“I made a promise,” Zoro said, and it felt like he was pulling a bone from his rib cage and offering it up to Luffy, still dripping in blood.

“What promise?” Luffy asked.

A better question would be to ask what part of Zoro wasn’t that promise.

But this time the words couldn’t come, and he knew that they wouldn’t ever come, not like this. Zoro hasn’t spoken it out loud in years, not daring to after losing the very sword that he was supposed to fulfill it with.

His promise to Kuina lived inside of him, small and angry and terrified. His head, his heart, his chest, his bones, his flesh. It all burned with it.

It was everything he was, but no one could know until he could feel the hilt of Wado Ichimonji in his own hands. How could he be worthy of a promise like that when he was starting to forget how Wado felt in the first place? How could he ever want or wish for anything before he got her back? How could he let it past his lips?

Luffy was kneeled in front of him, haloed by a wisp of smoke with a lockbox tucked under his arm. He was covered in black, powdery snow, his shorts singed at the edges. His eyes were glassy and big and dark, dark brown, the kind that burned into your retinas and stayed there long after you blinked. He was smiling, unharmed and whole and alive and perfect.

The feeling in Zoro’s chest—previously smothered in cloth and waterboarded by meditation down to a single smoldering piece of coal—ignited in an instant. Every safeguard Zoro had put in place disintegrated like spun silk on a stove. Every sound or look or touch that he tried to suppress shook him at his very core. It was never fucking ending. This, this would be never fucking ending.

There was something deeply wrong with Zoro. And he knew precisely what it was.

INTERLUDE: DADAN I

There was once a twelve and a half year-old with eight siblings who swore a lot because she was twelve and a half years-old with eight siblings. She had awful eyesight but was better at wrestling than Magra. Her hair was finally starting to grow and not just coil. She was tall for her age, but Mama still called her "little girl," which was wrong—if anything, she was "middle girl," the most middle child to middle child in the history of middle children.

“God, what the hell is that?”

Luffy tilted his head. “Uh, my room?”

A pair of boxers hung from the ceiling fan, spinning lazily.

“I mean the smell, dipshit. Something die in here?”

Luffy stepped in and moved some clothes aside with his big toe. Looked perfectly fine to him. Maybe he would have to throw some stuff in the laundry one day, but nothing worth this bad of a reaction. Luffy took a deep whiff of his room before letting it out with a contented sigh. 

Ah. “That might be the meat sock.”