Chapter Text
“Sixty million beri.”
Dracule Mihawk lifts the poster up, bemused, taking in the ghastly image of the man on camera. Bloody, fierce, reckless.
He had heard all about the tale of Whiskey Peak, the bounty hunters the boy had swiped away in an instant, turning them into specks of dust. His only ever student owed him that much, at least. Still, there was something warm growing inside of him, a sense of pleasure that so often he only found in the thrill of battle.
It had been so many years since he’d tasted defeat.
His eyes cast out over the sea, looking onwards into the waters, and he breathed in the spray of salt and the sting of blood across his sword. His latest challenger had earned the right to taste his blade, and now the body lay below his feet, and he had already forgotten the man’s name in favour of the one he had chosen himself.
Roronoa Zoro.
What more feats would the boy accomplish?
“This is only the beginning.”
“Those ghosts — you’re the one controlling them!”
They don’t really talk about families on the crew. They’ve all got their own wounds, deep etched scars about what blood and bonds really mean. They don’t talk about the yesterdays, or the people they’ve left behind.
Still, Zoro’s staring into the one face he’d hoped not to encounter on this journey, and he knows he’s supposed to be pissed, but right now? He just feels like a maggot, who should curl up and die and turn to dust and —
“Horo horo horo! You know already, how fearsome these ghosts can be!”
“Perona you fucking —
“Zoro?!” says the pink-haired demoness, floating in the air atop of him and he knows the cook’s already got heart eyes. They’re supposed to be retrieving shadows . This is not what he anticipated. “Why are you here?”
“You know each other?!” says Usopp, looking equally as baffled, and it’s a mystery how he’s still standing, while the crew is forced to their knees. Of all the people to be immune to her power, Zoro had never quite presumed it would be Usopp. He’s got to get Usopp to teach him, one day, how to overcome this mental hurdle.
“Why do you know such a cute woman?!”
Sanji’s leg is pressed against Zoro’s throat, and his rage builds over, the irritation at seeing Perona finding a target as he raises the hilt of his sword to bash against Sanji’s ankle in fury as he says, “Now is not the time, shit-cook!”
Fucking Perona.
Adoption isn’t quite what Mihawk presumed it would be. He’d envisioned that it would be easy. There would be a shop. There would be children lined up. He could just pick the least irritating one and the whole ordeal would be done with.
It turns out the situation is a bit more complicated.
He wanders.
Children are everywhere, but they’re loud. They cry. They wear bright colours. They’re soft and weak and run and shriek when they see him. He cannot envision why Shanks would willingly give up an arm for such beasts.
The girl is the first child that doesn’t run away, but she looks at him with clear disdain.
“You’re not cute,” she informs him.
She is small and he can already tell she’s weak. The bear is unique in that it looks significantly more beat up, patched together clumsily and for some reason it’s black with bandages, but it’s a distraction. The pink hair. The curled lashes. If he were to spook her just a bit more, she would scream and run in fear.
But she’s the first one to collect his attention.
Maybe she’ll do, for now.
“How old are you?” he asks.
“I don’t have to tell you that, pervert,” the girl says, standing just a bit straighter.
Gutsy. He meets her eyes and she doesn’t burst out into tears. It’s close, but not quite. Disappointing, but not quite.
The spirits move and meet his blade, a small dagger poking at a ghost in the air. He’s unfamailiar with this power, but it’s weak all the same. A child’s game. She shrieks in fury at him.
Then she tries to run.
For now, she can be used. He wonders if she has any interest in swords.
“Do you have a name?”
She’s staring at him in shock. Clearly, she had anticipated he’d catch her much later. They’ve barely moved at all.
No answer. No matter.
With that, Dracule Mihawk kidnaps a child and flees the scene of the crime.
He’d known Warlords of the seas were tough, but his teeth are grinding together more and more, thinking about all the things that he didn’t tell him. It feels like he’s been wearing a blindfold over his eyes the entire time and he wants to get stronger even faster. He wants to train, to get out of this damned bed and achieve not only his promise, but his revenge.
“I can’t believe you really didn’t know,” says a voice, and Zoro can’t really turn his head, but he recognizes it too well. “Well, I can believe it, but you know.”
Why is she still here?
If there’s one thing he knows about Perona, it’s that she never leaves the damned castle. Of all the times for her to go on an adventure. Of all the weirdos for her to find and get attached to.
Zoro turns his head, forcing his muscles to move a fraction of an inch to see her, sitting there with an umbrella and it’s clear as day she’s hidden her body somewhere.
“He never mentioned it,” Zoro replies, teeth gritting together.
“You could have read a newspaper. There were tons of them, all the time,” she says.
“ You could have told me,” says Zoro, glaring into those big, big eyes, as he asks, “How are you still here, anyways?”
“I stayed to see what happened to Moria,” says Perona, huffily, and she looks, for just a brief second, actually a bit disappointed over the whole thing. Zoro’s going to kill her, when he can move again. “And y’know, see who you were travelling with. The papers really weren’t doing them justice.”
Zoro blinks, surprised at that. She scowls, even fiercer at him, and he wants to ask except —
“Why is she here?!”
It’s Usopp, with Chopper and Sanji and the former two look terrified, while Sanji’s eyes twist into hearts as he twirls over like an absolute idiot and Zoro thinks maybe he’ll kill Sanji first. As soon as he can move again. He tries to sit up, but feels Chopper’s hands pressing him back down, shouting, “Zoro you’ll tear your stitches out!”
This is one disaster he didn’t anticipate on the Grandline.
“I’m not going to hurt him!” Perona shrieks, diving behind Zoro like he’s supposed to protect her and vaguely waving around her arms, as she glowers at Usopp like he’s the most terrifying beast she’s ever encountered, “I was just checking he’s still alive!”
“Huh?”
“We’re acquaintances,” Zoro says, spits the words out as she looks down at him with a scoff and says, “We lived together.”
Sanji’s on fire, looking furiously at Zoro with and Zoro’s not stupid enough to think it’s for him, especially not when the cook follows it up with, “ You had such a cute girlfriend?”
He should have just let Kuma kill the cook first.
It takes four weeks to return to the Grand Line. The girl attempts to escape twice, nearly drowns three times and grudgingly tells him her name.
Perona.
She also doesn’t think he’s cute and refuses to release her teddy bear, Kumashi, who is almost as large as she is. He’s gathered she doesn’t have parents, not in any way that matters.
She hates the island he’s chosen. Apparently the humandrills aren’t cute. She’s self sufficient enough though, but noisy.
He appreciates the first part; he cares less for the second part. He’s used to silence and introspection. To long hours of meditation.
Not a pre-teen shouting at him that she’s hungry or screaming about cobwebs ruining the vision. He’s a bit disappointed her dream is so mundane; a kingdom of cuteness. Still, her idea of cuteness doesn’t seem to be overly pink and feminine, and she seems to think the castle has potential .
“It needs work,” she complains, over and over again and it’s nauseating. He couldn’t envision giving her his arm, much less his hat, nor his blade.
What, he wonders, is he missing?
In all his years as a swordsman, he’s never particularly concerned himself with companionship. Child rearing is beyond him. This whole squabble erupted because Red-Hair had seemed so unfortunately confident. He had looked at Mihawk with the eyes of a man who knew better.
He speaks with blades. He knows swords. He cannot understand this shrieking creature.
“Dinner is ready,” says the girl, and he turns from his throne to stare at her.
She has found some abominable pink dress and dressed it with black lace and dark frills. It should be darker to be less of an eyesore, but she’s trying, at least.
“Dinner?”
He’s not hungry. He hasn’t gone out to find food and cook yet. The girl was surprisingly reluctant to get her own food.
“There’s no meat because I couldn’t see anything except those stupid monkeys but I got some fruit. I’ll go fishing tomorrow. So hurry up,” Perona continues, unaware of his surprise or perhaps unbothered by it. She’s a peculiar girl that way.
“You left the castle?” Mihawk asks, because he had presumed this was a failure, his experiment. He had been ready to drop the girl off to some orphanage, and be done with this embarrassing affair.
“Well yeah,” she says, looking at him with big, big eyes so unlike his own. “There wasn’t anything left in the kitchen.”
Children can surprise you, Red Hair had said. Dracule Mihawk hadn’t been surprised in very many years.
“How did you deal with the humandrils?” Mihawk finds himself asking, as he rises to follow her to dinner.
It’s a pointless question. He knows her answer is the devil’s fruit, because she’s tried it on him to no avail. Yet still, she had only been able to produce one of those negative spectres. And the humandrils would certainly out battle her eventually.
“I was sneaky, ” she tells him, equally stubborn. “Plus they’re not so bad when you get used to them.”
It’s the longest conversation they’ve had since he’s met her. It’s the first time, since he’s met her, that he finds himself genuinely curious.
Dinner is bland, the conversation is not.
“So you’re his sister!” Luffy says, like he’s solved a mystery.
It’s a competition between them of who looks more appalled at the idea, except, Sanji thinks, they’re wearing identical expressions of dismay. It almost makes that brute look related to that cute creature, and he hates himself for thinking at any moment that Zoro could be associated with cuteness. Of all the things he’d expected to come out of Zoro’s life, he hadn’t expected an older sister with pink hair who seems less than fond of him, and eager to participate in the destruction of his life and willingly work with the bad guys.
He doesn’t like the part of him that almost empathises with the swordsman.
Almost.
“We’re not siblings,” says Perona, and she’s still hiding behind Zoro, since Usopp won’t go away and it’s almost funny, how terrified someone can be of Usopp, of all people, but it just won’t do.
“Stop crowding her,” says Sanji, leg swinging in front as he puts himself between Usopp and the girl, because she’s a damsel in distress and it’s his job to protect her, but she’s already sneering at the crew as she says, “Well, as long as he’s alive, we’re done here.”
And then she vanishes into the mist, a presence there, and then gone, and he can hear Usopp mumbling to Chopper that she’s probably just returned to her body — whatever that means — as Zoro looks dead tired.
Sanji wonders if that’s how he’d feel if it was Reiju. If she’d been the one to show up on his doorstep. If she’d even care to stick around to see if he was alive — well. Sanji can’t say.
He hates that there’s a part of him that still cares what Reiju would do, of all things. That he still vividly remembers her, and that it’s all Zoro’s fault, that after ten years, he’s even thinking of her. It ticks him off, as he sits down beside Zoro. It’s been a long day. Between fighting Oars, and Moria and watching this idiot throw everything away for Luffy. It’s been a terribly long day, and to top it all off, he’s thinking of older sisters with pink hair and big eyes and disdain.
“She didn’t seem like she hates you, mosshead,” Sanji says, and he doesn’t know why he’s saying it to the swordsman, because that’s not really what he came to say. Or to talk about.
There’s a lot more on his mind. The whole sacrificial lamb bullshit, and he immediately erases that thought.
Zoro is many things, but to compare him to a lamb is an insult that even Sanji can’t quite bring himself to allow. What happened today was about honour, and about chivalry, about the duties of the First Mate and about unwritten rules that have transferred down centuries.
“She probably does,” says Zoro, scowling, and he’s looking suspiciously into the air. “She’s always been like that.”
It’s the first time they’ve ever had a conversation that doesn’t devolve into fighting. It’s the first time that Sanji wants to hear more.
“She stuck around to see if you survived,” Sanji points out, and he wants to ask but that’s not them. That’s not who they are. They don’t ask the questions about the past, about complicated matters and he doesn’t even care about things like that.
About Zoro, specifically.
“She’s a pain in the ass,” Zoro says, but it’s soft for Zoro, it lacks bite. The same way he talks about Nami, sometimes, when Nami’s not around. It’s almost fond, even, as he looks at the spot Perona was hovering.
Sanji thinks, idly, that maybe Zoro wouldn’t have protected her from Usopp but he’d protect her from other things, right? Is that what makes a sibling good? He thinks of Ace, and Nojiko, the weights they bore for their younger siblings. The burdens they carried on their broad shoulders, and even though Perona looks young, infantile in her own way, he knows she’s older. He doesn’t know what his face looks like, but something about Zoro’s expression looks at him curiously.
After a minute, Zoro suddenly starts talking.
“We grew up together. She’d patch me up after training and argue with me over dinner and we’d steal wine from the cellar and drink because there wasn’t anything else to do, really,” Zoro says, the question not asked but the answer given. “She didn’t tell me shit about the guy who brought us to his place, except that he was a swordsman. And she always yelled about how I wasn’t cute.”
“Huh,” Sanji says, and then he grins as he turns back to Zoro and says, “She wasn’t wrong about that, marimo.”
And they’re back to bickering but it’s different now, and there’s another conversation to be had about sacrifices and dreams, about Kuma and all that pain. But they don’t need to have the conversation right now, not when there’s an argument to be had.
It comes to his attention, nearly four years later, that Perona has not had friends to speak with. It’s not like Mihawk is one for conversation, but long stretches of time pass before he returns to the island, and he doesn’t quite know what the girl does when he’s away.
He asks, one day, if she’s lonely.
“It’s not like I want company,” says the girl, chewing on the candy he’s brought her and examining the clothes he picked out. She’s just shy of fourteen this year, and Mihawk can’t bring himself to send her away, just yet. “And I like the humandrils.”
They’ve started to imitate her, in a frightening manner. They wear black lace and stockings made from leaves and she’s got more negative hollows at her disposal, enough to defend herself, he knows, should she be alone too long. Should the marines call him away for longer.
Still, the next time he goes to the East Blue, he thinks maybe to look for a companion for her.
Shimotsuki Village wasn’t meant to be a stop along the way, but it turns into a place of interest when he runs straight into a boy carrying three practice katanas with him.
“Watch where you’re going,” says the boy, snappishly. “You almost ran me over.”
A swordsman fits the vision of his successor quite well, more so now that he’s had a clear understanding of what Red-Hair meant to do, when he gave away hat and arm. Mihawk cannot picture this boy, however, in his hat. He looks scrawny, with dirt on his clothes and under his nails, with clothes so utterly simple.
He lacks Perona’s style, that’s for certain.
“How old are you, young man?”
“Eleven.”
The boy sticks a finger up his nose, looking curiously at the broadsword along Mihawk’s back, and alarmingly, asking, “Fight me!”
And Dracule Mihawk stares at his opponent, and sighs heavily.
“I don’t have a sword to fight with you, young man.”
“Tch, that’s coward’s talk. Use the one you’re wearing!”
“No, you aren’t worth unsheathing this for.”
“No fucking way — you wanna go —”
And the boy charges anyways, all bluster, lacking the required coordination of a swordsman. He’s so pathetically weak, that Mihawk thinks perhaps this entire venture was a waste. The boy has the makings of promise, certainly, but then, most children do. They have their entire futures waiting for them, after all, filled with promises and possibilities.
“Why won’t you fight me?!” Zoro demands, furious, sweating.
It isn’t his prerogative, then, when he uses the boy’s own training katana to knock him out.
That’s the first time he meets Roronoa Zoro.
Why the fuck was Perona working for Moria? It’s thoughts like this that Zoro knows will keep him awake at night.
He’s tired, and until Chopper lets him out of this awkward, make-shift prison (yes, it’s his own full-body cast, for the injuries he sustained), he’s trapped inside his own fucking mind. What a wild, endless place to be consumed, a place that asks questions with no answers to them, and the entire thing seems so meaningless.
Is this how people live? Just endlessly absorbed in their own heads, in every single stray thought that ever could possibly exist, just ready at all times to lead their heads astray? It’s a wonder any of them get anything done, if their heads are constantly circling the drain of thoughts that seems to be leaking, at every single point of time.
“Here.”
A voice breaks through the monotony, through the grating silence, and Zoro turns, looks upwards and startles at the sight of a curly brow and a cigarette and a steaming bowl of what he thinks smells, inordinately, like miso soup.
“Chopper said you’d be fine on broths and liquids, at least for now,” Sanji mutters, and he’s got a tray of all kinds of things, as he takes a seat and stares suspiciously at the bowl, and then back at Zoro.
All his fingers are taped up, thick bandages wrapped around every finger, down the curve of his forearms, along the thick of his neck. He knows what he looks like. There’s bandages sliding along his jawline, across his forehead. He looks weak.
“Gimme that.”
And despite it all, he swings his arms forward, grapples with the bowl Sanji hands him. There’s pride at stake, as two aching arms strain against splints, trying to tip the hot bowl of miso soup into his mouth. It sloshes, splashing along his front, and he can feel the splint shatter, the wince of pain in his elbows, the tearing of flesh and blood spills from the wound, reopened, as he drinks the soup the cook made and hears the sound of his own throat glugging, hot broth sliding down his chin.
“Disgusting.”
He ignores the cook, grumbling as always. Instead, Zoro focuses on the taste, the refinement of it. Oddly, despite having only been at Shimotsuki village for so long, and despite the years away from it, training with the humandrils and only Perona’s shitty cooking for sustenance, the broth tastes vaguely like a memory of home.
The cook’s already moving, stumbling through the bandages, looking at the blood and starting to peel back the layers. Despite it all, his hands work with startling ease, and Zoro stares, surprised by it. Gentle fingers stretch along his torso, spreading back, and he’s still holding the bowl over his head, now almost empty, as the cook gets to work.
“What are you doing?!” Zoro hisses, annoyed, but he doesn’t move.
“Do you want Chopper to find out I let you tear through your bandages?” Sanji snaps back, equally annoyed.
The answer is a resounding no.
There’s a silence there, still heavy, awkward. They’re both alone, for the first time since, well, Kuma.
Those endless thoughts keep returning, the ones that he can’t train away. The wonder if Sanji would have taken it, and survived. If they would both have been here. If they’d have shared a burden of pain, equally, and what did it matter anyways? The right answer was always that Zoro took the pain, and that it was Sanji who made a broth that tastes like home. It soothes him, as careful hands slide through against his skin, pulling the tape tight around his chest.
What startles him, then, is the question, “What was your dad like?”
And Zoro blinks, bewildered by the question that all those incessant, unforgiving thoughts go silent, pausing.
“Don’t know. Never met him.”
Sanji blinks, looking back at him, and then he furrows a brow, annoyed, and he asks, “What about the guy — the one you lived with, with Perona —
“You mean the old man?” Zoro asks, bewildered. He has absolutely no idea what could have convinced Sanji to ask any of these questions.
Sanji continues to stare at him, brow furrowed, and tentatively, he asks, “Your — Like, my old man?”
Zoro blinks, remembering the chef Sanji’s referring, vaguely. The old man, the wooden leg. He’d really not been around much, on the Baratie, to have the old chef make an impact but he thinks of the boat, and the restaurant, and the mustache, and he nods, sagely, and says, “Basically the same, yeah.”
They both have the same shitty facial hair, after all.
“So he was like — he rescued you guys?”
It’s their first ever conversation without an insult traded, thus far. The whole thing makes Zoro deeply uncomfortable, and also strangely intrigued. He’d never thought of the cook as someone that had been rescued.
He’d never asked after the man’s story, he realises.
“No, you shitty love-cook. He kidnapped us.”
And he watches the emotions process on Sanji’s face. Nobody had ever told him how ridiculous the man was, how easy to read. Sanji goes through several emotions at once, from shock, horror, bewilderment, to suspicion, confusion, and oddly, jealousy. That’s the one Zoro has the hardest time placing, but he clocks it, nevertheless, as Sanji lights another cigarette and leaves behind a bandage tight on his ribs and miso broth soaking into his jaw. It doesn’t sting, despite every indication that it should.
“What do you mean, he kidnapped you?”
The next time Mihawk returns to Shimotsuki, nearly two years have passed. Not much has changed, and truly he’d had no real intention to return to this abandoned, forgotten corner of the East Blue. If he’d had it his way, perhaps he’d never have come back at all.
He had, however, seen Red-Hair recently.
The conversation had been particularly grating, this time around. All those dreams and hopes for the future. He can still hear Red-Hair, even now.
“The next generation is the one, they’ll change everything. You’ll see.”
It’s not that he doesn’t understand. Perona grows every time he turns around, a little taller, a lot more confident. So much stranger.
She’s calling the humandrils cute now, and for that reason alone, he worries for the girl. She’s on the verge of adulthood, with hardly any companions and he’s not used to this feeling. There’s a reason, all these years, he’s made it a point to travel alone, to embrace the idea of isolation. He’s the only Warlord without a crew, he’s a man who works solely for his own interests. He shouldn’t be thinking of Perona when he leaves, shouldn’t be worrying that she’ll be alright on that miserable island, or remembering that she wanted taffeta, for her endless, ongoing project.
He’s also being charged right now by a green-haired boy, wielding three katanas, one uselessly dangling in his mouth. At least, Mihawk thinks, he has finally graduated from the practice of swords to real metal blades, singing with intent.
It takes only a flick of the knife in his hand to tilt the boy off-course, send that clumsy stance backwards and watch as he lands, head first, into the dirt. The butter knife in his hands stays smooth, straight, polished.
The pink ribbon tied around it, one of Perona’s many requests for art projects, limps uselessly along, fluttering from the movement.
He glances at the knife, pleased.
He glances at the boy, steadying himself to stand up, and saying, with a sword spat out from his mouth, landing in his lap, “What the hell was that?!”
And he raises the swords again, scrambling to get into a proper stance. So the East Blue has some potential here, after all.
He’s not sure why he asks, but he does, anyways, “Are you properly growing?”
The boy just comes pummelling at him, and it takes another twist of his wrist to send him flying headfirst into the air. This time, the boy doesn’t get up.
Tch, he’d misunderstood the amount of force it would take, to send the boy backwards. He stares at the butter knife again, bemused. It truly is the weakest material he’s used thus far, a new test of his own abilities, to make a sword out of a knife.
The approach of a new man startles him, and he tilts his head backwards to the bland, smiling face of a swordmaster looking upon the scene of the crime.
“You are the stranger that young Roronoa mentioned, I believe,” says the man, hands folded. He offers a bow of respect, and Mihawk holds his stance.
Very few men are capable of surprising him.
“Are you interested in his development, then?”
Dracule Mihawk owes no man any explanation, certainly not this one. He holds, steady, silent. Koushirou continues to smile, bland, not a single intent of murder on that body, despite the way his student lays passed out on the ground. It’s an odd balance, one that confuses Mihawk more than he’d ever care to admit, especially not to a stranger that walks like a silent wind upon him.
“Perhaps, then, we can discuss an arrangement.”
Something about that makes him more uncomfortable than anything else could. He can’t imagine a world where Zoro, of all people, has the equivalent of a shitty old man, running around, beating him up, training him to cook. Well, in Zoro’s case, probably chasing him with a sword. Not, he supposes, unlike being chased with a knife and forced to learn how to julienne carrots before he can work properly as a prep cook in the kitchen. What do miniature Zoros do anyways? Just swing a katana in their mouths, probably.
The thought really shouldn’t settle into his mind because Zoro insists he was kidnapped.
What kind of freak would kidnap Zoro?
“So he just — took you? To his place?”
“Yep,” Zoro said, scowling. “That’s what I said, dartbrow, keep up.”
Sanji, far too invested in this story, and also well aware that Zoro is still technically bleeding, bloodied in pain and sacrifice, shuts his mouth and stares at the swordsman, waiting for this story to continue to unfold.
Perona has to admit, the island sucks.
Over the last five years of her stay, the castle remains ever so drab. She’s forgetting how the outside world used to be, and now at nearly sixteen years old, she’s starting to think she might miss it.
Still, there’s no ship off the island, and the storms come more frequently than they don’t. Rain slides in sharp knife-like attacks across the window panes, and she stares out into the castle with some sense of malcontent. Sometimes, she feels not unlike her own negative hollows, curling up inside her belly.
The world isn’t beautiful enough, yet.
Her hands return to the pink cushion she’s sewing. It was what Mihawk brought, after her last insistence. He’s offered, multiple times, to release her into the wild. She’s thought about it, in her own way, the idea of exploring the world, of being free.
It terrifies her more than she recalls. Not after spending so long here, on the island, beautifying, anticipating the way Mihawk comes and goes, not unlike a storm.
So this time, when he arrives with the boy, she’s not particularly surprised. Simply, she stares at him, nose crinkled, and asks, “But did you bring the fabric I asked for? Kumashi needs more repairs.”
Mihawk stares at her, as though every word she speaks is garbled. The boy in his arms looks passed out, a little bruised, but not particularly worse for the wear in any particular manner. He’s ugly.
“His name is Roronoa Zoro.”
“Ew.”
“See you find him a room.”
And just like that, he dumps the kid into her arms, and disappears into the hallway of the castle. No doubt, she suspects, to hang himself upside down from a rafter, or bury himself into a coffin and head to sleep. He’ll be out later, for wine, and dinner, and now she has three places to set at the table, and the kid in her arms is heavy.
She can’t remember the last time she talked to anyone that wasn’t Hawk-Eye.
He comes around as Perona sets him up in the green room . It’s not her favourite colour, so often clashing with her aesthete, but this lime-green accented space is one of her favourites. She’s stuffed him under a quilt she’d patched together, green patches spread over pink, and black pillows propping up his head. There’s furniture in here, forgotten in the castle for years and now she’s pulled it together, painted it all black, with a green throw rug and pillows that Hawk-Eye misunderstood. Frou-frou white, stained with green dye, in her attempt to get everything together.
“Where am I? Where’s my swords? Where’s the creepy dude?”
The boy is awake, eyes blaring, hands rolled up into fists and she sends one of her hollows into him immediately.
He’s curled up into a ball now, muttering to himself, over and over, “I’m a worm, a weakling, a waste of space —
“You’re at my castle,” Perona informs him, hands on her hips. “I am Princess Perona, and this is the castle of Extreme Cuteness!”
“I’m a worm, a weakling, in a weak ass castle —
“It’s not weak!”
“Weak fucking castle —
“It’s cute! Shut up!”
And she bashes him over the head with a pillow, furious.
This is when Mihawk finds them, surprisingly. She’s not sure what persuaded him out of his room, but the limp thrashing of a boy rolling around with a hollow inside his body, and Perona’s pillows savaging him over and over, is perhaps not what he expected to find. He looks at them, really looks at them, and sighs heavily.
“Release the boy, Perona.”
And his tone brokers no room for argument.
The hollow escapes, returns to her. She scowls back at him, as Zoro sits upright, shouting, “You’re the pervert! Where are my swords, you shitty old man? And what the fuck did this witch just do?! ”
“Your first test is to find them in this castle,” Mihawk says, arms folded. “As you remember, your sensei and I have made arrangements —
Zoro gets up, immediately, and throws off the blanket into a disgraceful heap and walks, to Perona’s amusement, straight to the closet. He opens the door and starts chucking around her beautiful, leftover scrap material, and she shrieks, “Not my stuff! How dare you?!”
And the pillow savagery begins again, as Zoro starts striking them down as they come, tiny fists banging down her creations. She wails when there’s a tear.
MIhawk stares at them both, wider-eyed than she’s ever seen him in her entire life. She had never had any clue his eyes could even go that wide.
“Perona,” he says, shutting those eyes in a look that might be exasperation. “This is my student, Roronoa. He’s been tasked to find his swords in the castle. Do not interrupt this task of his, but see to it he stays alive.”
And with that, he leaves her there, wailing on the floor at the torn pillow with a boy staring into the armoire he’s climbed himself into, saying loudly, “Where’s the other door? It was right here!”
The island couldn’t suck more.
“He faced off with Kuma, then?”
Dracule Mihawk stares at the pink-haired demon-girl that’s taken a seat at his table. Her arrival had been particularly surprising, considering it has been well over a year since he’d last seen her. Her letters, surprisingly, always found a way. He’d regretted letting her meet Gecko Moria, all those years ago.
It was, after all, a waste of her talents.
But then, she’d always been an odd girl.
“Took all of that pain, everything. And he was still standing. Kid’s gotten strong.”
She’s sipping a fruity drink, with an umbrella she’s crushed between her fingers. It was, after all, a pastel orange. She’s always hated light colours, preferring the more shockingly bright elements.
“He’s got this huge scar, on his chest now,” she continues, regaling him easily with her stories, and he blinks, says back, “I know.”
“What?”
“I gave it to him.”
“What?!”
And just like that, he’s being bombarded with far more questions than he anticipated, about a time long ago, on a ship far away from their little rendezvous point.
“Are my swords in here?!”
It’s been well over a week, almost eleven days, since he arrived on the island and had his swords stolen from him. The swords continue to elude him. He suspects the castle continues to keep moving around, deliberately setting him up for failure. It’s the only thing that truly makes sense about this abnormal, unnatural set up.
He’s been in this room twice.
The first time, the girl on the bed had thrown him out, screaming as she set her ghosts upon him. He’d lost well over a day to the sickness, laying on the floor feeling miserable until she came to give him dinner. After that, he hadn’t seen her again.
He never wants to feel like that again.
This time, he’s cautious, hovering behind the door upon realising the monstrosity of pink and black that greets his eyes are hers.
He still doesn’t particularly trust her. Not really, after everything she did. But he believes she’s someone important. Someone who might make a difference. Besides, she keeps feeding him, so he suspects there’s a reason the hawk-man keeps her around.
Not that he’s seen him since getting here.
It’s weird how few people live on this island. Once, he’d stumbled outside and gotten chased by those weird, miserable apes with the weird lacey scraps of dresses and branches. After that, he’d learned to avoid the large ornate doors, at least. It was just strange, how many times he flung them open and realised he was trapped here, powerless.
Maybe Perona’s negative ghost creatures were finally getting to him. Maybe he was weak.
“You!”
He turns, lets out a shout and stumbles over backwards into the girl’s room. To his surprise, and horror, there she is, floating in front of his face.
Zoro stares up at the shape of Perona, a fifteen year old girl, with curly pink pig-tails and racoon-eyes, inked in black that runs in tear streaks down her face. She looks frightened.
Oddly, his stomach rumbles.
And then he realises he hasn’t eaten.
When was the last time he saw her? Usually she came by, bringing him a meal or something, making sure he was drinking water and looking like she wanted to kill him, every time. His last meal had egg-shells in, but he hadn’t complained.
Wasn’t like he could cook anything, anyways.
And now his cook is a ghost.
“Are you dead?!”
It’s a fear that curves into his heart, sudden and unexpected. He’s only ever had one person die on him before, and Koushirou sensei had told him that all life returns to the ocean, after dying. That Kuina, wherever she was, would be resting.
So yeah, he hadn’t expected ghosts to really exist.
He also hadn’t anticipated she’d become one, this weird pink-haired girl. He wants to curl up again, into the ball of misery she brings because he was meant to be strong and his mind is racing a thousand miles a minute. He wonders if this is his fault. If the hawk-man will come after them next and then he’ll never fulfill his promise to Kuina, he’ll be weak forever, and then —
“Are you stupid?!”
He blinks, the thoughts vanishing from his head. Perona is still screaming at him.
“I’m not dead you moron! I just — I just wandered out of my body, by accident, okay!”
And he stares at her, jaw dropped, and he feels all that tension fade away. The worry, the things that felt immaterial. So she’s not dead, and he’d worried for nothing. It’s a lesson there, one that imprints upon his soul, the realisation that people can, and also cannot, be his responsibility.
“Anyways,” Pinky continues, setting her hands on her hips, looking inordinately pleased with herself, “This form is so useful. I can go wherever I want, whenever I want.”
She twirls, looking pleased at this and he sighs, irritated. He’d gotten distracted in his mission, and last time, she hadn’t let him properly search for his swords.
So he turns right back around, getting up, and barges into her place.
“Ha! You’re not allowed in here!”
“Says who?!”
“Says me!”
“Hawk-man said I could go wherever I needed to find my swords!”
His hands itched. It was the longest period of his life, since he’d started his training, that he could recall not having a sword in hand. He felt naked without them. No, that wasn’t quite right. He felt exposed, down to his very soul without them. There was a flex to his grip, a sweatiness to his palms, a fluctuating pulse of his own heartbeat. He felt, he knew, like absolute shit.
It was like dying, to be without a sword this long.
“They’re not in here, you dumb-ass.”
Zoro whipped his head around, startled to see the body of the girl rise from the bed, looking at him with a gigantic scowl on her face. She looked pissed off about it, that he was still in her room and he tensed as he sensed her ire building. The last few days, he’d dodged her wherever he could, avoided her ghosts.
This time, he was steady as the hollow slipped into his soul.
This time, he started to sob, big, howling, frustrated tears slipped down his face as he wailed.
The hollow slipped out, and Zoro was still struggling to breathe. He wasn’t a baby. He’d been poisoned by her hollows, he was sure of it, and the girl was staring at him like he was some sort of shrieking animal, invading her safe sanctuary and all he could think about was Koushirou-sensei, and Kuina, and the promises he’d never be able to keep and his head was starting to hurt.
He had failed everyone.
He finds the girl dragging the boy’s feet, looking frustrated the entire while as his body thumped softly on the ground. She whirls to face him, a frustrated finger dangling at Mihawk and he looks back at Perona, one eyebrow quirked.
“Why’d you even bring him? He’s ruining everything. ”
And he looks at her, tilts his head, and says, “Everybody starts at their lowest. Even you did, once.”
And her mouth zips shut, looking at him with large, impossible eyes, like she can see something there she finds wanting.
“If he finds his swords, will you let him go?” she asks, suspiciously interested in the boy for once. Mihawk tilts his head, considering.
He hadn’t considered the boy could be so directionally challenged. In truth, he’d presumed the challenge would take much less time than it did. It wasn’t an impossible test, but he could sense what Perona was up to. No doubt she already knew where the swords had been kept. After all, the girl seemed entitled to believe that because she’d done most of the upkeep around the place, she was the Lord of this castle.
He strangely hadn’t minded that about her. Until now.
“If he can’t communicate with his swords, then he’s no good to me as a swordsman.”
He looked at the tear-streaked face of the child, impassive.
How had Red-Hair ever felt such a fragile creature could uphold such a massive legacy? The man was a mystery still, far more unknowable than even the Poneglyphs, in this day and age. Dracule Mihawk let out a sigh, and looked at Perona now, making his way past her, to the cellar.
It was, perhaps, a good thing she’d become fond of the boy in such a short time. Still, he called over his shoulder, left her to ruminate with a final parting promise, “Never get in the way of a man and his swords, Perona.”
And with that, he continued onwards, wondering if he’d somehow made a terrible mistake.
Zoro returns to see his sensei, one last time, before his journey begins. He’s seventeen years old, barely an adult. He’s on the cusp of greatness, and finally he’s secured his own freedom.
Mihawk, for all his weirdness, has made him stronger. Considerably, compared to how he’d been when he left. There’s a sense around him now, an ability to bend to the will of his swords, and an ability to master them.
He needs real opponents now, challengers to grow from.
Mihawk never once raised his sword against Zoro. He feels weak, to never have earned such an achievement. He feels as though he was raised from nothing. Koushirou sensei argues he’s grown, but most days he doesn’t think he has.
The parting words of the swordsman who took him linger on his heart, inscribed along the vena cava. Each pump of his chest sends it through the bloodstream, and he hears it in Mihawk’s voice every single time, permeating the same layers Kuina once carved herself into so deeply that he couldn’t be moved from this goal.
I’ll be waiting for you, at the top, Roronoa.
So it shouldn’t be this shocking, then, as he curls himself between Johnny and Yosaku and looks over the bounties, trying to pick out which pirate uses swords, and who might be his next bloody target, that they say, “Warlords at it again, huh? Scary as all hell.”
He doesn’t even stir. Isolated as he grew up, with only Perona’s meagre interest in the papers to keep him from falling into total illiteracy, he hasn’t truly read much. Even now, it’s easier to focus on numbers than names, to rank each bounty in order. Who needs to remember the names of every enemy they face, after all?
It’ll only slow him down.
“Dracule Mihawk conquers an entire armada single-handedly, apprehending the Yellowtail pirates in the West Blue,” Yosaku continues, shivering at the name.
Zoro’s head snaps up, bewildered.
“Mihawk did what?”
“Yosh, are you a fan too, brother Zoro?” Johnny asks, beaming bright as he stuffs another long udon noodle into his mouth. “Should’a known a nutter like you would be into that.”
“A fan of who?”
He stares at both men, who stare back at him. Yosaku flips the paper to him, and he stares down at the neatly printed name of Dracule Mihawk, and the photo of him standing there, staring out disinterestedly at the island he landed on, holding that giant sword he never even graced Zoro with, once.
That, of all things, stings more than the sight of the man. How dare he draw his sword, and look bored to be doing so? After Zoro spent years doing stupid drills and stances and swings with not a single live opponent, only Perona’s stupid ghosts and dolls, and not once in his last six years of training has he faced a real opponent. The butter knife will never count.
And these nobody, these Yellowtail pirates, were faced with such an honour.
“You know bro, Mihawk, the greatest swordsman in the world.”
Johnny laughs, bright. Yosaku shakes his head, saying easily, “You’re working your way up to him, right? Trying to take down the big man.”
“Oh shit, that’s your dream, bro!”
“You’re so cool, bro, aiming for the top.”
Zoro can’t breathe.
All those years, all that time, and it was right there, right in front of him all along? He stares at Mihawk’s sneering face, at the memories of a gentle hand on his shoulder, adjusting his grip. The hand that caressed Wado Ichimonji, and then presented it to him and said, again.
All that time, his dream had been right there, in his hands and he’d missed his shot.
He wants to scream.
Instead, he asks, “Where can I find him?”
And therein starts the part of the journey everyone soon becomes familiar with. A man chasing his dreams across the East Blue, tackling any pirate in sight. The resentment simmers inside him, as he strikes opponent after opponent down, competing pirate against pirate, memorising the numbers on bounties and asking everyone he comes across how he could possibly get to the West Blue.
The story after this story starts then, when he’s tied up on an island, his swords exactly two-hundred and forty-eight metres away, chained up in a tower, and a boy with a straw hat beaming as he looks at Zoro and promises to bring them back.
It’s not, he thinks, a bad start to a familiar story.
There’s just one key difference, this time around.
“Throw me,” he rasps, sand and rice gurgling from his mouth. “If you’re going to be my captain, you have to throw me.”
In this part of the story, a man’s stake is lifted from the ground, a grunting Monkey D. Luffy exerting every bit of his strength to break wooden beams, and to fling a still tied up Zoro straight in the direction of his swords. He shatters the windows, flings in with glass shards raking along his arms, and wooden splinters spreading out along his shoulder.
But nothing, ever again, will separate him from his swords.
Once upon a time, he hadn’t known what a Warlord of the Sea was. It’s strange, then, that in the span of a year he’s run into three now, and each of them has left a different impression on him. One that he can’t quite shake, no matter how much he thinks about them.
This one, he knows, means to kill him.
No, not quite. Not death.
But the bubble of pain stares back at him and he will spend a lifetime thinking of the stupid paw-paw fruit, and the way Luffy shouldered every bruise, every beating, every strike and every mark for their sake. For the sake of the crew. And he’ll wonder what Bartholomew Kuma’s deal is, to take all that pain and place it atop his body.
He’ll still be standing when the cook comes to.
Those few additional years of training, that heightened awareness earned early on, barely significant, makes every impact today. He feels the way the Cook moves, and he can sense it as he turns his head, each movement making the muscle creak, blood streaking down every inch of his flesh, exposed veins, the torn muscle, the bone-deep weariness that never lingers.
His tongue hurts to move, to say, “He’s gone, Cook.”
And big blue eyes look at him, swirling brow so fucking stupid as he slumps forward, head landing on a hard shoulder. Nothing about the cook is soft, except those frou-frou ties and frilly table cloths he carries around, to lay out picnics for Nami and Robin.
A hand stretches, boney fingers pressed into his hair and he feels the sharp tug like a lifeline, the only bit keeping him conscious and he can hear the cook’s breathing, every inch of frenetic heartbeat.
It used to be that he only ever heard his swords, but lately, more and more, he can hear the world. He’s growing stronger, he thinks, dully.
Maybe every Warlord was just another stepping stone, to get stronger.
“If you die on me,” the cook mutters, “I’ll kill you, Zoro.”
And he grins into the curve of a shoulder, promising, “I won’t. Not until I’m at the top. Promised him —
And then the darkness overtakes him, entirely.
“You’ve got to find your swords, if you want him to respect you.”
The pink-haired girl makes this bold, statement announcement with no preamble or warning when Zoro wakes up hours later. She’s got a steaming bowl of rice, and dashi broth, and something suspiciously pink looking, fanned out on a plate. It’s supposedly sashimi, but it tastes nothing like any of the fish back home, and so he prods it carefully, not yet ready to trust the girl with his survival.
“I would have found them already!” Zoro insists, stuffing his face with rice. He hasn’t eaten, he realises, in forever. Forever being nearly two days, but the time is irrelevant. “But the castle doors keep moving around and —
“And you’re stupid,” Perona says, stubborn, finishing off his sentence for him as he stumbles his way through it. He scowls, furious at the suggestion of his own idiocy.
It’s insulting, is what it is.
“I’ll find them!” Zoro insists, another slimy fish sliding down his throat. He can’t remember what it tastes like. Even years later, he’ll never remember its flavour, only that it had been wet and coated in a strange film and that it had been one of his favourite meals.
“If you want me to help you,” Perona says, idly, checking out her nails, “I could, for a fee.”
And Zoro blinks, startled.
For the most part, the pink-haired demoness had been avoiding him. Outside of the few times she seemed to turn up, to keep him fed and alive, or whenever he accidentally stumbled onto her, they hardly ever really interacted. Her sudden altruism makes his face curl into a frown, lips pouting, suspicion etched into his features.
There’s never a good reason to trust her.
And besides, he thinks, stubbornness lingering in his bones.
“I’ve got to find them myself,” Zoro insists, more rice stuffed between his lips, gobbled in frantic need. He needs to get stronger. “They’re my swords, and he gave me this task. I’ll do it without your help, witch.”
And Perona blinks again, looking surprised by the power in those words. Teach her to underestimate him.
“I’m going to be the strongest swordsman in the world!”
And he declares his dream so big, and so bold, and he doesn’t see the way Perona’s gaze shifts, alarmed and intrigued at once. He doesn’t see the way she swallows her own broth back, thoughtful, considerate.
“Then you’d better start focusing on your swords, and not the castle, idiot.”
He wants to scream at her, to get into a fight, but he stops, a thought striking him. Focus on the swords, huh?
He’s not great at it, yet. At fighting. He’s still just a kid, as everyone keeps reminding him. He’s weak.
But he’s lived with Wado for the last three years, and his practice swords even less. The sword is all he has left of her, the blade that she’d wielded once against him now the blade that he carries. That blade, the one that gave him his first defeat.
This time, he doesn’t start wandering the castle aimlessly.
This time, he focuses on breathing.
Belly full, and Perona hovering around him, he settles into the ground, legs folded under him and arms on his knees, meditating. They’d done a similar practice at home, he remembers, swords laid out in front of them. It was important, Koushirou sensei would say, to clear the mind and focus entirely on the mission itself. On what mattered.
This time, when he opens his eyes, everything slowly slips away. He’s alone, the world is his dojo, and Wado is laying flat in front of him.
With his eyes closed, he takes a shaky step forward. Then another.
When he opens them, Wado is in his hand, and Perona is staring at him, bewildered. The sword, as it turns out, was in the room right next door. And now it’s in his fingers, waiting for him.
Mihawk looks at him from the door.
“So you have potential after all.”
And Zoro grins, burning brightly at that.
When it’s her turn to leave, Mihawk finds himself not quite as anticipatory. With Roronoa, it had been inevitable. The boy’s dreams were larger than life, larger than this island, at least. It was not in the boy’s best interests to stay here, leashed, unable to grow further. He’d left the boy in the East Blue himself, well aware that the child would easily get lost.
He hadn’t expected to return to find the girl with her bags packed.
It had become, somehow, a constant expectation. He’d turn around, make his way to the castle, armed with presents, and there would be Perona, with a wine goblet poured and another huffy demand and criticism to give upon his gifts.
“I’m ready to see the world, too.”
And she’d said it so boldly he had no choice but acquiesce.
It was the first time, in over a decade, that Dracule Mihawk took dinner alone.
He found himself missing their voices.
Still, it wouldn’t be long before he saw them again, would it? He raised a glass, toasting to their future successes.