing Sanji’s, warmth against cold, real against rain.

The city keeps coughing water through drains and gutters. Somewhere deep under concrete, something wounded and intelligent waits for another storm.

But up here, under streetlight and rain, they’re alive and together and for once — for once — that gets to be enough.

A LIL EPILOGUE, JUST FOR KICKS

Usopp counts them in like he’s about to launch a rocket. “Three, two… one! And… rolling!”

The little red light on the camera blinks to life, the lens whirring as he fiddles with the zoom, then with the focus, then with the zoom again like the image might suddenly become less embarrassing if he keeps touching it. Zoro sits on the couch like the couch personally insulted him, legs spread, elbows on knees, mug in hand. Steam curls up in lazy ribbons. He’s clean. Dry. Alive. Which still feels faintly unbelievable some mornings. Sanji hovers at the edge of the frame pretending he isn’t hovering. He’s wearing an apron tied tight over a black shirt, hair tucked behind one ear and still refusing to behave. The apron reads KISS THE COOK in big, obnoxious letters.

Zoro stares at it exactly once and then looks away with the intensity of a man refusing to acknowledge the sun.

It doesn’t work. The letters still exist.

Usopp clears his throat. “Welcome back to Straw Hats After Dark!” He points at the camera like a host on late-night TV. “I’m your producer, camera operator, emotional support human, and the reason Nami hasn’t sued this entire channel into the ocean.”

From somewhere off-screen, there’s the faint sound of a phone buzzing — Nami’s name lighting up the lockscreen with at least three knife emojis. Robin reacts with a quiet little laugh from the dining table where she’s reading, because of course she is. Sanji flicks a glance toward the window to where, outside, the city is damp and warm, that soft Australian summer rain that doesn’t fall so much as hang in the air. The kind that makes everything smell like eucalyptus and wet pavement and possibility.

Usopp flips a page on his clipboard. “Okay! It is February fourteenth. Valentine’s Day. Which means the audience has questions, and by audience I mean: everyone. Including people who should absolutely not have my number.”

Sanji makes an unimpressed noise and slides a plate onto the coffee table like it’s a peace offering and also a threat: little heart-shaped pastries, glossy with dark chocolate and arranged with surgical precision. Strawberries cut into neat fans. A dusting of powdered sugar like fresh snow and Zoro’s eyebrows tick up despite himself.

Usopp gasps loudly. “You made Valentine’s desserts?”

Sanji doesn’t look at him. “Shut up.”

Zoro takes one anyway and pretends it’s purely tactical.

Usopp beams at the lens. “Alright! First question: ‘Where have you guys been? It’s been forever. Did you quit? Did you die? Did you get kidnapped by ghosts?’”

Zoro’s jaw tightens around his bite. The sugar sticks to his tongue; the memory sticks to everything else and Sanji’s hands still, just for a second, like he can feel the question’s shadow on his skin. His eyes flick to Zoro, quick and careful. Checking. Zoro answers first. “We clearly didn’t die.”

Usopp nods quickly like he’s relieved to receive confirmation from the living. “Great! Good. Love that. So why no uploads?”

Sanji exhales through his nose and steps fully into frame, leaning his hip against the arm of the couch. It’s casual in the way that isn’t casual at all, close enough that his thigh brushes Zoro’s shoulder when he shifts. Zoro doesn’t move away. “We took a break,” Sanji says, voice smoother now, presenter-voice warming up. “For a while.”

Usopp squints. “Because of… you guys flooding half the city.”

Zoro can hear the rain tick against the window. He can hear the camera’s tiny internal fan. He can hear his own heartbeat, stubborn and loud and can see the way Sanji’s mouth tightens before it softens. “Yeah, sure. Let’s go with that.”

Usopp clears his throat and rallies. “Okay! Next question. From… a lot of people. What the hell happened in the tunnels, we heard —”

And that’s — no. They’re not discussing this on a live feed, hell, maybe not ever. Zoro’s voice cuts in, calm as a blade. “Actually, we’re dating.”

The silence that follows is kind of silence with weight. The kind that makes the room feel briefly unreal, like the tunnel has followed them home and swallowed the sound. Usopp freezes mid-sentence. The camera jitters. Somewhere in the apartment, Nami chokes on her drink.

“What?” Usopp says finally, very small, like his brain has blue-screened.

Sanji makes a noise that’s half cough, half strangled vowel. “Zoro,” he hisses, and his entire face goes red so fast it’s almost impressive. “What the fuck! We were going to — there was a plan —”

“There wasn’t,” Zoro says.

“There was,” Sanji insists, voice cracking with indignation. “We were going to ease into it. Control the narrative. Not drop it like a fucking — like a —”

Usopp’s hands are shaking on the camera. He points it back and forth between them like he’s watching rare wildlife. “Holy! Okay, okay, chat’s gonna—” He looks down at his phone where the livestream comments are already exploding. “Yeah, chat’s going insane.”

And as if summoned, the screen fills with hearts and capslock and vibrating keyboard smashes:

NO WAY????

ZOSAN REAL

THE TUNNEL WAS A LOVE RITUAL CONFIRMED

SANJI BLUSHING LMAOOOO

ZORO SAID IT SO CASUALLY I’M SCREAMING

Sanji covers his face with both hands like he’s trying to disappear. His fingers are trembling but not with fear, just with the sheer violence of being perceived. Zoro watches him for a second, expression unreadable. Then he reaches out and pries one of Sanji’s hands down gently, thumb brushing over the back of his knuckles like it’s the most normal thing in the world and Sanji’s eyes flick up through his lashes, incandescent with embarrassment before he squeezes Zoro’s fingers once, hard, then shifts their hands so his fingers lace with Zoro’s properly, because if he’s going to do this, he’s going to do it all the way or not at all.

Zoro’s mouth curves, small. “Relax, Curls, they probably already knew.”

“They did not,” Sanji hisses.

Usopp makes another dolphin noise. “Oh, they did. We all did. Robin called it like a year ago. Anyway! Walk us though when it happened.”

Sanji immediately starts to say something evasive but Zoro interrupts calmly. “After the tunnels.”

Usopp leans forward like the camera is gossip. “After the tunnels as in… after you almost died?”

Sanji gives him a flat look. “Yes, Usopp. After we almost died.”

Usopp nods vigorously. “Okay, okay, makes sense. Trauma bonding. Love that for you.”

Sanji’s glare could curdle milk. “We did not —”

Zoro’s thumb strokes once over Sanji’s knuckles, quiet and steady and Sanji shuts the hell up. It’s almost funny.

Usopp grins wider. “‘Who kissed who first?’”

Sanji makes a scandalised choking sound. “Absolutely not —”

“Me,” Zoro says.

Usopp’s dolphin noise returns with a vengeance and Sanji throws a look at the ceiling like he’s praying for strength. “Great. Fantastic. We’ll it on the merch.”

Sanji looks like he might actually throw him into the ocean. Zoro’s hand tightens on Sanji’s fingers, a small calming pressure.

Usopp laughs, relieved. “Okay! Next question: ‘Are you gonna keep ghost hunting?’”

Sanji lights up instantly, like someone flipped a switch. “Yes! But… rules.”

Zoro nods. “No solo runs.”

“No baiting,” Sanji adds, glaring at Zoro like he can see every stupid impulse he’s ever had. “No ‘let’s just see what happens’ like you’re not made of meat.”

Zoro snorts. “I am made of meat.”

Usopp wheezes. “That’s — please don’t say it like that.”

Sanji keeps going, animated now. “We’re upgrading gear. More salt. More iron. Better comms. And if anyone hears a voice they love, they shut up and they squeeze someone’s hand instead.”

Zoro’s grip tightens automatically on Sanji’s fingers. Sanji notices and flushes, but doesn’t pull away.

Usopp’s grin turns feral. “Okay, okay, so what’s the next location? Tell them!”

Sanji reaches under the coffee table and drags out a folder thick with printouts and maps. He flings it open with a flourish. “Coastal quarantine station,” he announces, eyes shining. “Historic. Documented deaths. Reports of footsteps, lights, voices, all the classics. And, most importantly, it’s above ground. No tunnels.”

Zoro relaxes visibly. “Good.”

Sanji smirks. “Also there’s a little cafe nearby with excellent pastries which is obviously the real reason we’re going.”

Zoro gives him a look. “Liar.”

Sanji grins. “Okay, fine. It’s mostly the cafe.”

Zoro’s other hand slides under the edge of Sanji’s apron and finds his hip, a quiet steady touch that makes Sanji shut up mid-protest. Sanji glares at him with no real heat. Then, because he can’t help himself, he leans down and presses a quick kiss to the corner of Zoro’s mouth, so fast it’s almost a secret. 

Usopp makes a strangled, delighted noise. “Cutting! I’m cutting before it gets gross.”

The camera beeps and the red light goes dark. Rain ticks against the window like applause and for the first time in a long time, the quiet in the room feels safe, full of warmth, full of breath, full of hands held on purpose.