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It is rude to point at people, Kuina always told him, and yet Zoro points without hesitation at the figure in front of him with his tiny arm, tiny hand, tiny index finger, in a highly accusatory fashion.
“Wait, who the heck are you?”
The other child turns around, for sure around the same age as Zoro, hair and clothes dark and desaturated as obsidian. And like obsidian, his hair spikes up in certain places in ways regular hair should not be able to without a copious amount of gel. He blinks curiously, once, twice, as though having trouble making sense of Zoro’s question.
“Me?” The child points to himself, with a colorless index finger. “I’m Sanji, didn’t I already tell you?”
“No, that’s the name of the other guy.” Zoro dismissively waves him away, him and his nonsense. “Speaking of the other guy— where did he go, anyways? He was here just a moment ago.”
The child shrugs. Zoro notices he and the child are of almost equal height, and with the shrug, the child’s shoulders reach above the height of Zoro’s. “Beats me. You didn’t even describe to me who you’re looking for, how am I supposed to give you a proper answer?”
“Blonde, loud, annoying, has weird curly eyebrows like you. But I think they curled the other way. Dunno. Likes to cook, a lot . Had a rat with him.”
“You mean this rat?”
The child pulls out a rat from seemingly nowhere; the rodent rests atop his open palm, sniffing at the dusty air with a twitchy nose, tiny rodent claws scraping pale skin as if it were a sheet of metal.
Zoro blinks curiously, once, twice.
“Where did you find it?”
The child shrugs again. “Dunno.”
“You’re playing tricks, aren’t you?” Zoro crosses his arms, and grunts in the petulant manner his master always disapproves of. “No way that’s the same rat. Yeah, sure, it’s white like the rat the other guy had, but there are plenty of white rats in the world. You’re tricking me, I know it.”
“I’m not playing tricks on you. I’m royalty. Playing tricks on commoners is beneath me.”
The child has blue eyes, but it is not the natural comforting blue of the ocean Zoro for some reason was expecting. It is the blue of artificial food coloring and neon ink; it is what Usopp would call cyan, levels more blindingly saturated than Franky’s hair.
Zoro does not like the artificial child, not one bit. “So that’s the same rat? Is that what you are saying?”
“Yup.”
“If that really is his rat, then that would mean you got it from him. In person.”
“That would be the logical conclusion, wouldn’t it?”
“So you do know where he is. The cook.”
“I’m the cook.”
“No you’re not.”
They stand face to face on the second floor of an unfamiliar gray townhouse, where everything outside and inside is gray. The peeling wallpaper, the wooden planks of the flooring, the staircase leading to the lightless first floor, the railing. The ticking clock, the leaky ceiling, the tin bucket collecting droplets, the droplets. The child smiles, the arc of it an impossibly perfect parabola.
Zoro does not remember picking up a shinai, the one held tight in his hand.
“I can prove it to you, if you want. Look,” the child says, the squeaking rat still jittering atop his palm.
A crunch , a pause. Silence.
It takes a beat and more for Zoro to understand something has changed— that the child’s held-out open palm has been balled into a clenched fist, maintaining its latitude. Something crimson leaks from the gaps of his tight grip, it is like squeezing a pomegranate to let the juice drip, but Zoro knows with the iron weight that drops in his stomach that this isn’t something so innocent.
He feels blue, in the way skin and flesh turns blue from cold, when blood stops warming the corners of the body and frost overtakes the nerves.
“Tada,” says the child, opening his grip, jazz hands, red fleshy deformed mass makes a slippery slide down the palm to land with a splat on the gray floorboards.
There is a nasty spill on the ground. Red on gray, a horribly vivid contrast of saturation. It is so easy to see where the gray ends and the red starts.
Zoro feels the crawl of red seep between his naked toes, cold shudder violently coursing through his body.
“...What the hell is wrong with you?!”
The child, his skin is gray too. So are his sclerae. Everything grayscale, except for the cyan ink eyes. Cyan as test tube fluid.
“I was proving to you that I am a cook. Not much is wrong with me. Did you know that I am perfect?” it questions, head tilting sweetly to the side in a perfect forty-five degrees. “I was made perfect. I know pests are a health code violation. They eat and contaminate your ingredients. What kind of proper cook would bring a rat into the kitchen with them?”
“You, you are—”
“Being reasonable? Yes, I am.” The child nods. “I make a whole lot of sense. Sanji is the one that made no sense.”
He is gritting his teeth so hard that his gums and jaw are beginning to hurt, strange, even biting down a sword never made his mouth ache like this. He wants to cut this thing into bits, he wants to paint color back into every cut surface. He wants to drain all of its cyan blood and fill the empty blood vessels with ocean water to make it finally breathe again.
“...You did something to him, didn’t you? You did something to the cook.” Zoro points a sword at him, suddenly not made of bamboo, it glints from the flickering old lamp hanging above the two of them. “What did you do to him.”
The thing, it walks into the sharp tip of Zoro’s sword, walks, walks, walks, keeps walking into it, tip pressing against chest, the hole on its black shirt grows wider and wider, the skin remains spotless and unpunctured.
“I did this,” it answers. “Made him stronger.” Zoro’s sword begins to bend against its chest as it walks closer, the child-not-child, the blade bending in harsher and harsher curves as the distance between the child and Zoro grows shorter and shorter. “This is what he’s supposed to be.” It is the child and Zoro now, nose to nose, so incredibly close that Zoro can feel the complete absence of breath on his skin.
The closeness makes Zoro feel like a nauseous boy hung upside-down by the ankles, painful pressure building in his cranium and eyeballs; he punches the child as hard as possible in the sternum. The sudden and tense shoulder movement makes his deltoid knot. “ Back off, ” Zoro growls, heart beating out of his chest in a thump thump thump but this is not love, not affection, it is nothing so nice and pleasant.
The punch busts his knuckles open red, red as the rat, and that leaves his knuckles thump thump thumping too.
It giggles, laughs. “What, are you trying to get rid of me? With a punch like that?”
“I’m going to kill you, is what I’m going to do.”
Zoro tries to punch it again, this time on the nose; his fist is slapped out of the air with a bloodied hand, and his fist too ends up smeared with rat blood.
“But you can’t do that.” The child eyes the stairway leading down, the way down seems endless and the number of steps infinite. There are no lights downstairs. A pitch black cutoff. “That is going to be too many dead dreams on your back.”
One from Kuina, who fell down the stairs, and another from Sanji, to drag a myth by its collar into the realm of reality.
“That’s why you can’t kill me,” The parabola smile splits wider, like a rotated crescent moon, “Because you can’t handle it. Kuina fell down the stairs and it hurt you enough. Of course you don’t have the guts to push Sanji down the stairs with your own two hands.”
“You’re not the cook.”
“But killing me kills Sanji.”
But Zoro knows this couldn’t be Sanji, because the child in front of him wearing the confident grin declares with such certitude that Zoro could not possibly kill Sanji, when Zoro knows very well Sanji has complete faith in Zoro to slit his throat and cut him clean if need be.
The glaring contradiction makes it crystal clear this could not possibly be Sanji.
He does not know what it was. He does not remember. Perhaps it was the smile that split like a slit across skin, the demeaning laughter. The proud declaration of royal status, of perfection, blind to his many glaring flaws. Perhaps it was the unnatural cyan. Because once upon a time, Zoro looked at Sanji and knew for sure that the first of mankind crawled not out of the mud but of the ocean, people were meant to thrive in the blues and absolution would come from returning to an amphibious way of living. Because the Sanji Zoro knew was not of gray and cyan but of the color Zoro wakes up to on the Thousand Sunny after every comfortable nap on the deck, of the open sea and sky the horizon line and the seagulls in between.
Or perhaps it was simply that he killed with his hands.
He does not know what it was, but something made him step forward.
Made him think I must.
Zoro shoves the child, hard.
The child, the boy, slips, loses his footing, his balance, his cocky smile, as his head and shoulders lean back into open space and secondhand vertigo overtakes Zoro, who has his arms still outstretched and palms still open from the shove, and with the shove, this boy becomes the second dark-haired child Zoro has known to begin a journey down a flight of stairs with no destination.
The too-wide slit smile returning to his face in a snap,
“Oh, wow! ” The boy exclaims, the creaking of the floorboards the droplets from the ceiling the ticking of the clock the very flow of time seeming to slow around his fall.
He laughs one last time, as the downstairs’ darkness swallows him whole:
“You actually had it in you!”
Roronoa Zoro, grown adult and powerful swordsman, does not cry.
Roronoa Zoro, indubitably loyal crew member of the Straw Hat Pirates, does not dread seeing his captain.
He is not supposed to. But he is not supposed to be sitting in a pool of his crewmate’s blood either, staring off into space, or maybe at the many wounds adorning his and the dead man’s bodies. A bruised sternum here, a dislocated shoulder joint there, rough gashes everywhere. Most prominent is the burn shaped like a shoe sole printed onto Zoro’s torso like a brand, Zoro, he looks and looks and looks and stays deathly still by the corpse marred with lacerations in the name of paying his respects. To Sanji, whom he did not kill, he thinks, Sanji was killed by the hands of something else— something sinister, something that hurt and killed with its hands, and when it wore Sanji’s shell to desecrate his good name Zoro avenged Sanji by killing his killer.
He hears the splat splat splat of a pair of sandals worn by busy feet, making its way across the red pool to arrive at the epicenter: a breathless Zoro, a lifeless Sanji.
Roronoa Zoro does not dread meeting the eyes of his captain. He is not supposed to.
But he is not supposed to do and be a lot of things.
When Luffy grows as white as a sheet and his wobbly lips part, Zoro answers the question before it can be spoken, because it will sting when spoken, he knows.
“I kept a promise.”
Because keeping promises to the dead is what he does best.