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The forest lies still beneath the early morning light, and Zoro walks alone.
Blood dries slowly, stiffening torn fabric. Beneath, cuts sting as Zoro’s skin stretches around them, and he can feel bruises taking root near muscle; he rolls his shoulders against the ache of rough combat, rubs the back of his neck. He’s been injured far worse than this before, has fought through it for his life. It’s not much, to him.
Somewhere, beyond the forest and the lingering mists, a sea gull cries out long and plaintive, hoarse voice slowly fading as it soars away. Zoro swallows at the sound, trying to remember the last time he had alcohol, water. It must have been earlier tonight, but his throat aches like he hasn’t drunk in days, and he shields his eyes from the unrisen sun, scans the trail for his crew. Nothing and no one appears.
Hm. Zoro remembers the half-light of sunrise across their faces, swollen and smiling, bloodied and beaming. It can’t have been more than some minutes since then, but when Zoro glances over his shoulder all he can see is the path walking up silently behind him, small outcroppings of stone and gnarled roots clambering over each other to swallow his tracks. He stops, and it stops. There is no flash of straw amidst the tress.
Something about the quiet here hangs like a sword above Zoro's head, tip pressed deliberately into his scalp, just barely enough to draw blood. It is a place for silence.
Hand hovering deliberately near his swords, Zoro continues forward through air stained by the faint miasma of rot.
The tree branches are twisted here, as demented as the forests of Skypiea had been towering, limbs that seem to have broken against themselves as they clawed outwards from sickly gray trunks. Here and there, gashes in the bark bleed a thin dark sap, trails of the fluid traced by vicious and thorny vines.
The others must have gotten lost. The dawn encompasses the entire horizon, withered forest infused from all angles by a soft grey light, providing no direction to the world. Zoro could have sworn the sun had escaped the horizon already, fiery beams strung golden and deadly across the rubble of a fallen mansion, rendering him and the others unto dust… but here he is, prowling through near darkness, with not a crewmate in sight. Zoro’s steady breath becomes the wind hissing through fragmented leaves, humming off the sharp ridges of stone that jut from the ground like the exposed spines of zombies. There is something almost intentional about the terrain here, shifting as it does when he turns, just enough to notice, just enough to question. There’s something malevolent in the air.
Even with all the grace and agility honed by his years of training, Zoro stumbles when a vine suddenly loops up out of the ground to snare his leg, thorns failing to pierce his boots even as razor sharp stones score gashes along his shins. He lands with a cut-off grunt, teeth closing around his tongue, sharp metal pooling at the gums. For a moment, the entire world tilts, vines holding him to the earth even as gravity seems determined to drag him off into the forest, fling him up into the sky. He closes his eyes against suddenly blurry vision, shaking his head. He can’t be caught off guard here, not like this.
Zoro breathes.
A set of worn shoes crosses the trail in front of him, plunging through the vines and stones like a well-trod pathway and vanishing into the woods on the left side of the trail before Zoro can blink. He pauses for a moment, staring at where the familiar silhouette fell into shadow, struggling to believe his eyes. Then he scrambles to his feet, tearing up the vines and half-staggering, half-running after the figure.
Whatever it is, it moves fast. He thinks he sees a the glint of sunglasses, for a second, and then a buzzcut – a blue hoodie, then a long green coat. The figure moves impossibly quickly, phasing through branches that Zoro shoves and shears aside, not seeming to notice the uneven ground. There is a creaking behind him as the forest closes in, and Zoro ignores it. If the others were on the trail, he would have seen them by now. He needs to find them, or if not them then something.
He’s focusing so hard on catching up that he nearly bowls over the figure when it abruptly stops, paralyzed against the thin, glimmering threads of a spider web. Hand resting against his swords, Zoro waits for the figure to move again, tear free of the web and turn to face him. When it remains still, Zoro lowers his head, shifts his shoulders, and walks around to face it.
“Eh – Johny?” Zoro whisper-shouts, upon seeing the silhouettes face. Then it wavers, and Zoro furrows his brow. “No… Yosaku?”
The two may have mirrored each other in speech and action, at times, but they never looked that similar. He knew them, he remembers them decently enough still to be able to tell the difference. Moreover, he left them in the East Blue.
The figure stares straight at him, stares straight through him, as if looking for something it cannot find. Its face is sallow, hollow, shadowed – its eyes flicker across his body, bloodshot. Darker blood pools across its abdomen, gathering in the creases of its shirt. It inhales, and the sound makes the spiderweb shiver. It exhales, and Zoro can feel a cold ache pressing around his temples.
“Big… bro…” the figure whispers, mouth barely opening. Zoro instantly draws Yubashiri, balancing it beneath the ravaged chin.
“You’re not him,” Zoro hisses, not entirely sure which of the bounty hunters he is referring to, and sensing that it doesn’t fully matter, here. The forest seems to grow stiller at his words, and he lowers his voice at the sudden tension in the air. Something here desires quiet. He can sense it. “What exactly are you?”
The figure stops breathing. It tilts its head. The second voice it uses is plaintive, familiar. Wrong. “Help me… please…”
“No,” Zoro responds, pressing the sword a bit harder. He wonders how the others are doing, if they are facing creatures of their own. They were injured, he’s certain of it. “Not until you tell me what’s going on.”
“What’s going on?” The figure jerks forward, splitting its chin on the blade. Zoro doesn’t withdraw. “What’s going on? You know what’s going on.”
“Tell me,” Zoro says, as deadly as he knows how. The figure only giggles, then grins, exposing for the first time its rows of bloody teeth. As it speaks, the teeth dribble out, plinking off his blade, catching in the spider web and folds of its clothing and sinking into the foul red mud it has created beneath itself.
“The bear,” it sighs. “The exchange. You know.”
All at once, Zoro senses something massive behind him, something that curves the air and wind and light itself, that bends and makes the world. Eyes flying open, drawing Kitetsu in his other hand, he spins around to face the threat. He is met only by the dim forest.
A blistering hand lands on his shoulder. On instinct, Zoro turns and stabs through the figure's chest, burying Yubashiri up to the hilt. Again, the creature stares through him. The air is entirely still.
“What a waste,” it sighs, then crumbles into itself, soaking into Yubashiri. The last of its teeth shower to the ground, and Zoro watches, stunned, as a path of rust ravages the gleaming blade, screaming furiously along its edge up to the hilt, leaving nothing but ruin and the foul scent of rotting iron. The destruction pauses, for a moment, so that Zoro can watch the metal disintegrate into crimson flakes. Then it continues, and Zoro stumbles back in horror as the rust coats and hollows his fingers, his wrist, his arm.
He cuts it off, flash of silver separating the arm at the shoulder, and falls to his knees, and keeps falling.
Somewhere, there is revelry. He is cold on the ground, and he cannot move, and the ground is shaking and the air itself dancing, filled with the sounds of dead men singing. Someone lays a hand on his arm. It is warm. It all goes away.
Zoro's eyes blink open in the predawn light, staring up at the gaps between branches. His back aches from where he was flung to the ground; his shins ache from where they were struck by the wooden sword. A branch snaps beneath someone’s foot, and he surges to his feet to show he can still fight, he can handle a rematch. His best friend stares back.
“Really? That’s the best you could do?” Kuina’s face is half-hidden by her hair and the shadows, but he’d recognize that stance anywhere. She studies him, unimpressed, then replicates the move that knocked him down. “I can’t become a stronger fighter by training with a weakling.”
“I’m not weak,” Zoro responds, face heating. “Let me try again.”
“Alright,” Kuina agrees. They step back into their starting positions, wooden weapons extended. Zoro’s teeth ache already from holding his sword. It’s early, he shouldn’t feel this tired, shouldn’t already be bleeding. If a part of him wonders how he was cut by a wooden sword, Zoro ignores it.
They start again, basic feints and jabs that Zoro mastered years ago, and only learned last week. He feels small. Kuina, though taller than he is, feels tiny. Like a honed thorn holding out against the heft of the world, before it is inevitably crushed. She defeats him a second time, plunging her blade into his belly. He swears he can feel the wood splintering.
“Again,” he grits out, fighting the urge to gag. She complies.
This time, the sword finds a home in the base of his throat, and the cold metal plunges all the way through to his esophagus, his spine. Zoro slumps to the side, gurgling, staring up at her. Even with her eyes hidden, he can feel the intensity of her glare. Her rage.
“You broke our promise.”
Zoro’s ears sting, then fill with tears. He tries to drag himself up, but the motion onto further fills his lungs with blood. He lies back down and watches her.
“We said one of us would be the world’s greatest swordsman. You lied.”
There is a flicker of gold in the woods behind Kuina – not the comforting shade Zoro knows, but a colder one. It gleams with the cold grace of a predator, and Zoro tries, again, to stand up. Again, he fails.
“You. Gave. Up.”
Zoro can only watch as Mihawk’s blade tears through Kuina’s body, her silhouette shredding into shadow, joining the blackness of the blade. He sobs, tries to drag himself forward, opens his mouth to challenge the swordsman, to join the blade like she did.
Dracule Mihawk turns away, and stalks into the woods. He does not spare Zoro a second glance.
Somewhere, there is the scent of alcohol, and merrymaking, and the sea. Somewhere, he is bundled and restrained. Somewhere he is guarded. It all goes away.
There is a bear in the woods, eating a young man.
No.
There is a bear in the woods, standing in front of a boy. Zoro doesn’t understand the bear, cannot quite articulate how he knows this even is a bear, and not some great machine, or cloud, or statue. He does understand the boy, even as his body writhes in motion while remaining entirely still, even as his limbs twist in and around and upon themselves, and his joints are inverted, even as he laughs and lies unconscious. The boy’s eyes are closed, and yet he is staring at Zoro, always. The boy wears a crown of worn gold. The boy wears a crown of glowing white. The boy wears no crown – at least, not yet.
Zoro stumbles forward. The bear looks up. Zoro removes Wado Ichimonji from its sheathe, inhales deeply, and uses it to open up his chest, from right hip to the left shoulder, lungs gleaming red, ribcage laid bare. Behind the blood-soaked sternum, one can almost see the pulse of flesh, the rapid beating of his heart. He sinks to his knees.
Surely that must be worth something.
The boy does not move. He does not see this, and for that, Zoro is glad.
The bear stares at him for a long while, before rising to its feet – and suddenly it is not a bear at all, but a man. The man walks over to him, crouches before him, and still Zoro is made diminutive in his shadow. He looks down upon the swordsman, and his eyes are more awful for being solemn. His voice is more awful for being gentle, and when he raises his hand, the touch is more awful for being kind.
He sends Zoro flying.
Somewhere, there is sleep. Somewhere, there are arms wrapped impossibly long around him. It all goes away.
Zoro is starving and thirsty and bound when he meets the Devil’s son. He leans forward against the ropes that score his flesh, making it clear in every fiber of his being, in the glint of his eyes and the tilt of his smile, that he is ambition, and power, and death to his enemies. The boy just laughs, and makes an offer. The boy makes a demand.
“Join my crew,” he says, and for the first time in what feels like years, the light begins to change. Zoro can see it over the boy’s shoulder, the gray horizon suddenly igniting, blazing, blinding. He should shut his eyes. Instead, they open wider.
The boy is an idiot, and a devil, and a god, and a king. He will be Zoro’s captain.
Right now, he is life itself.
The first daylight emerges from behind him, surrounding him, consuming him, until Zoro is staring straight into the rising sun. All of a sudden, he is holding his swords. All of a sudden, his bindings have been cut. All of a sudden, he is nothing and everything he ever dreamed of.
The past burns away and, having nothing else to offer, Roronoa Zoro plunges his arms into the fire, and is consumed by the sun.