Chapter Text
“Hey,” a young boy from the dojo says. He's prodding at her with his foot.
“What,” Zoro growls at him from where she’s doing pushups on the floor. She doesn’t bother to look at him, or at the friends that she knows are gathered like swarming flies at his shoulder. Forty-eight, she continues to count. Forty-nine…
“No one’s ever gonna’ marry you, you know,” the boy sneers, as if his opinion really matters to Zoro at all.
Fifty-one…
“Girls aren’t supposed to be strong, you’re supposed to be wives,” he tells her, voice rising as he fails to get a reaction.
Fifty-four…
“No one’s ever gonna’ think you’re pretty. And no one is ever gonna think you’re strong, neither! Just a silly, stupid, weak girl—”
Zoro pushes up out of her form and socks the little fucker right in the nose. She doesn’t hit him hard enough to break it. She hits him hard enough that it’ll sting and it’ll bruise something nasty, but she didn’t break it.
While the boy tries not to cry and his friends buzz uselessly around him, a loud laugh cuts through the space. Kuina comes down the stairs, holding her sword, smiling and giggling.
“Idiots,” she jeers at the boys, who are now scrambling to get away. Kuina is a few years older than them (and Zoro, too) and because of it, she towers over them. Naturally, they are terrified of her. She can knock their teeth in as easy as pie and they know it. “I told you not to mess with Zoro!” She shouts after them. When they're gone, she ruffles Zoro’s hair.
“Knock it off!” Zoro grumbles, swatting at her. “I’m not a baby!”
“Nah, you just hit like one.”
With a wordless snarl, Zoro lunges at her and misses, falling flat on her face. She staggers to her feet while Kuina looks on, smiling but merciless.
“I’m gonna be even stronger than you, one day,” Zoro growls at her through clenched baby-teeth.
“Good,” Kuina says, vicious. “I better not be the only woman at the top of the world. That sounds stupid.”
Kuina doesn’t live long enough to see the top of the world, though Zoro has no doubt that she would have. Kuina was destined to. Something inside of her burned brighter than any fire, smarted harder than any bruise, and dreamed bigger than the whole of deep, fathomless sea. Zoro will carry her sister’s dream on her shoulders and at her hip when she makes it to the top.
Although they were not sisters by blood, they were sisters in every way that mattered. In the end, Koshiro does not hesitate to hand over Kuina's sword to a weeping, snotty-faced Zoro.
Her hair is about the length of Kuina’s when she sets off from the village, Wado and two other swords knocking against her side as she walks.
Zoro cuts it all off with the edge of a blade.
Zoro grows into all hard edges and jagged planes of muscle. She has very few skills, so she does hard labor in exchange for meals and a place to sleep in the towns she travels through. As a result, her body is made out of sinew and rock. Most that see her mistake her for a boy because she is tall and flat-chested and mean-looking with thick biceps and a hard jaw. She keeps her hair short, shaved close to her neck--never long enough to touch her ears or get in her face.
This is just fine with her, as she doesn’t really give a damn about what she looks like—only that she’s strong and people leave her alone.
The first (and only) time she can ever remember caring about how she looks, she's in an East Blue city called Maine Cape. She’s fifteen years old but looks closer to seventeen because of her height, so she manages to earn some easy belli lifting crates for some fishermen by the docks.
Only once they’ve paid her and she’s on her way does she realize she has to piss pretty badly. She walks for awhile trying to find a fucking bathroom—it wouldn’t do her any good to piss any old place as she often does when traveling; Maine is a busy enough city that she’d be arrested for it—and it doesn’t help that all the damn streets look the same and all the buildings keep moving.
Eventually, she gives up and knocks at the first door she sees. It’s some kind of tattoo parlor. Marines and fishermen and some rough looking men mingle inside, talking loudly over a persistent mechanical humming. An older woman with slick, black hair and all sorts of piercings in her face opens the door.
“Can I use your bathroom?” Zoro manages.
“Knock yourself out,” the woman replies.
As soon as Zoro gets her pants down, she realizes something is wrong.
There’s blood everywhere. It’s coming from inside of her.
She’s pretty fucking sure that she hasn’t gotten injured there of all places. She’s really very fucking sure that she would have noticed if she had. But the undeniable truth of it is staining her pants and her thighs and her hands now, too.
She takes care of her business, cleans up as best as she can, and hurries back out towards the woman with the metal in her face.
“Hey,” Zoro starts, feeling awkward. “Do you have any bandages?”
The woman gives her a more thorough once-over. “You injured?”
No, Zoro thinks, unable to place the blood to any wound or source of pain. Maybe she’s sick from the inside and is going to die right here in this stupid, shitty city in East Blue, having gotten nowhere and having done her sister nothing but a great disappointment.
“N—Yeah?” She manages, staring hard at the floor.
The woman quirks an eyebrow. “Well? Which is it?”
“I’m… bleeding,” Zoro hisses out eventually. She doesn’t really know what more to say than that. After a moment, the woman hums in understanding.
“Kid, why didn’t you just say so? This your first time or something?” The woman starts to head back towards the bathroom. She rummages around under the sink and eventually gives Zoro a bundle of items. “There’s a shower in the apartment upstairs, go wash yourself. Leave your clothes outside the door and I’ll scrub ‘em for you. When you’re done, yell and I'll explain what you do with this.” She sets what looks like a densely packed roll of cotton atop the bundle. It’s no longer than Zoro’s middle finger.
Feeling much more out of her depth than she has in a while, Zoro does as the woman tells her. Admittedly, the shower feels great against her aching muscles. When she’s finished, the woman brings her a spare set of plain clothes and a glass of a strong, bitter alcohol.
“You’re a woman, now,” she says, encouraging Zoro to drink with a nod. She teaches her about all sorts of shit no one ever bothered to—about “feminine hygiene” and “her womb” and sex and where babies come from, of all things. With a very serious expression, the woman places her hands on Zoro’s shoulders and says, “Don’t get pregnant. You look like you’re a tough kid. I’d hate to see all of that go to waste because some asshole couldn’t bother to use a rubber.”
Swallowing hard and wondering why anyone would ever want sex, Zoro nods.
The woman claps her on the back and ushers her down towards the main floor of the parlor. In the work-space where men are getting art inked under their skin and talking in loud, rancorous voices, the woman opens a drawer and pulls out a vast collection of metal jewelry like the things that decorate her face.
“Pick whatever you’d like, kid. It’s on the house.”
“What?” Zoro blinks at her, not understanding.
“The day I became a woman, my mom took me to get my ears pierced.” She points to a few silver studs in her ear lobes. “It’s a right of passage.”
None of that really makes any fucking sense to Zoro, but she’s distracted anyways. She selects three identical gold bars out of the case.
“I want these,” she says, overcome by a strange feeling of rightness.
“Good choice, kid.”
Eventually, Zoro makes a name for herself as a bounty hunter. Slowly but surely, she’s climbing her way up in the world. Each new town she enters, a rumor seems to have gotten there first, carrying her name and gathering infamy with each mouth that speaks it.
In Shells Town, she is seventeen, and technically, is not allowed in this bar. (But, with each year that goes by, she just gets taller and her shoulders get broader to the point where no one questions her age. It is admittedly very convenient.)
So, when she saves some little girl from a rabid dog and her mom offers a free meal and a free drink at her bar as a token of her gratitude, Zoro keeps her mouth shut and accepts.
But since she’s not supposed to be in this bar anyways and she doesn’t really feel like spending the night in the local jail (wherever that may be) she keeps her head down as a smarmy-looking marine starts harassing the owner. It gets a little harder to play oblivious when the weasel-faced fuck starts getting aggressive with her. It gets impossible to ignore when his goons get violent and the owner’s little girl cries out, “Mommy!” and Zoro is suddenly to her feet at a truly alarming speed.
There’s a brief confrontation before Zoro admits to the murder of this asshole’s rabid fucking animal. The little girl is crying in her mother’s arms and Zoro wants it to stop—wants these genuine and kind (but weak, so, so weak) people to go about their lives—so she agrees to the sadist’s deal.
Zoro is seventeen and tied to a pole in a marine yard in the hot, hot sun and there is an idiot in a strawhat squawking about being a pirate and what the fuck, even?
Writing him off as a hallucination caused by heatstroke and dehydration, Zoro thunks her head against the unforgiving wood of the pole and closes her eyes. Her bandanna is soaked through with sweat. For the most part, she tunes him out.
As he walks away, strawhat bouncing on his head and black hair tickling at his shoulders, Zoro could swear that he looks like Kuina, for just a moment.
She writes this off as a symptom of heatstroke, too.
After the fight, the three of them (Luffy, this bean-headed wannabe marine, and Zoro) head back to the nice mom’s bar and she feeds them the most impressively sized meal Zoro has ever seen. Luffy inhales most of it which really shouldn’t be surprising, considering how loud and excessive this kid is in every other respect.
“Zoro-chan, would you like a bath?” the owner says after the commotion of the meal has died down.
The pink-haired bean-headed kid that Zoro hasn’t bothered to learn the name of looks like he’s about to stroke out. His eyes go wide. “W-w-wait—Zoro-kun is a girl?” he stammers.
Luffy turns to him with a quizzical expression, half of a chicken-wing hanging out of his mouth. He stares at his weird little friend like he expects him to start speaking entirely in riddles.
“Yeah,” Zoro says, pushing up from the table. “What of it?” she glares at the kid. Wannabe marine or not, she’ll kick his ass.
Luffy swallows the chicken-wing whole.
“Your bounty poster didn’t say that!” Luffy exclaims, not looking particularly off-put by the unexpected gender-reveal either way. Just curious.
Zoro shrugs. “Why would it?”
Luffy seems to think on that for a moment. “Good point!” he says eventually. He tucks back into the meal with gusto. Luffy’s friend just blinks at Zoro slowly with a not insignificant expression of awe. When Zoro swings her eyes over to him, he jumps and flushes pink from the head down.
“Don’t use all the hot water!” Luffy calls after her.
Sharing the dingy with Luffy isn’t bad. Actually, Zoro might say it’s kind of nice, if she would ever admit to such a thing. Luffy is an endless fountain of energy and stories and excitement that makes even the endless, quiet days at sea amusing. He’s good natured and reckless and free with his affection, flopping down into Zoro’s lap and using her as a pillow whenever he pleases. The first time he did it, she almost cut his balls off. It took her a bit to realize that the idiot didn’t really mean anything by it—he’s just overly tactile and doesn’t have a good concept of boundaries.
She acclimates to him and almost comes to be fond of him by the end of their first week together.
Nami, however, is a different story.
Nami is everything that Zoro is not and she has an instant distrust (and distaste) for the other woman. Nami is smooth, unblemished skin and dainty, feminine limbs. Her hair is short, but not boyishly short like Zoro’s—just short enough to still be feminine. She’s got freckles all over her brilliant, glowing skin and carries various balms and glosses for her pink lips. She bats her eyelashes and sticks out her ass and sizable breasts whenever a man with an equally sizable wallet walks by. Her laughter is like bells and her heels click-clack against most surfaces.
“You two smell like a barn,” she tells them, scowling particularly at Zoro.
They’re taking a couple days of rest in the town doctor’s infirmary while Zoro recovers from her stab wound. Luffy thinks Nami’s mothering is delightful. Zoro would rather get stabbed again than listen to Nami talk about skincare for a single second more.
After ushering Luffy away for a much-needed bath, Nami sighs and sits on the edge of Zoro’s infirmary bed. “How did you end up with a boy like that, anyways?” she asks and no—Zoro does not do this. She shrugs. Zoro does not engage in gossip. Zoro is not going to chat while Nami paints or files or sharpens her nails or what the fuck ever. That’s not who she is and it is never who she will be.
Nami is the kind of girl that has an adventurous phase in her teenage years and then either gets married or gets knocked up and lives an uneventful, but pretty little life, Zoro thinks. She almost loathes her for it. Zoro will never be that.
“I don’t trust you,” Zoro says instead, because there’s gotta be a reason why a girl like this is out robing pirates for fun, and a simple “adventurous phase” isn’t motivation enough, in Zoro’s book.
Nami’s eyes narrow.
“Whatever,” Nami says, feigning nonchalance.
It doesn’t work. Zoro is a swordsman. She knows when she’s cut someone.
Usopp is great because he’s just the right type of wild to keep Luffy occupied so that Zoro doesn’t have to. Also, Usopp has connections that can do things like build ships and Zoro is pretty fond of having a bed now, even if she does have to share the room with the Sea Witch. (At least it’s not the unforgiving wood floor at the bottom of the dingy.)
“Well, it was nice to meet you guys,” Usopp says, awkward and nervous on the beach. Zoro rolls her eyes.
“Get on the ship,” she tells him. He scrambles to obey, overjoyed.
Luffy gives her a knowing (and almost smug, she would say, if she thought Luffy was capable of being smug) smile and she wonders, is this what it is to be first mate?
The lanky, leggy twig of a blonde chain-smokes his way over to their table at the floating restaurant. He fixes his single visible eye at Nami from underneath a truly ridiculous blonde fringe. His expression is sultry and he's trying way too hard to be cool.
“Hello,” he croons, his voice not entirely unpleasant.
Then, Zoro gets her first glance at his whole face and has to bite her tongue to keep from laughing outright.
His fucking eyebrow. She’s never seen anything like it. It’s hilarious. She kicks Usopp under the table and his eyes leap to her with a question heavy in his face. She nods frantically at the waiter.
Usopp’s eyes go comically wide and he claps a hand over his mouth, shoulders shaking in muted laughter. The movement catches the guy's eye. He looks to Usopp, scathing, before his eyes settle on Zoro. She can see him inhale slowly, startled.
“Well, hello there, my equally-as-lovely flower,” he starts. Nami erupts with terribly-suppressed laughter at the other end of the table. Usopp is nearly crying with the effort of holding back beside her.
“No,” Zoro says.
“Hm?” The waiter hums, batting his eyes at her. “Does the atmosphere not please you, my darling? Let me fetch you a rose for the table, or a bottle of wine, on the house.” He winks.
“No,” Zoro repeats. “Actually, yes, booze. Bring booze,” she amends.
“Oh my god,” Nami whispers to Usopp. “This is priceless. Someone get me a Den-Den Mushi. I have got to take a picture of Zoro’s face.”
The waiter fucking… bows? She doesn’t even know. “As you wish, my delicate rose,” he simpers.
Zoro exhales and pushes back from the table. She stands to her full height, finding herself eye to eye with the ridiculous curly-brow. She crosses her arms and has the absurd urge to flex and show him just what he thinks he’s calling delicate. This guy is so skinny, she thinks she could probably throw him over one shoulder if she had to. She fixes him with a flat stare.
“Look, Curlicue, I’m not delicate.” There’s a limit to the condescending shit she’ll put up with from men.
Impossibly, he holds her stare. Then, he flushes pink. She can practically see his heart jump in his chest. “No, I guess you’re not,” he says, sounding positively enamored, which is honestly very counterproductive to Zoro’s goal of scaring the shit out of him.
Before she can retort, he saunters off. She sits back down and tries to glare Usopp into silence.
Nami, the witch, leans across the table. “What was that?” She says, grinning, cat-like. “I’ve never seen you square up to a man like that before.”
Zoro does not like what she’s implying.
“Oh, put those things away, you damn hustler,” Zoro says, gesturing at Nami’s boobs where she has them pushed up comically against the table. “They’ll spill out of your shirt and sink the restaurant.”
Nami huffs and very pointedly does not adjust her tank-top.
“Please, not him,” Zoro says to Luffy.
Luffy whines, pouting. “But Zoro… He’s a cook.”
It occurs to her belatedly that this might be a losing battle.
Mihawk arrives at the Baratie and Zoro’s blood sings. She’s ripping her bandanna off of her arm and tying it around her head before she can even breathe through the excitement.
This is it, she thinks, hand tight around Wado. This moment feels a lot like destiny.
“Zoro?” Luffy asks, and there’s a lot in the prompting of her name.
“Captain,” Zoro breathes, finally. Her eyes fixed on the legend in front of her, on the goal of her life’s dream. She will defeat this man. She will take his title between her teeth and she will wear his mantle of Greatest at the very top of this world.
Luffy lets her go.
“Wait, woah, hold on, she’s not going to fight him, is she?” The simpering idiot-cook says. It is background noise, now. All that matters is the impending duel. Zoro’s skin hums with adrenaline, her whole body alight with it.
“Zoro is going to be the greatest,” Luffy replies.
“No, you—you have to stop her—he’ll—” The cook sounds panicked, almost.
Luffy places a single hand on the cook’s chest, holding him back, (not that Zoro sees.) “This is her dream,” her captain says, simply.
This is enough.
Her own blood is thick and metallic in her mouth as she swears an oath to her captain. She knows that she is crying—she can feel the warmth of her own tears against her face. She will not lose again. She will not lose. She thinks she understands what she saw in Luffy that very first day in Shells town—she saw the same inexorable will in the boy as she did in Kuina all those years ago. Luffy's does not dream bigger than the whole deep, fathomless sea. Luffy dreams bigger than the ocean itself.
Luffy is destined to reach the top. Zoro can feel it in her bones.
Nearly bisected, choking on her own blood and burning with fresh sea salt in her wounds, she swears to the sky, to her captain. She will not lose again.
Luffy receives her words with a smile.
Okay, so. Usopp is not much of a doctor.
Zoro drifts in and out of consciousness, partially from the trauma of her wounds and partially from the blood loss, too. It feels like there are hands inside of her chest, pulling out her guts and spreading them all over the deck. She thinks she cries out, but she can’t be sure.
When she finally, fully comes around, the ship they’re on is frighteningly empty.
“Zoro!” Usopp cries out, his hands are on her shoulders, gently urging her to lay back down. Johnny and Yosaku hover nervously just out of sight. Her entire body is in agony.
“Where—”
“Luffy ordered us to pursue Nami. He and Sanji will catch up later. You need to rest—you’re… you almost…” She hears him loud and clear, although he doesn’t finish.
“Thank you,” she tells him. She means it, too. Although he is afraid, Usopp is incredibly brave. His hands were steady as he stitched her up. This much she knows.
“Y-yeah. Just… don’t make me do that again, okay? We really need a doctor,” he says. Her vision is blurry and out of focus but she forces her eyes open. There are tears in the corners of his eyes. She can tell there’s still something he wants to say.
“Spit it out, Usopp.” She’s fighting for consciousness, here. If something is really, really wrong, she’d like to know before she passes out again.
“I’m sorry!” he splutters.
“What?” She forces out.
“Well, I—I had to—you see, the wound was on—um—your shirt was—well—and I—”
“Usopp. Are you kidding me right now?”
He gathers himself and bursts out, “The great captain Usopp is nothing less than a perfect gentleman, but extenuating circumstances—”
“Usopp. Oh my god, I was going to bleed out. I don’t care if you saw my tits,” she says none-too-gently.
“ Ohthankgod,” Usopp exhales all in a rush. “I thought you were going to kill me, if you survived.”
“You’re a fucking idiot,” she tells him. It’s the last thing she manages before she passes out.
Sanji is infuriating.
“Look, we’ve gotta’ fuckin’ talk,” Zoro growls out, cornering him in the kitchen of the Merry after breakfast one morning. Cocoyashi is long behind them and the Grand-line is waiting. It will be a few days until they reach Loguetown, but this shit can’t wait. It needs to stop. Now.
“Anything, Zoro-chwan,” Sanji starts, hearts in his eyes.
“Oh my god, you’ve gotta cut that shit out.” She pinches the bridge of her nose. “Stupid ero-cook… Look, you’re gonna get yourself killed over nothing.”
Now he’s taking her seriously. “Whatever do you mean, my darling?”
Zoro gestures to encompass all of him. “This! This thing that you do with women, it’s ridiculous. You were going to get yourself killed trying to keep me out of the fight at Arlong Park, you stupid fucking idiot. I can fend for myself.”
“You shouldn’t have to—”
Well and truly pissed, Zoro gets up in his face. “Really? Why? Cause I’m a fucking girl?”
Sanji splutters, but he doesn’t have to answer. She knows the truth of it without him having to say it.
“Get this through your fucking curly-brow skull. Your ridiculous chivalry bullshit routine? It doesn’t help anyone," she says in a growl. She can feel her own words vibrate deep in her chest. "Women aren’t lesser, women aren’t greater. Nami might not care if you simper around her and lose half your blood volume every time she wears a low-cut shirt, but if you get between me and a fight again? I will cut you down, nakama or not.” She backs up from him, practically boiling with anger.
“You’re not noble, Cook. You’re a fucking misogynist.”
When she leaves the kitchen, slamming the door behind her, Sanji does not follow.
(Zoro is a swordsman. She knows when she’s cut someone.)