Chapter Text
Zoro
The wood under my soles is cold, smooth, familiar.
It is the only constant in an existence that seems to have lost every other point of reference.
The rest of the world can fall apart, the seasons can rotate frantically until you lose all sense of time and space, but this dojo stands still.
Motionless.
Just like me.
I breathe in the scent of old wax, honest sweat, and seasoned bamboo.
It is a scent that saturates the lungs, that chases away the stench of smoke and asphalt of the city of Tokyo for a few hours.
Here, time is not a flowing river, but a stone that resists.
"Straight back, Kenta. If you don't feel your center of gravity, if you don't become one with the ground, the sword is just a useless piece of metal. A dead weight"
My voice echoes against the bare walls, calm and flat like a freshly sharpened blade.
There is no anger in my tone, only surgical precision.
The kid winces, his small figure wrapped in a keikogi that is too big that makes him look even more fragile.
He corrects his own posture, shifts the weight and squeezes the shinai with his knuckles that turn white from the effort.
He is ten years old and looks at me with a mixture of terror and devotion, as if I were some kind of severe deity descended from some mythological peak to torment his afternoons.
Poor little fool.
He doesn't know that the only thing that keeps me on my feet, that keeps me from slipping away like dust in the wind, is precisely this rigidity.
If I soften, I collapse.
If I allow a single thought to deviate from the perfect line of my training, I stumble into the void.
"Ten more lunges. Decisive. Without hesitation. Doubt is a luxury you can't afford during a duel"
I observe the rhythmic movements of the class.
One, two.
One, two.
The rustle of the uniforms is a flutter of wings, the sharp blow of bare feet on the parquet is the heartbeat of this room.
It's mesmerizing.
I desperately need it to be.
Every correction I shout, every millimeter of position I fix with a sharp touch of my hand, is a brick that I add to the wall I have built around me.
Here there is no room for distractions.
There is no room for memories knocking on the door of the mind.
Here there is only the present, the breath, the bamboo fiber and muscle tension.
Control is the only currency that has value.
If I control my body, if I control the breath in my lungs, then I can delude myself into thinking that I control my life.
Suddenly, an insistent vibration shakes the bench at the back of the room.
My phone.
I ignore it.
It vibrates again, a buzzing sound that seems to want to pierce the sacred silence of the dojo.
Then a third time.
The kids cast furtive glances.
I remain motionless, my arms crossed over my massive chest, my gaze fixed on an invisible point in the void in front of me.
I know who it is.
It's Nami who wants to complain about yet another badly divided bill or it's Usopp who tries to drag me into some weird evening to convince me that "I need to have fun".
I don't want either.
Solitude is a dress that fits me well; It pulls a little on the shoulders, but it protects me.
I wait for silence to reign supreme again, a dense and heavy silence, before dissolving the class.
"That's enough for today. Clean the floor, honor the dojo, and go home. And you, Kenta..."
The kid stops in the middle of a bow, as tense as a violin string.
I get closer, feeling the warmth emanating from his tired body.
I ruffle his hair.
"Put more heart into it next time, brat. Technique alone is an empty shell. Without the soul, you're just waving a stick"
He blushes ferociously, gives me a bow so deep that he risks tipping forward and runs away with the others.
I am left alone.
I pick up my phone.
Three missed calls from Nami.
And a text that shines on the display, almost offensive in its urgency.
Nami: Zoro, move out of that dusty hole. See you at the crossroads in ten minutes. Don't let me look for you, you know that I find you wherever you hide.
I snort, a hoarse sound that is lost in the void.
I put on my dark jacket over my black shirt, feeling the cold of the evening that begins to filter through the cracks in the walls.
Her is a real threat.
That woman has a supernatural sixth sense to find my refuges, as if she had drawn a mental map of every dead end in which I try to disappear.
I walk through the streets of Tokyo with my hands buried in my pockets.
The city is turning on the first lights, an amber and artificial reverberation that bounces off the windows of luxury shops and the signs of soda machines.
It is the hour when normal people return home, to their families, to their certainties.
I feel like a stranger everywhere.
"Zoro! Over here, chronic idiot!"
Nami is leaning against a lamppost, her slim silhouette wrapped in a camel coat that, to the eye, probably costs as much as three months' rent.
The wind ruffles her orange hair, but she doesn't seem to care.
"You're five minutes late" she begins, pulling away from the post with a fluid movement.
She doesn't greet me, she doesn't ask me how I'm doing.
She reads in my face that she would not like the answer.
"I'm lost" I answer, and it's the absolute truth of my life, even if she thinks I'm referring only to the road trip.
"You would get lost even in a straight and well-lit hallway, it's nothing new" she smiles at me, but it's a smile that doesn't reach her eyes "Shall we go for a drink? Usopp and the others are already ahead, in our usual place"
"I don't really feel like crowds, Nami. Luffy's screams tonight could push me to commit murder"
"It will be a quiet thing, I promise you. We have...some news to comment on. Important things"
We walk in silence for a while.
Nami is usually a river in flood, she talks in bursts of money and business.
But tonight she seems to weigh every single step, every breath.
She gives me sideways glances, full of a pity that I hate with all my being.
It is as if she is waiting for the right moment to drop a bomb, calculating the radius of the explosion.
"What kind of news?" I ask finally, trying to give my voice a tone of bored disinterest.
Nami suddenly stops in front of the window of a shop.
She turns to me, arranging a lock of hair behind her ear with a studied gesture.
Her tone becomes casual.
Too much.
It's that tone you use when you want to say something huge, devastating, passing it off as a trivial weather update.
"Oh, no big deal, after all we expected it. Except that the official invitation has arrived. Sanji is getting married. He announced his engagement to that girl, Pudding. The daughter of the owners of that hotel chain, remember? It seems that this time that idiot is serious. Wedding in June"
The world around me doesn't stop.
The cars continue to whiz on the wet asphalt, a couple of tourists laugh a few meters from us, the pedestrian traffic light clicks on green with its rhythmic beep.
And yet, for an infinite instant that seems to last a geological era, my heart stops beating.
I hear an annoying, electric buzzing in my ears, as if someone had hit a bronze gong right next to my temple.
Sanji is getting married.
The words float in the icy air, heavy and opaque as molten lead.
I should have expected it.
In a remote, rational part of my brain, I knew it would happen sooner or later.
That damned cook has always been a scumbag, a lover of feminine beauty, a slave to his own gallant impulses.
An idiot with a perpetually lit cigarette and a heart that is too easy to give away.
But to hear it like this...hearing it as a worldly news story, as an inevitable and distant event, is something else entirely.
It is a blade that penetrates between my ribs, slow and silent.
"Ah" I say.
My voice reaches my ears as if it belonged to someone else, a stranger speaking from a distant room.
"Good for him. He will finally have someone who puts up with his complaints in the kitchen and his melodramatic scenes"
Nami doesn't laugh.
She doesn't give me the satisfaction of a sarcastic joke back.
She stares at me with those big and overly intelligent eyes.
"Zoro, you don't have to be a stoic hero with me. We all know that between the two of you..."
"What? That we were together? It was high school, Nami. A lifetime ago. It was a game between kids who didn't know what to do with their time" I interrupt her, my tone becoming unnecessarily sharp.
I feel the anger rising, warm, dense, familiar.
It's an old friend, the anger.
It's much better than the feeling of emptiness that hit me a moment before.
"It is his life. I don't give a damn about what that shitty blondie does. I hope he is happy and that he gets out of the way"
"I thought that at least tonight, between us, you would stop pretending to be a block of granite"
"I'm not pretending anything. I'm hungry. Actually no, I just want to be on my own. I'm going to eat something alone. Go to the others, tell them that I'll see you another day"
I turn abruptly to leave, feeling the physical need to put distance between me and that news.
But my mind betrays me.
It is a cowardly betrayal.
A micro-flashback hits me from behind like a low blow, a sharp image that I can't suffocate.
The smell of rain and cigarettes.
He laughs, with his head resting on the back of a couch in a falling apart apartment, while he makes fun of me for my inability to distinguish right from left.
The warm light in the kitchen turned on at three in the morning.
The warmth of his skin against mine under the heavy covers in winter.
I chase away the image with an almost physical violence, shaking my head.
No.
Not here.
Not now.
I won't allow him to win again.
"See you, Nami" I say without turning around, raising a hand in a hasty greeting.
"Zoro, wait! Don't be an idiot! The others are waiting for us!"
I don't answer.
I speed up my pace, almost running through the crowd that now seems to me an unbearable obstacle.
I need to move.
I need to get the blood flowing faster to wash away that thought that has etched itself in the brain like a parasite.
I walk aimlessly for almost an hour, carefully avoiding the streets we frequented together, the parks where we went to drink hot beer, the alleys where we fought for hours before making up in ways that still burn on my skin.
But this city is a trap.
Every corner, every neon sign, seems to shout his name.
Sanji is getting married.
The anger has now turned into a dull annoyance, a kind of unbearable itch under the skin that I can't scratch.
Why does it burn me so much?
Three years have passed since our paths parted with an explosion of pride and unspoken words.
Three years of silence interrupted only by sporadic messages of good wishes and superficial chatter during group dinners.
Jealousy?
No.
I don't feel jealousy.
That is a feeling for weak people, for those who are not in control.
It's just...annoyance.
It annoys me that he has managed to move forward, that he has found a place in the world, a woman to love, a linear future.
While I'm still here, stuck in a dojo teaching kids how to stay balanced, when I myself feel like I'm walking on a tightrope over an abyss of nothingness.
I don't care...right?
I shouldn't care.
I stop in front of a dark and heavy wooden door, half-hidden in an alley that smells of humidity, industrial waste and wet asphalt.
It's not the trendy bar where Nami and the others go.
This is a different place.
A place where no one asks you how you are, where engagements are not celebrated and where the light is too low to see the dark circles under the eyes of those who sit next to you or the tears that will never fall.
I feel the visceral need to annul myself.
The control? To hell the control.
Tonight the wall I built is too heavy to hold.
I feel my arms giving way under the weight of years of fiction.
I push the door.
The air inside is a thick blanket of cheap tobacco smoke and low-volume blues music.
It's the perfect contrast to the manic order and cleanliness of my dojo.
I sit at the counter, deliberately ignoring the few people scattered around the tables.
The bartender, a man with a face that looks like a map of scars and regrets, doesn't even look me in the face.
I thank him mentally for this gift of anonymity.
"Whiskey. The strongest you have. Leave the bottle" I order.
My voice is a hoarse whisper.
When the glass slips in front of me, I grab it with fingers that barely tremble.
It's an almost imperceptible trembling, a millimeter of uncertainty, but for me it's like an earthquake.
I drink it down in one fell swoop.
The liquid burns as liquid fire, a lava flow that runs down the throat and inflames my stomach.
It's a chemical, physical pain that I can handle much better than the tangle in my chest.
I look at the reflection of my face in the dark glass of the bottle.
I look like a ghost.
A ghost with misplaced green hair and too much pent-up anger pressing against his temples.
"Another one" I murmured, pouring the amber liquid.
I don't want to think of a black or white groom's suit.
I don't want to think of him fixing the knot of his tie with that vain gesture he has always had.
I don't want to think of a woman smiling at him on the other side of an altar, ready to take everything I couldn't keep.
I don't want to think that, in some parallel universe, in some stupid dream I had while drunk, that place next to him could have been different.
I just want to disappear into this glass.
I want alcohol to anesthetize neurons, for the mind to stop projecting that damn black and white movie that is my memories.
I want darkness.
I pour again.
I'm alone at the counter, surrounded by the white noise of a city that never stops for anyone, with news that has just gutted me and no desire to go back to my apartment.
I'm about to make a wrong choice, I feel it in my marrow.
I feel that familiar attraction to chaos, to self-destruction that calls me like a mermaid whenever things become too real to bear.
At that moment, I feel the seat next to me move with a squeaking squeak.
Someone sits down, invading my bubble of isolation.
I don't look at who it is.
I don't care if it's a bum or a murderer.
But the scent that the newcomer gives off attracts my attention despite my efforts.
I hold the glass in my hands, the muscles of my arms outstretched, my gaze fixed on the damp stain of the counter that seems to have the shape of a distant island.
"It's a shitty night for everyone, huh?" says an unknown voice.
It is a warm, deep, strangely friendly voice.
I barely look up, ready to respond with a sharp insult or a grunt that makes it clear that there is no room for bar conversations, but the words literally die in my throat.
My breath stops halfway.