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When you take off Shanks’ hat to sleep, it’s all or nothing.
Starfished on the top bunk, twelve hours, dead to the world and snoring loud enough to sway the ropes holding you aloft. Moving only to scratch the scar on your cheek, thrash the blankets off, kick the empty air with a rubbery leg, or–
nothing.
When you sit in the crows nest and stare at the thumbprint moon. Simmer in the heat of your own ambition. Not dreaming, worrying, or planning, but something like meditation. Like prayer, kinda. Wayfinding.
One afternoon you asked Zoro what he dreams about during all his naps, and that got him annoyed, which never really fazed you; annoyance is necessary, crucial, it means you’re holding his complete attention– but then he scooped up his whetstone and blades and stomped off to another stretch of the deck, after a flustered I don’t have dreams and why are you asking me this and at least I sleep normal hours.
The last part is not exactly true. Neither is the first part, but you’ll figure that out later.
So you spend the afternoon with Usopp instead, slingshotting him high over the waves and whooping when he cannonballs back down into the electric blue wake of the Merry. You send one long arm to grab his waist and haul him back aboard for another jump, urging again, again, do a flip this time, and each time your palm burns where the saltwater lingers. (As a kid Shanks made you stick out your tongue anytime he caught a pout forming– I’m looking for spots; jealousy turns your tongue green, Luffy, bet you didn’t know that, kiddo.) Nowadays your mouth gets dry watching Usopp carve through the water.
The breeze carries Nami’s lazy whistle from her lounge chair on the top deck, and you scamper up the mast for a better view, tangle yourself into the ropes as sweat dribbles down your ribs– hey, Usopp, would you jump from up here?
You know he would, if you asked. You know you could jump into the perfect water, too, if you wanted. Zoro would fling himself over the rail to fish you out, cussing like a cat in the bath, but he’d do it. It looks dark and cool from this high, the most beautiful color in the whole world, in your opinion, the color of driftwood burning– what’s it like, to be held like that? To let fly and know something endless will be waiting to catch you, and unwilling to let go?
Below the cream billow of the sails you see a flash of green. Knee-jerk, really, how that’s always going to be the color of want: new jungles, secret islands, a comet’s burning trail, Zoro’s head falling back against a barrel as he dozes. Like a kid with his thick knees tucked up, rest laying its soft palm across his stern brow. Not unguarded, though. When Zoro sleeps it’s as if he’s beyond the highest of the high walls he puts up. A perfect defense. Untouchable.
Can you move over, just get off the- why do you always wake me up?
I don’t like when you go places without me.
You go everywhere with me, dumbass. It’s a small boat.
Not when you’re asleep, Zoro. I don’t know where you are then. It’s not fair.
He sighs. Tiredly scratches square nails across his cheek. You show up there, too, Luffy.
Your own scar shivers.
--
Night watch, no moon. Louche tilt to the black silk bandana drooping low on Zoro’s brow as he fights to stay awake next to you in the crows nest. A thief’s knot secures the tails in the back– that’s one Sanji taught both of you early on in his tenure on board. There’s honor among linecooks, but that doesn’t stop busboys with sticky fingers, he lectured that day, and pulled out his own coin purse to demonstrate. Anyone can tie a square knot, but if you want to know whether someone’s been in your things, do a thief’s knot.
I don’t care if you guys go through my stuff, you offered, to help keep things simple.
Zoro frowned at the coin purse. It looks the same as a square knot.
Exactly. And most busboys will open it up, skim twenty percent, and throw a square back on it like nothing happened. But see these? Sanji flicked the two dangling ends of the purple cord. The bitter ends? These are a dead giveaway. They tie up the same side on a square, but different sides on a thief. He did a weird jazz hand ta-da and dropped the purse on the table with a satisfying metallic thump. If they’re a good burglar, they’ll re-tie it exactly the same. Otherwise-
Bitter ends? Funny, Zoro interrupted, reaching across and thumbing the end of the purple rope. I didn’t know these had a name.
--
Midnight again. Stars as small and bright as milk teeth in the sky. Another witching hour watch, this time alone, and when you creep into the crew quarters to wake Sanji for his shift, he’s on the floor, curled on his side by Zoro. Cornflower blue shirt untucked and wrinkling, open at the collar and loose at the wrist. His head is pillowed on your swordsman’s outstretched arm, against the soft swell of muscle, and their breathing is lopsided, unmatched, but the thought is immediate: Sanji knows. He knows what’s over the wall, the one Zoro climbs over every night, he and Zoro are on the other side right now, yep, there’s the garden, there’s the two of them in tacky wrought iron chairs at a small table where they can drink sour black coffee and point at the birds and talk forever and in the morning, in the morning– Zoro will make a joke that you won’t understand. And Sanji will wiggle those eyebrows and say to you, Oh, it’s nothing. Just a- nothing.
“Luffy?” You turn. It’s Nami, bleary eyed, propping up in the cocoon of blankets she wove herself into to fight the chill. She whispers, “What’s wrong?”
“Go back to sleep,” you whisper back, and find that your throat is filled with coarse desert sand. “I just- need a glass of water.”
She squints. Rumpled. Baffled. “Then go get one?”
You nod solemnly, slip out the door, and walk straight past the kitchen.
Instead you take the stairs, not stopping until the smell of citrus and living wood clears your sinuses and tempers the racing pulse in your chest. Nami’s mandarin trees inch toward the stars and block the view, leaves fluttering. The fruit is almost ripe, each piece sleeping in the branches; reaching up to pull one down, it fits perfect and orange and round in your hand. You can still only think of the arm, the muscle, the idea of its weight under your palm. Instinctive, you hold the unpeeled mandarin to your lips and wonder how– just wonder.
There was an island Robin talked about once, where spoken language never developed. It was bound to happen, all these isolated archipelagos drifting alone in the Grand Line, and somewhere there was a village where people said hello by drumming a certain rhythm on their leg. News was shared in woven cloth, wedding vows were a pattern of breath performed in unison, cheek to cheek, scholars taught history lessons through dances passed down by their parents’ grandparents. Knowing, Robin said, means something different there. One million ways to understand the world, and we just picked ‘sight’ and ran with it. There’s probably an island of people out there composing poems from scents alone.
She leaned further over the railing and closed her eyes. Her bangs were getting long; they ruffled in the wind and skimmed her high cheeks.
Are you trying to smell a poem?
No, captain, she laughed. The most wonderful sound. You’d always been a little in love with her for it, always would be. I’m trying to say– sometimes there’s questions only our bodies can answer. You know that better than any of us. But you need to stop chewing on Nami’s pencils.
What answer would you finally find if you got your teeth on Zoro?
A rustle. You didn’t hear him come up the steps, only realized when he leaned against the trunk of the tree your back is resting against. When Zoro, meticulously trained, light on his feet, let you know he was there.
“You’re gonna catch a cold,” he says after a long moment, detouring around hello.
You slap a few beats on your leg in response.
A blanket lands in your lap. Heavy and brown and sorta ugly, like a blanket for a horse. But it’s still warm from-
“I’ll take this watch,” Zoro says, and slides down to sit on the deck with his back against the same trunk, shoulder pressed to shoulder. You can only see the shell of his ear, the slant of his nose in profile.
“I can’t sleep,” you say.
“Nami told me. I mean,” he chuckles, sending heat through you like a sandstorm, “she threw her slipper at my head and woke me up. Said you were sleepwalking.” Elbows you in the side, juts his chin at the blanket. “If you aren’t gonna use it, I’ll-”
“No way,” you jump, and spread it over yourself, bundling up to the neck. He’s right, the seasons have changed without you noticing and your short sleeves offer nothing but the opportunity to feel the furnace of his skin against your arm, leaving the rest of your body cold and oddly detached.
“I was havin’ this weird dream,” Zoro finally says, barely louder than the waves bumping the hull. “About Shimotsuki village.”
From here all you can see is the railing, not the blue-black sea beyond. So you look up instead: past the leaves, the branches, the twirling stars, past the sky, all the way to a place where you stop and Zoro’s voice starts. Not his voice- the sound of him. A place where you don’t need words to understand him.
“You were in it,” he says. Quiet, so as not to wake the mandarins. “I brought you to my old training field behind the grain sheds. And to the cliff we used to dive off as kids. It kinda looks like an old man sneezing if you stand in the right spot. I showed you how we hung persimmons to cure in the dry season. Big strings of them on every porch.”
He thinks you’re asleep, that’s the only reason he’d ever peel open his chest like this. You let him. Slow your breathing. Close your eyes. Let the crown of your head settle against the bark.
“In summer everyone at the dojo would get roped into helping plow the fields, then in the fall sensei would pause classes again and make us pick corn. And there’d be harvest bugs everywhere, in my clothes, in my shoes, it was awful.” The smell of citrus blooms– he must’ve grabbed your orange and started to peel it. “In the dream, the dojo had a big fireplace, but really it was a stove no one but sensei was allowed to go near. I think- no, it’s hard to remember now.”
You want to ask.
Tired, for real.
Head on his shoulder; at some point it fell into place.
“I have this dream,” Zoro says, “that we make it through this and I take you back to Shimotsuki and you get to see it all. My dojo. The fields. Kuina.” There’s a long pause, so long you think he’s nodded off. But no– he sighs. A finger touches your cheek, featherlight, and the pad of it smooths along your scar from end to end. “She would’ve loved you. Would’ve kicked your ass, probably.” Pushes a tickling curl off your forehead. “She’d love you a lot.”
In his voice is the same steadfast conviction you’ve heard a million times.
She would’ve loved you.
I am going to be the world’s greatest swordsman.
And you know– like a vow of breath, history choreographed, the melody of perfume, a bite mark on the arm– you know which of those two things matters more to someone like Zoro.
You’ll tell him in the morning.