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The first time it happened was at Sabaody, although Zoro wouldn’t realize that until much later. In the moment all he knew was that one second he was fighting the strange not-Kuma alongside Luffy and the cook, and the next he was on the ground, all but paralyzed in agony.
Even then Zoro could tell that this wasn’t just a case of reopened wounds, because he could feel those too, as a separate, mostly mild discomfort. Like week-old bruises, vaguely achy but not truly painful. Nothing at all like the storm he suddenly found burning its way through the rest of him, hot and fast like wildfire, an ache so intense it sank all the way down into his bones.
But there had been no time to stop and think about it on Sabaody, not with the threat of the strange not-Kuma and a Marine admiral hot on its trail. So Zoro did what he always did when faced with nigh inconceivable levels of pain—he grit his teeth and pushed through it, forcing himself to get up and keep going until he simply couldn’t anymore.
The second time it happened was shortly after Zoro’s arrival on Kuraigana Island, trying to fight all the Humandrills so he could prove to Mihawk that he was worthy of being trained.
It started out slow, as a dull sort of throbbing deep within his joints—annoying certainly, but not insurmountable. Zoro didn’t even notice it had gotten worse until the last of the goddamn monkeys fell, when he paused for a moment in the rubble to catch his breath. Without his mind occupied by the heat of battle, Zoro suddenly became all too aware of the turmoil that was now engulfing him, and this time he recognized it. It was the same sort of pain he’d experienced back on Thriller Bark, albeit not nearly so intense—which meant that it was only excruciating enough to nearly bring him to his knees.
After several long moments spent yelling out every curse he could think of in an effort not to scream, Zoro gained enough of a hold on himself that he was able to hobble back to the castle and prostrate himself at Mihawk’s feet. The pain continued on for several hours afterwards, but by the following morning it was gone, and Zoro only had the myriad cuts and bruises and probably fractured ribs incurred from fighting the stupid Humandrills to worry about.
The third time it happened was a couple of months later, and once again Zoro simply grit his teeth and rode it out. It wasn’t as bad as the second time anyway, even if it did last for nearly two days.
The fourth time was shorter but worse than the third. After hours of agony, Zoro finally broke down and took a couple of mild painkillers to try and ease his suffering. They didn’t help.
The fifth time Zoro simply tried to work through the episode again, though he could tell his training had suffered for his efforts. Mihawk made a passing comment at dinner that night about Zoro needing to make sure he didn’t start getting sloppy, and he became all the more determined to simply grin and bear any future flare ups of these strange remnants from Thriller Bark. After all, what hope did he have of becoming the world’s greatest swordsman if he couldn’t even handle a little pain?
The sixth time, he lost an eye.
The heavy wooden door to Perona’s makeshift infirmary creaked open, and Zoro glanced over from his spot lying on the cot to see Mihawk stepping inside. The Warlord hadn’t said anything to Zoro since his injury had occured beyond directing him into Perona’s care, but Zoro had been bracing himself for a thoroughly disdainful chewing out over such a humiliating mistake. Part of him even expected Mihawk to declare that this was the end of their time together, which was why instead of resting, Zoro had been mentally compiling a list of counter arguments on why he should be allowed to stay.
But to his surprise, Mihawk simply sat down in the chair next to the cot, looked at Zoro with his eerie yellow eyes and asked—
“What happened?”
Zoro couldn’t quite hide his wince, as much from the question as it was from the painkiller-dampened throbbing of his now ruined left eye and the decidedly not dampened ache still gripping the rest of him, like knives that had been driven straight into the marrow of his bones.
“You saw what happened,” he replied, voice raspy from dry mouth and fatigue. “I slipped up.”
“What I saw was a full body spasm that resulted in you not being able to block in time,” Mihawk said flatly as he pinned Zoro under an uncomfortably piercing gaze. “That wasn’t just a slip up. Something caused it. Have you been hiding an injury?”
“No,” Zoro said, which wasn’t technically a lie. These episodes of having to relive Thriller Bark weren’t producing any kind of actual physical effect, at least as far as Zoro could tell. It just felt like they were. Very intensely. For hours on end.
“Then what was it?” Mihawk pressed, and despite the fact that he was currently laid up on an flimsy infirmary cot, fighting both a new injury and an old one, Zoro couldn’t help but sigh irritably.
“I told you—”
“Roronoa, while I can understand and appreciate the instinct not to appear weak here, you are doing yourself no favors here by lying to me,” Mihawk cut him off. “In fact, you may be putting yourself in active danger.”
Zoro couldn’t help but stare at him in disbelief.
“I’m in training with you,” he shot back. “I’m putting myself in active danger every day!”
“Then you can see why it does not benefit you to take on any additional risk by not being truthful,” Mihawk replied smoothly. “Clearly there is something more going on here than ‘just’ a slip up. And if you refuse to tell me what it is, then you can consider this the end of our time together.”
Zoro shot up, ears and neck starting to burn in anger and humiliation. “What the fuck?” he demanded, even though he’d been preparing for this very possibility only a few minutes ago. “Why?”
“Because I refuse to train someone who insists on keeping secrets that could cause me to harm him unnecessarily,” Mihawk answered simply. “You’ve already lost an eye. Who’s to say a limb won’t be next?”
“My haki—” Zoro began to protest, but Mihawk cut him off again.
“Isn’t strong enough.”
Zoro’s hands fisted in the thin sheet that had been covering him, the rough cotton beginning to tear under the strain of his grip as he wrestled with Mihawk’s ultimatum.
He didn’t want to tell Mihawk what had happened, because that would mean having to tell him about Thriller Bark, and Thriller Bark was supposed to be Zoro’s secret, one that he planned on taking with him to the grave. It was bad enough that the fucking cook knew as much as he did and that Brook had apparently been awake to witness the whole thing; the idea of anybody else finding out about what had transpired between himself and Kuma that morning made Zoro feel vaguely ill.
But it had only been a little over a year since Luffy had sent his secret message, and Zoro knew he wasn’t strong enough yet to handle whatever was waiting in the New World. He needed more training, and Zoro was certain that Mihawk was the only person in the world who could provide it at the level he needed. He needed Mihawk, for both his experience and expertise, and… If Zoro were really honest with himself…
He liked Mihawk. He liked training with Mihawk. Once Zoro had gotten over the initial shock of having convinced the fearsome Warlord who had once nearly sliced him in half to agree to his request, Mihawk had turned out to be a lot like himself—which was to say, kind of odd, not great with people, and obsessed with swords. They got along well, and he’d proven to be a surprisingly good mentor this past year; patient without being coddling, challenging without being unreasonable. Mihawk knew exactly where and how to push in order to make Zoro be better, faster, stronger—and that in turn made Zoro want to drive himself even further, determined to show Mihawk that he wasn’t wasting his time. That someday, Zoro was going to face him on the battlefield as an equal, and then as a victor.
Which only made losing his eye like this all the more humiliating. It would have been one thing if it had happened during one of Mihawk’s more intense challenges, of which there were many. But taking a hit that he should have been able to parry even as far back as when he’d first challenged Mihawk in the East Blye, just because he hadn’t been able to keep himself in check during a spasm?
That was failure, plain and simple. And the shameful sting of it cut through him all the deeper because Zoro was supposed to be better than this.
He tried glancing surreptitiously at Mihawk from the corner of his eye, but the Warlord was sitting to the left of the cot and Zoro couldn’t actually see him if he didn’t turn his head. The realization made him grimace and draw his knees up so he could hunch over them, pressing his forehead into the jut of his patellar bones as he clenched his good eye shut, trying to ward off the sudden prickle he could feel welling up behind it.
There was no choice. Zoro couldn’t afford to leave Kuraigana now—especially not now, not after what had just happened. He would need all the help he could get in learning how best to compensate for his new injury, and Zoro had no doubt that the best person to help was Dracule Mihawk.
Which meant he was going to have to come clean about Thriller Bark.
Fuck.
It was still many more minutes before Zoro actually decided to speak, breaking the tensely charged silence that had settled between them by saying roughly, “You’re a Warlord, right? So then you must know Bartholomew Kuma.”
“I do,” he heard Mihawk respond.
“Do you know how his Nikyu-Nikyu powers work?”
There was a small pause before Mihawk replied, “I do.”
Zoro sighed heavily, dropping his knees so he could shift around to face Mihawk properly, determined that if he was going to do this, he could at least not hide from his mentor’s gaze like some kind of chastised child. But the movement caused a fresh spike of the bone deep ache to roil through him, and Zoro barely caught himself from doubling over in pain, a small hiss escaping through his tightly clenched jaw. He felt Mihawk’s gaze sharpen like a tingling at the edge of his senses thanks to his newly awakened observation haki, but the Warlord didn’t move, nor did he speak.
The absence of a response to his spasm was strangely comforting. It made it a little easier for Zoro to relax once the wave had passed, rearranging himself gingerly so that he was sitting cross-legged on the cot before he finally lifted his head to meet Mihawk’s gaze. He found it as sharp and yellow and eerie as ever, but…
It was not unkind.
“Kuma appeared on Thriller Bark right after we beat Gecko Moria,” Zoro began slowly, voice still raspy and quiet. “We tried to fight him, obviously, but we just weren’t strong enough to take on two Warlords in a row like that and Kuma wiped the floor with all of us. He said he was there to take Luffy’s head; I couldn’t let that happen, so I begged him to take mine instead. Then cook tried to step in and offer himself up in my place like a fucking moron—” (he couldn’t help rolling his eyes—or eye, as it was now) “—so I had to knock him out. But I guess Kuma must have seen that and thought it meant something that more than one member of the crew was willing to sacrifice themselves for their captain, because afterwards he promised not to kill Luffy. But in exchange…”
Zoro trailed off, squeezing his eyes shut as a sharp jolt shot down his spine and then spread out to every inch of his body; hot and fast like wildfire, burning its way through his muscles and then settling as a heavy layer of ash deep inside the hollows of his bones.
“He had you absorb one of his Nikyu-Nikyu bubbles,” Mihawk guessed after several long moments, when it became clear that Zoro couldn’t continue speaking.
Zoro nodded tightly, hands fisting against his thighs as he fought the next wave of pain that roiled through him.
“Of Straw Hat’s pain from his fight with Moria?”
Another nod. Mihawk didn’t respond right away, and another tense silence filled the air between them as Zoro tried to breathe his way through the turmoil currently engulfing his body and Mihawk did whatever it was he was silently doing. The awkward quiet was only broken when suddenly he said—
“That’s quite an impressive feat, Roronoa.”
At that, Zoro cracked his good eye open.
“Absorbing the bubble?” he dared to ask, pleased when he managed to keep his voice relatively steady.
“Surviving it,” Mihawk clarified. There was a gleam in his eerie yellow eyes that Zoro recalled seeing right before the Warlord had nearly cleaved him in two in front of the Baratie. Dimly, Zoro recognized it as respect, which made something like pride swell within his chest; but unfortunately he was in no position to appreciate the unspoken compliment any further, instead having to wince and clench his teeth as another jolt shot down his spine.
“He said that I wouldn’t,” Zoro ground out, willing the prickle that kept building up beneath his good eye to stay where it was and not start leaking out.
“By all rights you shouldn’t have. I’ve seen what that particular trick of Kuma’s can do, and the results were, shall we say, not pleasant.” There was a brief pause before Mihawk continued, “So you sustained some sort of lasting injury from the experience.”
Zoro grimaced. “Sort of.”
He couldn’t see Mihawk’s face, but he could hear the sharp arch of one eyebrow in his voice as he said, “Sort of?”
“I don’t think it’s like, actual physical pain, because if it was then things like painkillers would help. And they don’t. At all,” Zoro explained through his still grit teeth. “It’s more like when… You know how people who have lost limbs sometimes say they can still feel the pain, even though they know the limb is gone?”
“Yes. I believe the term for it is phantom pain.”
“It’s more like that,” Zoro said. “Like… Like it’s not actually there, but because my mind can remember it, my body can too.”
Mihawk hummed thoughtfully. “I see. How often does it occur?”
“It’s happened a handful of times since Thriller Bark. Mostly while I’ve been here, but looking back I think it might have been part of what took me out so easily on Sabaody too.”
“And is it triggered by anything in particular?” Mihawk asked.
Zoro shook his head. “Not that I can tell. Usually I wake up and it’s already started; then it just kind of continues throughout the day.”
“Is it always the same intensity?”
“No. Sometimes it’s worse than others.” Zoro grimaced, shoulders hunching as he dared to admit, “Today was… particularly bad.”
“And you didn’t say anything because you thought you could handle it,” Mihawk guessed, and Zoro felt his ears growing hot with shame again.
“I always have before,” he offered, though the excuse sounded weak, even to himself. “I had no reason to think that this time would be any different.”
“Apart from the fact that the pain was already worse than usual,” Mihawk said, clearly unimpressed with Zoro’s explanation. There was a pause, and then he added, in a slightly softer tone, “You should have told me.”
The flush spread from his ears down the back of Zoro’s neck and across the bridge of his nose, hot and sharp. “It’s just pain,” he protested, not quite able to meet his mentor’s gaze as he spoke. “How am I ever going to beat you if I can’t learn to just work through it?”
“There is a difference,” Mihawk said pointedly, “between pain gained during the course of a fight and pain acquired beforehand. And in my personal experience, the latter is much harder to deal with because you don’t have the benefit of adrenaline and endorphin rushes to keep it at bay. Had I known you were having difficulties, I would have called off your training for the day, and you’d still have both your eyes.”
That made Zoro scowl. “I don’t need you coddling me,” he snapped.
To his surprise, Mihawk let out a heavy sigh.
“It isn’t coddling, Roronoa.”
Zoro scoffed. “Oh yeah?” he bit out, knowing he was being a shithead but unable to stop, because it was easier to be angry than embarrassed. “You think all the opponents waiting for me in the New World are going to be ‘considerate’?”
“Of course not,” Mihawk replied smoothly. “But that’s precisely why you should have informed me of this problem sooner. Believe it or not, Roronoa—” And here he pinned Zoro under an unusually intense look of eerie, yellow-eyed scrutiny, which was saying something for Mihawk “—you don’t simply have to suffer through this phantom pain; there are things you can do to manage it. Mitigation techniques, if you will. And once you learn those techniques, you won’t need your opponents to be considerate, because you’ll have a better handle on the pain before you face them.”
He finished this statement with a tone rather reminiscent of the painfully exasperated fondness so often used towards Zoro by the rest of his crew, and it made something inside his chest ache so fiercely that for a moment, the phantom remnants of Thriller Bark vanished. What settled in their place instead was a bone-deep sense of longing and the same sort of mild embarrassment that came whenever one of them had to do something like drag him back from getting lost. It was awkward, and obviously Zoro didn’t like it, but it didn’t sting the same way that humiliation did. Mostly it just made him feel kind of silly.
“I… hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted, reaching a hand up to rub sheepishly at the back of his neck.
“Obviously,” Mihawk replied, and Zoro could have sworn he saw one corner of the Warlord’s mouth twitch.
There was a moment of contemplative silence, and then Mihawk continued, “Here’s what’s going to happen. I will insist that you rest for the remainder of today and tomorrow, but after that you are free to continue with your normal weight lifting regime. Your sword training will be put on hold until you’re sufficiently recovered from your injury, and in the meantime we will shift focus from armament haki to observation haki until I am satisfied that your missing eye will not be a significant handicap. Additionally, we will make time to teach you some techniques to help you manage this phantom pain of yours, and of course going forward you will inform me immediately of any flare ups so that we don’t have to deal with any more avoidable accidents.” He leveled Zoro with a look of rather stern reproval. “Do I make myself clear?”
Zoro’s throat had grown oddly swollen, and he had to swallow around the tightness there before he could respond.
“Yes.”
Mihawk nodded sharply. “Good.”
He stood up and then paused, brow furrowing for a moment before he asked, “What is that snack from the East Blue that you’ve been making with Perona recently? Onigaru?”
Zoro cocked his head in confusion. “Onigiri,” he corrected. “Why?”
“Ah, yes. Onigiri.” There was a slight pause. “Does Perona know how to make them?”
He said this with an air of perfectly cool casualness, as though to suggest it meant nothing that he was asking and Zoro should not ascribe any further meaning to the question. But Zoro felt the corners of his mouth twitch anyway.
“Yeah, she should,” he said. “But tell her that if she tries using jelly as a filling again I’m going to kick her ass. I don’t care what she says, strawberry and seaweed is not a good combo.”
Mihawk’s nose wrinkled. “Duly noted,” he replied dryly, and then left.
When the door finally closed behind him, Zoro exhaled shakily, and finally stopped trying to fight the prickle that was still pressing insistently behind his good eye.
The seventh time it happened, Zoro very nearly didn’t tell Mihawk because the episode was (relatively) mild, and the thought of having to admit that he probably shouldn’t train today made Zoro’s stomach churn something fierce. But then he considered the potential consequences of not telling Mihawk, and while Zoro might have been an idiot, he wasn’t stupid. And so, very grudgingly, Zoro confessed to having a flare up at breakfast.
Mihawk merely hummed in acknowledgement and directed Zoro to meet him in the library later instead of outside like usual. There they spent the day going through an entire list of mitigation strategies that Mihawk had apparently come up with, including but not limited to: breathing and meditation, several (non-sword related) forms of physical activity, fishing, gardening, something called a sudoku puzzle, and a few board games. The end result after two days (Zoro was beginning to realize the milder episodes unfortunately lasted longer) was discovering that distraction techniques worked the best, as the more Zoro was thinking about something else, the less he was thinking about the pain. Also, much to the shock of both Mihawk and himself, that he wasn’t half bad at chess.
The eighth and ninth times, Zoro (barely) hesitated to let Mihawk know that he was having an episode, and his mentor took the opportunity to distract him by introducing Zoro to several other types of strategy games. Zoro got to watch the gleam of mild interest in Mihawk’s eerie yellow eyes turn positively manic as he taught Zoro how to play things like Go, Shogi, Pachisi—as well as a handful of increasingly difficult card games. Zoro took to most of them like a fish to water, and Mihawk’s only complaint was that with just three of them at the castle, he couldn’t effectively teach Zoro how to play Mahjong too.
The tenth time, the episode only lasted a couple of hours, but they were the most excruciating hours Zoro had been forced to endure since Thriller Bark itself. He couldn’t do much more than hold a hot cup of tea between his trembling hands while Perona read out loud to him from books on martial arts history in a mostly failed attempt at distraction. Afterwards, Zoro felt the same sense of burning humiliation that he had when he lost his eye, but this time he managed to swallow his pride long enough to ask Mihawk for his advice.
“At present, it seems you’ll simply have to endure, same as you were before,” the Warlord finally answered after several minutes spent in ponderous silence. “Or push through it, if it should occur during a time when you need to fight. I am at least satisfied that your armament haki is now strong enough to help you compensate for something like another spasm in most cases.”
Zoro sighed heavily. “I guess,” he muttered, more to himself than to Mihawk. It wasn’t as though he thought he couldn’t just push through if the situation called for it, but now that Zoro knew there were better strategies out there, gritting his teeth and bearing it seemed like an even less appealing prospect.
There was a brief pause, and then suddenly Mihawk asked, “Roronoa. Do you recall what I said when you first told me of your surviving the incident on Thriller Bark?”
Zoro frowned. “I think it was… something about it being impressive?”
Mihawk nodded, his sharp features taking on a peculiar expression that Zoro couldn’t quite name.
“I stand by that assessment. Even if all you can do during one of these intense flare ups is endure through it, that is still a feat few could hope to manage. I realize it isn’t much, but perhaps you could take some… comfort, in that fact.”
For a moment, all Zoro could do was stare at him.
“… Thank you?” he finally said, entirely unsure if that was an appropriate response or not. It didn’t help that Mihawk’s only reaction was to nod sharply before turning on his heel and stalking away, just a touch faster than was strictly necessary.
Later, Zoro would turn their brief conversation over and over again in his mind, thinking especially of the look on Mihawk’s face. It was hard to tell, because the only person Zoro had seen with anything close to that particular expression directed towards him in years was Luffy, but Zoro could almost swear that Mihawk had looked…
Proud of him.