Chapter Text
1: He’s Like A Completely Different Person.
Zoro woke up.
Excellent, considering he hadn’t fully expected to.
He was alive, and more importantly, his captain was alive.
That meant they won.
Luffy was already sitting up beside him, stretching out his arms and back, not unlike a cat waking up from a nap. It was only a moment to catch his breath before Zoro joined in. He cracked his neck, tested his torso, felt out all his aches and pains and made decisions about which bandages were definitely unnecessary.
And then Luffy shot him a grin, and before he knew it he was grinning back and calling for sake like his life depended on it. Luffy called for meat even louder at his side.
The crew were all inevitably drawn into the chaos.
“Zoroooo! Luffyyyy! It’s been so long!” Chopper called through tears. Apparently ‘so long’ meant a week, which, well, maybe Chopper’s reaction was valid. That was a new record.
Food kept coming, booze kept flowing, and it wasn’t long before Brook started up on his violin. A true straw hat party, completed by Chopper’s lecture about drinking and removing bandages too early, and the shocked expressions of Momo, Hiyori, and attending Samurai, before they begrudgingly gave in and joined in on the fun.
But something was missing.
The food was good, and the sake great, but in the back of his mind Zoro was craving something else. Onigiri made just a little too salty in retaliation for some insult or another, but a sake dropped to the deck beside it, which would compliment it and end up balancing the salt perfectly.
It would be served with the smell of smoke and the sea, and the feeling of a bruise forming on his thigh after being kicked awake. The sleep-muddled sight of blonde hair disappearing around the corner.
“Oi, witch,” he drawled between finishing one bottle and reaching for another.
“Hm? Zoro?” She called back, glancing up with a wide smile on her face from where she’d been entertaining Toko and Otama. A flash of fondness shot through him, a brief thought that she really enjoys taking care of the kids, that he quickly silenced. He refused to be drawn into the witch’s trap, no matter how innocent she seemed.
Thinking of the witch also usually led to thinking of him, and that thought got Zoro back on track.
“Where’s the cook?”
It’s like he kicked sand on a campfire.
The straw hats fell into a hush. Brook never stopped playing, but his music and their conversations all dipped in volume. Nami’s face, previously beaming, immediately soured into a frown.
Across from him, Luffy picked up on the change in atmosphere. He never stopped eating, but did slow down, and his eyes took on a darker cast.
Zoro couldn’t help the way his Haki spiked. He caught Usopp hiding a wince as he threw his observation Haki out as far as he could, searching desperately for a ping.
He got nothing.
“Nami,” he prompted, gruff and demanding to mask the worry underneath.
“Zoro,” Usopp butted in, holding a hand to his head. Zoro shifted his gaze onto him, and Usopp flinched, but bravely chose to continue.
“You won’t- you can’t find him that way. I’ve tried. You and I both know that when he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be.”
Zoro scowled, causing Usopp to yelp and throw his hands up in defense, before begrudgingly stopping his search. The Cook was annoyingly good at disappearing, and didn’t so much quiet his voice as he did completely mute it.
Nami sighed, and he dragged his gaze back to her.
“Sanji-kun has been… distant,” she admitted, speaking quietly. She sat up to face him fully, and Robin moved to take over the two children with a gentle smile and passing hand on Nami’s shoulder.
“He’s been avoiding us, and-” she broke off with a frustrated sigh, temperament slipping off the edge of concern and falling headfirst into anger. “I don’t understand what’s up with him! He spends more and more time out of the Capital, hasn’t cooked for us once, and he completely refused to visit either of you-”
“Nami!” Usopp cut her off, eyeing Zoro hesitantly.
“Usopp, Robin asked him to make lunch for us, and he said no! To Robin! He’s like a completely different person!”
“I know, but getting angry over it won’t help anything!”
The two kept going, with even Franky and Brook chiming in on the oddness of their cook the past week, but Zoro had stopped listening.
Dread was no stranger to him. Zoro knew the feeling of heaviness, the cold, creeping void of an inevitable outcome, but this was different.
This was heat, and he was hot, and sounds of battle were in his ears with the adrenaline of fighting for his life pumping through his veins, somehow hearing the buru-buru-buru of a den-den mushi over it all.
‘If I lose my mind… you must kill me.’
Nami’s words cracked like lightning in his head.
‘He’s like a completely different person!’
Zoro stood up.
“Oi! Zoro! Come back here- I’m not done with you yet!” Chopper wailed, but was ignored. He began his walk, no idea where he meant to go, but going nonetheless.
“Give it up, Chopper,” Nami sighed, “He’s hopeless.”
Robin gave a small laugh. “You might try any of the coastlines,” she told him, painfully gentle, no doubt seeing straight through him, the way she always has. “Our cook, when we see him, has been smelling more and more strongly of the sea.”
Zoro grunted in acknowledgement and thanks, even though they both knew Zoro’s sense of direction was a combination of luck, divine interference, and whoever was sent to fetch him (blonde hair, the smell of cigarettes, the feeling of a hand on his shoulder to guide him).
He was just leaving the room when Luffy called out to him.
“Zoro!”
He paused, glancing back, and met the intense, all-seeing gaze of his Captain. This was Luffy when he meant something, when he needed you to pull through, for the good of the crew.
“Bring him back, okay?”
And Zoro wasn’t a liar. He didn’t believe in giving out false hope, and his Captain deserved nothing but the truth. But looking into his eyes, looking at the crew’s expectant faces, relying on Zoro, trusting in him, he could do nothing else but nod.
Walking away down the hallway, hearing Luffy’s demands to see the city, Momonosuke announcing a festival in their honor, and the crew cheering, Zoro grimaced.
His heart was pounding and his chest was tightening.
Zoro wasn’t a liar, and he hoped the cook wouldn’t make him into one. But seven days ago, he had made a different promise. Back on that fateful day in Onigashima.
‘I’ll make sure to kill you myself!’
++ ++ ++
In the end, it was Sanji who found him.
Like he always did.
Zoro’s wandering had lasted for hours - taking him through barren fields, past the fallen Onigashima, and eventually, to the coastline.
He’d stopped for a minute at a rocky cliffside over the coast, to take in the view of the rising moon reflecting off the waves, when his observation Haki picked up the Cook’s voice on his radar. It sparked to life violently, before settling into something subtle; like the flame of the Cook’s lighter. Zoro honed in on it, and after a few seconds, could tell the Cook was speeding towards him.
Zoro looked back in the direction he’d come from. Even from this distance, he could see the bright lights of the festival at the Flower Capital. If he closed his eye, he was sure he could imagine the laughter, the music, the taste of the sake and the feeling of bumping shoulders with the crowd.
Curly only kept him waiting for a minute, a whisper of the wind all that announced his arrival.
The waves kept crashing, and Zoro kept breathing. He briefly entertained the thought that it would be easier to pretend that the den-den mushi call never happened, but he owed the Cook better than that.
He let the silence drag on, waiting for the other man to say a word. But another silent minute crawled by, and Zoro realized he’d have to initiate.
“I came back from hell just to kill you,” he declared.
No response, no defense. No insult. Just the sound of the waves.
“Sanji,” Zoro risked, and that got a sharp inhale. “I don’t fully understand, but I swore to kill you myself if I had to.”
Finally, he forced his eye open, and met the Cook’s gaze. Zoro always noticed when the Cook wore blue, with the way it complimented his features and made his eyes pop, but the blue yukata was having no effect tonight. His one visible eye was cold and unreadable, posture stiff and neutral. There were no hunched shoulders, and his hands dangled at his sides instead of resting in pockets or at hips or behind his head. To top it off, there’s not a cigarette to be found.
“Do I have to?” He asked.
And that was the catalyst.
Sanji came rocketing towards him almost faster than Zoro could blink, a switch flipping in him from the calm, emotionless affect to a violent, deadly aura.
The clang of a flaming shoe impacting Enma echoed deep into the night. Immediately, Zoro could tell that this was no spar. Sanji was coming at him, a brutal, ruthless onslaught, and it was all Zoro could do to keep up with his pace.
Shit, is the Cook actually trying to kill me?
A pang in his heart, a stutter in his breath, and Sanji took advantage of it, landing a devastating hit to Zoro’s ribs.
“Fuck, Curls,” Zoro coughed, managing to scramble away and put some distance between them. Something in his chest had given at the impact. Across the way, Sanji stared him down the way a predator would watch their prey - cold, calculating, detached. He looked like a stranger.
So it was kill or be killed, then.
Fuck.
Zoro took their brief separation to draw Wado Ichimonji and secure his bandana in its place. He scolded his aching heart into submission. Sanji was an opponent who deserved all the respect Zoro could give him.
Steadily, purposefully, he rotated his blades to be sharp-side out. This was no spar.
Across from him, the Cook was tapping his flaming foot, orange flames morphing into blue, climbing up his thigh.
There was a shrill screech, followed by a flash of red light and a crackling boom.
Zoro’s eye twitched, Sanji’s weight shifted, and the two were clashing before the sparks of the first firework sputtered out.
Neither of them hesitated. Every attack was with the intent to kill, and injuries were quick to build on both of them. The Cook’s speed and toughened skin were new, but Zoro’s Haki flowed through his swords, and blood was being drawn nonetheless. Meanwhile, the Cook was merciless in his assault on Zoro’s still bandaged torso.
It was unlike any other fight Zoro had been in.
Neither man offered the taunts typical of their spars, a grim, foreboding atmosphere having long since descended over them. Their clashes timed with explosions of color over the capital, the crashing of waves ever-present in the background, even as chunks of the cliffside were lost from the impacts of their fight. The two moved faster than most would be able to see - appearing as blurs of green and blue, locked together across the ground, in the sky, only ever separating for a second before engaging again.
The thing about having a sparring partner, Zoro thought, meant knowing how they fought, inside and out, and knowing that they knew just as much about you, too. But it was different, now. Attacks previously never used, deemed too destructive or saved as their finishers, were released without abandon. Weaknesses were being exploited.
It felt like it would never end; an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, two wings of a bird trying and failing to fall out of sync, two parallels destined to forever reflect each other.
They were stuck, until they weren’t.
The Cook had skywalked up, and Zoro rocketed up after him, leaping with enough intensity that his takeoff cratered the ground below. They continued to engage, until Zoro was positioned above him, gravity working to pull them both down.
Zoro saw it in Sanji’s face.
Emotionless, cold, detached, unlike anything the Cook had ever been before - but then, a twitch of his jaw, the slightest shift of his eyebrow.
Zoro was slashing down, knowing that the Cook would easily block, and intended to use that to springboard and gain some more height, to stay in contention with an opponent who maneuvered the skies far better than him.
The Cook would block.
Zoro knew the Cook would block.
He didn’t block.
Zoro felt his own eye blow wide as blood splashed up, spraying into the wind as it battered them in their descent.
It wasn’t fatal, not yet - it ran vertically along the right side of the Cook’s chest (the beautiful blue yukata ruined), and Zoro knew that if he could just get the man to Chopper he’d have a chance to live.
But the goal wasn’t to let Sanji live.
Fuck, Zoro thought, and felt his breath hitch.
He wanted to scream. To shout. To accuse him, because ‘Why didn’t you block?!’, but no sound escaped him.
Sanji made no reaction, no move to stop their falling.
Zoro’s hands trembled, sheathing Enma and Kitetsu, and he grabbed Wado Ichimonji in a vice grip to try and make them still. He blinked, to clear his vision, (when did it go blurry?), and set the blade in place. Stabs weren’t his usual finishes, his style lending itself to slashes instead. But in this specific case, a quick death, a merciful death, was the final favor he could give to his crew mate.
Words unspoken, unthought, teetered at the tip of his tongue. With startling clarity, he remembered the first time he ever saw the Cook. Blonde hair, polished suit, athletic build. Bullying Luffy like he’d been doing it all his life.
He’s beautiful, he had thought. I should tell him so.
Wado Ichimonji hovered over Sanji’s heart, and Zoro was a fucking coward.
“Goodbye,” he whispered instead, and as they crashed back down to the ground, stabbed him though.
Zoro closed his eye, heaved for breath, once, twice, and startled at the feeling of a hand against his cheek.
His eye snapped back open, meeting the Cook’s gaze, hair askew and both eyes visible. He was smiling.
“Thanks, Marimo,” he mumbled around a mouthful of blood, and Zoro watched with mounting horror as his blue eyes went dull, and the hand dropped from his cheek, brushing over his lips on the way down. The blood he’d trailed across Zoro’s face burned hotter than Diable Jambe ever did.
He pried his shaking hands from Wado Ichimonji, stood from his position of straddling the Cook’s hips, and stumbled away. His front was wet, stained red, red, red-
He only made it a few feet before his stomach flipped, and he was emptying bile and sake onto the stone. Regardless of the fact that Sanji had asked him to, had forced him to, there was no doubt in Zoro’s mind that he’d regret this forever.
His promise was fulfilled.
The fireworks had stopped by now, but the waves were still echoing against the newly reformed cliff face. The world kept moving. Life kept going.
And then, the sound of a different promise shattering.
“Sanji?”
Zoro snapped his gaze towards his Captain. He stood at Sanji’s feet, staring at the tragedy. At the sword in Sanji’s chest.
This was inevitable, he tried to tell himself. Luffy would have to find out eventually. But fuck, he thought he’d have more time. (Not that time would ever fix this, a voice whispered in the back of his mind.)
“Sanji?” Luffy called again, broken, so quiet Zoro could barely hear him over the building static in his ears. His straw hat was on his head, but not angled low enough to cover his eyes, giving Zoro a view as Luffy’s confusion bled into understanding.
Luffy’s eyes snapped to Wado Ichimonji, still buried deep, straight through the center of the cook’s unmoving heart.
“Luffy, Captain, I can- let me-”
“No,” Luffy whispered, unmoving. His jaw had fallen open, eyebrows raised in shock, eyes going wide in disbelief. Blood was seeping into his sandals.
“Luffy-” Zoro choked on his words, the wetness in his eyes spilling over and mixing with the warm, warm, warm red on his cheek, on his lips.
“No,” Luffy repeated. “No, I refuse.”
And Zoro’s fallen to his knees now, gone from choking on his words to choking on his breath. He was trying and failing to inhale, the blonde on the edge of his vision was fading, and his own hands in front of him lost the feeling of the stone beneath him.
It clicked that this was Conqueror’s Haki. It was his captain’s, but not really; familiar but slightly off, and strong - so strong. Wind was whipping, the sky was darkening, thunder was booming, and were chunks of the cliff face floating? Was Zoro floating?
Zoro thought he saw a flash of white and purple through the haze, but his vision was going out fast.
The pressure continued to mount, a natural disaster contained to the body of a devastated, heartbroken nineteen-year-old. As he unknowingly destroyed the entire southern coast of Wano, his Captain addressed him one final time.
“Zoro. Bring him back.”
2: This Is Some Pretty Strong Deja-Vu.
Zoro woke up.
“...Not a doctor… I don't have time… That bastard!”
Zoro woke up, and his first thought was ‘the Cook smells good,’ and his second thought was ‘what the fuck,’ and his third thought was ‘ow’.
Combined with the maroon taking up his vision, the smell of cigarettes, and the oddly familiar pain slamming his body, Zoro realized with startling clarity that Sanji was currently cussing out Law. His deep monotone had been responding to Sanji, unintelligible but recognizable, and he must’ve shambles’d himself and Zoro down from the rooftop of Onigashima and onto Sanji’s shoulders.
Wasn’t I just - was Luffy here? Something’s wrong -
But then Sanji was moving, and Zoro’s broken body was being jostled, and it got pretty hard to think.
By the time Zoro’s senses came back, finally able to process more than just pain pain pain, Curly-brow had got him laid out in a (mostly) still standing room. Zoro might’ve been out longer than he thought, because Sanji had also managed to scavenge bandages and various medical supplies from somewhere, too.
But something felt off. His core was shaken, and lingering on it too long brought flashes of stress, of pressure, and of something hot on his cheek.
“Curly-brow,” he croaked out through the pain, interrupting Sanji’s mutterings about ‘Stupid swordsmen’ and ‘dumbass idiotic moss-heads’.
“Mn?” he called back, attention still on wrapping Zoro’s ruined body, not on the words Zoro needed him to hear. And Zoro didn’t even know what he wanted to say, not really, but knew the Cook had to listen anyway.
“Sanji,” he said, the syllables spoken quiet and calm, but deafening in effect. Sanji startled, actually dropping the roll of bandages onto Zoro’s torso, and whipped his head around to lock gazes with the swordsman.
“Shit-cook,” he continued, a bid to resume normalcy.
“We’re going to live,” Zoro landed on. Simple, reassuring, and the truth. They were going to make it out of this alive.
Sanji just stared at him, probably searching for why Zoro felt the need to declare such a thing, before picking up the bandages and resuming wrapping.
“Obviously,” he agreed. Then, “Kaido, Big Mom, they’re the ones who messed you up like this?”
Zoro grunted in acknowledgement and noted, with mild alarm, how thick the wrappings had gotten.
“I’m amazed you managed to find the rooftop,” Sanji joked, and the attempt at levity managed to bring the atmosphere back to something more familiar between them.
“Do you even know how to apply a bandage?” Zoro asked, rather than grant that a response. Sanji gave him a prolonged side-eye before he responded.
“It’s the same as trussing a ham,” he replied.
“Am I a ham to you?”
“You’re not that appetizing!” Sanji finally tied off the bandages, leaving Zoro completely immobile. Zoro moved his eye to track his movement as Sanji took a few steps to reach a nearby candle, the only source of light in the room besides the ambient glow coming from the cracks in the walls.
Sanji picked it up, lit his cigarette, and took a deep inhale.
“Tell me Luffy is okay,” he demanded, smoke escaping from his lips and dissipating into the heavy air.
“He figured something out,” Zoro responded. “He’ll win!”
“I know that.”
++ ++ ++
When Zoro woke up again, for real, when he was able to move and process more than a fuzzy image of Chopper and a goat doctor hovering over him, he experienced the strangest sense of deja-vu.
Marco’s yellow-blue fire was just sputtering out, and he locked on to the Cook’s Haki in an instant, knowing when and where they’d be attacking before he even processed that he was moving. That was normal; when the two of them got on the same wavelength, they clicked together like two pieces of a puzzle.
Their bickering was normal, their determination to see their Captain become king was normal, even the subsequent ignoring of the trash talking from their enemies felt normal.
What wasn’t normal was the way the Cook was moving - a bit stiffer, less fluid, but Zoro, even as he called out to him to ask what was wrong, didn’t feel surprised by it.
“I’m not saying I don’t feel well, it’s just that I felt strange,” the Cook continued on, and King is going to-
Did Chopper’s medicine make my reflexes faster? He wondered as he blocked the attack, a half-hearted quip about the Cook owing him one slipping out like second nature. But that wasn’t quite right, because he’d known King was going to attack before the man had conveyed any intent, hadn’t he?
Deja-vu, he decided, and proceeded to stop thinking about it, instead committing his full attention to the fight with the leather-wrapped pterodactyl freak.
++ ++ ++
Now, Zoro may be an idiot, but he knew he had the smarts for fighting. Not necessarily in hunting for weak spots or in subterfuge, those strengths belonged to Sanji, Robin, and Brook, more than anyone else on the crew, but rather in his instincts. In the way he could sense his opponent’s intentions, feel the tide of a one-on-one progressing and navigate clashes the way Nami navigated the Grand Line.
The entire fight with King, something was off.
Zoro was moving a little too fast, body reacting to King before he moved. It should’ve been a good thing, but it almost made fighting him harder; the entire time Zoro was being caught off guard by himself. He didn’t think this was what conqueror’s Haki was - if anything, it should’ve been from his observation Haki, but that didn’t feel right either.
And then a passing thought, hit him when the flame goes out, and Zoro knew the fight was his.
(In the back of his mind, the ‘how did I think of that?’ went purposefully, determinedly ignored.)
But before he could test it, before he could press his newfound advantage-
Buru buru buru buru… buru buru buru buru…
“Hah? A den-den mushi? Who’s calling me at a time like-” he cut himself off, because he knew the answer. As he deflected King’s projectiles, Curly’s voice rasped out from the snail.
“I snuck one in your Obi. Just in case you die in a ditch somewhere.”
“Stupid Cook!” he responded, on instinct. ‘Don’t bother me!’ was on the tip of his tongue, but he found himself hesitating to say it. Another moment of silence passed, almost like Sanji was waiting for it, before he just continued on.
“We’re gonna beat the Animal Kingdom Pirates.”
“Yeah, of course!”
“But after the battle, if I lose my mind, you must kill me.”
Trembling hands, something hot on his cheek. Zoro missed a step and narrowly dodged being cut in half, a mild sting ripping into his side instead. What the fuck was that?
“Oi,” Sanji prompts him.
Zoro knew what he should say. His crewmate was asking for a favor, and wouldn't be asking unless he felt it necessary. The promise formed on his tongue, but the words refused to come out.
What escaped instead was a pathetic gasp for air, and a voice even Zoro would admit sounded desperate.
“Don’t lose your mind then, Shit-Cook!”
Sanji tsk’ed on the other side of the den-den mushi. “That’s not the response I’m looking for, Marimo.”
Zoro let out a growl, deflecting another attack of King’s.
“Fine,” he agreed, because this call needed to end and Zoro needed to focus.
“I’ll make sure to kill you myself!”
“Thanks, Marimo,” Sanji murmured through the line, and a cold shiver ran down Zoro’s spine.
“In that cast, don’t die until then,” Zoro added on, in an attempt to shake the heavy feeling of wrongness that settled on his shoulders. If anything, it made the feeling worse.
“Mn. Sorry for the trouble.” Sanji hung up, and Zoro went back to fighting King. Like nothing happened, like he didn’t just promise to kill the only person he’d ever hoped to grow old with.
++ ++ ++
Zoro beat King, as he knew he would, and woke up a week later to a missing, wrongly-acting Cook and a terrible feeling in his chest. The whisper of a promise he regretted haunted his every move.
He left the Flower Capital, Luffy’s “Bring him back, yeah?” ringing in his ears, knowing that something inevitable was coming.
Hours later, it was a familiar coast that bore witness to his reunion with Sanji. He voiced the thought aloud.
“Have I been here before? It looks familiar.”
Zoro waited, patient, for the reply that should’ve come. ‘Everything and nothing looks familiar to you, you hopeless, directionless house-plant.’
There was nothing.
“Are you going to join me?” He asked, reclining back into the grass with his hands behind his head, and looking at the starry sky. Sanji didn’t move.
Zoro was content to let the silence drag on, to breathe in the salty air and let the crashing waves fill the space between them. It was a twisted reflection of the nights they used to find on the Sunny - Zoro heading up to take the night watch, Sanji finally leaving the galley, and finding a quiet moment of respite as the rest of their crewmates slept below. A moment of peace, where they could bump shoulders and enjoy the night and the company, never to be mentioned the next day.
When Sanji attacked, the only warning Zoro got was the shifting of grass and a change in the wind.
Blocking the kick was second nature.
“Curls,” he hissed, pushing away from him and stepping back. “Are you really trying to kill me?” But he felt like he knew the answer.
Sanji merely stared him down, face cold and emotionless and not at all the Cook he knew.
Enma, already in use, and Sandai Kitetsu as he drew him, were both frothing at the bit for a strong opponent, their bloodlust never satisfied.
The Wado Ichimonji, however, was oddly reluctant. She was regularly more reserved in terms of craving violence, a more dignified blade than that, but the irresolute feeling she gave off was like nothing Zoro had ever garnered from her before.
Work with me here, he thought, but knew that he was no better.
Red light bloomed in the distance, a shrill screech breaking the silence of the night. The firework exploded, and they crashed together.
++ ++ ++
In the end, Zoro won.
Wado Ichimonji sliced deep across Sanji’s chest, and he would bleed out in minutes.
“Stupid Cook,” Zoro choked out. “Why didn’t you dodge?”
Sanji reached out, grabbed Zoro’s wrist in a cold, trembling grip, and as his chest stilled and his eye slipped closed, smiled.
A rush of static overtook Zoro’s vision, accompanied by a pulsing throbbing in his ears. The feeling of his heart racing, pressure building in his skull, and then everything stopped.
3: What The Fuck, This Is Not Deja-Vu.
“That bastard!”
The smell of cigarettes, maroon filling his vision, pain throbbing through his body.
He’d been here before.
“What the fuck?” It came out slurred, delirious.
“Shut up, dumbass!”
That was Sanji’s voice, snapping at him. But wasn’t Sanji just-
“What the fu-”
“I said shut up! Tsk, I don’t have anything to explain to you anyways. Fuck if Law told me what’s going on. Fucking hell. You should be the one explaining to me!”
And then Sanji was running, and Zoro was in and out of consciousness from the pain, but he definitely recognized the room they were in when he came to as a partially-wrapped mummy.
Was it a Devil Fruit? Was that a thing?
Sanji kept wrapping, and Zoro kept panicking thinking.
“Hey.”
The last… time he’d been here, he thought something was off. He’d thought it was deja-vu.
Shit. It wasn’t deja-vu at all.
“Marimo.”
Think back, think back, think back. Would a Devil Fruit user have to touch him to make it work? Could he remember anyone doing so? Why would Zoro be the target?
“Zoro?”
How long until its effects ended? Did he have to kill the user?
“...oi. Oi! Marimo? Zoro? You still there?” Sanji’s voice bordered on the edge of panic, and Zoro realized that Sanji had been calling him, and was tapping his still-exposed cheek with increasing franticness.
Sanji’s hand on his cheek, hot blood on his face. A cold grip on his wrist, blue eyes closing with a smile.
“... what?” Zoro asked, focusing on the living, breathing version of the blonde in front of him.
Sanji was quiet for a moment, giving his face a long look, before turning away with a strong exhale.
“Don’t ignore me like that. I thought you died on me for a second there,” He muttered. He dug his fingers into his hairline and pressed his forehead into his palm. Zoro watched a little too intently as it shifted his fringe and exposed a fraction more of his face.
“I’m still here,” Zoro told him, the urge to reach out and grab his other (warm, alive) hand only stopped by the bandages and his own broken body.
Sanji heaved a long sigh, and leaned against the table he had Zoro laid out on, fished out a cigarette, and held it unlit between his teeth. The angle blocked Zoro’s view of his face.
Gently, Sanji removed the hand from his hair to reach out and place it on Zoro’s chest.
“Good.” It was softspoken, almost a whisper.
“Curls,” Zoro called, getting a gentle pat on his chest in response. “Don’t you go dying on me either.”
Sanji huffed a laugh. “As if I’d ever let you outlive me, Shitty Swordsman.”
Liar.
++ ++ ++
Zoro would, later on, wonder what the hell he’d even been doing this time around. At the time, ‘beat King faster and then find the devil fruit user who did this in order to efficiently and succinctly end them’ had seemed like a perfectly sound plan. As soon as he was up again, he was after King faster than Chopper on cotton candy.
Except somewhere along the line, he’d forgotten that King was a lunarian, thus almost unkillable, and that he’d almost died fighting him the first (and second) time.
Zoro was so focused on saving time that he never picked up the den-den mushi ringing in his Obi.
So maybe his top priority was getting free of this time loop first, and dealing with the Cook later. How hard could it be to just not kill him, anyways?
By the time Zoro beat King, he estimated he’d saved about two minutes.
Adrenaline draining and feeling the imposing time limit of Chopper’s miracle drug, he booked it back to the castle. His Observation Haki was going wild, searching for any unusual voices. For anything that would even hint to the possibility of a devil fruit user. But his range was poor and everything was such a mess inside that he couldn’t make anything out.
He was almost back to the main room when his heart clenched and his breath seized, and he knew his time was up. Shit. Hope someone still finds me here.
++ ++ ++
So maybe he needed to re-evaluate his options.
Crew partying around him (minus one cook), Zoro frowned to himself.
Fighting King faster wouldn’t solve his problem. And immediately afterwards was an inevitable week of unconsciousness. How to create more time?
Maybe he could talk to the Cook. If he could get Sanji looking for the devil fruit user during the time Zoro was unconscious, it would dramatically increase the likelihood of finding them. Or… the loop seemed to end after the Flower Festival. Maybe he could just find them now.
“Oi,” he asked the room at large, “whatever happened to Kaido’s soldiers?”
“Oh, the Beast Pirates?” Momonosuke answered him. “Right now, they’re being kept in Udon. We’ll probably leave the Tobi Roppo and other officers in there, but I was hoping to get the average folk working to reverse all the damage they’ve caused to Wano soon.”
Zoro gave a nod, to show that he heard, before standing up.
“I’m heading out,” was all he said, experienced at brushing off Chopper’s answering concern.
“Oh, Zoro!” Nami called him.
“What is it, Witch?”
Nami bit her lip, looking between him and Luffy hesitantly.
“Just… You should know that no one’s heard from Sanji,” she said.
“Hah?” Zoro asked. In his vague recollection of this day, shouldn’t she have been complaining about how he was acting? About him being different?
It was Robin who spoke up next.
“I’ve been reassured that our dear cook survived his battle with Queen. He saved the lives of some Geisha I know, and there are Flower Capital citizens who report seeing a blonde, blue-eyed foreigner wandering the streets. But he has avoided my own eye rather expertly.”
“Tch. Dumbass Cook,” Zoro muttered. Couldn’t he stick to the script? (You don’t mean that.)
“Keep an eye out for him, okay?” Nami asked, and Zoro didn’t bother to answer her.
Halfway down the hallway, he heard Luffy’s call.
“Sanji’s so silly sometimes. Try and bring him back, Zoro!”
++ ++ ++
Zoro fully intended to find the Udon prison, find the devil fruit user, and be free from this hell.
It’s not his fault that Wano’s landscape could move!
He’d stumbled onto a rocky cliffside (that he knew a little too well) and resolutely turned around, only to find it again, and again, and again. Before he knew it, darkness had fallen, the moon had risen, and a blue-eyed blonde was waiting for him the next time he arrived.
“Tch, I don’t have time for this right now,” he growled, turning around to go and track down the stupid moving prison already. He’d just avoid the Cook until after this first problem was solved.
But Sanji didn’t let him.
A flaming shoe collided with the back of his head, sent him flying forwards, tumbling into rock and grass and finally rolling to a stop.
“The hell, Curls?” He cursed, climbing to his feet. He spat out a mouthful of dirt. Behind him, the stranger in Sanji’s skin offered no reaction. I should’ve expected this, he thought. Almost hysterically, he recalled an old insult of Sanji’s about ‘mossheads and their non-existent pattern recognition’.
Zoro reached for his swords, intending to just- incapacitate, Sanji, not kill him, except-
“What…?” he trailed off, because Wado Ichimonji was sticking to her scabbard. Another harsh yank and she came free, but the sword felt ten pounds heavier. Not that much of a difference to Zoro, but off-putting enough it would be troublesome, especially against an opponent like Sanji.
I’m not going to kill him, he tried to tell her, but the Wado Ichimonji was still deeply reluctant to fight.
Apparently, she was right not to believe him.
“Shit,” Zoro panted, looking at the moon, refusing to look down. His boots were slick on the stone as he staggered away, almost slipping.
“Shit,” he repeated. Sanji had practically thrown himself onto Zoro’s blade.
He dropped Enma and Kitetsu to the stone without a care, Wado Ichimonji left impaled in the body behind him. The sounds of fireworks had stopped a while ago, the Flower Festival slowing as the night grew from late to early.
It was a relief when the pressure in his ears and static in his vision finally appeared to sweep him away.