Chapter Text
He dreamt about his mother last night. It’s all he can think about.
He’s standing amongst the redwoods that paint the hills on the western side of Zaimoku prefecture. The gods of all trees loom over him, impossibly tall, terribly red, awfully real. He feels watched. He feels hunted. Mist curls sinisterly around his knees, something is swimming in it, but he never sees what it was. He knows it’s not the thing watching him. There’s something else here.
Music starts to play. That sad piano that’s been following him his whole life. Is it this that hunts him?
He walks through the mist, to a redwood that stands alone, a Ronin tree. The music comes from it, from inside it. Wado is in his hand then, but she’s silent, the kind of silence that comes from death. He slashes her quiet blade across the bark and it creates a shallow gash. Nothing happens.
Then blood starts to gush from the wound, terribly red. He’s fascinated by it, by the blood and the way it oozes down the old bark, the color almost too bright to be natural. Copper pennies fill his mouth and he spits them out, they disappear through the mist. The taste of blood had been so thick that it became an object on his tongue.
More. He wants more.
Slash after slash, he cuts the redwood. Are Gods this easy to kill? Their apostles are weak and fleshy, but Gods are supposed to be immortal, untouchable, unkillable. He’s killing one now, God of all the trees. Blood sprays onto his face, his white shirt, his trembling hands. He breathes blood, in, out, in, out, in-
He stops when he’s made a gory hole in the redwood, currents of blood pouring from the wound. He stares, afraid.
There’s a mirror in the wound. He stares at himself. So drenched in blood that he can’t see the color of his skin, his hair, his shirt. He is terribly red.
“You look just like your father,” His mother says, voice proud, voice unloving.
Something crawls up his throat. A scream pushes past his teeth and he watches in horror as a spider drags itself from the black hole of his throat, stepping carefully from his lips. It crawls across his face. He doesn’t know where it goes. It’s just gone. There was a terribly red hourglass on its abdomen.
His mother says it again. A wolf snarls somewhere.
He breaks the mirror, screaming, howling, roaring. There’s the decapitated head of a Bull behind the glass and it stares at him with his mother’s eyes, gold and ill. The inside of the redwood is no longer bark but red meat, shiny and foul with the stench of something disemboweled. He knows that smell. He loves that smell.
He looks down. The mist isn’t mist anymore. He doesn’t think it ever was. Its blood, terribly red, reaching his knees, getting higher. It’s hot, bubbling, like a river that runs through Hell. Is this Hell? Is this a burial ground for sinners?
He looks up.
A million feet hang above him. The forest creaks. There is no wind.
“Zoro,”
Zoro turns his head, swallowing his breath. Luffy is staring at him expectantly, gaze flickering between him and his plate of untouched breakfast. There’s the taste of copper pennies on his tongue and Zoro pokes around his teeth, making sure there aren’t any in his mouth.
“You gonna eat that?” His captain asks hopefully and he stares down at his plate, at the red bacon and the red tomatoes, and shakes his head, offering his plate, “Nah, you can have it,”
The Cook is too busy fussing over Nami and Robin, so he gets away with it, especially since Luffy gets rid of the evidence in record timing, almost eating the damn plate in the process. His chest is tight, something thick and heavy is weighing his lungs down, like mist blood smoke. Zoro stands up and leaves the Galley, pretending he doesn’t feel all-seeing eyes on the back of his head.
It’s cold and windy outside, the kind that foretells autumn. The sky is tucked beneath a blanket of mottled clouds, but now and then the sun will peek out from under its cover, a pale pearl flashing white before retreating behind the clouds, the wind too bitter even for her warmth. Zoro stands at the railing, eyes closed and breathing deep, he imagines his breath comes out as a red mist, so he keeps his eyes shut.
When he thinks his lungs are clean, he does a quick visual check of the sails and ratlines, making sure nothing’s been blown out of place by the wind. Everything looks good, in place, as it should be. He comes round to the stairs and stares at them for a bit, trying to decipher if they’re too wet to be safe, but they’re surprisingly dry, much to his relief. The waves are choppy and a blue-grey, but they seem docile enough to stay away from Sunny’s deck.
It’s been two months since Thriller Bark. He’s healed. But not good enough.
He can walk on two legs without crutches, without helping hands, without losing his breath after five steps. He can train without being scolded, without fainting after climbing to the Crow’s Nest, without seizing after four reps of his lightest weights. He can eat with the crew now, breakfast, lunch, dinner and all, without his head becoming a minefield that each loud noise steps on, without his stomach writhing like he’s swallowing mouthfuls of worms, without the promise of his muscles trying to rip through his skin.
Zoro’s healed, but he is far from the pinnacle of health, far from his expectations of his own body’s capabilities.
He still has Episodes, though certainly not as frequently, certainly not every day, certainly not multiple times a day. Before, they used to happen over the smallest thing or even at random, but now it takes a boatload of stress on his physical and mental health for one to get triggered. The seizures are mandatory to follow if Chopper doesn’t sedate him in time, but they’re getting shorter and the most he has now is usually three in a row before it all calms down.
The most important recovery though, the one the crew is most happy about, is that he hasn’t had a cardiac arrest, or, you know, died , for a month now. Which is a pretty big victory, he guesses.
Zoro sits at the bottom of the staircase with a sense of finality. He was originally going to head up to the Crow’s Nest to train for a while, see if he can beat his record of one-handed push-ups, but there is a deep kind of exhaustion weighing him down that he has no energy, nor will, to fight. He should fight it, keep to that discipline that he’s instilled in himself for years, but everything feels a bit… colorless, at the moment.
It’s that fucking dream’s fault.
Zoro is used to having strange, gory dreams, but it’s been a long time since one has disturbed him so much. Also, he usually forgets them before breakfast or the second he opens his eyes, the only evidence that he had one being a cold sweat on his skin and a slight unease in his gut.
In his peripheral vision, he sees a body swinging from the rigging. He doesn’t look, pretends it’s not there because it isn’t, it’s only there in his mind.
He sighs through his nose, frustrated. Woman won’t give him a damn break.
Absently, he scratches at his collarbone through the layers of his shirt and gauze, feeling the bumpy texture beneath. Even though the incision wounds from the lung-surgery-thing on his sides are now completely healed, stitches removed and all, Zoro has to keep wearing gauze on his torso and shoulders, as well as around his neck, to protect the scabs on his skin so they can heal. Apparently, he has a habit of scratching them off not only during Episodes but also in his sleep and throughout the day without even realizing it.
An old habit from his childhood.
“Stop picking at your scab, Take,” His dad reprimands fondly, swatting his little hands from the healing scrape on his knee, “It won’t heal if you do that, it’ll get infected and we’ll have to cut your leg off,”
Zoro gapes up at his dad with wide eyes, looking between the maroon scab on his knee and his cornflower eyes, quietly begging his dad to be joking or telling fibs. The night is warm and alive with fireflies that dance over their heads. They don’t have fireflies back at home, in the south. A finger knocks under his chin, closing his open mouth with a click of his teeth.
“You look like a catfish, gaping at me like that,” His dad laughs and reaches down to tickle Zoro’s sides with an evil grin, “Might eat you up, catfish is my favorite!”
He shrieks with laughter and tries to bat the large, tattooed arms away as they wrap around him, drawing him into a heavy-built chest and Zoro takes his chance to escape by grabbing the open flaps of his dad’s blue yukata and closing them around himself. He giggles in his homemade cocoon, which gets warmer and warmer with each breath. Surely his dad can’t tickle him in here.
“Hello,”
Looking up, he’s met with his dad’s face looking down at him, chin touching the tattooed hollow of his throat. Zoro stares back, cheeks puffed out. He’s been found. Suddenly his dad’s face turns scared.
“Behind you, Take,” He warns and when Zoro turns around, heart already in his throat, a shark is staring unblinkingly back at him. He screams and scrambles out of his dad’s lap, so scared that he runs away and, because of the tears blurring his vision and the long grass whipping by his face, he trips over a rock.
Zoro stays on the ground, curled in a ball with his arms wrapped over his head to try and protect himself from the shark, hoping that the long grass around him helps hide his small body. He doesn’t know how a shark can swim without water, but this one can.
“It’s okay, Take,” A warm hand brushes over his back, “I forget how sensitive you are,”
“’m not *hic* sensitive!” He sobs back, sniffling and hiccupping with his face pressed against the rain-damp dirt, petrichor filling his nose, “There’s a *hic* shark in-in- in your yukata!”
He hears his father laugh, that soft chesty rumble that reminds Zoro of the mama horse at the barn, the chestnut mare called Reckless that makes jackhammer sounds whenever she loses sight of her baby. The paper-like sounds of the long grass bending crunch beside Zoro and he peaks through the gap in his arms to see his dad sitting beside him.
“It’s my tattoo, Zoro,” His dad explains patiently, a small smile on his face, and Zoro realizes that summer is coming soon because the tips of his blue hair are already going purple, highlighted white beneath the moonlight, “I know, it’s pretty scary, but I’ve had this since before you were born, you should at least remember it’s there,”
Embarrassment turns his face into a hot pan and he crawls over to sit in his dad’s lap for comfort, excepting the arms that envelope around him. He looks at the shark inked onto the center of his dad’s chest, a big thing called a Great White, and now that he’s no longer in the dark of the yukata, but in the cool and warm hues of moonlight and firefly-glow, he doesn’t look so scary.
Dad says that sharks are calm and gentle, only scary when they’re hunting because they get their big teeth out. The hunting shark, with its big teeth out and white eyes and two swords crossed behind it, is on dad’s back and Zoro refuses to look at that one longer than necessary. But this sh ark, the calm shark, is okay, he’s just swimming along the black-grey gradient waves with a wisteria branch hanging from its sharp fin like a gift. He’s not going to hurt anyone.
“I’m sorry,” He whimpers to the shark because it must be awful when people scream at you because you look scary, it’s not his fault.
“You saying that to me or the shark, Zoe?” His dad asks softly, tilting his chin up so he can wipe away the wet dirt smearing his forehead and cheeks.
“The shark,” He sniffles, wiping the snot from under his nose with his forearm, “If someone ran away from me because I looked scary, it would hurt my feelings. And I don’t want to hurt his feelings,”
“I’m sure he forgives you, plus, sharks are hardy creatures, it’ll take a bit more than that to hurt their feelings,” His dad reassures, wiping his tears away and staring into his eyes with something very thoughtful in his own, “You’ve got a kind heart, Zoro, and my mother used to say that the strongest Roronoa’s are born kind,”
Zoro was born kind, but he certainly didn’t stay kind. Maybe that’s how the strength is born; In the ashes of kindness’s death, power rises.
“Not much weather for photosynthesizing, Marimo,” Comes a familiar smoky voice and Zoro sighs again, briefly looking over his shoulder to see Sanji stood a few steps above him, leaning against the railing with a cigarette in his mouth.
“Came out here to escape your stupid ero-bullshit, Curly,” He bites out, easily irritated, “I’d prefer if you left me alone, with my peace,”
A heavy gust of wind blows in from the west, the grass waves dramatically and the sails beat around with loud sounds. They’ll have to pull them up if the wind gets worse. The hanging body is perfectly still.
“Peace? Tsk, only a dumbass like you would call sitting in high-speed winds peace,” Sanji remarks snidely, descending the steps and Zoro sets his jaw, he really doesn’t want to deal with this right now, “Well, if it’s so bad to you, how about you take you and your shitty attitude back into the Galley, ‘kay? You’re pissing me off,”
He doesn’t look up when Sanji comes to stand in front of him, he just stares unfocused at the grass at his feet, the shadow body still in the corner of his vision. The wind whips through them again and Zoro shivers minutely as it cuts through his shirt, sending goosebumps across his skin.
“You’re pissing me off, as well, bastard,” Sanji spits and Zoro can smell the smoke on his tongue, “You think I wouldn’t notice that you didn’t touch your breakfast and tried to rid the evidence in Luffy’s trash-can mouth?”
A headache is starting to simmer in his temples, a nasty one too. Fuck, it feels like the beginnings of a migraine. This fucker needs to shut up and fuck off now because Zoro can take pain like a champ, the only things that weaken his tolerance being The Thing That Happened But Also Didn’t Happen, the phantom pains of that thing that didn’t happen, and migraines. Zoro can barely get through a migraine on a good day, let alone on a bad one.
Today is a bad day.
“’m not hungry, what are you gonna do? Force feed me? Stick a tube down my throat?” He snaps angrily, trying to rub the headache from his head, “Not eating one breakfast isn’t going to kill me, ‘kay?”
“It might if it's your last damn meal,” Sanji says darkly, something dangerous in his tone that has Zoro clasping his hand over Kitetsu’s hilt, who sings back C’mon Sensei, let's scare him a bit.
“You’re really doing my fucking head in now, Cook,” He growls warningly, glaring up at the cook from beneath his brow, and Sanji meets his gaze, hair mussed from wind and cigarette burned halfway down, “Leave me alone,”
Kitetsu’s blade is drawn before Sanji even has his foot off the ground. Hard-soled shoes clash with curse-forged steel, the sound like a clap of thunder amongst the howling wind. He pushes Sanji off Kitetsu and the cook steps back, immediately spinning around with a roundhouse kick that Zoro dodges, crouching down and swiping Sanji’s leg out from under him. With an impressive recovery, Sanji flips and lands on his feet, squaring up, cigarette cocking out from his scowling lips.
Zoro’s head pounds something awful now. His brain feels too small for his skull and it throbs agonizingly, sharp pains that have his eyes twitching and jaws clenching. This perverted fucker has just made his annoying headache into an appalling migraine that has ruined Zoro’s day, and night, indefinitely.
“I told you to leave me the fuck alone!” He yells furiously, not helping himself in the slightest, and the Cook scoffs at him indignantly, “It’s no small transgression, purposely skipping meals, Shitty-Swordsman,”
Kuina splats on the ground, right in the middle of him and Sanji.
The crack of her neck and bones breaking is so loud his eardrums tremble and there’s already blood pooling around her head, her face obscured by her dark hair. She’s in the same position as always; mangled beyond repair. Zoro stares at her, rigid with horror. This has never happened. She’s always just appeared at the bottom of the stairs; she’s never fallen before, never made that sound before.
Was that what it sounded like? When she hit the bottom of the stairs?
The blood staining the grass is red. Terribly red.
“IT’S YOUR FAULT SHE’S GONE!” His mother shrieks and he’s made aware of the hanging corpse all over again, still unmoving in the wind that whips around them.
“What’s the matter, Marimo? Lost your nerve?” Zoro distantly hears the Cook poke, but even in his shell-shocked state, he can hear the uneasiness in his voice, “Marimo?”
He can’t move. His breathing is fast and awful, there’s barbed wire in his chest and it’s crawling up his throat. Something is constricting around his heart, a snake, a spider’s web, a hand. Kitetsu is screaming at him, Wado is trying to comfort him, Shushi is whispering something, but he can’t hear what they're saying.
“Oi, Zoro!-”
It barely registers to him that he’s falling and when it finally does, he’s already lying flat on his back, the moist grass wetting the back of his shirt. The sky is too bright, even though it’s just grey clouds, and the rumbling in his skull is like approaching thunder.
He used to be so scared of thunder because thunder meant storms, and Zoro hated storms as a kid.
There are feet hanging from the rigging above him.
Something too big to name consumes his entire body and every single muscle tenses up all at once and he knows what’s about to happen and he’s not ready, no, he’s not ready, he can’t do it today, please, no, no no no don’t-
Zoro opens his mouth and-