Chapter Text
It should have been an easy mark. Zoro wasn’t sure how it had gotten so off track, so he found himself wandering back to where it started and should have ended.
He’d managed to find his way to a floating restaurant in the middle of the East Blue, and fortune had conspired to drop Don Krieg in his lap right in the middle of his drinks at the outdoor bar. Several hours of chaos and fighting later, he was loading the highest bounty targets onto his boat for a drop off at Shells Town, and some kid with a straw hat was leaving with the cute blond waiter from the restaurant. Well. Good for them, he supposed; not even a little jealous, of course not. They had both been involved in the fight with the Krieg pirates along with the fighting cooks on the ship. Zoro didn’t think the Cook pirates, nor their bounties, were still active, as to be recruiting kids, so it was probably just a matter of the straw hat being in the right place at the right time, much like himself. Impressive devil fruit though; he’d have to remember that one. More importantly, he’d have to make sure that the Cook pirates weren’t still active or he’d have to come back and deal with that. They made good food, so he was kinda hoping that wasn’t the case.
Zoro finished tying up his marks, dropping the last of them in the hold of his ship and turned to start removing the ropes holding his ship to the pilings. He spared a glance over the boat the waiter had gone to, watching for a moment as he seemed to be arguing with the straw hat kid about whether he was going to get on the boat. Curious, but not his business. He could offer them a lift maybe, since that boat wasn’t going to go far, but he didn’t have extra sleeping space. As it was, he had tossed another one of the pirates in his own bunk just to have space for the short trip to Shells Town and had resigned himself to napping on the deck. It was as his boat was pulling away that he glanced back and saw the straw hat stretching his arms, wrapping them around the waiter and pulling him onto the boat that he wondered if he should have made it his business.
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Zoro must have caught a bad current or something because it took more than a week to get to Shells Town and he was almost out of his travel rations by the time he docked. He called over a few of the Marines from the docks for a cart to unload his cargo and made his way to the bounty office in short time.
After collecting his bounty and storing most of it in the hidden compartment in his bunk, along with the restocked rations and supplies he needed, Zoro found himself at the bar, nursing a bottle and listening to the patrons talking. Bars, he found, even in towns run by Marines, were good places to get tips on marks and their whereabouts. He sipped his beer, glancing around. He choked on the sip, doing a double take, as he spotted that straw hat wearing kid, along with the very cute blond waiter at a table not too far away. Zoro regained his breath, coughing a few more times and taking haggard breaths as he watched. He mostly tuned out Straw Hat, focusing on the waiter, who looked very perturbed to be there. The waiter turned to Straw Hat and yelled something that Zoro couldn’t hear over the din of the bar. He frowned as he continued watching, taking another sip of his beer to try and quell the burn from choking as Straw Hat responded to the yelling by simply coiling a rubber arm around the waiter and squeezing, cutting off the argument as he ate. Zoro set down his bottle, hand moving to the swords at his hip as he moved to get up.
Zoro stopped in the process of putting his hand on Wado’s hilt as a small girl caught his attention by running up to him with a plate with onigiri on them, offering them up to him to try with a bright smile. So focused on what the girl was saying - something about being a fan of his and reading all the articles about him in the paper, Zoro did not realize that he was being watched. He reached out and picked up one of the onigiri from the plate, taking a tentative bite and fixing his expression immediately to be as passive as possible. They were probably some of the worst things he had ever eaten (was that sugar? and chocolate? In onigiri?), but he finished them all regardless, told her they were delicious and thanked her anyway. By the time she carried on her way and he could turn back to the table, the straw hat and waiter were gone.
Well, that was fine. He finished his beer to wash the taste from his mouth and set the empty bottle back on the bar. He had to make his way to the Conomi Islands anyway, and see what the talk about some fishmen pirates was all about. It was rare for there to be fishmen in the East Blue and he had heard they could be tough fighters. He was never going to become the world’s greatest swordsman taking on the small fries, so that was going to be his next destination. No distracting himself with pretty blond waiters on dates with weird straw hat wearing rubber guys.
Zoro made his way back to his ship, unaware of the chaos that was slowly beginning to unfold within the Marine base walls, until a News Coo delivered him a new poster a few days later: Straw Hat. The fishmen could wait.