Archive of Our Own

When Zoro was four years old, he fell in love. 

The sword that Mihawk put in his hands was too heavy for them, but he hadn’t let himself falter. He’d understood, even then, the solemn duty that Mihawk had gifted him. Before he’d known his own last name, he’d known this. He’d known what he was made for.

And after Kuina, it melded into him. All of his life would be found in the sword — all the triumph, the dread. The dojo would be the only place the sun winked in, the rest of his life a dark winter. His hand was not his hand if there was not a sword in it. This future was obvious, close, so much clearer than the present. Zoro knew from before he could articulate it: any today could be sacrificed for that certainty of tomorrow.

Zoro met the love of his life when he was four. Three years later, he meets Sanji.

Zoro is seventeen when he moves back into Mihawk’s mansion. A broken wrist strapped to his chest, he glooms up at the grey house as the taxi departs, wordless, behind him. Adrenaline from the latest tournament is distant, dead. All that’s left is this — a coastal neighbourhood of large, yawning mansions. Isolated fortresses ringed by high fences and security cameras. The unyielding ache in his wrist.

There’s no one to greet his return. Mihawk is on the press circuit. Perona is at university. Servants that Zoro never sees leave him meals on marble countertops. Zoro spends days cheek-down on a grey leather sofa, alone, re-watching his latest matches, noting each falter, each upper hand lost. He never watches that last match. Mihawk left the tape of it out for him. He shoves it under the couch. 

Being back in this town, after so many seasons in hotel rooms for competitions, terms boarding in specialist schools — he itches. His life up until now has been tournaments, training camps, interchangeable cities. Here, energy unspent, mind restless — he isn’t used to being unable to sleep. He can see the ocean from his bedroom window and hears it, inescapable, every night. 

The summer is unnaturally wet. From his old room, on the highest floor, he can prop himself on the window ledge each sleepless night and watch rain slobber down into that distant sea, coat each darkly leaning tree in their too-big garden. Mihawk’s house is quiet enough that he thinks he can hear them growing.

It’s certainly quiet enough to hear next door. Music blares and there’s voices, sharp screeches or putrid laughter that Zoro slams his window shut to, but never quite manages to block out. It goes through to morning most nights. Only the sound of the sea blocks them out, but flashing lights glare multi-coloured on Zoro's ceiling. Reds and blues to make all the music sounds like sirens.

During the days, he goes to physiotherapy appointments, ignores all their advice. The sleeplessness doesn’t impact his training. Nothing could. Mihawk wouldn’t let a broken wrist get in the way of training. He aches through reps in the daylight, lies to his doctor, makes sure Mihawk's staff see. When evening comes, he slumps onto a sofa by the window, rapping his fingers, jittery as hell because his life has one single goal and he’s always been ready for it. When he can’t sleep he lies awake thinking about the tournament Mihawk is currently sweeping up, wondering what the weight of that trophy is. Listening to the thumps of the parties going on next door.

The crack in his wrist is the past, he thinks. Things that happened to him in third-person. His future is right there , as soon as he gets this cast off. As soon as they let him back in.

It takes a week before he notices the light in the cellar next door. The wall between their houses is taller than most trees, but the empty distances between the houses gives Zoro a clear view from his top-floor window. There is it — dim and dank-looking somehow, sickly yellow. Zoro notices, keeps tapping his fingers on the windowpane. Notices, and looks away. 

Perona calls and he doesn’t answer. Koushiro has left messages but he doesn’t visit. Oblique displaced fracture. He’ll be out of this year’s entire circuit.

Finally, two weeks after the taxi dropped him off, he realises that the house next door has gone quiet.

The next night, there is someone in his garden.

Mihawk moved him into the house when Zoro was seven. Zoro was smarting, he remembers, prickly with missing Koushiro and Kuina and his embarrassment at that fact. The day Mihawk had come to collect him, he had seemed as tall as his tall house. To this day, he still seems that tall to Zoro sometimes.

The house itself was more like a castle, Victorian-era, grey, dusty like no child had ever run through its halls. Part of a scattering of too-big impositions along the town’s coastal walk. There were no photos on the walls and no one there when Zoro would get back from training — Mihawk’s staff felt more like spies, silent and expressionless and always just beyond Zoro’s line of sight.

Zoro was only there for a couple of years, seven to nine or so, and all his memories are blurred by the constant roar of the sea. Even indoors, he felt damp. Outside, the walled garden was unnaturally dark all year round, thick with trees and perfectly clipped grass. Fruit from the trees was binned before it could spoil the lawn. He was never allowed to play out there. There were special rooms inside for training.

Perona used to tell him ghost stories about its previous occupants. Stillbirths and young boys who didn’t come back from the war — spectres for a young Zoro to face sword in hand. She told Zoro not to leave his bedroom on a full moon, to keep his curtains closed once the sun hazed down. She said there were noises at night, that if you lay sweet and still in bed, you heard the thumpings. You heard the wailings. 

The Vinsmokes had always lived next door. 

The two figures in Mihawk’s garden are blurry and tall, like they’ve been stretched on a rack. They cluster at the old ash tree between the two properties, one hulking over the over. Zoro sees the larger one shaking the slighter’s shoulder. He can’t hear what they’re saying. The small one doesn't appear to be looking at the other, head turned instead to the end of the garden, to where the sea swirls beyond.

Maybe another person would have been interested enough at that. Two strangers in their garden at night. Maybe most people would. But Zoro’s wrist aches; he rolls over and doesn’t sleep.

The figures are back again the next night. They’re back the night after that. Zoro sees this with only the throb inside his bone, held uncomfortably tight in his cast. They’re still arguing, clearly stuck in some stale-mate down there below Zoro’s bedroom window, and Zoro is content to let it be just that.

Then — a moment of dumb chance. The larger one has the smaller one by the collar. The scent of a fight has Zoro sitting up straight, pressing a palm to the cold window, gut scrunched tight, heart beating odd and off-rhythm with something . Through the smudges of rain, he sees figures twist and squirm and contort as the smaller one tries to wriggle out of the hold. The larger figure suddenly shoves them back and they go stumbling into a block of light from Mihawk’s kitchen. The figure yanks around, snarling, and Zoro sees — a ghost. 

This is what Zoro remembers:

A small yellow thing, knee-height amid a blur of blank-faced staff. A hand held out to him, offering him something, but he doesn’t know what. A figure scrambling ahead of him somewhere, scraped knees and bruised elbows, dirty t-shirts in one block colour. The view of the garden from above. And, always, the rushing sea.

So Zoro doesn’t remember much. He barely remembers anything that wasn’t swordfighting, wasn’t Kuina. He has no interest in it, hasn’t glanced a thought in its direction since he moved out of this house. He has this vague impression of seeing, up from his same bedroom window, five strange children lined up like little soldiers in the garden. Noises that Mihawk told him to ignore. Perona not wanting to play outside, Perona snapping the curtains shut when Zoro got too near.

The main thing he recalls is this: a slight blond boy who could never keep up. Not with those other boys, not with Zoro. But also a boy that always bounded back, stumbling and collapsing with excitement on his face, his hair everywhere. Clutching a bump on his head with one hand and reaching out with another. Soft, gentle — weak. 

Then, when Zoro was eight, that boy died. 

He waits until the boy is out there alone.

Zoro hasn’t been in the garden since his return. The brick walls are still above his head and the lawn kept neat. It stretches far into the dark, beyond where Zoro is able to see, in a lightless line of trees. From here, he can't see the sea. A thin rain scrubs the sky clean, keeps the moon hazed out. 

There in the garden, they stare at each other. For a moment before either of them speak, the boy’s face — this nearly adult face — is a picture of perfect shock at Zoro's entrance. Slow surprise, crouching there at the roots of the old ash, white face full of big eyes staring up at Zoro. But it's unmistakable. Zoro, hanging out of the patio doorway, barefoot in the wet grass, takes it in like a slap. Awful sinking feeling already happening.

He blurts out, “You’re dead.”

A moment where the words haven’t landed yet and the boy is still just blinking at Zoro in the dark garden. Then, face smoothing quick over, he turns back to whatever he was doing to the roots of the tree — “Clearly not.”

His voice isn’t anything like the voice in Zoro’s memories. Zoro recalls, distant, something so high-pitched it almost grated. Remembers the hot feeling of annoyance. This voice is bent low, careless. The kind of voice Zoro uses to strangers and fans he doesn’t really want to talk to. The kind of voice Mihawk uses.

Zoro doesn’t say anything for a while. The boy finishes scratching around in the dirt at the base of the tree and then stands up, turns around. He’s skinnier than he should be, is what Zoro thinks first. His face — his perfectly blank face, hollowed out at the cheeks and paper-pale, a glow in the moonlight. His hair falls blond and unwashed over his forehead. His eyes aren’t blue in the thin dark of the night, cold like the tiles in Mihawk’s entryway, pale and almost grey. One throat-grabbing moment and Zoro wonders, can’t stop it, if this really is a ghost after all. 

A thought hits him, corrosive — the only way to find out is to touch him.

Then the boy snaps, “What’re you doing here?” and it yanks Zoro out of the thought. Sleet in the boy’s hard eyes and people don’t usually look at Zoro like that. Roaring crowds, proud teachers, stunned opponents — not this. 

Electricity floods his mouth. Zoro demands, “What are you doing here?”

The boy keeps staring, half-sneer passing over him. “There’s never anyone here,” he says, like that answers that question, like Zoro is the one being stupid. No one is ever here, Zoro knows that, all members of their tacked-together family with better things to do than to see each other. A few members of staff to keep the house intact in its vacancy, that's all. It explains nothing.

Zoro tries instead: “You’re the boy from next door.”

The boy’s strange eyebrows nip low and tight, his mouth presses. “So are you.” Zoro sees — the careful angle of his neck. The fall of his hair. Swirling sensation in Zoro’s stomach, sharp as the cracked bone at his wrist. Zoro keeps just looking — the curved mouth, the high white cheekbones. The silver moonlight. 

It’s like a fight but he doesn’t know what move to make, first time in his life, he doesn’t know how to counter, how to block. Zoro takes a step forward. The boy watches him like a trapped animal, shifts his weight backwards, about to pounce or about to flee, Zoro can't tell. Cold hard blue, bright with something terrible. Eerie stillness like he’s not even breathing, shoulders tensing like something is going to happen —

Then the high call of somebody whistling cuts through the space between them. Somebody at the end of Mihawk’s garden. Both of them snap their heads up at it. Too-quick, the boy is on Zoro. Shoves him in one blur, presses him flush against the ash tree, the two of them now in the dark, out of sight. 

Zoro makes a noise, but a palm slaps over his mouth. “For once just shut up ,” the boy hisses, breath in Zoro’s ear. “He can’t see you.”

It’s the alien shock of it that keeps Zoro from shoving the boy away. He doesn’t know when someone was last this close to him without a sword. The ash tree is hard in his spine and the boy brackets him all over his front, no real heat to him but bone-solid pressure. His hand is frosty over Zoro's mouth, tasteless. Zoro’s heart thunders so hard the boy must be able to feel it. In his ear, the boy’s breath is as loud as the boom of the waves; up close, his eyes are bright as the glint of Zoro’s swords.

Zoro’s stomach pulls up through his throat, he’s about to say something, he doesn’t know what, when the boy is yanking away just as suddenly as he came. One hand still on Zoro’s chest, each finger starred off-centre from his heart, slight push to keep Zoro against the tree, his head turned towards where the sound had come from. Ice thawed off his face now Zoro is forgotten and the boy standing there in his garden doesn't look like a ghost at all.

He looks like a boy.

Then he shoves back away from Zoro without another look in his direction, cursing under his breath, “ah shit, no time, shit. ” He's off, a white blur, now tugging at his hair, now half-way down the garden, now fogging back into a ghost in the dark depths in Mihawk’s trees. Breathed in by the garden like he’d never been here at all.

Zoro stays there for a while, racing heart and clenching fists. The pain in his wrist itches at him, as if the boy next door hasn’t risen from the dead, as if the normal rules of the world still apply.

He goes to bed damp from the rain. The next day, he has physio, repetitive movements and slow-spoken instructions, the boy flickers like a candle through Zoro’s mind.

He can’t remember what his name was. 

His bedsheets are still wet the next night. 

There was a funeral. Zoro is sure of that.

There was Kuina’s funeral and there was the boy’s funeral. He remembers one a lot better than the other. Taking Kuina’s sword. The look on Koushiro’s face that has never left it since. The other boys from the dojo crying, trying not to cry, hiding their faces behind their small hands. He doesn’t remember anything like that from the boy’s funeral. He remembers that they were around the same time. Mihawk had made him and Perona go, Zoro screaming obscenities because there was no reason to care that this boy had died when Kuina only just had. 

Kuina was his first friend. Was more. When he was a child, he’d defined himself entirely by the ways in which he fell short compared to her. Losing her was like losing his outline, all the borders he’d known himself by. He’d never managed to defeat her. The only thing he could do, then, was defeat everyone else. 

At meal times, Mihawk’s staff won’t even look at him. A kendo magazine has done a glowing feature on him, the prodigy, and the staff have placed it by his breakfast. Zoro thumbs idly through it, staff already melted away. The article ends with the question of how Zoro can recover from his last match, from his injury, and what Zoro remembers is the ghost boy in his garden, his cold dead-eye look. Zoro sulks down into his chair. He pushes the food around his plate and leaves without eating.

The boy doesn’t appear the next day. Zoro doesn’t see him on the long tree-lined street they live on and he doesn’t see anyone else in the Vinsmoke house. He thinks about asking one of Mihawk’s staff about the family next door, but feels it would be wrong somehow. For them to know he’s thinking about something other than this snap of his bone — for Mihawk to know.

Mihawk leaves a message with the staff for Zoro to go back to his old dojo and so Zoro goes back to his old dojo. It’s in the centre of the town, thirty minute walk from Mihawk’s place. Zoro turns down the offer of a chauffeur, but doesn’t see the boy in any of the places he passes. Seeing Koushiro again — Zoro again can’t quite bring himself to eat the food the maids leave out for him that night. Wonders if he should tell the man that people are coming back from the dead in his garden. Tries it out in the mirror: maybe your daughter will be next.

Back at his window seat after he’s maxed out his broken wrist on push ups, unwelcome thoughts skitter through Zoro’s normally quiet brain. A kitchen knife, roof tiles slick with rain, the half smile of an eight year old boy. The bottom of a staircase. Bubbled-up images he can’t connect into a story, like a burnt film reel. 

He rolls over in bed, rolls over in bed. Thinks of the boy in the garden — of his funeral, of another funeral. The boy who came back from the dead. The girl who didn’t. Some feeling like a new organ lurching to life inside him. He still can’t eat.

He tries to think about training instead, about going back to Koushiro’s dojo and showing him how he wields Kuina’s sword this time. About Mihawk and about Mihawk’s future defeat. But his mind keeps veering away, first time in his whole life, slipping out of his grasp. He sees instead, photograph-bright flashes, the boy’s blond hair and thin wrists and the flat frown of his mouth. The press of his body. Zoro's stomach lurches at it.

It’s not fair. It’s the wrong person.

Beyond the sea, there are voices in the dark.

The thrown stick hits the back of the boy’s head with a satisfying thwack . The boy squawks and jerks around from his place crouching at the foot of the ash tree, face going open like someone hit a switch, mouth moving, before his gaze lands on Zoro, and he pastes back on his blank scowl. Not the boy. The ghost.

He turns away again, snaps tonelessly, “What?”

Zoro throws another stick at him — the boy dodges this one without looking around. Annoyed now, Zoro huffs, “You’re the one in my garden.”

The boy snorts, continues fiddling in the dirt. “You’re welcome to leave.”

“ My garden?”

Popping the p — “Yep.” Still not looking Zoro’s way. 

Zoro scowls, feeling tense and stupid and bothered . After a moment, the boy rolls back around to sit at the base of the tree instead. He looks up at Zoro, finally, and Zoro quickly wishes he wasn’t. Zoro is used to being looked at — used to cheering crowds and judges, but it’s not often he feels shockingly aware of being looked at. Not since, not since —

It makes no sense, maybe it’s the nighttime, but Zoro finds himself seeing shards of Kuina in this boy. It’s dull night and there’s something in the way he sits there on the wet grass, too-relaxed with an undercurrent of violence, something in the way he stares at Zoro — pretty sneer, sea-shade eyes that get in Zoro like coral. He’s dressed in a yellow t-shirt and loose trousers, clothes smeared with dirt from the tree and, under that, older-looking stains. He's too-thin and he's Zoro's height and he looks nothing like a young girl, nothing at all. 

Except Zoro can see Kuina, just there, in the set of his scowl.

Zoro asks, just to see if the boy will stop staring like that, “Who’s that other guy?”

The boy frowns, flat press of his lips. “Who?”

“The other guy in my garden, idiot.”

The boy sneers up at Zoro, cross-legged at the bottom of the tree, but he also tenses for just a moment. He smooths it over quick; other people, not-Zoro people, would have missed it. Silent, the boy fishes out papers and tobacco from deep in his trouser pocket. Stalling, Zoro thinks.

He’s got something.

Then the boy rolls his eyes, ducks his head to squint at the cigarette in the dim light, blond fringe falling in front of his eyes — something about the hunch of his shoulder makes him look more like the half-remembered boy from Zoro’s childhood. 

“Fuckin’ annoying is what he is,” the boy grumbles finally, frowning down at the cigarette he’s rolling, quick clever movements of his fingers. Telling him nothing. 

“Why’re you always hanging out with him in my garden then?”

The boy looks up at that, grins all wicked-sharp to clash with those dead eyes, and still something thumps off-key in Zoro’s gut. He lifts the now rolled cigarette. “Brings me these.”

The boy is taking a drag on the cigarette now and Zoro wrinkles his nose at the smell, imagines the tar reaching down his throat. Zoro’s diet is pre-planned and regimented; he’s never smoked in his life. He swallows down a gritty feeling in his throat, watching the cigarette in the boy’s lips, murmuring state of unease, still looking for similarities.

The conversation has taught him nothing; he’s always known conversation never does. He’s about to storm over to the boy and grab him by the collar when his posturing is disrupted by a noise from his stomach. The boy looks up at that, sits up ram-rod straight. The light from his cigarette traces the line of his face and squints a lone spot of warmth in his ice-cool eyes. Suddenly, he’s nothing like Kuina at all. 

“Hungry?” the boy asks, abrupt chirp in his voice. It jolts something forgotten in Zoro, the image of a small white hand holding something out to him. The voice of a different child. The boy rummages around in his pocket again, this time comes out with a ball of tin foil. He thrusts it towards Zoro. “Here.”

When Zoro takes it, cautious, the space between their fingers is so strange that it starts a blood hum in the back of Zoro’s mind. He hasn’t slept right for weeks and the proximity to this ghost boy has him feeling it, sudden smack at his temple. His heart is thumping hard again and it’s like he’s afraid, but that couldn’t be right. He’s never been afraid before.

It’s an onigiri. Zoro rolls it around in his hands for a moment. Then he asks again, “Why aren’t you dead?” 

Flip switched and the boy snarls at him like something that should be kept on a chain. “Why aren’t you, you green-headed freak ?”

“I went to your funeral.”

Around the cigarette: “Do I fuckin’ look dead?” 

There’s no way he’s mixed them up. Zoro takes a bite of the onigiri; he is sure of this. There was Kuina’s funeral and there was the boy’s funeral. They both died and one came back. Zoro eats some more, thinks. When he looks over, the boy is still sat there at the base of the tree, foot tapping with agitation, smoking. All Zoro feels is the sick urge to push his damp hair back from his face. 

“Tell me why you aren’t dead and I won’t ask anyone else about that other man that hangs around here,” he says.

Shock on the boy’s face, quickly there and quickly gone, sudden spots of colour high on his cheeks. Real tsunami fury, Zoro thinks, sea drawing out to rush all at once back in. Then that same high whistle as last time carves through the night and the boy’s head cracks in that direction, dog with a scent, whole body leaning toward the dark end of the garden, where the sound still rings. Zoro is forgotten again, easy as anything — the boy is on his feet and he’s running.

Zoro scrambles to his feet after him, manages, words hissing out — “ Where are you going? ”

The boy rolls back around mid-move, a water-ripple, looks Zoro head-on. All that rage has fizzed away like sea foam. He’s jogging backwards and he tips his head back in something like reverence, breathes in deep. “Can’t you smell it?”

Zoro smells cold and clean. He doesn’t know what else. “What?”

The boy looks straight at him, disappearing backwards into the dark of the trees, eyes Cheshire-cat alight, the last thing Zoro sees.

“The sea .”

A voice that sounds like his, ten years ago, says — “It was raining. You were both small and his hair was stuck down to his forehead. He had blood down his face and a knife in his hands. It was raining.”

Zoro forces his mind to it. Small stabs of memory like pin-pricks. The unremarkable gated streets at night. The only time Mihawk didn’t have Zoro enrolled in training. They climbed up the split-trunk ash tree bordering their houses, moonlight all broken up through the leaves. The boy sitting scrunched up in the canopy, poking at Zoro with a stick. Stretching small arms out for seeds. Hopping off one long branch onto Zoro’s roof.

Zoro goes to the garden in the daytime and it seems like a different place. The dirt around the ash tree is a patch of disturbance in an otherwise glass-flat lawn. He can see the path through its branches up to the roof. But he can’t bring to mind anything more than flashes of actually being up there.

The bottom of the garden is unremarkable. The wall at the end is red-brick and damaged in certain places, but Zoro runs a hand along its length and finds nowhere to sneak through. 

He walks back up to the top, to the tree. One-handed, the other still strapped down, Zoro swings up a few branches to peer over the wall separating Mihawk’s from the Vinsmokes’. The lawn there has been concreted over. There are no trees, no plants. All along the wall, pointing inward, are security cameras. He looks down for the cellar window he saw that first night. He spots it, smaller than he expected, and sees what he thinks are fingerprints smudged on the glass. 

The next time Perona calls, he answers. When she asks how he’s faring alone in Transylvania, he asks, “Do you remember next door?”

A pause at the other end. Shuffle sounds as if Perona is moving the phone to the other ear. Slowly, “Yeah.” And then nothing else.

“The blond one?”

Heart big in Zoro’s throat and Perona clears hers. “The one who died?”

Later, in bed, the sound of the sea crashes through Zoro’s window, submerges the room. Lying on his back, he imagines breath warm and loud in his air, but he knows it was cold, cold as the grave, cold as the sea. He feels the past lying down on him and violence shimmers all around, hot as the sun.

Mihawk calls. 

Zoro sees the message the next morning, penned carefully by one of the staff he never sees. The outcome of Zoro’s last match was disappointing, it reads, but with proper training there is no reason it should happen again. Underneath, the address to Koushiro’s gym that Zoro has never forgotten. A member of staff watches as Zoro reads it and watches as he puts it down.

The house has a training room for Zoro. When he gets his swords in hand, the grip makes his wrist spit pain. He begins his reps. Gets through fifteen minutes, teeth bared. Then, out of the corner of his eye, through the wet-condensed window, he glimpses the spot at the bottom of the ash tree where the boy crouched in the dark and there, further, up in its branches, the spot where he had clambered up as a child. For a moment, Zoro thinks he can see him there, yellow in the tree.

His footing fails, he flubs his next move, quick pain striking along the fissures in his wrist.

His sword clatters to the floor.

The next time the boy is in his garden, Zoro floats the memory — the two of them clambering hand over hand up the ash tree onto Zoro’s roof. He’s rewarded with a crack in the mask on the boy’s face and it feels like what a trophy feels like, the comparison so unexpected he misses the boy’s words, gone blind, deaf. Later, he will be unable to re-create this moment of the boy’s frost thawing in his mind. Another memory gone. But in the moment, his mind is full of swords.

The boy leads the way. Zoro’s body remembers what his mind does not, knows which branch to duck and which to grasp. No hesitancy in the leap onto the roof. At the top, Zoro nearly bumps into the boy, is about to snap a warning, but the boy isn’t looking at him. He is standing straight on the tiles and staring out to sea, shaking like a taut rope.

“I forgot,” the boy says, sounding oddly choked. “I forgot you could see the sea from up here.”

Zoro looks across the dark garden to the coast just beyond the wall and the horizon just beyond that. It must be the same view from the Vinsmoke house. The two buildings raise the same height into the sky, with the same balconies and towers. The sea laps at their far garden wall, just like it does Mihawk’s. But the boy is staring and Zoro wants to put his hands on his face and tug him back to look at him instead, do something unexplainable and childish, something in the dark.

The mercury-coloured sea swirls across the boy’s face, pre-storm taste of something in the air, some potential. And then, like the pour of moonlight through his bedroom window, a name.

Sudden cohesion of the past onto the present. On the slick roof, Sanji holds an onigiri out to him. He’s always holding something out to him, Zoro thinks suddenly. So he takes it.

Another memory — “You're a cook, right?”

Sanji’s face does odd things at that. Another crack, with a nameless part of Zoro giving a little cheer inside. “Guess so,” he says. He ducks his head to roll a cigarette and Zoro looks away, hasty.

“You any good?” 

Sanji says cheerily around his now-rolled cigarette, “I’ll push you off this fucking roof.”

Zoro smacks at him. Sanji doesn’t even try to duck away, takes the blow like he’s practised at it. Just rolls his eyes annoyed. Zoro reclines on the roof to snap a large bite out of the onigiri. 

“Not running off tonight?” Zoro says.

Sanji huffs, shakes his head. Chants under his breath, “Nah, we’ve got time, we’ve got time.”

Zoro isn’t sure what he means by that. He’s spent too long thinking about the past these recent weeks. Zoro has always had time because he has always known exactly who he will be. Sitting next to this ghost on his rooftop, no tournament scheduled, no friendly match come morning, Zoro feels like he's side-stepped time entirely. He's off-kilter, suspicious. Having a name has made the boy less of a ghost, but he isn't sure if that's what he wants: death reaching its bony hands back into the domain of life when Zoro has worked so hard to separate them. 

He doesn't want to look at Sanji anymore; he turns back to the gardens below them, the sea just beyond. Dark clouds are fattening up the skyline, promising disaster. Sanji shifts, knee knocking against Zoro’s. Zoro thinks of one year ago, a moment clearer than any other, a final opponent at his feet, a single silver moment when he’s won , simple as that. Thinks of one month ago, and the clean crack of his wrist. Thinks of ten years ago, on this rooftop, but it’s all made up.

“Where's the rest of you?” he asks.

Sanji gives him a strange smile. “What happened to your arm?” he counters.

Zoro scowls, buy raises the onigiri in a toast, a concession. It's a draw, but that's an improvement from Zoro's last fight, and Zoro is tired of the past. There’s something about this moment — maybe it’s the sea — but on that wet rooftop, Zoro’s life feels suddenly, sweetly empty. No sword in his hand, no opponent around the corner, no Mihawk in the wings. No ghost of a girl to live up to. None of the things that have defined him. Only a rooftop, a storm, the sea.

Sanji. 

Koushiro won’t let him fight his boys. Not until the cast is off, not until he gets the okay from his physio. Zoro still goes back to the dojo anyway, watches the other matches and takes tea with Koushiro afterwards. He makes sure that Mihawk's staff know where he's going. 

“Isn’t it weird?” Sanji asks one night. “Training the person who’s gonna beat you?”

Zoro doesn’t think it’s weird. He understands it perfectly — Mihawk shaping his own certain future. If not Zoro, then someone else. So why not someone hand-crafted, someone you have always seen coming?

Sanji doesn't get it. “What's the point in knowing your whole future?” he asks darkly. “Who wants that? I wanna imagine it could be anything.”

Sanji doesn't object to Zoro being around in the nights anymore, but that doesn't mean he's particularly softened towards him. Still icy-sealed up. It leaves Zoro on the defensive more often than not. Sanji references their childhoods and Zoro recognises none of it. Sanji mutters something Zoro doesn't understand under his breath, face stormed over, and Zoro is irrationally worked up at it: the smear of dirt under Sanji's eye, the faint bruise ringing his throat, the unknown set of his mouth.

Zoro never asks. The thing is — if Sanji were the boy of his scant memories, feeling so much, if he were acting soft, emotional, then at least Zoro would understand that. He would understand their roles. What to do. But most of the time Sanji acts like nothing. Life as Zoro knows it is so black and white. You win or you lose. Zoro doesn’t know what winning means here.

Most nights, they clamber onto Zoro’s roof. Sanji reclines against the tiles and scowls at Zoro, pokes at him, calls him names and smirks savagely when they land. There’s always rain in the air and his blond hair curls with it. When looking at him is too much, Zoro will tip his head back to study the stars. Sanji always stays facing the sea. 

Sanji asks him questions about his past titles, about his tours. He wants to know about every city Zoro has visited and jabs his elbow at Zoro's side when Zoro can't remember them. So Zoro tells him about planes landing in the middle of storms, the glass-clear summer sky of one city and the grey-stone buildings of another, how you couldn't see the tops of some of those shiny skyscrapers and how loud Zoro had thought the sea was when he was finally back in Mihawk's mansion.

It's the last detail that Sanji grabs at. He pushes up onto an elbow, frowning at Zoro. “There are places without the sea?”

“What? Of course there are, you idiot. What a dumb fucking question.”

Sanji doesn't even react, eyes far-off. “I dunno.” He shrugs, looks back over Mihawk's garden to the dark ocean beyond. “It's just always been there. Hasn't it?”

Not for Zoro. He's forgotten what his childhood night-times were like with the sea as lullaby. 

He’s also forgotten about the other figure.

They’re scrapping languidly beneath the ash tree one night, just shoves and scuffed heads, Sanji avoiding Zoro’s broken wrist in a way that pisses him off, so Zoro moves to get him in a headlock — and then there’s an angry noise from somewhere behind them and Sanji goes sudden white with fear, no moment to turn or react, Zoro is slammed to the side.

Sounds knock around in Zoro’s head, no meaning, as he rolls a few times on the wet grass. Then he rockets back to his feet, unknown danger, mind gone to that blank place it goes to when he’s got a sword in hand and a body in front of him. But when he moves forward to counter-strike, there’s Sanji in between him and his assailant, arms thrown wide and back to Zoro.

“Calm down, you senile freak,” Sanji is rushing out, forced-casualness. “It’s just Zoro.” Which makes Zoro falter, makes his stomach scrunch up small. He hadn’t told Sanji his name and Sanji knew anyway. 

Glowering at him over Sanji’s head is an old man with the largest moustache Zoro has ever seen. He looms over the two of them more in energy than in stature, his whole wrinkled face contoured in disgust, forehead knotted under a bandana. He quickly yanks Sanji towards him and glowers at Zoro.

“What d’you mean, just ?” the old man snaps, eyes dark. “I’d guessed that, y’bloody fool .”

It crumbles into an argument. Sanji is ranting up at the old man with a level of animation so far unseen. The old man just looks over Sanji’s head to where Zoro stands lamely with his eyes hard, dark. Zoro can’t hear what they’re saying, both of them now putting work into speaking too low, Sanji tugging a fist on the old man’s sleeve, face tight and asking, the old man still looking only at Zoro. 

The night garden has felt like a bounded space, Zoro realises. Those walls kept out the end to Zoro’s last match, kept out Mihawk’s watching staff, kept out Mihawk. Zoro doesn’t know what to do with this new entrant. For the first time, it feels like there is an intruder.

Finally, the old man drops his eyes to Sanji, snaps, “Shut up, boy.” He gets Sanji by the wrists. The way Sanji is looking at the old man, Zoro knows this is who whistles for Sanji sometimes, who can always snap Sanji’s attention away from Zoro with one tuneless ring, and he says nothing.

The old man drags Sanji away. Zoro lets him.

Sanji isn't alone in the garden for another week after that. The old man is there, like a guard dog, but Zoro goes out anyway. Lets the old man stare at him while Sanji sneers, "What took you so long?" and Zoro grins shark-like back at him, completely against his will.

Sanji must have said something to the old man, because while he looks openly furious at Zoro's presence, he doesn't drag Sanji away. Instead, he acts like Zoro isn't there at all. Zoro doesn't push his luck; he doesn't ask.

He also doesn't ask what the two of them are doing in his garden. He can't see any rhyme or reason to their meetings, to what they do here. The old man — this is almost exclusively how Sanji refers to him too — is there about half the time. Some nights, Sanji sits cross-legged at the old man's feet, tongue stuck out in concentration, as the old man winds thick ropes around his hands. Other nights the old man brings him books on topics they both go out of their way to keep Zoro from seeing. Sanji snaps them up greedily every time.

Through-out it, the old man calls Sanji by a long, ever-changing list of vegetables that always make Sanji flush with fury. The two are usually caught up in each other as soon as the old man arrives, squabbling with an easy familiarity Zoro doesn’t recognise from his stilted updates to Mihawk. Sanji ranting at the old man, gesturing wildly like some whole other person than the iced-over boy Zoro usually gets. The old man scowling down at Sanji, eyes warm, moustache twitching.

On the best nights, the old man leads Sanji through hand springs and flips, wide-flung pirouettes. A constant guiding arm beneath the small of his back. Zoro takes in each falter, each flaw, like it’s his own, thinking of his failure. It keeps an acidic feeling in his throat, and, underneath that, an increasingly constant thrum of need. 

After a few nights of watching this, Zoro starts going to Koushiro’s gym most days. The boys from his childhood competitions are grown tall and strong, but Koushirou looks disapprovingly at Zoro’s cast and still won’t let him fight them. They keep having tea in the back instead. Zoro tells him about his past victories and Koushiro asks him if he's made any friends and insists he stay for another pot.

One night, watching the old man trap Sanji in a headlock and call him a list of ingredients, Zoro asks, ”Is this your dad?” 

Sanji jumps out of the old man’s grip, looks scarlet and wide-eyed at him; the old man looks flat at Zoro. 

“I’m his cook,” the old man says. 

Sanji turns to scowl at Zoro, still red. “You’ve met my dad.”

Maybe he has. But, still, Zoro isn’t much interested in why the Vinsmoke family’s private chef would be meeting one of their sons in their neighbour’s garden at night. The quality of the food the old man brings is enough to convince him that the man really is a cook — the prickly way Sanji picks each offering apart solidifies that Sanji is, too. It doesn't go any way into explaining how Sanji has come back from the dead. But, Zoro realises, that's a question he hasn't asked in days. He keeps getting stuck on other things, a handflip Sanji wants to show him, the wet stick of Sanji's hair to his forehead in the rain, the way he touches Zoro when he wants his attention.

A fortnight in and they’re arguing when Zoro slips outside — not the normal arguing, instead the old man talking low and fast at a stone-faced Sanji who won’t meet his eyes. Sanji keeps shaking his head, lips pressed together tight and hands fisted, as the old man shakes him by the shoulders.

“What're you waiting for?” the old man is hissing. “It'd bad enough he's seen — "

They stop when they see Zoro. Twin blank faces. Sanji opens his mouth, but the old man grabs him harsh by the arm and mutters something that Zoro can’t hear. Sanji’s eyes are unreadable on Zoro, but he doesn’t try to say anything.

The old man tugs Sanji to the back of the garden, the dark clutch of trees soon obscuring them. As always, Zoro doesn’t try to stop them.

Mihawk leaves another message with one of the maids, inquiring about Zoro’s injury. Is he ready to return to competitions yet? Has he started practice matches?

He leaves a note with Koushiro, too. Koushiro is clearly unhappy, but doesn’t object. Zoro can’t remember if the man’s objected to anything since Kuina, life skimming over him like the seabed. 

The first friendly Koushiro arranges for him, Zoro twirls the scabbard of his sword in his palm, breathes the way he was trained, keeps his eyes on his opponent. But he's thinking about the old man's grip on Sanji's arm last night. He tries to reel it back to familiar ground, imagines Sanji as part of his audience, arms in the sky, mouth open, lost in the boom of a crowd. But he keeps coming back to Sanji rain-damp on a rooftop, holding out a hand, churlish scowl and copper-bright eyes. The old man shaking him by the shoulders. The aches in his body are new — after a decade of training, they are new.

He nearly loses the match. 

“You’re distracted,” Koushiro says. Bright slides of memory — Sanji’s flat blue eyes, Sanji’s hands in the dirt, Sanji’s hair, Sanji’s sneering mouth, Sanji’s shoulders. Yes, he’s distracted. Curiosity is born in him, but it’s nothing to do with Sanji’s death. It's Sanji life. What would he be in the daylight? When Zoro is champion, where will he be? Zoro wants to see him in a kitchen, he thinks, see a knife in his hands, see an apron knotted around his waist. Wants to know if he's bitchy in the mornings and what he looks like when he's asleep. 

“I know it can be hard, being back here,” Koushiro says over their pot of tea after Zoro nearly flubs another friendly. “I think about her too.” 

But Zoro hasn’t thought about Kuina in days. The realisation is like slamming into a frozen lake. He tries to picture her face but his mind lurches away. Sanji’s eyes, Sanji’s hair, Sanji’s mouth.

Zoro has always known who he is. He has never been this. 

That night, Zoro dreams of something he never has before — someone else. 

This is what Zoro remembers:

Sanji straining up, smaller than the other boys and unable to reach whatever they held above his head.

Sanji crying in the garden, little fists pressed into his eyes, in a torn yellow t-shirt and rain-boots.

Sanji scuffing at the concrete with his toes, guilty eyes floating back to the Vinsmoke house, where someone large watched from within.

Sanji hiding something behind his back, black-purple bloom across his forehead, backing away.

Sanji holding his hand out on the roof, offering Zoro something, whole of the sea behind him, and Zoro — doing what?

None of it explains Sanji now. His strange smile sometimes. The way he only appears in Zoro’s garden at night like something fae, like something that couldn't exist in the daylight world of Zoro's physio appointments and untouched breakfasts and the scuffed linoleum of Koushiro's gym. It doesn't explain the tight look on Sanji’s face when he looks at the old man sometimes, the dull bruises around his neck, the one outfit he wears.

It doesn’t explain anything. So Zoro tries not to think about it at all.

Zoro limits himself to goals, objectives. He tries to get his mind back.

“Gonna get this off soon," he tells Sanji on the rooftop, waving his broken wrist at him. "Then I can compete again. You could come to a match. Watch me destroy 'em.”

Sanji reclines on the tiles, cigarette burning down between his fingers. “Don’t really get out much, green bean,” he says, looking slant-eyed and eerie at Zoro.

Zoro scowls at the nickname. “Just lurk in my garden like you’re gonna break in.”

Sanji laughs at that, but Zoro doesn’t get the joke. Sanji rolls to his side to throw a plastic bag he'd found tucked behind the ash tree at Zoro. Inside, more onigiri.

“These are my favourite,” Zoro says as he unfolds the tin foil cradling it.

Sanji inhales, exhales smoke. “I remember,” he says.

It gets Zoro, when Sanji says things like this. Gives him a shudder of the two of them as children. Sanji learning his favourite foods, his name, his dreams, while Zoro gave up the rest of the world. Swords and Kuina, matted together. His only dimensions. No room for Sanji at all.

“Anything must be possible out on the sea,” Sanji says, suddenly. He’s spun round to stare straight at Zoro, cut through with an intensity Zoro hasn’t seen before. “Can’t you just imagine it?”

Zoro has only ever been able to imagine one thing. His hand on a trophy. A body at his feet. His vision is narrowed, thinned. The sea is too wide. It doesn’t fit.

Sanji goes on: “I used to wonder about it when I was — in the house. If you’d actually done it.”

Zoro doesn’t need to ask what he means. “I will.”

Sanji tips his head to the side, eyes narrowed, but no real heat to him. “That's what you said. Strongest in the world. Could beat up anyone.” He roles his wrist, gesturing at nothing, the light at the end of his cigarette leaving impressions in Zoro's eyes. “No one could hurt you.”

“That's right.”

“How d’you know? You some sort of fortune teller, moss-o?”

Sharp grin from Zoro, immediate. “I am, yeah.”

Sanji laughs, a sound like the sea below them. He rubs at his forehead with the back of his wrist, still laughing, but it’s toneless now. He shifts to face Zoro, crowding into him, right there, and it’s like Zoro has never been anywhere else.

Never wanted anything else. 

“What’s gonna happen then, sprout?” Sanji reaches out to ruffle Zoro’s hair, electric bolt through Zoro’s skin, look on Sanji’s face nothing still. His hand stays there and Zoro’s body keens at it. Zoro doesn’t reply and Sanji tips his head to the side, considering. Then sits back. 

“I used to think I knew," Sanji says. "I used to think there was something else after this.” He looks down at the stub of his cigarette in his fingers, now burnt down far enough to scar. He shrugs. "Guess I grew up.”

Zoro doesn’t know what to say to that. So he doesn’t say anything at all. 

He doesn’t think about how empty and silent the Vinsmoke mansion has been until, one day, it isn’t anymore. 

The night before, under their tree and on their roof, Sanji looked across at him, huge boyish eyes, face-split grin, as Zoro sputtered at some passing insult. The moonlight through the ash tree made a world on Sanji’s face. At once, Zoro was dropped into a gut-punch of deja vu. He was eight years old and it was the first time Sanji had smiled at him like that. They were on this same roof and Sanji’s lip was split and it was raining and the moments crashed together. The horizon was angled wrong over his shoulder, like he alone had shifted it, the sky nearly poured out.

Then loud, booming voices from the Vinsmoke place and Sanji’s face had opened up, just like that, sudden terror and he’d gasped out, “Oh, shit,” and scrambled down off Zoro’s roof and into the dark of the garden. 

Sitting on his window sill in the daylight, taking in the cars parked haphazardly along the Vinsmokes’ long driveway, the lights blaring inside for the first time in weeks, Zoro scans the scenes for Sanji. Tries to get an angle into the windows. He never sees him. 

That night, Mihawk’s garden is empty. Zoro stays up all night watching for something that never comes, thinking. It should be dawn.

He spends the next day going around the perimetre of the Vinsmoke place, not really understanding his own unease. He checks the bottom of Mihawk's garden again and finds, this time, a slim gap where the bricks have been carefully removed. Just wide enough for a person to slip through.

A few days later, a blue head pops above the fence asking for someone called Zeff. The large man mimes a ridiculous moustache and it’s not hard to work out who he means. Zoro doesn’t ask why the stranger has come to ask for the Vinsmokes’ chef in Mihawk’s garden instead of the actual Vinsmoke house, just tells him he doesn’t know. The blue-haired man goes away, muttering, and Zoro resists the urge to scale the wall over to the Vinsmokes’ place.

He paces the garden again instead. Checks the ash tree that spans their two properties, if anything has been left behind its trunk. Nothing. The soil around the roots is loose. Indeterminable time and, when he goes back inside, there’s another message from Mihawk penned by the phone. 

He was meant to be at another friendly at Koushiro's gym today. His stomach drops away as he reads the message; he's missed it. Mihawk already knows. He runs to the gym and doesn't look back at the Vinsmoke house, feeling disproportionately out of breath, but it's too late.

Forgot —

Maybe none of this would have ever happened if Sanji hadn’t held a hand out to him like that when they were still children, he thinks. Maybe it wasn't the endless hotels and the jet lag, maybe it’s that hand that’s emptied him out all these years and he never knew. 

He thinks he wants to go back, to reclaim, to know what made Sanji happy like that, what made him bleed. He used to just want victory, but now. Now. Time can only move forward, he knows. He can go into the future and see himself, champion of the world, see Sanji in a glossy kitchen somewhere, but he can never go back to that roof. He can never be that eight year old boy. He can’t ask him any questions.

It’s another night where Zoro can’t sleep. Outside his window, from where the Vinsmoke mansion glooms, there are sounds. 

The garden stays empty for a week. Zoro looks out each night, listens to the thumps of the parties next door, and sees nobody. He spends one long, raining night slumped moodily under the ash tree. When it comes, the dawn knocks him dead. 

The blue-haired visitor has given him the old man’s name, but it takes another kendo magazine laid out by Zoro’s breakfast to make him realise what he can do with that.

The first result online: Vinsmoke Chef Gets Five Years for Break-In. An unmistakable mug shot tops the article. Underneath Zeff’s blank-looking face, Zoro reads about a wealthy family’s disgruntled ex-employee who attempted to burgle the house after being fired. He checks the dates. He and Sanji would have been around nine years old. The article describes Zeff as ex-Navy, says the Vinsmokes’ security team found him in the mansion’s cellar. Nothing of value was taken.

Further down the article, there’s a series of photos of the Vinsmoke family, bright-haired kids Zoro connects to his vague memories, unsmiling at the camera outside the courts. He clicks to other news reports, press releases from Germa Tech, sees that same set of strange siblings at corporate events, graduating from some expensive private school, little prodigies. Something about the photos unsettles him, but Zoro had already long left the neighbourhood by this point in history, he doesn’t know what it could be.

Another detail rotted in time.

Zoro wakes up and knows he is there.

Still night. Strange slow moment where his feet find the floor by his bed and he doesn't remember moving. The sound of the sea rushes past him as he descends the stairs, barefoot, each step creaking, his hand skimming the rail, the waves in his ears, an eight year old boy in his mind, running in slow-motion to where it's too dark for him to see.

In Mihawk’s garden, Sanji is talking, fast and hard and quiet, hands fists in Zeff's shirt. Zeff is hardly breathing. Zoro feels narrowed thin. Time moves forward, but trips. Stutters, stops. Sword-minded, he takes the details in like instinct, like Sanji is another opponent. Sanji is favouring his left side. His pinky is slightly out of place. His jaw is bruised purple, his lip is split. One of his hands can't quite close around Zeff's shirt.

“I won't, I won't,” Zeff is saying. Voice all clogged up. “C'mon, aubergine, calm down, I won't.” His hands come to Sanji's cheeks, horribly tender, the red lines under his right eye, the puce-coloured bruises around his temple. 

They aren't looking at Zoro, until Zeff is. And then he takes Sanji’s wrists with painful gentleness and disentangles them from his shirt. “You go down there and wait for me, boy,” he says, that same slow voice he always has for Sanji, even in insults, nods in the direction of garden's end. It’s the first time in a long time that Zoro has seen Kuina in Sanji — in how he blinks up at Zeff, how his mouth moves quietly. He looks like a child, Zoro thinks, that’s it. Another bruised up child. He still hasn't looked over at Zoro and Zoro has no idea if he knows he's here.

“Go on, lad, go,” Zeff says, a gentle push, and Sanji stumbles down to the bottom of the garden. 

They both watch him go, watch his slight stumble, the limp he's trying to play off. Zeff breathes in one heavy blow. Then he walks up to Zoro and fists both hands in the front of his pyjamas, drags him up close.

“I dug him out,” Zeff says, low and rough. Zoro can smell his breath. “I did that — me.”

The words are a terrible knot in Zoro’s throat. He has nothing to say. Zeff's eyes are moving between both of Zoro's, like he's trying to get something across, spotlight vision, like he's trying to see something in him. He shakes Zoro by his collar, but when Zoro's mouth moves, nothing comes out.

He doesn't know what to say.

A moment and then Zeff's face closes up. “Remember that,” Zeff says, then shoves Zoro backwards, Zoro’s heels slicking on the wet lawn, nearly toppling him. When Zoro recovers, looks up, the old man is already walking away. And he knows he's failed something, but he doesn't know what.

In one year, Zoro will be world champion. Everything will be different, Zoro thinks. They’ll never be here again. 

Two nights later, Sanji says: “I can’t be out long.”

He says: “Follow me.”

Tied up under a low-hanging willow at the docks below the Vinsmokes’ mansion, the boat is medium-sized and wooden. The inside contains a kitchen and two narrow bedrooms. When Sanji tugs Zoro through the dark undergrowth at the base of Mihawk's garden, keeping his hand in his as they squeeze through that fresh-looking gap in the high brick wall that Zoro had discovered the other day, the horizon blows open into choppy waves.

The sea — Zoro is paper thrown into it. This sea has always been the beast at the bottom of his garden, the scream outside his window when he tries to sleep at night. Childhood soundtrack. He's never been this close to it, he realises. It's cutting back on itself, dragging and deep, and Sanji is right there next to him, still gripping his hand, like he's about to claw him down to its deepest trench. Zoro has the image of its jaws opening around them both, bruised like Sanji's.

Zeff is waiting on the deck, leaning heavy against the railing and staring flatly at Zoro. He doesn’t respond to Zoro’s nod of greeting. Sanji shoves Zoro, “go on, go on,” and Zoro scrambles onto the boat uncertainly. It feels like something he shouldn't be near, he thinks. His legs wobble like a colt’s. The ocean is too big and the boat feels too small.

Sanji unites the docking rope and hops on board, gracefulness that Zoro doesn’t really recognise in him. He’s in just that same thin yellow t-shirt he's always in and there’s bruises on his elbows, but he’s standing up straight on the deck, slouch gone. Blue eyes, roiling sea, match flame. Freed of gravity.

“C’mon, lettuce-head,” Sanji says, and for the first time Zoro makes the connection between Zeff’s nicknames and Sanji’s. The intimacy of being eaten. “The sea.”

Zoro’s never been on a boat before, but it’s clear Zeff has. He barks orders that obviously don’t apply to Zoro, who scrabbles to sit down at the side, hands clasped to the railing. Sanji, in moving contrast, springs into action at each one, knocks back every new word Zeff shouts across the deck to him, and soon they're moving. 

Sanji's hands blur quick on the ropes. Zoro has seen Sanji on land — dark, walled-in land — exclusively. Now, the awful expanse of the ocean, Sanji moving, he is someone cracked open and new. Crouched in the boat, dragged along in this direction that only Sanji can control, Zoro can’t look away. The smack of cold salt wind, whipping Sanji’s hair back, t-shirt snapping against his body, both his eyes visible for the first time, wide and seeing something Zoro can’t.

Zoro turns around and Mihawk's house is gone. He feels like he's going to throw up. Waves crash against the side of the boat and spray seawater into his face, forcing him to squint. All around, there is blackness, rushing up like a army, rushing Zoro away from the shore. Below them must go on forever, he knows, no seabed to speak of, nauseating uncertainty. They are moving into some future but Zoro doesn't know what it is. He wishes, seasick, for land.

Beach blow against the boat is tamed in Sanji, his fast-moving hands and his eyes, which take in the whole of an ocean that is near-blind to Zoro. They skip over waves, bumping over each smack of the current as if Sanji had called it over himself. Zeff is whooping— “That’s it, brat, that’s it!” — and suddenly Sanji’s head snaps around, grinning so bright and wide, lighthouse beam, no shadows at all, that Zoro is knocked breathless for a moment, before he realises that Sanji isn’t looking at him at all.

He’s looking at Zeff.

Zoro might as well not be there at all. Some elemental shift is happening on the seabed, someone is bubbling out their last breaths in the waters below. A whole history passes between Sanji and Zeff's twin grins, but Zoro can't read it. He's trapped in the middle of the horizonless ocean and he can't see a damn thing other than Sanji's unrepentant beam, a ten-year collapse, moving Sanji and Zeff onto somewhere that Zoro can't follow.

Zoro fell in love for the first time when he was four. He falls in love for the second time at seventeen, in the black churn of the sea.

Zeff stays behind on the boat. Zoro idles awkwardly on the mossy bank while the old man talks quick and quiet to Sanji on the deck, his hands tight on Sanji’s shoulders, smiling helplessly in a way Zoro would never have imagined, Sanji wide-eyed and grinning back up at him. Finally looking straight at each like they couldn’t look away. 

After, they clamber up their tree, onto their roof. Zoro stiffly, Sanji near-bouncing. Before them, over the sea, there is the smallest hint of dawn. Zoro has never seen Sanji in the daylight before, he thinks. Never seen all of his angles. Looking at him here, with the darkness still a buffer, is too much already. If he were to see him in the sun, Zoro’s afraid it might be over. It might be something he wants more.

For the first time — Zoro wants to run away. 

And it comes from him helplessly, he who has always known his future, who has never doubted in his life — “What’s going to happen?”

Sanji shuffles closer on the tiles, first touches of rain, his eyes dark, dark blue and rounded. Zoro is stuck on the scarlet line of blood threading his bottom lip.

“I dunno, broccoli-boy,” Sanji says, low. “Anything I want.”

Sanji’s thin fingers are in Zoro’s top now. There’s a buzzing in Zoro’s head, not his pulse, Sanji’s pulse, drowning out his own and the things it usually pounds out, the things that have made him, he can’t remember where his swords are, he can’t remember where hers is —

When Sanji kisses him, it’s with rain in their mouths. Merciless, just the way Zoro has always liked, and so of course Zoro kisses him back. He’s helpless. He hates it, the eight-year-old voice in his head.

This could never happen in the daylight. The sun would burn them both away. His body has only had one use, one need. Now, in the dark, it has want. He clutches back, at sea.

When Sanji pulls away, Zoro stares at him and Sanji looks back wet and clear, really there now. The ghost finally come to life. Something rings in Zoro’s head, a warning bell, there’s somewhere else he should be right now, but he has no idea where. The morning, maybe, when he’ll crawl into the dojo and Sanji will be banished by the sun, when Zoro will fumble his match on sleeplessness and bottomless want, where Sanji takes and feeds until Zoro is as rusted as his swords. Where Sanji is always eight years old, is always seventeen years old, and so Zoro must be, too.

Back in Mihawk’s empty mansion, Zoro throws up onto the tiled entryway. He grasps blindly for something familiar. He finds a mantle-piece full of Mihawk’s trophies and knocks them all down.

The next day, at Koushiro’s gym, at Kuina’s gym, all he can smell is Sanji’s skin. He fumbles another friendly against this weird long-nosed boy and leaves without saying goodbye to Koushiro. 

The staff in Mihawk’s house are looking at him strangely. Mihawk has left another message, but Zoro doesn’t read it. He ignores the food left out for him in the kitchen and locks his bedroom door behind him without really knowing why. He spends the night, sleepless, staring out of his window. Down into the garden. He doesn’t go outside. He doesn’t see anyone there.

Three nights pass with no sign of Sanji or Zeff. On the second day, Zoro walks the perimeter of the Vinsmoke outer wall again. Sees those security cameras, pointing into their own garden. The front gate is padlocked. There are alarms on every window Zoro checks.

Zoro has strange dreams that night. Images of pale hands reaching up from the sea. Fragments, salt-water taste in his mouth, hardening his hair. A shipwreck or something, dragged down by all those white hands, dirty yellow t-shirts floating on the foam. More hands on the seabed.

He jolts awake and realises, suddenly, what was off about the photographs in the news articles he’d read. Sanji wasn’t in a single one.

The first search result this time is an obituary. The boy from next door, dead at eight years old.

Zoro swallows at his computer, the blue light catastrophic. There’s noises coming from the Vinsmoke house and they are different. Zoro’s not sure in what way, he feels it in his throat. 

He waits until he is sure Mihawk’s staff are asleep and then slips outside. Nobody there and nobody on the roof, but it's not enough. His dead boy, his ghost. Rain in the dark and Zoro heaves himself up to the top of the wall between their two gardens, hot flash of pain in his wrist. Still hidden in the branches of the ash tree, he remembers the security cameras, and stops himself from vaulting over.

Inside, the lights are hazy-muted and yellow. Nothing moves within. He waits there between their houses, breath held. Nothing. Lost, slipped away, gone. Zoro licks his lips. A summer of nights and Sanji, still there in his mouth, tastes like a future of night, too. Of missed practices and missed shots, matches he should have won and calls from Mihawk that he should have taken. His undead boy, his ghost in the garden, until Zoro is a ghost, too.

Zoro sits there, head ducked, and feels like a child. Feels stupid, out there in the rain, nearly breaking into his neighbour's garden on some teenage impulse and he knows — it will always be like this. Zoro knows only totality. He does not know how to give himself entirely to his swords and entirely to Sanji. They’re seventeen, he thinks. One more year and Zoro has made it. The world champion. Mihawk. That, then Sanji. 

He is resolved; he retreats. When he forces himself back into his bed, it is damp again. He dreams of Sanji as a small child, scooped up out of the grave by Zeff’s large hands, swung around til he’s screeching-laughing, kicking little legs, tiny fat fists. Dead child, already rotting.

This one wet night, this dark hum where he sat in the space between their two houses and retreated — he will regret this.

In the morning, Mihawk is there.

Raps on his window. The first time Sanji has come to him. 

Up on the roof, the sky is dark violet. Rain soon. Sanji sits close by him, facing Zoro instead of the ocean, its mass too big over his shoulder, an unnatural blue like it’s going to burst right past Sanji and drag Zoro away. 

The first thing he does is grab Zoro’s face, rough, and press a cold kiss to his mouth. Zoro is stony under his touch, doesn’t respond, eyes screwed up tight and fists in his lap. Sanji tastes like seawater this time. His hands, his hands.

When Sanji pulls back, blinking, he keeps his grip in Zoro’s sleeve. He keeps saying his name, Zoro, Zoro, no nicknames this time. “You remember,” he starts, falters, tries again. His hand is tightening in Zoro’s sleeve, his voice is urgent. “Look, you remember when we were kids —”

Zoro feels stuck, somewhere between Sanji and the sky. The ocean is too-close and too-loud. This is the conversation, he knows. But he doesn’t want to know anymore. The present just won’t end.

“I don’t remember a thing,” Zoro interupts. Looks right into Sanji’s eyes, into his death and his thoughts of the sea. Hasn’t changed a bit, an eight-year-old boy, like none of it ever happened. Zoro's wrist is healing but here is the past, still, a fist in his top, sinking him backwards. 

Sanji blinks, grip loosening. Terrible something crossing his face, but Zoro is thinking of Mihawk, that morning, a silhouette in the doorway. Mihawk, the next morning, waiting outside their house with a car. Missed calls from Koushiro. Kuina's sword untouched on its mantle.

Sanji clears his throat. “Okay, okay, but, Zoro, listen —”

Zoro squirms out of his grip. Sanji makes a grab for his arm again and Zoro yanks it away. Sanji swears, face cut angry now and confused, snapping, “I gotta tell you something —”

Again, Zoro slices across. “Tournament tomorrow, curly.” He looks to Sanji, whose mouth is still open mid-sound, whose hand is half outstretched towards him. There is something being offered here, offered again. But Zoro’s hands are already full. He’s already tired. “Mihawk came back last night. He’s got me into one.” He grins crooked and false. “Got them to look past this.” He wiggles his wrist at Sanji, finally released from its cast. It still aches.

Sanji blinks, blinks, recovers. “Oh,” he says, almost strained. “That’s — ” 

And he doesn’t say anymore. 

They sit for another moment, not speaking, not touching. Zoro hadn’t noticed, before, all the ways Sanji had been leaning into him, even in those first meetings. Crowding into his warmth like it was something new. Only notices now the boy sits rigid, at a careful distance. Sanji looks out to sea again like he always does, but there’s a set to his jaw now.

After a long, horrible moment, Sanji looks back to Zoro. Forced blank smile and it’s just like those flat sheets of ice when Zoro first found him digging around the ash tree’s roots. Like they’ve gone back in time.

“Zeff is waiting for me,” Sanji says. “I gotta go.”

Thick block in Zoro’s throat. Swallowing it down. He wants to tell Sanji to stop, to wait, he thinks the whole mess of him could be cured if only they could touch again — but Sanji is already scuttering over to the edge of the roof, getting a foothold in the ash tree and readying to lower himself down. And Zoro needs him to go, needs to not touch him again. Mihawk, then Sanji, he reminds himself. This, then that.

But he still throws out, helpless, sounding nothing like himself: “See you.”

Cut in half by the eaves, Sanji doesn’t reply. He’s got the strangest look at his face. Like — Zoro doesn't know what like. Like someone who isn't Sanji at all. He doesn't even nod, just stares at Zoro, steady and unblinking, wild animal tugs in Zoro's chest, and then disappears over the edge of the roof. 

It’s the last time Zoro ever sees him.

Zoro lands first place. He thinks he might have re-broken his wrist. Afterwards, the celebration blurs around him and he can’t find Mihawk in the crowd, everyone melting together and Perona sending heart emojis to his phone. Feeling gleaming and gold, he’s imagining a future tournament and texts from someone else. He’s righted the world in this one victory. The future settles back into him. Koushiro hasn't come to the tournament, disapproving still, but even that doesn't get to Zoro. He'll come to the next one.

He goes to the garden that night and no one is there. His medal hangs limp around his neck. He climbs up to the roof — empty. But they've disappeared for a few days before, he tells himself, and wears his medal the next night, too.

A week passes.

Mihawk is pleased. He doesn’t say as much, but Zoro can tell in the way he stands in corner of Koushiro’s gym to observe another friendly. The way he hasn't left on another trip yet. Zoro can feel his tomorrows all settling into place and feels calm, almost giddy. This, then Sanji, he thinks again, and when he tastes the boy's kiss on his mouth now, it's just rainwater, no salt at all. He's happy, he realises. He's regained himself. One more year, then Sanji.

The next day, he wakes to sirens.

A moment where he thinks it's another dream. Red and blue back and forth on his ceiling, making everything in his bedroom strange and otherworldly, noises and lights like the parties. Like his eyes have been rolled in seawater. Instinct, he checks out of his window first. There are figures in the garden, but it is not Mihawk’s garden, and it’s not figures he knows. 

Mihawk is standing on the stairs as Zoro skids out of his room, nearly tripping over the top step in unnamed panic. Wrapped in a dressing gown, Mihawk opens his mouth, reaches out a hand to catch Zoro by the arm —

Zoro shoves past him. He flings the front door open, heart in his throat, and stops.

Police tape runs like ribbons around the Vinsmoke house. 

When he runs, stumbling, to the dock, the boat is gone. 

Mihawk keeps the curtains shut against the press. When the police come, Zoro tries to answer their questions, but he doesn’t know anything. Not really. He tells them about the noises he would hear at night, thumps and yelling. The parties at the beginning that suddenly stopped — a business trip, the police explain. He tells them about the final party and the quiet nights after. 

They tell him about the prison cell in the basement.

“Another neighbour reported hearing sounds from the garden multiple nights leading up to the incident?” one officer asks him, peering over her glasses. 

Zoro shakes his head. “That was me — training.”

The officer keeps looking at him. “Alone?”

Zoro thinks of Sanji pressing close on the rooftop, the taste of rain, split-lip blood, of Zeff catching Sanji under his arm and ruffling his hair, of the sickly light in the cellar and the bruises on Sanji's arms, of the two of them, the only two people in the world, as they rode the waves — “Alone.”

“Did you see anyone else around the Vinsmoke house in the time leading up to the incident?”

That’s what they keep calling it. The incident. 

A missed work trip. A house visit from a concerned employee. And what they found within.

Zoro just keeps shaking his head; it’s all he can do.

That night, when Zoro climbs up onto the roof, the stepping-stone branch on the old ash tree snaps off. He fumbles as it falls, catches himself on the lip of the roof. He hauls himself up and sees there, on the cold tiles — a kitchen knife. He picks it up with numb hands and recognises it as one of a set in Mihawk's kitchen, but that's all. It's been left here by one person, he is sick-sure of that, and he has no idea why.

He'll never be able to ask. Their past is, finally, irrevocably, gone. 

Zoro will become world champion two weeks after his nineteenth birthday. He’ll look out over the crowd and he won’t recognise a single face in its sea. Mihawk will be on the press circuit. Perona will be at university. He will have everything he’s always wanted — a trophy in one hand and nothing in the other. 

But, for now, Zoro sits on a rooftop alone, mute kitchen knife in his hands, and looks out to another ocean. He imagines another boy, eight years old, looking out of the barred window of a cellar and hearing only its waves, looking out to the cheap substitute of the violet sky instead and wonders if, maybe, somewhere else, Zoro was looking up at the same sky. But he knows that he wasn't. 

Zoro imagines, in a way that he had thought only Sanji could imagine, all motion-stop colour, that blond sparking ghost of his somewhere out there. He’s on the deck of a small ship, maybe, leaning against its railing, the wind a playful lilt in his hair. There’s Zeff by his side and there's their belongings, Zeff's squirreled away over months of planning and Sanji's all brand new. There’s his hands, quick and sore on the ropes after a summer of practice, and there’s those open eyes of his, and there's the boundless blue blur of the water — that water that was entirely him, that Zoro had never understood, that he’d never really been able to see.

Out there on its waves, moon heavens-high above, the boy in Zoro’s mind grins, wide and joyous in a way Zoro has never seen, will never see, grins out endless to the endless ocean, finally alive, as it bears him toward an unknown future, towards a certain dawn.