DISCLAIMER: None of these characters are mine!
Zoro had been on watch for about two hours. He had spent those two hours in the crow's nest sitting on the ground, leaning against on one of his biggest weights and watching the sky. Ever since he returned from the separation, Zoro had been paying a lot more attention to the sky. Kurigana had been blanketed by fog day in and day out, and Zoro had begun to miss not just the blue seas, but the blue skies as well. Another thing he had taken a shining to were stars.
Before Kurigana, he hadn't thought much of stars. He'd looked to them a lot when he was a kid after hearing a story about people's souls becoming stars after they died, but after a while he pulled his head out of the clouds and put all his focus on his training. But now, after two years of grayness, he found himself thinking there were few things more stunning then the night sky over the open sea.
It was little things like this that he had come to miss the most. These were the things he'd taken for granted. They'd been so constant, he'd barely thought to acknowledge them.
The little things, like the rocking of the Thousand Sunny, the brightness of the stars, the warmth of the sun.
Zoro was drawn from his musings when he heard someone climbing up the crow's nest. The sound wasn't quite the same as he remembered it, but he could still tell who it was. Zoro continued to look out the window as Luffy pulled himself up and sat down next to Zoro. They sat in silence for a minute.
"What're you looking at?" Luffy asked, finally interrupting the quiet. "Usually you'd be training up here, but you're just staring out the window."
"The stars." Zoro replied. He felt kind of silly saying it, though. Not many people would picture Zoro to be the type to stare at stars. Luffy looked out the window as well.
"That one right there is called…" Luffy said, pointing to a cluster of stars. "The Big Spoon."
"Don't you mean the Big Dipper?" Zoro asked. Luffy shook his head.
"Nope. It's definitely called the Big Spoon." Luffy said. "Big Dipper sounds stupid." Zoro laughed, and they lapsed back into silence.
"…How long has it been?" Luffy asked.
"You've probably been up here fo-"
"Not like that!" Luffy said. "I meant, how long has it been since we were together like this?"
"Oh." Zoro said. Longer than two years, definitely. Zoro looked at Luffy and found himself unable to pin down the last instance where he had spent quality time with him.
"I don't know, actually." he said. Luffy frowned, and Zoro got the impression that was the wrong answer.
"But we're here now, so that counts for something." he said. "And we have a lot more time to spend together in the future. That's what we all trained for, isn't it?"
"Yeah." Luffy said. "If you forgot last time, then you've just got to remember this time. And if you forget this time, you'll just have to remember next time!" Zoro nodded, and looked back out the window.
It was the little things he had missed the most. The things that had been so constant. The things he wanted to make sure he never lost again: The rocking of the Thousand Sunny, the brightness of the stars, and the warmth of his captain beside him