Work Text:
I wanna be your slave
I wanna be your master
I wanna make your heartbeat
Run like rollercoasters
I wanna be a good boy
I wanna be a gangsta
'Cause you can be the beauty
And I could be the monster
It blew his fucking mind, really, how silly and unimportant and pathetic it was. How inconsequential of a thing in the greater scheme, how unforgivable a vice, how shameful a habit.
He couldn’t pinpoint the when and where with precision, but it had started.
Little by little, with remarkable subtlety, until he was too deep into the woods to turn around and leave; somewhere down the Grand Line, somewhen around the crew’s stint in Thriller Bark. That’s when it had become conscious on his part, at least.
One day she had stood, an enemy, on Merry’s deck; looked down on him over the sharp edge of Wado, made him feel small and inadequate with the ease she could disarm him with. The next she was precious nakama, someone he was ready to cut the World to save, someone he'd die for because he had one fucking job and no Straw-Hat was dying on his watch. No regrets, no second thoughts.
One day Zoro had wanted to rip the scorn out of her face with steel, the next he had found himself wondering why she smiled so little and why it looked so fake, restrained.
With her pale jokes and the trail of blood behind her that ran back to Ohara, only someone without a soul wouldn’t have found that woman fascinating, only someone with no thirst for fun or adventure wouldn’t have wanted to know more about her travels across the seas.
That’s how he had made it make reason the first few times he caught himself staring, anyway.
Way past the point where it was sensible of him not to trust her, he had kept an eye – two at the time – on her; watched her long fingers turn the pages of several books, followed the curve of her hips when she climbed up stairs or crouched before archaeological ruins, dusty crumbles of history that appeared to be the only thing that truly moved her.
Much had been there for the Straw-Hats to learn from her; she had sailed long and notably hard, it would have been a waste not to soak up as much information as they could.
It surely had helped that the information package came wrapped so neatly.
With the dauntingly long hair – and legs – and those pretty eyes she had, mirrors of blue water that read effortlessly into his very soul, it was hard to evade the spell her beauty cast on the world around her, not to say impossible. With every story, cautionary tale and anecdote Nico Robin had caught his attention and never let it free again.
It was what it was, an inconvenience on a good day, but he had sat on it too long not to recognize the ailment that plagued him.
He had a crush.
A stupid, useless, nonsensical, unnecessary crush; he made up unrealistic scenarios in his head, dreamed with his eye wide open – only one left now – whenever the damn woman as much as looked in his general direction.
It was bad. And he felt quite pathetic.
Almost as pathetic as…
“Nami-swan~! Here’s the coffee you asked me for!”
When admiration had turned to longing and vague respect blurred into affection he couldn’t tell, but he had hoped two years would help him bury the hatchet of desire.
It hadn’t.
One look at her on Sunny’s deck, at the big smile on her lips while she got reacquainted with the others – or the way the stupid pink skirt fell down her body – two years of convincing himself he was over it (her) were gone with the wind.
“I took the liberty to make you a little snack, too~!”
From where he had been pretending to nap under the shade of Nami’s tangerine trees, Zoro watched the ero-cook waltz across the deck below with a creased brow.
He supposed he had to give it to his arch-rival: he was less of a coward. At least he tried to act up on his pull towards women – and a certain navigator in particular – albeit with little to no success.
He didn’t freeze and panic and blurt out the first thing that popped into his mind when Robin approached him with anything neither battle nor crew related.
As a matter of fact…
“It’s nice today, isn’t it?”
A perfect ray of sunshine hit the top of the archaeologist’s head where she stood not too far from him, nose stuck in the clouds.
He took a long moment to appreciate the frame.
Then, the panic hit.
“I was wondering,” He licked his lips, “Are turtles the only animals who live up to a hundred years?”
Her eyes narrowed slightly as amusement turned to confusion, the latter drawing a horizontal line on her forehead.
“I’m not sure. I guess jellyfish are technically immortal,” She deadpanned, “Chopper’s probably going to help you more with that. I can send him up here if you’d like?”
“No need”.
Robin disappeared quickly after that.
She was nice today indeed.
And he was the same old fucking idiot.
I love you since this morning
Not just for aesthetic
I wanna touch your body
So fucking electric
I know you scared of me
You say that I'm too eccentric
I'm crying all my tears
And that's fucking pathetic
If anything, he was discreet.
Looked at her only when he was sure he wouldn’t get caught and kept his distance, respected the natural boundary of never-going-to-happen.
Watched her back on the battlefield but didn’t annoy her with small talk out of it.
His strange fixation wasn’t her problem to deal with, after all, but his shame.
So much energy wasted that he could have channeled where it really mattered: training.
Zoro figured he could learn to live with it, to be functional in spite of it. When coming clean was not an option, finding a way to circle around the issue was his best shot.
He started to avoid her.
Cut any octopus foolish enough to draw his weapon on her but tried not to be around her too much when there wasn’t an enemy in sight to monopolize his attention.
Not so much that she’d notice or think anything of it, but enough to keep himself the way he was supposed to be: sane, focused, rationally-inclined.
It even worked for a while.
Away from the eyes, away from the heart - they said. And they were right.
Then he watched a flying harpy puncture her shoulder side to side, watched her teal dress darken where the fabric was soaked in her blood, her eyes turn liquid because of the pain.
It occurred to him that he’d rather make a fool of himself than to leave her unprotected.
Not that he had expected to find a flying harpy made of ice in that of Punk Hazard, somewhere allegedly inhabited, but had he not been so eager to end in a different exploration team after freaking out over a pair of shorts, well, chances were Doflamingo’s minion wouldn’t have been able to touch her if he was there from the start, ready to welcome the ice with steel.
He kept the good eye on her as much as possible after that.
Even if it made his thoughts stray from the righteous path, even if it made him plummet faster and all the more violently down the slippery slope: by the time Sunny approached Dressrosa, she probably thought him a baboon – an awkward, stuttering mess who couldn’t as much as talk to her without tripping on his own words but wouldn’t let her out of sight, not one, not two but all three swords ready to shield her at all times.
Especially when that Trafalgar guy was aboard the brigantine, with his cooler-than-thou demeanor and the smooth talking that had everyone else forget he was a rival pirate captain on their same quest for the One Piece.
Luffy believed him an ally, so he was treating him like one, but that didn’t mean Zoro trusted him.
Not when he seemed to find any little excuse to monopolize the archaeologist’s attention with this or that book they had both read.
Part of him had succumbed to jealousy, he recognized that, didn’t appreciate the way she seemed so well-disposed towards the stranger, how threatened that made him feel in a twisted sort of way, but a bigger part thought the other Straw-Hats mad for the way they were so easily letting someone that went by the name of Surgeon of Death into their midst.
Even now, as the swordsman quietly lifted some weights in a lonely corner of the main deck, he couldn’t stop his eye from periodically looping around and checking on the spot where the man had been trapped into a game of cards with the captain. Arrogant smirk shaded by his well-kept goatee, it was clear to anyone but his opponent that Law had been just dealt an excellent hand.
“Those two make quite the striking pair, don’t you think?”
A novel clutched in her porcelain hand, Robin climbed her way down the wooden ladder with the agile grace only someone who had sailed as long as her could boast. In a weightless leap, she landed not far from where he stood, on a break in between repetitions, dabbing his sweat away on a towel that was already drenched.
The air around him went hot to sweltering as his eye caught on to the dress she had changed into and the way the fabric wrapped most sinfully around her body. She had her hair up, her long neck on full display – he had fantasized about sinking his teeth in it more times than he was proud of. With great effort, he looked away and at Law again.
“Hn. I think he’s out of place on Sunny”.
The way he saw it, it wasn’t wise to pour all their hopes and dreams into the new alliance just yet.
Frankly, he was surprised someone as smart and naturally distrustful as Robin had not second-guessed the whole ordeal more vocally.
They didn’t know shit about the guy, after all, didn’t know what drove him, what were his goals, his weaknesses.
It was common knowledge that pirate alliances failed more often than they succeeded, often within a day of getting stipulated.
The archaeologist herself had taught him that.
“But not next to Luffy”.
Whatever she meant by that, he got too distracted by the billowing of her skirt around her thighs as she covered the final steps between them to decipher it.
“Chopper told me there are sharks in the North Blue that live up to 400 years”.
“Oh?”
Zoro wanted to smack his own face with the sweaty towel. Probably would as soon as he was alone.
He didn’t have many weaknesses but holy shit, the absolute way he could get lost in that smile.
“Yeah,” He gave her a lame nod. “I want to cut one if we ever come across it”.
“I’m sure you will”.
The bloody picture he painted quickly rid him of her presence. Didn’t want her so close when even he could smell how desperately he needed a shower.
With a twirl of her daisy-printed skirt, she was skipping towards the game of cards.
And he was still a fucking idiot.
I wanna make you hungry
Then I wanna feed ya
I wanna paint your face
Like you’re my Mona Lisa
I wanna be a champion
I wanna be a loser
I’ll even be a clown
‘Cause I just wanna amuse ya
Not a vice, no less than a habit.
Just a reminder that there was a heart under all the muscle, a hot-blooded man under the killing machine. Even though not many people knew, and he often lost touch himself.
He always felt guilty after, when he was naked and alone and the steamy bathroom granted him enough privacy to indulge. Indulge himself and the idiot cock hanging between his thighs, the thoughts that flowed fast and unrestrained in his head on these rare occasions, the images such thoughts marked with fire in his memory.
He could never unsee them.
He wasn’t sure where the shame that filled his chest as soon as another region emptied came from. Maybe it was because those fantasies included someone very specific, whose eyes twinkled there as they did in the sun, whose mouth looked just as damn fine eating ice-cream as it did in the dream, closing around his…
It always started like that, a slip in the mental restraint he had taught himself from a very young age. A spontaneous dirty thought that grew and multiplied and followed him around until he found the time and the place to deal with it – as it had turned out, one had to schedule such endeavors to near perfection when one shared quarters with so many people at once.
No one wanted a repeat of the time they had stumbled upon an Usopp naked from the butt down and his secret picture of Kaya.
The shower worked best.
No one would interrupt and it made it easy to get rid of the evidence, to let the running water take the pressure off his shoulders and neck to move it someplace more profitable.
It was the place in which it felt the safest to close his eye and just let his thoughts meander, chase each other through the madness.
Zoro’s fingers slowed to a halt where they had been spreading the shower gels across his arms.
As always, he tried to talk himself out of it when the idea first sprung into existence, danced the usual mental tango.
Why not- Why yes-
What if Dressrosa killed him today?
A pirate’s death was seldom predictable, might as well go down like one and enjoy earthly pleasures while he still could. His right hand followed a familiar trail down his chest, splashed the water around as it neared the objective.
A flash of daisies behind closed eyelids, fabric sliding up to reveal a pale thigh.
He found himself wondering whether it would feel as soft as it looked squeezed in his palm.
Found himself ready too when his fingers gripped around the sword he used the least, as Usopp had put it once and then never again after he had punched some fear into his long nose.
It irked him that the dumbass was right.
He had been working on a new personal record, though. After two of his driest years since childhood, he found himself hitting the shower far more often than his hygiene standards required.
It wasn’t his fault that she was everywhere.
On deck at sunrise and at the kitchen's table for breakfast, when he trained and when he napped, smiling and talking about the thousand different things she knew; always there, always too pretty not to be a distraction.
Driving him insane.
The first stroke was slow, deliberate.
Disconnected him from reality and helped him reach that sweet dimension where anything was possible as long as he could think it.
Where Robin wouldn’t be horrified by his unholy thoughts but drop her clothes on the floor and beckon him forward.
(A man could dream…)
He repeated the motion.
Felt his body tense before it relaxed in a familiar way and welcomed the sudden disruption of the authoritarian training regime he forced on it.
He recalled the cursed shorts, the way they had hugged the round curve of her ass.
How sweat had trickled down her collarbone to pool in her cleavage, disappeared from sight but not from his thoughts.
It was a sad day, the one you caught yourself jealous of a drop of sweat.
He tightened his grip, let it sit high and close to the tip, added purpose to the up and down jerk of his arm as a first, tame wave of pleasure made his spine tickle. Back pressed against the shower-wall, he dropped some weight on it to focus his strength where he needed it as he conjured up the mental image of a different, smaller set of fingers locking around the same dick.
Eyes a little unfocused, because of course she’d be thoroughly impressed by it in his fantasy – he surprised himself with the way every little detail was thought out.
How sunshine fell perfectly on her face, how the dream-deck was unusually and conveniently empty, if not for him and dream-Robin and the way she encouraged him to reach forward and touch her too, to let his fingers run through her hair and explore every inch of soft, supple skin she had to offer. Let those same fingers disappear under the daisies and the other five close around the pliable curl of a breast.
In his head she kissed the way she oh-so-rarely cursed: out of breath and with a lot of teeth.
Her hand also felt different than his own, new and exciting, a little cold if compared to the sweltering point it met his body at.
But why stop with just a hand, uh?
(Again, might be the last.
Should be a wank to remember.)
In a blink, her mouth had replaced her hand, her tongue now dictated the rhythm of his pleasure, kissed him better and happier.
Another and the sundress was gone, and in its place stood a little black thing she had not worn in a long while, rolled around her waist and overstaying its purpose; the deck was gone now and they were in the library, cloaked in the shadows of night.
He had her bent over the desk and asking him to fuck her harder. A handful of her gorgeous tits disappeared from his dream-hands as his line of thought hit a startling revelation.
Shit.
She could clone herself, couldn’t she?
The ceiling-light flickered in the library.
When he looked down again, let his real hand pick up the pace, an additional set of breasts required his undivided attention.
He bit on his lip to suppress the awkward grunt that hummed at the back of his throat.
Not that Zoro expected people to listen in with their ears pressed on the door while he was in there, but Sunny was a small ship, and he could pretend he had slipped and fallen in the shower only so many times. He had been already banned from going into the bathroom after having a drink, after all.
Body and mind working together, it wasn’t long before he stood in front of a familiar precipice.
There were times he liked to slow down when it got to this point, to let his hand go still against all instinct before he repeated the whole process again – and again, depending on the mood – and then there were times he just needed to bust one because he couldn’t take it any longer.
Today, it turned out, it was the latter.
Heart pounding, he dropped his entire weight on the wall as he quickened his pace a final time.
His brain emptied for a long instant as a sudden yet not unexpected wave of pleasure surged through him, made the nape of his neck tickle and his toes curl over the shower tray, released the built-up friction he didn’t even know he was carrying.
He felt his body tense, then relax – felt his mind go light and dizzy, mellow even.
Then he came through.
He heaved a deep breath, hand painted warm and sticky. Thoughts still stuck on a pink nipple.
He let his eye slid open, got hit by the first wave of guilt and vague awkwardness as he cleaned up the mess, watched the only incriminating evidence slither down the drain.
He supposed his crime was victimless, and no one but him would ever know the wretched things that happened in his mind, yet he still couldn’t shake the feeling he was overstepping a boundary – doing something he wasn’t supposed to, which perhaps was just the thing that made it feel so great – not to mention feeding into a mental addiction that he knew to be unhealthy.
But he didn’t know how to stop. He couldn’t avoid her, couldn’t stand too close to her either.
He was fucked.
Far less pleasurably than he daydreamed about.
Zoro walked out of the bathroom about five minutes later, dressed and with his hair still wet.
The way the sun was burning the sea today, it’d dry off before he could make it to the other end of the ship.
He hesitated outside the door as he tried to figure out what call was strongest, hunger or sleep – should he climb all the way up to the second floor and the kitchen to get a snack or should he go straight for a nap on the lawn deck?
Both options were tempting.
“Ah, so that’s where you were!”
Robin’s voice cracked the air like a whip; a sweet one but a whip, nevertheless.
Drew blood to his face and made him splutter for air as he turned around to face her. He found her smiling and good-humored, looking so innocent he wanted to cry: she didn’t have a clue what he had been doing just minutes ago, or what he had been thinking while he did it, how it involved her, whereas it was all he could panic about as he stared back at her with a blank eye.
“You were looking for me?” He didn’t like the way he had to almost choke on his saliva to get the words out. “What’s the matter?”
“Well, Chopper was…” She specified. “I’m just helping him”.
Of course, she didn’t want shit from him.
Made a lot more sense for the real world, didn’t it?
Surely didn’t want him lusting after her, and he had squandered her every attempt at companionship when she first joined the crew, made it a persistent point that he didn’t trust her and waited only for the moment she’d slip.
Even though she knew that he no longer felt that way, he couldn’t really blame her if he wasn’t her favorite person in the world.
Or even close to the top five.
“I’ll tell him you’ll drop by the sick-bay when you wake up later”.
“Uh. Sure”.
Wait – how did she?
His eyebrows narrowed in confusion.
Fear shivered down his spine as he wondered whether she could read minds now – that wouldn’t have boded well for him. At all.
“Your eyes,” She giggled, “Well, eye. It gets shiny when you’re tired and you want to sleep. The grumpy face too”.
He sighed with relief.
His dirty secrets were safe. For now.
Wasn’t sure he could keep them much longer, though, seeing that the dress she was wearing looked very similar to the one in his fantasy.
“Enjoy your nap. I have an inkling we’ll need you to cut a lot of things when we finally get to Dressrosa”.
Personally, he couldn’t wait. He was itching for a fight that would make him feel challenged.
Couldn’t say he had had one after leaving Mihawk’s merry castle of creepy yet.
“You get a vein popping on your neck”.
It was the archaeologist’s turn to shoot him a puzzled look.
“When you’re tired, I mean”. Zoro lifted a hand to trace the line on his own neck. “You get a vein popping on your neck. Right here”.
It only occurred to him after he said it just how sinister it sounded, how much observation it implied on his part.
Yeah, the dress didn’t help.
Turned out it wasn’t just similar, it was the very same one. And she looked every bit as edible in it as she had ten minutes before in the shower.
Thankfully, there were no desks in sight to make his face grow even redder, to turn his tongue heavier and clumsier.
It was desperate enough as it was…
“The heart of a giant tortoise beats at less than half the speed of a human’s”.
He was gone a moment later.
I wanna be your sex toy
I wanna be your teacher
I wanna be your sin
I wanna be your preacher
I wanna make you love me
Then I wanna leave you
‘Cause, baby, I’m your David
And you’re my Goliath
Later that day Zoro woke up to a descending sun, neck stiff after he had let it hang over one shoulder for several hours.
An orange blanket was wrapped around him, knitted with an expensive fabric that would surely add some beries to his debt.
“’Twas about time”.
He turned his head to the side, where the navigator sat cross-logged on the bench that ran around the foremast, looking down on him with a feline smirk that on Nami’s face could only mean one thing.
Blackmail.
“We can already see land”.
How much had he slept?
Couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours, yet he felt like he was waking from a century long slumber, heavy-boned and groggy.
“Give me a minute”.
“Take two if you need them”.
He did.
Rubbed his eyes – even the dead one – and yawned, stretched his arms up high to get the blood flowing again and…
Zoro shifted in his seat on the floor.
The weight on his hip felt off, yet all three swords were there when he checked.
His suspecting glare fell on Nami, who still looked at him like a cat who has just cornered an escaping mouse. “The hell do you want, witch?”
“More like I think you might want something back”.
She lowered her eyes on the folded piece of paper she was fanning herself with, drawing Zoro’s attention to it.
That shade of yellow white was oddly familiar.
“It’s going to cost you, of course”.
“What’s that?”
“You don’t recognize it?”
Two things happened at once.
The man’s hand shot for Wado’s sheathe and searched the secret compartment near the top, finding it empty, while Nami made to unfold the paper and show its contents to him.
“Don’t you fucking dare”.
Nami’s snicker fizzled out.
“Care to tell me what this is all about?” She waved the paper in his face, but kept it sealed. Something wicked glinted in her eyes before she added, “Or I guess I could just ask Robin…”
A witch through and through.
Zoro didn’t need a mirror to know that his face burned just as much as the flaming shade of orange on the navigator’s head.
Tough luck.
Out of all the people who could stumble upon the incriminating doodles, it had to be the one who not only would extort something from him to keep the secret, but also question him about it.
Just fucking fantastic.
At least they could be sure her pickpocketing skills had not resented from her long stint in Weatheria.
“How much?”
“Oh?”
“How. Much. Do. You. Want”.
He wondered whether she had gotten to the bottom of the compartment, found those pictures that didn’t only make him pathetic, but look like a pervert too: in one word, the ero-cook.
Yuck.
“An explanation would be nice to start with”.
“It’s just a drawing,” He shrugged. “Not even that good”.
“Oh, I think it’s very good. Almost professional,” Nami argued, “What I don’t quite understand is why you’d be carrying it in your sword…”
He felt the urge to scrub the smugness out of her face. It was only because of her inopportune, pedantic questions that he was aware of his crush, because she had spelled it out for him.
Her fault he had become so hyper-fixated.
Least she could do was to let him be now that he was buried in a six feet deep hole of his own making. Now and then, he wasn’t comfortable telling Nami that she was right.
What then?
Someone else could look at him with the same disgusted pity the mirror reflected, think him an absolute fool? A potential liability, even, with how often he lost his focus around Robin, how easily he forgot the rest of the world in the wake of her smile.
He huffed, let his eye lower to a small wooden split on the deck.
Something viscose germinated in his throat.
The only way to keep this conversation between him and Nami and not send her off asking questions was to give her the truth.
“It’s my best work so far”.
Yeah, very uncomfortable.
Technically not the entire story – it didn’t tell anything about the choice of subject – but not a lie either. Already more than he could bear.
“You made this?” A rustle of paper, followed by two small whistles. “Holy shit! This is incredible. I didn’t even know you could draw”.
It wasn’t something he did with any regularity, or a skill that he liked to advertise.
More like a special hobby he cultivated on those rare occasions he was alone – and the best way, he had found out, to channel his little crush-problem somewhere it didn’t hurt.
Until now.
“It’s just a sketch,” He mumbled.
“This one, perhaps”.
She folded the paper and returned it to him, but the swordsman’s relief was short-lived. She fished a much bigger stack from behind her back.
“You woke up before I could look at them all, but some of these are glaringly detailed”.
That smug grin again.
Zoro wanted to die.
A fragment of pencil thigh was shoved on his face next. Judging by the odd angle of the knee, it could only be that one drawing.
The one he had sketched on a night he felt like taking an extra-long shower, but found the bathroom occupied for several hours in a row.
But of course the witch would get her hands on the lewdest picture of them all. He expected her fist to nuke him at any given moment now.
“How long, then?”
“It’s not like I’ve counted the days,” He snorted. Nami’s glare suggested she wasn’t happy with that answer and not scared to retaliate, so he hastened to add in a whisper, “Years?”
“Ah-ah! I knew it!” Then, parroting a younger Zoro, “I’m just suspicious my ass”.
He ignored the jab.
“Mind giving those back now?”
He didn’t want her to lose one of the sketches and give him an even bigger headache if someone else aboard the ship found it.
What if Robin did?
He wasn’t sure he could tank the embarrassment if that was the case.
Roronoa Zoro, promising swordsman. Born and raised in the East Blue. Killed by his cock – wouldn’t ring so nice on his tombstone, would it?
“For the right price…”
“You touched my swords and I didn’t cut your hands. I think we’re even”.
Not that he would ever draw his weapon on the navigator, but she didn’t need to know that.
Especially if it returned the drawings to Wado’s sheathe, where they belonged.
Where he could pretend they didn’t exist.
“How about you give me those back and we never talk about any of this again?”
She handed back the stack, but didn’t miss to square him with all of her disappointment as she spat, “How about you stop wanking on paper and do something about it?”
Might as well have slapped him.
It would have stung less.
He shoved the sketches back into the secret compartment, made a mental note to put some sort of lock or sigil on it later so that only he could open it. If he ever found the courage to look at them again now that Nami knew they existed, of course.
“I’d rather cut my own throat”.
“So, what? You’re just going to stare like a dumbass forever?” She frowned, this scenario likely less intriguing for her than the one where she got to make fun of his disastrous attempts at flirting. “Don’t look at me like that. Frankly, I’m surprised I’m the only one who noticed…”
Zoro nodded.
“…Yet”.
The navigator stood up, flashed him a smile that looked oddly understanding.
How come she had not called him crazy yet, reiterated the truth that haunted him?
Nico Robin was out of his league.
Plain and simple.
“Just so you know, Sanji was onto you at some point. Took me a lot of effort to throw him off your scent”.
The woman started to make her way upstairs, orange hair swooshing behind her.
Halfway up the nearby ladder, she turned around to coo, “I’m sure you understand why I have to double-charge for that, yes?”
Zoro waited for the navigator to be gone to cuss her out, kept doing so all the way up to the sick bay. Little did he know, Chopper wanted to talk about Robin as well.
How come he couldn’t catch a fucking break today?
“Ah, Zoro! I was waiting for you”.
Chopper was sorting out his equipment when the swordsman walked through the door of the infirmary.
He peered at him from behind a neatly compiled list of things they needed to stock up on, lips stretched in a big smile.
The young reindeer never failed to lift his spirits, whether he did that intentionally or not.
“There’s a little something I’ve been meaning to ask you about,” He tapped his hooves together, like people did with their forefingers. “I’d spare you the trouble, but I couldn’t think of anyone else…”
“What the matter?”
“…No one I could trust to get the job done, at least”. Chopper forsook the sweetness and put on a more serious face, the one that he liked to pair with his doctor pants. “Anyway, it’s Robin,” He admitted. “I’m worried about her”.
“Robin?”
Something was wrong with Robin?
She looked perfectly fine when he saw her earlier, just as maddening as she usually did.
“You two are alike in that you don’t take your injuries seriously and don’t care how many headaches that gives your doctor…”
Zoro ignored the not-so-subtle reproach.
There was no reason to argue the issue further.
There was a point two people just had to agree they disagreed: one thought the other panicked way too easily and underestimated what his body was trained to take, the other believed the resident swordsman to be an incurable case of reckless, always on the hunt for new ways he could learn to live with it.
“Just because she didn’t bleed out or lose her arm, it doesn’t mean she shouldn’t let the wound on her shoulder heal properly. I keep reminding her, and she keeps telling me she’ll listen to me this time, but then I turn around for one second and she’s hauling weights around like I haven’t said a word. I’m losing my patience, but I have not lost my hope with her yet…”
Zoro ignored this jab too.
“What do you need me to do?”
“Keep an eye on her for me? Please?”
Had the archaeologist’s well-being not ranked high in his list of priorities, he still couldn’t have said no, couldn’t have denied Chopper such a simple request. Not when he asked so kindly and looked so fucking adorable in the white doctor’s coat Robin had sewn for him out of an old bedsheet.
“Just make sure she doesn’t put any unnecessary strain on her right arm and…” His voice lowered dramatically, “Make sure no one rips the stitches away when we inevitably walk into a fight, will you? Took me an extra hour to try and minimize the potential scar as much as I could. I’d be pissed if my efforts went to waste”.
A cussing Chopper. That was a new one.
Maybe he was rubbing off on the little guy a bit too much, as Nami liked to taunt him.
“If we exclude the people I wouldn’t trust with this responsibility,” Mostly Luffy, “She can bribe Nami off her back and Sanji is too easily side-tracked… Usopp would cower away as soon as she argues back. You, on the other hand… You’re not easily swayed, and she respects you enough to listen to you. Like I said, I’m at the end of my rope here… Everyone keeps getting injured and I’M ALL BUT OUT OF BANDAGES!”
“Woah. Calm down, buddy. You don’t need to worry,” He reassured him. “No one’s going to lay a finger on her”.
He would make sure of that.
“And who’s the lucky woman?”
He froze on the spot, startled by the melodious hum of Robin’s voice.
“Slugs have four noses. Isn’t that crazy?”
He nodded once in Chopper’s direction, a quiet promise he’d remember their conversation and keep his word, then let his feet drag him out of the sick bay at the speed of light.
He swore it wouldn’t have been as bad if he did this shit on purpose.
It had to stop.
He'd run out of both dignity and animal facts soon.
As he left, he heard her voice again, addressing the reindeer this time, “Are you okay, Doctor-san? I’ve heard you yelling…”
Lucky woman?
More like cursed.
`*•.¸,¤°´✿.｡.:**.:｡.✿`°¤,¸.•*´
She always found it very amusing how the swordsman’s mood could change faster than the weather on a remote corner of the sea.
Hot and cold, flustered and yet cut from the same steel attached to his hip.
How she couldn’t read him as easily as the other Straw-Hats, how bigger the margin of error on everything that concerned him.
He didn’t put much into words and looks could be deceiving – a little something was always left to her imagination.
She liked that about him.
Two years after joining the crew, though, Robin wasn’t quite sure that he liked her.
Tolerated her, of course, made sure her back was covered in the heat of battle, but she didn’t know about him nearly as much as she knew about the others, didn’t spend with him as much time – a lingering distance stood between them that they always failed to cover.
Well, she failed.
Couldn’t really say he even tried.
If she tried to talk to him, much like today, he always found a way to disappear quickly and cut it short. On those rare occasions Zoro made the effort to indulge her, he was fidgety and nervous, a single block of stone, as if he just could not wait to be elsewhere, talking to someone else.
Or not talking at all.
He wasn’t the most sociable Straw-Hat out there, she’d give him that, but she couldn’t help it but wonder why his disdain for human interaction always felt more poignant when it came to her.
They cooperated flawlessly, but he ran away at her every attempt to get up close and personal, to get to know the man behind the swords, as proven by his recent escape from the sick bay.
Chopper was obviously privy to information that was forbidden to her, if the way he had dodged her questions was anything to go by.
She would have thought they were at least comfortable enough with each other to share positive news such as finding a significant one, but it turned out they weren’t.
Did he still think she’d turn on the Straw-Hats one day and backstab them?
After all they had been through?
The only way to know it for sure was to ask Zoro himself, but she knew such a question would offend him beyond repair.
She resigned to live with the doubt.
The swordsman was in love, then?
It sounded like something out of a children’s tale. Unbelievable yet somehow exceedingly cute.
How charming.
Pity she didn’t know who to congratulate, whose neck to threaten should the man’s heart turn up broken. As she helped the doctor finish up his list and tidy up the sick bay from all the supplies that he had misplaced for inventory purposes, Robin let her thoughts wander, sort through the possible candidates.
Anything but listening to the reindeer’s concerns about her health.
While appreciated, they came a lifetime too late.
She didn’t know Zoro intimately enough to guess his type – with little information to go by and little to no first-hand experience, the archaeologist was surprised to come up with as many as three different names.
There was the Ghost Princess, whom he had shared a house and presumably his routine with; two years were an awfully long time, after all.
He was young and healthy – and a pirate – so, while perhaps not as vocal as the chef on the topic, it felt safe to assume he was probably not a monk.
Perona was undeniably beautiful too.
It could also be the Navy captain that always had him look so perturbed, Tashigi – just as pretty, and surely he’d appreciate the sword she came equipped with, her commitment to her honor as a fighter. It made sense, seeing that they had just seen her in Punk Hazard.
But such a relationship was hardly accessible, wasn’t it?
And she kept trying to arrest him.
Could be Nefertari Vivi, the princess with the exotic hair and a lifelong bond with the Straw-Hats.
She could pen him heartfelt letters from the desert and he would… Read them and jot down a reply?
It sounded romantic.
Would explain why he could be spotted on deck with a pencil and a stack of papers sometimes, refusing to let anyone come near him, too.
It only occurred to Robin when she made her way over to the kitchen for dinner that the most obvious guess had been in front of her the entire time.
The swordsman sat primly at the dining table, red-faced and with a narrow eye as the navigator perched beside him on the bench whispered something in his ear, a victorious grin playing on her lips.
But of course.
Nami.
Beautiful, smart, reliable, compassionate Nami.
Someone he had known for a very long time and never failed to look out for, someone a relationship was feasible with.
How had she not been her first guess, she wondered? It made so much sense.
In light of this new theory, she understood why the swordsman had not wanted to tell her about it, but probably had been forced to drag the doctor into the mix out of birth-control concerns.
No one else seemed to be aware of the budding relationship between the two that was quickly taking shape in Robin’s head.
She supposed it hurt a little to realize that, was she right, that meant Nami didn’t trust her enough to tell her either.
Thankfully, something she found on her way to the library after dinner cheered her up.
Lodged between a wooden crate and the floor, there laid a wrinkled piece of paper; sketched on it, a portrait she liked better than any photograph she had ever taken.
Robin took a mental note to smile more often.
Whoever had drawn the piece, they seemed to enjoy it when she did.
It felt like the least she could do to repay the unexpected boon.
`*•.¸,¤°´✿.｡.:**.:｡.✿`°¤,¸.•*´
Because I’m the devil
Who’s searching for redemption,
And I’m a lawyer
Who’s searching for redemption
And I’m a killer
Who’s searching for redemption
I’m a motherfucking monster
Who’s searching for redemption
And I’m a bad guy
Who’s searching for redemption
And I’m a blonde girl
Who’s searching for redemption
I’m a freak that
Is searching for redemption
I’m a motherfucking monster
Who’s searching for redemption
As it turned out, Dressrosa wasn’t that friendly a port. Everywhere they turned the Straw-Hats met a new member of Doflamingo’s gang of terror, often weirder than the previous, and one by one they were all throwing their arsenal of combat skills and cheap tricks at them – rather quickly, it became clear that they wouldn’t leave the island until the entire Donquixote crew was defeated.
Zoro didn’t mind.
He wished for a real fight.
Something hard and bloody and messy, something that would let him test his new limits and confirm it once and for all that he was ready to take the New World by the horns.
He took pride in what he did.
Dared anyone to call it vanity when all he wanted was for his merits to get the proper recognition.
And now he stood in front of a beast made of stone, someone who could knock down entire streets with just a flicker of their wrist, who could grow into the city itself, larger than the castle perched upon the highest hill of the island, the one they were all trying to get Luffy to.
The swordsman was starting to get lost in the new alliance just like he had gotten lost in town earlier, dashing around for hours – here and there someone new popped up who wanted to lend their hand to the straw-hatted cause.
While the help was appreciated, it was hard to keep track of the people he could and could not cut.
He needed to draw Pica somewhere more private, where he couldn’t hide behind civilians and he’d have to fight him like a man, risk something himself if he wanted to be the one who killed the next Strongest Swordsman. With so many people and wills clashing all over the town, however, pinning him down was no easy task.
It required his undivided focus, and for Zoro to let go of every thought that wasn’t the prey he was haunting, which included his reasonable concern for the rest of the crew.
Or the half currently in Dressrosa, at least.
He knew Franky to be the furthest from him, his energy buzzing as he faced off against someone just as fiercely determined to win.
Usopp couldn’t be too distant, or else he wouldn’t be able to pick up on the mild panic attack he was having, but he was too much of a scaredy cat to walk into any actual danger, wasn’t it?
The captain was with him, so no reason to worry about him for now, but it had been a while since he last sensed Robin’s presence and he didn’t like it – not when there was an Admiral lurking nearby and the streets swarmed with Marines.
Law’s got fainter by the second somewhere in the royal palace.
Eventually, it was Pica who came to them. Not caring what he destroyed, he made the city stomp and the ground change under their feet as he tried to bury them in his stone graveyard, angry his voice had made them laugh – or that he and Luffy didn’t fear him enough not to call something ridiculous when it slapped them in the face.
Along with the building he bent to block their passage. He didn’t care that there were people in it, children who got hurt and died under the rubble.
Seemed about the kind of asshole that Zoro had been looking forward to cut down.
As one of Doflamingo’s top-ranking officers, he should have been strong enough to get his blades heated when they eventually got a taste of his blood. He exchanged a brief glance with Luffy.
After so many years of punching their way through chaos together, words were not needed to decide on a common plan of action. As much as the captain would have obviously enjoyed beating some civility into Pica’s thicker-than-rock skull, it was Doflamingo that he had a major bone to pick with.
A bone whose heartbeat was fading in the distance.
Whatever Law was getting up to, it wasn’t pretty.
Zoro jumped off the bull they had been riding when Luffy leapt high into the air with it, narrowly avoiding the collapsing building.
He went straight for where mere moments before his Haki had spotted Pica’s real body, the one that could feel pain, but the latter quickly disappeared into the pavement underneath him when Wado’s sharp edge sliced through his stone arm, shaping the asphalt a disfigured curl in his passage.
The enemy was willing to play dirty now that Zoro had proven that he could cut him: put people between them, sneak-attacked and swiftly retreated into the ground below as he sent him spinning on all corners of the battlefield.
The chase felt endless.
If they kept up with this shit much longer, he’d quickly run through his stamina.
Pica could count on several advantages.
For starters, his size.
If he hit him with one of those giant arms he could summon, the impact was bound to break a bone or two – a swordsman who couldn’t move his elbows or grip his weapon because his knuckles were busted wasn’t of much use in combat.
Then there was the enemy’s superior knowledge of the battlefield, seeing that Dressrosa was the Donquixote Pirates’ domain, and to conclude the non-negligible detail that the man he was fighting could bend the city around them to suit his murderous needs.
He had to play it careful.
Zoro figured he couldn’t stay on the ground, not when it was so likely to swallow him whole.
He needed to go high, up in the sky.
Only there could he make a proper assessment of the field he was playing, of the casualties he gambled on with every possible course of action. He glanced up at the clouds, checked where the sun stood so that it wouldn’t blind him.
There, hanging on something shaped like a flower and in the company of people the swordsman had never seen before, Robin was flying but without her Hana-Hana wings, about to cross over the remnants of one of Pica’s creations from earlier – a giant reproduction of himself that had torn apart an entire neighborhood.
The fuck was she doing there?
“Robin?!”
“Zoro! You need to help us get to the Flower Hill!”
That woman was crazy. Deranged.
She’d have breakfast with vampires and dress the color of blood.
He wasn’t sure whether she underestimated the risks sometimes or if she just didn’t care. Lived each day like the last, that was sure.
“I can do that,” He shouted back, “But why?”
Why waltz her way into the thick of danger, put herself in such a vulnerable position? Was she drunk? Drugged? Out of her mind?
Even though he expected it, Pica aiming for the merry company that glided through the sky next still made his internal temperature reach the boiling point. He believed he had made it clear enough that it was him the stone-beast was fighting, his dead body he needed to step over if he wanted to get his hands on another Straw-Hat.
And now he was gunning for Robin of all people.
Bastard just had to make it personal, uh?
He watched the giant grey fist lift in the sky, watched the arm attached to it stretch backwards as it charged a powerful blow; studied its speed and made a rapid calculation of the kind of impact it would cause.
If the hit landed, the archaeologist would pass out before she could even consider crossing her arms and sprouting something on the ground below to cushion her fall.
Out of time he could lose, Zoro started running his way up the behemoth half body that stood between the party of three and the Flower Hill, knowing he had one chance and one chance only to stop him before they were doomed.
He unsheathed the last sword, closed his jaw around the cool steel of the hilt as he let Haki discern the right spot to strike for him.
He jumped high and closer to the action, twisted and spun on himself to unleash three slashes of energy that rejoined into one powerful blast before they split Pica’s stone-chest in half, cutting further through to his real body hiding inside. Kitetsu purred in appreciation of the blood it had drawn.
Its wielder’s reaction wasn’t too different from the sword’s when Robin grinned down on him from high up in the sky, safe and now able to continue her hot pursuit of the Flower Hill.
Whatever she hoped to find up there, she could count on him to curb any attempt to stop her.
Several hours passed before Zoro got the chance to see her again.
Donning dust-covered clothes and some scratches here and there, but overall fine if not for the red soaking up the bandage around her shoulder.
Chopper wasn’t going to be pleased.
The swordsman wasn’t fond of her wound reopening either, but he still liked it better than the alternative: at least she had not been murdered by a vicious plummet down the clouds.
His hand locked spontaneously around her wrist when she made to follow Rebecca out of the makeshift infirmary-tent, holding her still.
They had set it up on the street next to the one where Luffy had passed out from exhaustion after his fight with Doflamingo, and while the people with the worst injuries had been already tended to, Robin was yet to let the Tontatta princess heal her with her magic tears.
Just his usual luck that hours earlier he had been stuck for hours with the fairy whose superpower was to nag people to death.
“Where do you think you’re going?” He scolded her, “You need someone to check on that wound”.
“I’ve had far worse,” The archaeologist retorted, blue eyes lowering to where his fingers curled around her wrist, not so tight that it would bruise but strong enough for her to know that arguing with him on the one simple request he was making would lead her nowhere. “You don’t need to worry about me. I can take care of myself”.
He knew she could.
His problem was that she didn’t do it nearly as much as she should have – not when there were people around her that she deemed worthy of her protection.
Leave it to her to throw herself in Doflamingo’s way to save Trafalgar Law. Thankfully, the captain had been with her at the time, engaged the Warlord before he could try anything of substance and distracted him as she escaped with the ally he had known for so little and yet held so dear, but still.
For someone so smart, she was often reckless.
Surely, she knew someone like Doflamingo couldn’t wait to cover her in sea-stone and ship her off to the nearest Marine facility.
Not even for the bounty, but because he could.
Or maybe he’d force her to join his crew of madmen, torture her when she’d refuse to share her unique knowledge with him.
Zoro couldn’t tell which scenario sounded the least palatable. He hated both with the same passion.
“But who’s going to take care of Chopper when he finds out you’ve ruined the best stitching of his career?”
He let her go, dropped her wrist and summoned a smile to his lips. With a woman so stubborn, no point disputing the manner directly.
It wasn’t an easy feat by any means, but there were ways to swindle her, weaknesses of hers that could be exploited. Most notably, her deep affection for the Straw-Hat doctor.
Impossible not to notice for someone wired the same way.
The swordsman knew he had struck the right note when her shoulders dropped down with guilt and she looked away, the way she did on those rare occasions she ended up not being right.
“Maybe you should. You took such great care of me earlier, after all”.
“How about no one gets in the way of a giant fist or opens up their stitches in the future?” He sighed. “Seriously, woman. I don’t mind lending a hand, but I’m far more useful if I’m not scared shitless. What made you think it wasn’t a stupid idea to glide over a battlefield?”
A crease fell on her forehead.
She typically took part in this kind of conversation on the opposite end, to ask Luffy to be more far-sighted and even the swordsman himself not to let his arrogance get the best of him.
Now she knew how it felt.
And Zoro knew where she came from when she bothered him with this kind of thing.
“I never thought it was a good idea. Just the quickest and only route we had,” She clarified. “Maybe it wasn’t the smartest move I’ve ever made, but I can’t say I regret it. Thankfully you were there to open the way for us. I’m glad you remembered me in time?”
“Remember you?” He deadpanned, “How could I forget you?”
This woman was many things, but forgettable wasn’t it.
Yet he got a flash from earlier of finding a paper stuck at the opening of Wado’s secret compartment, an unfamiliar face staring back at him, yet drawn with familiar lining.
It didn’t feel as odd in light of what she shared with him next of her first-hand experience with Sugar’s terrifying power. He could see now why smacking her face on a giant wall of stone was more appealing than someone erasing her entire existence with just one touch.
Even though he knew someone else’s Devil-Fruit was behind his control, especially one so wicked and strong, he still felt guilty about the temporary lapse. Aware the woman had struggled with feeling accepted her whole life, her time in Dressrosa’s Toy Factory pretty much equated to being locked in a room housing her worst fear.
No one in the whole world who cared about her.
“Guess he earned that God Usopp epithet, uh?”
The sniper could count on him to listen to some of his far-fetched stories in the near future.
Had to thank him somehow for looking after her at a time he couldn’t.
Hard to save something you couldn’t remember you loved, wasn’t it?
A huge weight lifted off his chest when her ears were tickled by the sound of her laughter.
She was obviously a little shaken by the event and tried by all the negative excitement of the day, but other than that she sounded her normal self, quietly serene.
Happy she had gotten lucky for once.
“I’d say you’ve also earned next Strongest Swordsman yourself”.
For a moment he thought Dressrosa had not happened at all, that he was still locked in the bathroom on Sunny and making up all sorts of mental scenarios to tease his heart to an impossible pace. Especially when she winked at him next and shot him a praiseful smile.
Neither Robin, real or fantasy, would lie about that.
So, it had to be unreal, right?
The painful scream of one of the patients told him it wasn’t.
Oh fuck…
“Squirrels adopt orphans. How awesome is that?”
Zoro decided to help Rebecca getting stuck civilians out of the rubble himself.
I wanna be your slave,
I wanna be your master,
I wanna make your heartbeat
Run like rollercoasters
I wanna be a good boy
I wanna be a gangster
‘Cause you can be the beauty
And I could be the monster
Having stopped Doflamingo’s decades old rule of terror, the Straw-Hats and their friends were granted any sort of gift and honor over the rest of their stay in Dressrosa, as much from the common folk as from the newly re-throned Riku Family.
It was a brief stay, just long enough for Luffy to recuperate some energy and set sail again, but leisurely and comfortable thanks to the cabin they had been given as their temporary base, moved towards the coast so that they could see the Navy coming when they eventually came to get them.
Zoro didn’t buy the act one bit.
He had watched the W.G. stomp on too many innocent people to believe a single word said by one of its officials, not to know that they had no intention to let them leave without trying to apprehend them – the Marines were just biding their time, probably waiting for backup or orders from up above, maybe both, but there was no way they’d just let the infamous Straw-Hat crew set sail and aboard the ship of yet another pirate they wanted dead or alive.
The Going-Luffy-senpai was something hideous, a clash in shapes and colors that could have only come out of the imagination of a colorblind child.
Offensive in a way, detrimental to the captain’s image in that it portrayed him in a lame pose and not ready to strike down with thunder anyone who dared approaching the figurehead, with a simpleton’s grin and his arms flopping anticlimactically to his sides to follow the profile of the ship.
The wooden blocks shaped like Chopper’s antlers towards the back were a nice detail, he supposed, if he really tried to find something he liked about it other than the fact it would get them to the next step in their journey.
Pity the antlers cut visibility in half for the people operating the vessel’s cannons, who had to aim through a feature that was purely aesthetical. On a ship that had forsaken all aesthetic sense at that.
It felt weird to walk on a deck that had been so obviously inspired by Merry, stirring old and bittersweet memories he’d rather avoid.
He didn’t like dwelling on the past, torturing himself with the might-have-been-s.
What was done could not be changed, no matter how much he didn’t like it. Months of sleep deprivation and unnecessary fights had not brought Kuina back when he was a kid, after all.
The future was all he (they) had, as dangerous and inscrutable as it might have appeared from their current position on the string of time.
It was the only place with room for improvement.
As for the Going-Luffy-senpai, it would do – it was big enough to house them all and strong enough to fight back if the Navy got too close, not to mention navigated by people who looked too enamored with Straw-Hat Luffy and his crew to be much of a problem or nuisance to them.
As much as he hated looking at it, they could sail on it just fine.
Or such were Zoro’s thoughts when he finished inspecting the ship to see if it met the mark of a suitable ride to Zou, walked away from the docks and all the way back to the cabin in the woods – an act, mind you, which took him several tries and brought him to destination only close to sundown.
With Luffy still passed out and Trafalgar Law spending all his waking time atop the Flower Hill, looking down on the city he had helped rescuing, the Straw-Hats had turned to him to get them out of Dressrosa and back with the rest of the crew in the least amount of time and effort, trusting he’d have their backs as they recovered from the fight themselves. It made him feel even prouder over Pica’s failed attempt to land any significant blow.
He had walked out of that battle not only victorious, but unscathed.
He had done it.
He had proved – the first of many instances, he’d make sure of that – he was ready for the New World, that his body was stronger and his blade more strong-willed than anything it could ever throw at him. That no one could hope to break up the Straw-Hats again.
It felt liberating, silenced the anxious voice sealed at the back of his conscious thoughts.
He was good. No, he was great.
He was worthy of his ambition.
He was enough to chase it.
Not everyone seemed as galvanized as he was by the crew’s brief stint in Dressrosa – or Usopp for that matter.
The long-nosed sniper went around collecting the (at times monetary) praise of the residents he had freed from the toy-curse and looked his best version of himself thus far. More confident than ever, it seemed he had stumbled upon a truth his crewmates had long since recognized as self-evident: he wasn’t a kid impersonating a pirate no more, but a brave warrior of the sea that wannabe sailors could look up to as an example of skill and determination. Not that he would every say, but Zoro was proud of him too.
As for the others, Luffy shouldn’t have taken much longer to wake up, and surely would demand a huge banquet in celebration of his victory when he did, rightfully so, but Franky had come out signed in many ways by the time he had spent with Señor Pink, he had been cloaked in a rare halo of sadness since the end of their fight, while Robin…
He couldn’t be sure since he was avoiding her once more, disgusted by the way he so easily lost reins of his thoughts in her company.
He should have known better than to let his stupid crush do the talking for him.
Her shoulder was now fully healed thanks to Mansherry crying her magic tears on the wound and she seemed to have chucked out a huge chunk of the fatigue she had cumulated over the past week, yet she didn’t wear the face of a Robin he knew to be happy and serene.
If the multiple times he had caught her staring at them in longing were anything to go by, she didn’t look forward to say goodbye again to the friends she had just reconnected with.
As for the Revolutionaries, he didn’t know what to think- especially about the one who called himself his brother but whom Luffy had never mentioned. Sabo was extremely skilled and looked like a powerful ally for the Straw-Hats to have, but the resident swordsman didn’t like the way he could find him in Robin’s personal space so often, braver and better than him in that he could talk effortlessly to the woman, without either choking on his own tongue or embarrass himself to death with the nonsense coming out of his mouth.
Or both.
While Zoro was almost positive that the Army’s second-in-command had something going on with the archaeologist’s other dear friend, Koala, there was no other way to call the unrest in the pit of his stomach but with his name: jealousy.
He couldn’t help it but wonder whether she had missed him the same way she looked like she was going to miss those two, felt a mixture of stupid, hopeless and pathetic when he couldn’t imagine her doing so.
Not that he had given her many reasons to think him a shoulder she could cry on over the years, least of all a kindred heart she could open hers up to – he had kept vigilant and Robin distant even after he had lost all doubt and suspicion, feared she’d be able to pick him apart and lure his little secret out of him if he let her get too close to where she made him feel all soft and pliable. Weak.
The insurmountable gap between them was just him getting exactly what he had sown.
He found her by the entrance when he finally reached the cabin, enjoying the last kisses of the sun on her skin as she sat in the reclining chair that Kyros kept in his patio.
Had he not known better, he would have thought she was waiting for him.
“Was it a fruitful trip?”
Zoro shrugged. “That ship is an eye-sore, but it can make the trip to Zou and fast. We just need the captain to wake up…”
“…And hate me because I didn’t tell him that his brother is still alive”.
He could see it lingering in her eyes, hear it in the low and redundant inflection of her voice, the sense of shame and guilt that was stealing the color from her cheeks.
Was that what had been bothering her so much these past few days?
She thought Luffy would hold a grudge because she had not promised him the near-impossible?
It was no secret that she occupied a special spot in the captain’s heart, that he kept her tucked under the corner of his heart that made him go the most feral when provoked. Listened to her wisdom first even if he ended up answering the call of his gut, always made sure he kept a smile on her face and laughter bubbling up in her belly, committed every day to his unspoken promise to try and undo all the pain and misery she had suffered before they met.
He had not dragged her out of the Tower of Justice for Robin not to have a happy life.
To put it simply, Zoro couldn’t picture a single scenario where the captain got mad at her, if only because Luffy believed her capable of doing no wrong. She let him join for bedtime stories with Chopper on nights he struggled to fall asleep, indulged him when he came up with a new game even if he often neglected to establish any rules, kept him reasonable when his control swayed.
Luffy loved her.
Nothing short of murdering the rest of the crew could change that.
“What were you even supposed to tell him? Yo, Luffy, I met some guy who claims to be your brother?” He chirped in an awful imitation of her higher-pitched voice. “For all we know he’s not even his real sibling…”
“They’re brothers alright…” The woman argued with a light scoff, “I was suspicious too at first, but the more Sabo shared with me of their childhood, the more the little brother in those stories sounded like Luffy. Did you know he got attacked by a bear once because he tried to steal its lunch? It was before he ate his fruit too”.
While that did sound like their glutton of a captain, Zoro still wasn’t convinced.
He didn’t know Sabo much and did not trust him.
“No, but I know that the only brother he ever mentioned is the one who died in the war”.
“He probably thought we wouldn’t care about the one he mourned long before we met him. Sabo told me he was announced dead after the incident that gave him that scar on his face. Sailed away with the Revolutionary Army before he even began to recover from it… He remembered his brothers only when he picked up the paper two years ago and…”
Her voice lowered sinisterly, gaze turning away from him and to the dying sun, “…And found out what happened to one Portgas D. Ace”.
It was always a depressing subject to breach, sucked all morale out of the crew.
How Luffy had needed their help in his chase against time and how they had not been there for him.
Technically not on purpose, seeing that it had been Kuma to send them flying in all sorts of remote corners of the world, but that collective wound was still open and bleeding, nevertheless.
For Zoro, the worst part was that they had to be grateful for their lack of participation in the War of the Best. The way they had been then, such a conflict would have chewed them and spit them back out. Dead.
Just went to prove there was no virtual limit to how strong one could aim to become.
“Assuming this is all true and your friend didn’t lie to you…” He didn’t bother masking his dislike for the scene she had just painted of her and Sabo having long heart-to-heart conversations, “I think you’re overestimating the captain’s ability to add two and two, not to mention your own responsibility in his brother deciding to wait so long to reconnect with him. Like you said, Ace has been dead for a while now”.
It had been sad to watch his flame burn out, such a promising talent pay with his life for a crime he was born into: being the son of the Pirate King.
They owed it to him too to find the One Piece, crown a new one and shake the status quo until it finally crumbled apart.
“I’m serious, Robin. Don’t sweat it,” He added in a softer tone, “If he wasn’t lying, Luffy is first and foremost getting a brother back out of this deal. Do you know anyone who wouldn’t be happy about something like that?”
Approval shone in her eyes as she looked away from the sunset and back at him, “You’re right. I’m worrying myself too much about this”.
He was about to mentally high-five himself when a new and deeper shadow fell on her face. “I guess that’s just my way not to think even worse thoughts”.
Such as?
“Why is he taking so long to wake up?”
“Captain just needs to recover some energy. He fights way too physically not to get a little hurt himself”.
“It’s been almost a whole day”.
“So? I’ve seen that man sleep for an entire week when the circumstances called for it. Luffy will be fine. He didn’t bust his ass for two years just to be destroyed by the first Warlord he meets after his big comeback”.
The swordsman would know.
He had trained under another for the same reason.
“Luffy will be fine”.
“Thank you, Zoro”.
“Anytime”.
He froze in surprise when she stood up and made her way over to where he leaned against the patio’s wooden column, felt his temperature raise when she opened her arms and pulled him into a hug. “You’re a good crewmate”.
He found his face pressed against her neck, senses overwhelmed by the softness of her skin and the smell of freshly cut flowers she carried with her - barely got the time to awkwardly pat his right hand on her back before she was pulling away and shooting him another dazzling smile.
He wasn’t much of a hugger, but he could learn to make an exception.
“A group of owls is called a parliament!”
Guessed he was still much of an idiot.
I wanna make you quiet
I wanna make you nervous
I wanna set you free
But I’m too fucking jealous
I wanna pull your strings
Like you’re my Telecaster
And if you want to use me,
I could be your puppet
On the crew’s second and final night in Dressrosa he found the woman on the patio again, basking in the moonlight this time and with a far tender smile on her lips than she had been smiling the day before, staring down at something in her lap, probably a book.
“I told you he would be fine”.
He tipped his head to where inside of Kyros’ cabin Luffy was making the whole structure tremble under the sound of his joyous laughter.
Robin turned around and shot him a cheeky grin, “I told you Sabo was really his brother”.
And I told you the captain wouldn’t hate you for not telling him, he thought, but opted for a less petulant, “Guess we should start listening to each other more, uh?”
“I always listen to you, Mr. Swordsman,” She replied. “You’re far more competent than you credit yourself for when it comes to surviving on unfriendly seas. Wouldn’t do me much good to ignore the man who saved my life twice in a week, would it?”
Was she insinuating he didn’t listen to her, or had she forgotten that she was the only reason he had not been crushed to death by the pressure of the water nearing Fishman Island?
Maybe both.
Or maybe neither.
She looked calm and relax, amicable even.
Like they were just trading opinions more so than determining which was right.
Like she cared what he thought.
“Anyone would be a fool to ignore you”.
Okay, maybe one that came out a bit sultrier than intended. Zoro cleared his throat, shuffled closer to where she sat directly on the patio’s wooden railing this time around, settling down next to her.
The reclining chair was more comfortable, but she could enjoy a better view from here, a larger slice of the moonlit ocean.
He had been right about the book.
Even though her fingers made to shut it close when it entered his line of sight, he still caught a glimpse of the external paper she had spread out over the page on her right.
What the fuck?
What was that doing here?
How much did she know?
How much could he lie his way out of?
The witch babbled, didn’t she?
Joke was entirely on him for admitting to his little crush and think the noisy navigator could keep it to herself. Not that Nami had given him much choice on that regard, having found his secret stash of guilty pleasures.
“What’s that?”
His voice came out more of a rattled sound than the clear and nonchalant question he had hoped to produce, but the woman beside him didn’t seem to pay it much mind.
She looked far more concerned about the finger he had stuck between the closing pages of the book, and the way it could have wrinkled or tore the paper. She re-opened it, bestowed a little smile upon the drawing before she showed it to him.
If anything, it was an innocent one.
Framed her leaning on Sunny’s main deck and staring out into the horizon, long hair whipped by the wind.
The one he sketched before they even left Sabaody.
Not his best work by any means, but he was fond of it. Surely would miss it in his collection, although he supposed it was only fair that his ever-inspiring muse would get at least one creation.
“Usopp did that for you?”
“It’s just a little trinket I’ve recently stumbled upon,” Robin confessed, cheeks tinting an exquisite pink that he immediately planned to immortalize on a new piece of paper at a later time. “And no, I haven’t asked him yet, but I don’t think this is Usopp’s work. He’s not so keen on realism”.
“So, you don’t know where it comes from?”
She slammed the book shut, for real this time, set it down to the side before she gave him a long shrug, one that told him just how much her curiosity was eating her alive. “I do not,” She admitted, “But I hope to find out one day. I’d like to thank the person who made it”.
At least she didn’t seem to hate the mysterious artist.
Zoro toyed with the idea of telling her the truth, then realized he wouldn’t have many pieces to showcase that didn’t feature her in some type of way and that such an oddity would have generated questions he really was not ready to answer to.
It seemed the witch had kept her mouth shut in the end, although he still suspected her to be responsible for Robin finding the picture.
“Good luck finding them”.
Not.
He wasn’t going to make it easy for her to track the sin all the way back to the sinner. Would die before he told her there was not a day she left his thoughts alone and appropriate.
“Do you think it would be impolite of me to ask them to draw something on request?”
That picked his interest.
“What would you ask them?”
She lowered her eyes, let them flicker back to the ocean as the red tinge of embarrassment crept up her neck. “I’d just love to see what their Chopper looks like. If they made me look this good, imagine what they could do with such an adorable little face- Err, I mean”.
“I know exactly what you mean,” He laughed. Even the driest heart would have rained for those big shiny eyes. “And I guess there’s no harm in asking, is there? Worst case scenario, they won’t do it”.
Only he already knew he would, knew he had already done it before.
As a matter of fact, the reindeer was the thing he drew the most often aside from Robin and, well, swords. Ancient or modern, of all shapes and sizes, all different shades of steel. That was why he had started drawing, after all, to make himself all the beautiful weapons he wished he could one day afford to own.
“I guess you are, once again, right”.
A long, comfortable silence stretched between them as they observed the dark expanse of the sea before them.
Or rather, Robin stared at the ocean and the swordsman stared at her out of the corner of his eye. He had made sure he put the functioning one to good use by sitting on her left and couldn’t say he regretted the choice as it gave him room to look at her from up and close but without bothering her with his unsatiable thirst for her form.
She talked first, moved his gaze back to the water even though he’d have rather drowned in her eyes instead. “We set sail again in the morning. We’ll finally be back with Nami and the others…” She made an awkward pause there, “Are you happy?”
What kind of question was that?
Of course he was happy.
The Straw-Hats were stronger together and he’d rather have them all in the same place, lest someone got hurt when he couldn’t help.
“A couple days hardly compare to two years, but yeah. We’ve hardly had the time to reconnect before the ocean split us again”.
“I’m sure our navigator is fine,” She continued, “Nami is far too smart to get caught up into trouble she can’t deal with”.
A bit random, but okay?
Couldn’t really focus much on her words when she smiled like that, eyes outpouring with affection.
“So are the others. No need to worry about them,” He reassured her, assuming she didn’t sound her usual sharp self out of concern. “The shitty cook ran to their rescue”.
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
“What?”
“Sanji’s devotion for her”.
The fuck did he care?
If anything, it offered some comedic relief when the chef’s so-called gentlemanly ways earned him a sandal stomping in his stupid face.
“Not as long as it doesn’t bother her, no”.
Not like it bothered him when the shitty cook made Robin special snacks and swooned as if she had just asked for his hand in marriage when she thanked him, or when he made Sunny’s deck slippery with his drool as he gawked at the woman while she sunbathed.
She didn’t seem all too satisfied with his reply, although she didn’t press the issue any further.
“I see,” She hummed, agreeably, “To each their own, right?”
Whatever she meant by that, it got lost in the cackle of the waves as they hit the nearby shore. He always liked listening to the sounds the sea made at night, to the hollow whizz of the surfing wind over its crest and the softer lapping of water stuck on an endless loop.
Felt right, felt peaceful, felt like home.
The home he had never truly had until Luffy handed him one on a silver platter and asked only for his best effort in return.
“Right,” He mumbled.
He wondered what was going on in that labyrinthine brain of hers, what had her asking odd questions and sharing her precious time with him of all people. He bet that book she had with her was better company than he could ever hope to be.
Hard as he might have tried, it was impossible to act normal around her when he felt anything but.
Elated? Yes.
Ready to jump out of his own skin? Sure.
Light-headed even.
With enough adrenaline pumping through his system that he could leap to the moon and cut her a slice, yet painfully restrained in that he knew she’d probably not want it if he was the one giving it away.
The worst part of having feelings for her?
To be aware she’d never return them.
Not that he counted on finding the balls to tell her about it anytime soon.
To what end?
It would only make things tense and awkward and for no reason at all, extend the inconvenience to someone else and with nothing to gain from the transaction for all parties involved.
It was bad enough he wasted so much time stressing about something that would never happen, yet somehow always failed to get her out of his head.
Not that she helped.
Like she wasn’t helping now, smelling all delicious as she slotted closer to him on the railing to lean her head of soft hair on his shoulder.
Eyes still locked on the ocean, Robin sighed. “Things are only getting deadlier from here on out, aren’t they?”
More people hunting them down and trying to cut their journey short, tougher enemies to fight and challenges to beat, less and less time on the clock as everyone in the New World raced to get to the One Piece and the number of foes who’d try to steal their best advantage increased.
Zoro could see why she’d be worried more so than excited about the travels to come.
He wasn’t the one who could translate Poneglyphs.
Whereas he’d be killed instantly in case of defeat – wouldn’t consider the Straw-Hats defeated until both he and the captain were dead, anyway – Robin would be lucky if she managed to kill herself before the people who hated her so viciously could do it themselves, or those who wouldn’t mind torture as a mean to her knowledge got their hands on her and sea-stone around her wrists.
But it wouldn’t come to that, would it?
They all had trained, matured, shaped up: they had everything they needed to succeed and they damn right would.
“Where’s the fun if they don’t?”
Behind the confident façade, though, he found himself asking for the blessing of the stars littering the sky above them.
There was no such thing as too much luck, not in their line of work.
“That attitude is going to get you killed one day, you know?”
“Can’t think of a better way to go”.
Well, maybe a couple, but he wasn’t so drunk on moonlight that he’d share them with her.
Robin let a long minute pass, so long in fact that by the time she spoke again, sliding off the improvised seat, it didn’t register immediately with him was she was referring to.
“I’ll be very sad when you do”.
She picked up her book, smiled a sleepy grin as she tucked it under her right arm.
“Good night, Zoro”.
He froze when she leaned forward and brushed a featherlight kiss on his cheek.
A moment later, her retreating hair made the golden drops on his left ear twinkle and she was making her way back inside, where the captain still cackled like the demon he was.
The swordsman kept his face turned to the water, held his breath as he waited for the cabin’s door to close behind her.
Then, finally, he gave the ocean a long scoff.
“Flamingos are pink because of their diet”.
It wasn’t until two days later that Zoro finally had the chance to corner the witch and grill her for information.
Not that she was very responsive, mind you, busy as she was moping over the shitty cook and his even shittier wedding-
What the hell was he thinking?
Leaving like that, with barely a word and no plan on how to get him back, giving up on himself and the crew to accommodate the scheme of a family he had never even uttered a word about.
The idiot was a prince then?
Would explain why he was so damn fragile.
Given the circumstances Zoro couldn’t be sure he would have seen him again, but if he did then he’d make sure he let the other know just how viscerally disappointed he was by his behavior.
It was always the ones beyond suspicion that backstabbed you, uh?
Of course, he didn’t share any of that with Nami. Let her cry and vent and vaguely listened to the long list of items that she would add to Sanji’s debt as soon as he was back on Sunny.
Maybe there would be no need for him to punish the prodigal crewmate with the navigator personally overseeing the operation, although he’d never abdicate the pleasure.
“…And then I’m going to triple-charge him for every hour of beauty sleep I’ve missed because of him!”
“Hn”.
“How dare he treats us like luggage he can just drop anywhere he likes?”
“Uh-uh”.
“…I’ll cut the knees out of all his favorite suit pants!”
Rightflank Forest looked nice outside the window that day, a clear sky peering behind the highest tops of the trees and a soft breeze shaking them, blowing new life into the battle scorched woods.
The Minks seemed to be recovering somewhat well from Jack’s attack, optimistic and laborious, yet far too often the scream of an orphaned child who had survived Kurau pierced through the Fortress, painting a gruesome picture of the fight the Straw-Hats had walked on the burnt remnants of.
“Are you even listening to me?”
“More like waiting for you to be done so that I can ask you about the thing I wanted you to meet me here for”.
Zoro dodged the punched that came barging for his head then.
“Here I thought you wanted to be a decent friend for once and let me cry on your shoulder. My bad”.
He looked down at the mess her mascara had made of the front of his t-shirt. Not fair.
“Anyway, what did you want to know?”
“Only if you had anything to do with Robin finding a certain drawing”.
The guilty face she made next was all the confirmation he needed.
“YOU EVIL B-” Another punch dodged, then a deep breath. “When you finally learn to mind your own business, it’ll still be decades too late”.
That got a smile out of the unhappy navigator, if opaque and not quite reaching her eyes. “Ah, Zoro, you wound me,” She complained, “If I don’t keep things interesting around here, who will?”
Interesting?!
If Nami was trying to murder him, she was succeeding.
“Besides, it’s only a matter of time before she catches you red-handed. You’re not exactly smooth with all that secret staring. I figured I’d help you put your best foot forward”.
“What you helped with was giving me one more problem to deal with,” He chasisted. “She isn’t going to catch me doing shit”.
Because she didn’t see him.
Not the way he could only wish she would.
His face must have mirrored such thoughts, for Nami shot him a pitiful look behind her mug of hot chocolate before moving back to the subject she cared to discuss.
“How did you know she has that drawing, though?” She asked, “She’s keeping it very private”.
“I’ve seen her with it…”
Ocean-gazed with her and even got a little kiss in the process, but it meant nothing and he wasn’t going to let vicious hope cloud his throat and judgement. It felt pathetic enough that he was yet to wash his face since she had touched it with her lips. He and Robin were crewmates.
Tentative friends at best.
Nothing more.
“Anyone ever told you that you’re shit to gossip with?”
“You. At least a dozen times”.
“Good. Because you are”.
Nami rose from her seat at the kitchen table and picked up her mug, dropping her free hand on his shoulder. “I think you should tell her how you feel. Don’t be too scared to tell her you like her only to regret it if one day she’s gone”. The other wasn’t sure they were still talking about him. “Who knows? The result might surprise you”.
“Nami, are you in there- Oh”.
As quickly as she had opened the door and peeked into the kitchen, Nico Robin was mumbling an apology and closing it again.
Nami frowned. “Fuck”.
`*•.¸,¤°´✿.｡.:**.:｡.✿`°¤,¸.•*´
She wasn’t sure why the image had disturbed her so much, why her mouth was filled with such a bitter taste as she fled from the Fortress’ kitchen, ignoring the heartfelt Garchu-s that were sent her way by this or that Mink whom she happened to stumble upon.
If it was the soft pressing of Nami’s fingers on the man’s arm that made her head spin, or the fact she had been standing so close to the swordsman, entirely immune to the bubble of private space the latter was so peculiar about but didn’t seem to mind her breaching.
Up close and intimate, conversing with their eyes more so than they did with their mouths, they had painted quite the lovely picture.
Robin just hated the inexplicable, inappropriate way it made her feel.
From a rational standpoint, she was nothing but happy and merry and bright about two of the people she cared for the most finding love and solace in each other, even inspired by the way they were trying to build something worthwhile while never knowing which day would be their last.
It took some courage to fall in love at sea.
At a deeper level, though, in that chamber of her mind she visited so rarely, the one housing the bad and the worse of her thoughts, there her throat was clogged by a thick smoke that made it hard to breathe, there she couldn’t stop herself from feeling a little blue about it, disappointed even.
Like something laid in that equation that she couldn’t help it but desire for herself.
And while she didn’t dare speak its name even to herself, the archaeologist was painfully aware that it wasn’t Nami’s.
The world felt calm around the swordsman, a waveless ocean that wouldn’t swallow her whole but let her float safely on the surface, void of sharks and water lapping on her skin most tenderly, almost imperceptibly.
He was strong, reliable, exceptionally easy to trust if he wasn’t staring at you over the edge of this weapon – piqued her interest even then, on their very first meeting, with his three swords and the earrings and attitude to match.
Robin had known upon first glance that the one they called the Pirate Hunter was no ordinary man.
Wondered why the ones who had tried to collect her bounty had not looked as good, as sharp and yet as soft to the eyes with the sun magnifying his unusual green hair, kissing his tan.
Upon joining the crew and with no illusion that it could be permanent, she had been hurt by his behavior but understood the lack of trust, even commended him for his ability to see past her façade and the lies everyone else had been happy to believe.
Upon returning to the Straw-Hats, she had followed his lead: shifted to more amicable tones yet kept her respectful distance, gave him time to get accustomed to calling friend someone whom he had previously referred to as enemy, always maintained herself aware that there was nothing she could do to clean the old stains and start off again on a blank slate. While it had saddened her a little that he still felt unapproachable most of the time, slowly but surely, she had gotten the gist of his implicit clues: Zoro didn’t hate her, he just had his own way to get the message across.
A way of little gestures and impeccable attentiveness, of proving it more so than saying it that she was safe when he was around.
Truthfully, though, it had not been until recently that she had really sat down and thought hard about what the deal was with him, why he never failed to catch her eye and make her heart hum approvingly.
Why he made her feel nervous but in a good way.
She had not had a lot of time in her life to eviscerate the concept of romance, gave it her interpreation and determine whether it was something that might have eventually interested her. Men, women, both attractive and both likely to cut her throat if she exposed her neck too much.
Couldn’t trust neither.
But then she had stumbled upon people that were worthy of that trust, would guard it like a treasure, and the idea had not felt so far-fetched and impossible all of a sudden, albeit far from a priority.
It grew over time, sedimented in the two years she had spent on her own, longing for home; had she wanted to fall in love, she would have gone for a soul like the swordsman’s.
Or such was the impression a moonlit beach and the flash of steel cutting through a whole mountain had bestowed upon her.
Not that she had ever planned to move past idle thinking, but even that felt obscenely wrong now, made her feel awful and dirty, a traitor.
Nami deserved a better friend than someone who occasionally fantasized about their man, and so did Zoro.
Along with the others, they were a fundamental component of the rock that supported her and kept her standing when her knees were weak, when pressure cracked the back of her neck like a whip.
She should have been happy for them.
No other feelings allowed.
No wondering what it might have felt like to kiss his lips rather than his cheek. She had thought it long overdue, to seal their bond as tight as the one they both shared with the other Straw-Hats, but she could see the error of her ways now that, under the light of retrospective, the gesture felt anything but innocent when she recalled it.
She was happy for them.
Robin repeated the internal mantra for the umpteenth time as she finally made her way out of Rightflank Fortress, wishing for the warmth of the sun to chase away her impertinent thoughts.
She didn’t see Nami leave the place two minutes later, take the opposite path from the one she was trekking on.
By the time she was back at the end of her solitary walk, mind much clearer and unperturbed, spirit slightly uplifted in that she had much in her life now which she could draw the happiness from, the navigator was getting ready to set sail for Whole Cake Island. Alas, Robin didn’t get the chance to congratulate her before she left.
`*•.¸,¤°´✿.｡.:**.:｡.✿`°¤,¸.•*´
Cause I’m the devil
Who’s searching for redemption
And I’m a lawyer
Who’s searching for redemption
And I’m a killer
Who’s searching for redemption
I’m a motherfucking monster
Who’s searching for redemption
He had thought the witch out of her mind, when she first shared her nonsensical theory with him and set out in pursuit of Robin after the latter stumbled upon them in that kitchen in Zou and left as if she had not been welcome, but the more time passed after the event, the more it sounded, albeit still nonsensical, just about right.
For reasons unknown, the archaeologist was avoiding him.
As much as she could avoid him while sharing the tight quarters of a submarine, anyway, but the clues were all there.
Wouldn’t address him directly unless she couldn’t avoid it and kept to herself, aloof and distant, ever-so-polite but in a way that reeked of fiction.
Then there were the things she said when he managed to corner her and force her into conversation, the fidgeting, the way she refused to look at him for any significant amount of time.
He tried not to let it get to his head at first.
Obsessed as he was with the woman, maybe he was just reading too much into things.
Maybe nothing was strange about her behavior, he just looked at it through the lens of wishing for her attention and being disappointed when he didn’t receive it.
Maybe this was the way things were supposed to be. Polite strangerhood.
But he had gotten a bite of the frosting and now he wanted the whole fucking cake.
If anything, he had always known himself to be ambitious. Time to cut down the pity party like he could cut a Haki-covered mountain-man in two, turn a pirate worth 99 million beries into a joke.
Whatever had the archaeologist believing him romantically involved with Nami, best if he cleared the air before missing the shot that he had glimpsed in Dressrosa.
How had she even gotten to such a conclusion, though? It made no sense to him.
He didn’t do witches.
As a matter of fact, he typically didn’t do much of anything, but the point still stood that he found it nothing short of bewildering that the archaeologist would think of Nami and not herself if she had to guess his type. He had been told he wasn’t nearly as discreet as he fancied himself to be in the special favor he reserved for her, and he figured he and Nami butted heads with each other way too often for the people around them not to pick up on their deep incompatibility.
Even if she wasn’t aware of his feelings for her, she should have known that the ones he had for Nami were not of the romantic sort.
Yet the more he mentally recapped his recent interactions with Robin, the more Nami’s words didn’t sound like the prophecy of a madwoman, but the warning of a wise seer.
All the questions and the odd glances, that air of scrutiny about her when he didn’t offer to join the half of the crew going after the shitty cook.
The way she had looked like she was intruding on a private moment the other day in Zou, seemed so burnt by the view.
Shit.
If that was what she believed, that he and Nami had some sort of obscene tryst going on, then he had to set the record straight.
It wasn’t Sunny, but the Polar Tang was a far more dignified ship than Bartolomeo’s, better navigated and stocked up on everything that made a pirate’s life at sea much easier – including rum.
Barring unforeseen circumstances, it should have taken Law’s yellow submarine about ten days to get the Heart Pirates and their guests to Wano.
Without proper weights to lift and only a tiny and under-equipped gym at his disposal, the swordsman was killing the time with sword-care and long naps more so than training since boarding the ship two days before. And sneaking booze out of the Surgeon of Death’s personal stash.
It was a calmer way to sail than he was used to. Nothing much happened at the bottom of the ocean. There were no enemies to cut, no adverse weather phenomena to change their course last minute – nothing Trafalgar Law couldn’t R.O.O.M the ship out of, anyway.
While he knew he’d regret it later, when he’d have to compensate for the lost time, he couldn’t say he minded the unexpected vacation.
Gave him time to think and sort out his priorities, to relax and analyze things critically, find a peace of mind that he had long thought for-ever lost.
When one couldn’t make something go away, one just had to accept it.
He liked Robin.
So, what? Couldn’t make him more of a monster than the wicked pleasure he got from the smell of fresh blood, or the clattering that steel produced as another swordsman fell to the ground.
With stakes increasing every time the Straw-Hats left for a new port, it didn’t sit well with him that he might have died with the glaring regret of never speaking his mind.
It didn’t feel right.
He was no coward.
Didn’t duck and hide in the face of danger, didn’t cower behind other people when shit hit the fan.
If anything good could come out of getting over himself, might as well give it a try.
With the priceless advice of a bottle of white rum, in his seat on the Tang’s storage room’s floor, Zoro devised a plan in five stages.
Phase 1: to make it beyond clear that he was a free man. If he wanted to plant the absurd idea in Robin’s mind that he might have been a better time than she probably thought, then he couldn’t have her thinking that he was already dating her best friend.
Phase 2: to figure out how the hell he was supposed to articulate feelings that barely made sense as thoughts. He wasn’t a poet, didn’t know how to sculpt a sentence to his advantage, how to use words as masterfully as he could draw a straight line with just a pen and paper.
Phase 3: to test the waters. He took the occasional risk, sure, but like most people he didn’t gamble on games that he knew to be rigged against him. No point asking her out if she was disgusted by the thought.
Phase 4: to do some research. Even assuming he’d find an appropriate way to pop the question(s) and that she’d materialize the best possible outcome by saying Yes, he still didn’t know shit about women and the way to romance them – just that they tended to look and smell better than men, and that the archaeologist was a scary one: would ask Chopper if he wanted more candy and a foe if they wanted their neck snapped with the same voice.
Phase 5: to hell with what was right and acceptable. With what made sense and was expected of him, what he had always expected – not to fall for a pretty smile, but it wasn’t his fault if the view was do damn great.
Phase 1 rolled into motion sooner than he thought, little after lunch the following day when he happened to pass in front of the library and spotted her inside through the semi-open door, eyes glued to the pages of the book she was holding in her lap.
No trace of Trafalgar Law hounding her like a vulture, or anyone else for that matter.
Robin was perfectly alone and he was perfectly happy to stare from the threshold for a long moment, to memorize the darker nuance her hair took when the Tang cruised at the bottom of the ocean where direct sunlight never hit it.
He felt bad for interrupting her when his approaching steps echoed through the room and she lifted a nervous gaze from her book.
“Is there anything you need?”
“Just something to kill the boredom with. I figured someone like Law is bound to have a couple books on swords…”
Her face distended, eyes twinkling in the wake of her favorite subject.
Culture.
“As a matter of fact, it’s more than a couple,” She stood up, neared the wall-height shelf on the opposite side of the room from where she was sitting. Beckoning him forward with one hand, she explained, “This whole section is about swords. From the bottom up, you’ve got East, South, West and North Blue. Top shelf are swords made in the New World…”
“Got anything from Wano in there?”
“Uh, let me see”. A cerulean eye sprouted on the ceiling, peering down at the titles perched atop the highest shelves. “Basic Principles of Steel-Work, The Art of Sword Maintenance, Legendary Blades and Where To Find Them… Ah, here you go”.
The eye faded and an arm appeared on the side of the shelf in its place, sliding a book off and dropping it down.
Robin caught it in her real hand.
“The Samurai and the Mountain”.
Meanwhile, Zoro was vaguely aware of something uncomfortable sitting on his face and especially his nose, making it tickle.
In her haste to retrieve the book for him, she had sprinkled a handful of dust on them too.
His throat closed as the allergy kicked in, nostrils tingling in a familiar way as he took a deep and involuntary inhale.
He couldn’t let her hear it. He couldn’t let her hear it. He couldn’t let her-
“A-CHOO!” He sneezed, voice going up to an unusual pitch.
Fuck.
There was a reason he never did that in public.
Couldn’t sound like a kitten under the rain when you tried to project the image of a lion roaring in its forest.
“I’m so sorry,” She apologized when she turned around and noticed the thin layer of grey covering him. The woman shoved the book in his arms before she reached up to clean him up, swat the dust off his shoulders and wipe it off his nose.
She hesitated when her fingertips approached his hair, then let it fall to her side.
“I’m sorry,” She repeated, “I swear I’m not doing it on purpose”.
“Eh?”
“I didn’t mean to overstep”.
“Overstep what?”
“Your boundaries,” She sighed matter-of-factly.
If she didn’t mind, Zoro really would have liked it if she explained those to him.
It was the first time he heard anything about it.
As far as he was concerned, she could touch him all she wanted.
“I’m sorry,” She apologized for the third time in the span of a minute, “I should know better than to grope a taken man”.
She called that groping?
Then how should he call what he did to dream-Robin when he hit the shower?
Wait…
Taken man?
Was Trafalgar holding them hostages without him knowing?
His brain replayed his last conversation with Nami, the one they had at the bottom of Sunny’s ladder before she left for Whole Cake Island, and it hit him just how paradoxical his current predicament was.
‘She thinks you and I are dating, you chimp’, the navigator had said.
He had laughed in her face.
Turned out he was the joke in the end.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
The archaeologist shot him an odd look, then gestured for him to follow her as she sauntered back to the reading area of the library.
They both sat down.
Robin returned to the same armchair as earlier and he dusted his hair and clothes off before he plopped himself down on the sofa, where he had perfect frontal view of her frowning face.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you about it, but it seemed even less appropriate somehow. I realize I’ve been taking a little too many liberties. While I didn’t mean anything untoward with my actions, I’m aware that I shouldn’t have acted the way that I did…”
Zoro was a little startled. He had come in here thinking he’d have to pretend reading an entire book to win some of her time and attention, yet she was seemingly doing it all by herself. She spoke again before he could get even one word in.
“If I caused you any sort of problem with Nami, I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am”.
He swore, if she said ‘sorry’ one more time…
“Nami?”
She nodded. “You don’t need to hide. Your secret is safe with me. If the others find out you’re in love, it’ll be because you told them-”
She was cut off by the sound of his laughter as it exploded with another sneeze.
Only the dust wasn’t to blame this time around, just the nonsense pouring out of her mouth.
He couldn’t believe it.
He and Nami? In love?!
It wasn’t the first time he heard of the bizarre idea, yet he still failed to understand the mysterious way she could have gotten to such a conclusion. He and the witch bickered on a good day and threatened to kill the other on any other. They quite obviously didn’t mean that last part, but they just as obviously didn’t have a secret relationship.
“Are you finished? Good,” He wiped a stray tear from the corner of his good eye, “Holy shit. You’re crazier than I thought, woman”.
It was Robin’s time to gawk with confusion written all over her face, eyebrows flexing.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure what kind of drugs you’re on if you think that Nami and I are… What? Fucking in the crow’s nest when no one’s watching?”
“I wouldn’t have put it quite as graphically, but yes”. Her eyebrows knitted. “You aren’t?”
“Duh?”
“Oh”.
He laughed some more as she drowned in her embarrassment, face turning a beating red.
Wow, she really did not like being wrong.
“Seriously, though. Why would you think that?”
“Well, there’s the obvious fact you’ve been a bit… Err, gentler as of lately…”
Maybe he wasn’t discreet, but Robin was proper oblivious. In all her mental gymnastics, she had somehow managed to completely overlook the obvious suspect.
“…And then I overheard you talking to Chopper about some woman on our way to Dressrosa. You sounded very fond of her”.
No shit.
“I am,” Zoro admitted. “I think she’s amazing”.
“But she’s not Nami?”
He shook his head. “She’s not Nami”.
A little smirk played on his lips as he watched her hustle mentally to come up with a new name.
When she couldn’t, she showed him the same blank face as earlier and mumbled, “Well, it hardly matters who she is. Just tell her–”
“She’s not my girlfriend either”.
She seemed to perk up at that, guilt lifting off her like a veil.
“Actually, I don’t think she’d even consider me a candidate”.
On his part, Zoro found his tongue smoother than ever. In the absence of an explicit subject, it felt liberating to finally share the tempest raging inside him with someone.
“Why wouldn’t she?”
The question sounded genuine, so he decided to humor her.
“Mind telling me why you thought it was Nami before I answer that?”
Robin nodded, “I figured it had to be someone accessible, someone you could spend a reasonable amount of time with. Not to mention someone Chopper would know. Taking all that into account, you can’t tell me Nami isn’t the obvious guess”.
“She isn’t,” The smirk deepened. For someone so smart, Robin could be rather dense at times. “But to answer your question, I just think she’s not interested in me that way and I can’t say I blame her for it”.
“I do”.
The whole thing would be hilarious if it weren’t depressing. The swordsman pinched the bridge of his nose to stop another sneeze, “Trust me, Robin. You really don’t”.
Based on the criteria she had just laid out for him, how come she still looked none-the-wiser?
“No, you trust me. She’d be a fool not to see what you’re offering”.
For once, hope bloomed in his chest and felt reinvigorating rather than claustrophobic, spurred him into action instead of holding him back.
He shoved his hand in the front pocket of his pants, where his fingers curled around his last completed piece. While he had drawn the picture for her this time, he still felt anxious at the idea of handing her the gift – it meant claiming the paternity of the one already in her possession.
His arm covered the distance between their opposite seats and he gave her the drawing.
“Would she now?”
She glanced down at it with curiosity, peeling the paper open with careful fingers.
A gasp tumbled out of her lips as the shapes on the page were revealed to her: a Chopper with starry eyes who ate cotton-candy on Sunny’s deck and, as of last night, a smiling Robin sitting next to him, looking sideways at the happy reindeer.
“Hey, this is…”
The archaeologist sharply cut herself off, lifting her gaze to him with a bit of a lost expression.
“I don’t understand,” She complained. “Where did you get this?”
Zoro’s face fell.
She couldn’t be serious.
With all the pieces of the puzzle now in her hands, how come she seemed unable to pierce them together? He had watched her brainpower her way through far more arduous deductions.
What was she missing?
“You know the person who drew it, don’t you?”
And that was how Zoro steamrolled his way directly into phase 5.
“Since the day I was born,” He scoffed. “I made it”.
She slipped her hand into her shirt, fetched the other drawing from her left bra-cup. He thought it was sweet that she kept it right above her heart.
Robin held it up between two fingers, tilting her head to the side in an obvious question.
“Yeah. That one too…”
He unhooked Wado from his hip, showed her the opening of the secret compartment before he clicked it back shut.
“…And everything in here”.
The woman held her breath for a long minute of silence, during which Zoro braced himself for whatever would come out of her mouth next.
There was absolutely no way she wouldn’t put two and two together now.
And yet…
As it turned out, Nico Robin never ceased to amaze him. She dissected him with her eyes, lips flattened into a thoughtful line.
It seemed she had not realized that the one about the drawings and the one about the unnamed woman from earlier were, as a matter of fact, one and the same conversation.
“Why?”
He wanted to die.
He really had to spell it out for her, uh?
Zoro wondered what made her think she was so unlovable. So unworthy of striking someone’s fancy. Why she’d be so blind to clues he had been assured were flagrant.
Why it wouldn’t take her much to think him madly in love with Nami, but she’d rather not extend the same courtesy to herself even now, in light of the new information he had provided.
“Do you like it?”
She looked at him as if he had grown a second head, then down at the drawing featuring Chopper again. Her face softened as she let her eyes linger on the meticulous details of the doctor’s fur, mouth relaxing into an elated grin, “I love it with all my heart. Thank you”.
Smiling back wasn’t a conscious effort on his part.
If the feedback looked like that, he’d make sure he showed her his art more often.
Not just the patchworks of mutilated limbs that came so effortlessly to his blades, but the carnage of lines that had sweat dotting his brow and self-doubt eating away at his soul.
Well, maybe not the pieces that made his mind go mellow and drained blood from the rest of his body to pool it between his legs.
“Anytime”.
She unfolded the other drawing, performed a similar ritual of devotion before she showed it to him. “I’ve asked for the other, but what prompted this one? Not that I’m complaining, but I’m sure there are better subjects-”
“For fuck’s sake, woman. I refuse to believe you are that dense”.
It may had taken him a long while to get there, but he wasn’t patient when he made up his mind on something.
He was telling Robin today and…
Shit.
He was telling Robin?
For real?
He'd be disappointed if he finally took the leap only to then wake up in his bed, covered in sweat and sorely disappointed.
“Want to know what you overheard with Chopper and I? He was asking me to make sure you’d take care of your shoulder after you got wounded in that lab. Which you promptly did not do”.
The doctor had not been pleased when Law made her a study case while reporting the news of the Tontatta princess’ incredible healing prowess.
He lifted the drawings off her lap and set them aside, grabbed her hands and squeezed them into his own as a steady eye asked her to look at him and look at him good, because what he was about to do was obscenely terrifying and he wasn’t going to repeat himself a second time.
“Look, Robin. I wasn’t even going to tell you, but you leave me no choice. This is fucking ridiculous…” He scoffed, “Do you remember what you told me before we boarded this ship?”
“Which part?” She inquired. “It was a long conversation”.
He rolled his only eye.
They had been waiting for the Tang’s crew to perform the security checks that its navigator was so peculiar about, standing by the shore with a bag each of their essential possessions. He had been complaining about Law’s now seemingly permanent presence in their lives like he often did, not sure he understood what drew his captain to trust so much someone who was technically a rival, and Robin in return had reasoned that, while she had been skeptical too at first, the only thing they could do was to suck it up and welcome the Surgeon of Death in their midst if that was Luffy’s wish.
He was special to the captain and therefore he was special to her.
“You’re special to the captain, but that’s not the reason you’re special to me”.
Realization hit her like a bucket of cold water and ice, burnt at the back of her widening eyes.
Robin turned her face to the drawings, then back to him. Then she did it again.
A deaf thud followed, along with the sound of shoes scraping on the floor.
His back whipped into the cushions behind him when she pushed her whole weight on him, flattening him against the sofa. Before he could do or think anything, not even relish in her unexpected affection, she had their mouths perfectly aligned and his breath stolen from him, her smiling lips molding into his frown of surprise. Gold on lava.
He let one hand reach up to palm the side of her neck, while the other settled somewhere on her hip, clawing at the skin to pull her closer.
This was the point where he closed his eye, right?
Stopped staring at her like a short-sighed owl?
Where if he woke up from this, he swore he’d murder the whole fucking planet and then himself.
His right eyelid slid shut as he willed his brain to take on a more observational role.
Let his boiling blood and the exhilarating tingle born out of their adjacent skin lead the way.
Let him follow the friction.
Get lost of his own volition.
He opened his mouth when her tongue came knocking on his lips and took a long, leisurely taste, returned every nib and every bite as his hands committed to memory every inch of her body they discovered. Ran his fingers through her hair and used it to tilt her head to the side when his lungs suggested that there wasn’t much time left and he felt that it was his turn now to explore and ravish.
The fantasy had not quite prepared him for the real thing, for her kiss that tasted like honey and the pressure that her sole nearness pinned him under.
He found that he didn’t mind it, though.
Wasn’t going to stop unless she told him to. Or until he was out of oxygen, as it eventually happened.
Regretfully pulling away to catch his breath, he found her staring when he opened his eye again, her hands still glued to the chest she appeared so fond of – fond enough to sprout an additional pair to fondle it better, at least.
He couldn’t help himself.
“Now you can say you’ve groped me”.
Zoro didn’t duck the hand she swatted on his shoulder next, and as expected it came too gently to hurt. Still, he trapped her wrist and lifted it to his lips, blew a wet kiss on it.
“Easy there. Wouldn’t want to hurt yourself”.
That earned him a glare, but she failed to look much threatening with the red cheeks and her hair all messed up, a rare moment of vulnerability in her eyes as she watched his every move like a hawk.
He brushed the long blue-black strands off from her face, guided them all the way back, behind her head. Cupped her cheek and traced the profile of her dainty nose with his thumb, gave himself a moment to study her like he had never gotten the chance before.
Deeply, carefully, without hiding.
“So…”
“Uh?”
“Well, umh-”
“Kiss me again?”
He didn’t like how disgustingly pleading that came out of his mouth, although it scored him a gorgeous smile in return.
Robin shook her head yes, leaned forward and slotted their lips together once more.
Gave him a slower kiss and stole all his secrets.
“Like I said, only a fool”.
He made a mental note to ask her about that later.
“Pity we’re on a submarine,” She continued, shooting him a look that was right out of a shower fantasy. “No crow’s nest to desecrate”.
For now.
They’d be back on Sunny eventually and they could think about it then. As it was, he had far more pressing matters to tend to.
The where really didn’t matter much to him, not when all his brainpower was channeled on theorizing on the how.
“I’m sure there are plenty of interesting places on this ship-”
In a loud swish of air, the teal pearlescence of Law’s R.O.O.M materialized in the library to envelope them whole, cutting the swordsman short and dropping a single piece of paper next to them on the couch. It read, ‘I’d appreciate it if you didn’t desecrate the Polar Tang either. You’ve got a cabin. Use it. -Trafalgar Law’.
I wanna be your slave
I wanna be your master
He came through to the smell of stagnant blood and burnt flesh, to a warm, wet breeze blowing on his hair, tipping off the balance of the golden drops pierced to his left ear. There was a sense of lightness to his body, of lesser substance.
It posed an odd contrast to the pressure he vaguely felt weighing down on his chest.
Before he knew where he was or what he had been up to, Zoro remembered how much blood he had lost, how liberally it had gushed out of his wounds and tinted everything around him a haunting crimson. Frankly, he was surprised he was alive.
Even his body could only take as much, yielded past a certain threshold. Everything hurt.
His head, his legs, the muscles on his back.
His teeth and the hole they had torn in the inside of his cheek, his hands – a curse for each finger.
His left ankle and his burning spleen.
The clogs in his lungs, the sore neck, the paralyzing fatigue he had signed up for by abusing all sorts of Haki through the raid, the existential dread that came from a prolonged use of Enma.
He coughed and he wasn’t surprised when a thick clot of blood shot up his throat and made him regret his sense of taste.
The pain was driving him crazy, but not as much as not knowing what happened after he passed out.
Was the battle over?
Had Luffy won yet?
Was everyone okay?
Robin?
Robin.
He recognized her hand in the cool fingers that gripped his jaw and turned his head to the side, helped him spit the blood before it suffocated him.
“Chopper! Come here! I think he’s waking up!”
Her voice sounded distant against the constant whistle ringing in his ears, but it seemed the doctor was fine too. Eight more to go.
“Don’t stress, Robin-chwan! He’ll be fine. Dumbass likes to taint this world too much to die- I’m sorry! I’M SORRY! NO, ROBIN-CHWAAN-”
The swordsman wasn’t sure whether this was the moment he fully returned to his body or the one before his death.
He just knew that he wanted to fall asleep and wake up on Sunny, wake up in a warm embrace and be able to talk to Robin without having to pay Kinemon’s pimp-wife for her time. Wanted to undress her a thousand more times and draw her until his hands bleed. Wanted to listen to her persuasive voice paint the pictures of The Samurai and the Mountain for him.
Wanted to play stupid games and win even stupider prizes with his captain; to kick the shitty cook’s ass until it was proven once and for all how unequivocally superior to him he was; to tell Usopp to stop hiding his porn where it was so easy to find; to teach Chopper how to use a sword just in case he found himself in a situation where his Devil-Fruit wouldn’t be of much help to him; to finally beat Franky at a game of poker, to drink Fishman Rum with Jinbei and to doze off to the eerie song of Brook’s violin. Hell, he even wanted the witch to conn him out of everything he owned if it meant that he was still alive.
Zoro opened his eye to the still burning remnants of Onigashima’s castle and a bleak sky that was grey from the ash.
His sight remained unfocused for a second or two as the galloping of horses in his skull intensified, splitting his head in two.
He didn’t want his rediscovered sense of hearing now that he knew to be lying in the middle of chaos. Without a single ounce of strength.
The weight on his stomach turned out to be Robin.
She was curled up on the ground next to him, face pale and signed by tears, blood and dirt in equal measure. She looked tired.
She also had a phantom arm growing out of the chef’s head and pulling at his ear to punish him for his impertinence.
Had his cheeks not felt like they were made of stone, he would have let his lips tug into a smile.
“How do you feel?”
“Like a whole ship ran me over”. He coughed up another clot, “Twice”.
“Chopper is going to take care of you. You’ll be alright”.
Didn’t really feel like it then.
“Hn”.
Taking advantage of his distraction, the Straw-Hat doctor swiftly snuck a needle in his arm to prep a blood transfusion.
He believed he knew which one it was now.
He wasn’t dead yet.
Plenty of sunsets ahead, new memories to make.
Limits to overcome.
“Robin?”
“Yes?”
He felt his energy wane, took a long and hard look at the teary grin on the woman’s face as he cursed Chopper when he punctured him again with the anesthetic. “I won our bet”.
“Oh?”
“I told you I can cut thirty people in less than a minute”.
She leaned forward to blow a kiss on his blood-crusted cheek. Then, for his ears only, “I guess I’ll have some modeling to do when you feel better”.
On his merry way to absence of consciousness, praying that the reindeer would at least be gentleman enough to go heavy on the painkillers, he devised the plan to get rid of all future plans.
Phase 1 and only: to get the damn woman to marry him.
`*•.¸,¤°´✿ THE END ✿`°¤,¸.•*´