Chapter Text
Zoro ran away from home when he was seven.
It wasn’t just to get away from the family he barely remembers now. He’d always wanted to be the best, even then. Zoro could barely remember a time when he wasn’t motivated to be the best. It wasn’t hard to leave his old life, his old memories, behind, even as young as he was. He was meant for bigger things, or he’d at least die trying for them.
Stumbling upon the dojo in Shimotsuki had been a blind stroke of luck. He remembers barging in during that afternoon’s lesson, yelling near incoherently in his excitement to train with them. He told them his name was Zoro, and no one asked any questions about it, offering him food, shelter, and training. His hair had grown long, longer than he had ever had it, from his travels, and he remembers Koushirou helping him cut his hair short.
They were the first people who ever looked at him, and saw him.
He devoted all of his time to practicing, especially after he had embarrassed himself by losing so brutally to Kuina during their first duel. Kuina had been everything Zoro needed in a rival. She was arrogant, stern and abrasive, never one to mince words or spare feelings. She destroyed Zoro, over and over, knocking him down and leaving him winded every time they fought. Yet, whenever he became overwhelmed with frustration at his repeated losses, he’d think of that cocksure grin he’d see her throwing at him from his spot on the floor, and he’d burn, burn, with the urge to finally beat her, to be the best.
He hadn’t beaten her yet, not even once, but he was improving, their sparring matches drawing out just a bit longer with each iteration. Interpreting her position as the best being challenged, Kuina threw herself harder into her training. Zoro had thrilled at the idea that he’d been the one to challenge her arrogance, to push her to improve at the threat of him, even as she continued to beat him into the dirt with each match.
Zoro sought her out late one night for their two-thousand and first fight, demanding they battle with real swords. Kuina, eyes downcast, accepted without a word, and then beat him with the same swiftness she had in all their practice matches. Zoro, supine in the grass yet again with his face damp from tears, had bared his soul to her, and told her of his dream to be the best.
And Kuina had laughed at him.
It was a bitter, nihilistic choke of a noise, and for the first time, Zoro had wondered what she had been doing out here by herself in the first place so late at night. Her cheeks were flushed, deeper in color than they should have been from the exertion of their match, and her eyes were rimmed red.
“You’re lucky, Zoro,” she had spat, eyes turned up towards the sky, like she was trying to hold in tears. He’d never seen Kuina cry before. He’d never seen any expression on her face other than her teeth gritted in determination or her grinning in victory. “I want to be the greatest swordsman too. But girls grow up, and their bodies become weaker than men’s. I’m never going to be the greatest.”
Kuina tells him this, and Zoro can barely comprehend the words she’s saying. He thinks of the countless hours he’s spent training by the river bed, the green locks of his hair left on the floor after Koushirou helped him shear it all off, of the people he thought of as family a lifetime ago calling him by a name he despised. Zoro puts a hand to his chest, where he’d hastily wrapped bandages earlier that day, remembering how his body had begun changing and he didn’t understand why-
“You’re lucky to have been born a man, Zoro,” Kuina finishes lamely.
Zoro sees red.
“How can you say that after you’ve just beaten me!?” he screams at her, sitting up and ripping handfuls of grass from the ground. His throat burns with the effort to hold back his tears, his whole body burns.
Kuina looks back down at him, almost like she’d forgotten he was there, her eyes forlorn and tired, unlike Zoro had ever seen them before.
“It’s not fair! You’re my goal!” He can’t keep the tremor out of his voice. “How can you sit there and tell me you’ll be beaten one day, like - like it’s inevitable, when I’ve done nothing but train to beat you? Because of that?” There’s so much he wants to tell her, so much more, but he can barely find the words beyond the rage that’s making the edges of his vision blur.
He stands up now, clenching his fist in the front of Kuina’s shirt. Her eyes widen in shock at the motion.
“Promise me this,” he growls, “that one of us will become the world’s greatest swordsman. Promise me!”
She looks at him like a deer in the headlights, and a few seconds pass until she’s shaken out of her stupor. She sniffles, then, finally, grins that arrogant smile again that she always looks down at him with when he loses. “Idiot. You’re so weak.” She reaches forward and grabs his other hand, pulling it up towards her face.
“I promise.”
»»————- ————-««
He never got to tell Kuina the truth. Not the full truth, anyway.
He leaves, takes her sword with him, and travels the East Blue in search of the world’s greatest swordsman. He trains, and fights, and takes bounties to get by. His body changes, accumulates scars, and he learns to adapt to it, to shape it in his own image as he struggles to be the best.
Deep down, there’s a part of him that knows it should have been Kuina. It should have always been Kuina. Instead, she’s buried in the ground by circumstances outside of anyone’s control and he’s the only one left with their dream. He has to be the best for both of them.
Zoro would have to be enough.
He meets a boy in a straw hat with a smile bright and sure, and he follows him to a floating restaurant. He meets an angry woman with flaming hair, a long-nosed fool, and a man with eyes the color of the sea with that same smirk, that same arrogant smile that reminds him of the spirit on his hip-
He meets the world’s greatest swordsman. He’s made aware of the depth of his inadequacy by Mihawk’s blade piercing diagonally between the twin scars on his chest. The man with the damnable smirk yells at him as he bleeds out, to give up on his dream, to not die for something so out of reach. In his blood-loss-induced haze he's jolted with the dissonance of it, that arrogance so similar to the one that motivated him for years, telling him that it isn't worth it.
He burns to prove him wrong.