Title: Come and Find Me
Theme: #22 – Mother Nature
Pairing: Zoro/Robin
Setting: Post Timeskip
Listen to this while reading: Angles by The XX
Hello cats and squirrels and talking tonakai. I'm sorry for the long hiatus! Just had a week of for graduation and some quality time with the boyf after months apart. I'm back at home now, and here's just a little something I secretly wrote in my office yesterday. I hope you like it, thank you for reading, reviewing, favoriting and all. I will try to update 5 Days very soon, I hope.
Just a purple sticky note, barely hanging on his cup filled with sake. He smiled at the very familiar, cursive handwriting he had usually seen on the door of the Crow's Nest.
"Come and find me," it spelt out, the more he reread it in his mind, the more he imagined it as a woman's whisper. Her whisper.
The room was very lively, his captain jumping from table to table, teaching everyone else his trademark silly dance. Their navigator was sitting with a group of men, bragging on her excellent poker skills. Their sharpshooter was telling stories that might actually seem convincing, this time. Their cook was swooning over ladies that he himself find average-looking. Their little doctor was dancing with their skeleton Soul King musician, captivated by the wonderful party music. Their shipwright disappeared once or twice – to see Sunny, he said, he loved Sunny dearly – and when he's around, he was gulping gallons of Cola and swayed his hips in those black Speedo.
Their archaeologist was standing across the room, with her seductive stare hugging his throat from a distance. She smiled once the swordsman raised his eyebrows in confusion.
"Come and find me," he heard the whisper inside his head again, and the lovely archaeologist began her steps, and disappeared after the entrance door.
The swordsman crumpled the purple note in his fists. Notes. Purple and green post-it notes. How truly bizarre, the way the swordsman and the archaeologist communicate from time to time, every day. Between good old hellos and goodbyes, and 'what are you doing', and 'have you eaten today', and 'what book are you reading'. Day by day, quick notes turned into deeper conversation, and though they talked less than five sentences per day with each other, their hearts and lungs became closer friends.
Cold air greeted his skin for goose bumps, forcing him to tug into his deep green robes closer. There was no sight of the archaeologist anywhere, only empty cold streets dimly lit by aging streetlights. Damn this woman, he thought. He hated playing games.
His inhale caught her scent – though mixed with the smell of old tar roads and concrete – from his north. Potpourri, he concluded. He is bad with recognizing flowers and their scents, though he remembers the archaeologist's scent by heart. "East," he murmured to himself, though walking north. He heard a chuckle from a distance in front of him.
"Your sense of direction, still very awful. I'm scared you might get lost."
But she ran small steps anyway, leaving the swordsman with all darkness ahead of him. He called, but all he heard was footsteps and nothing more. Trusting his good hearing instincts, he let his feet wander and travel, deeper and deeper. Gone the smell of concrete, came the smell of fresh and stale leaves and wood and mud. He didn't seemed puzzled at all, anyway, after all the faint sounds of footsteps and leaves brushing on fabric, and perhaps skin, led him wherever he was going.
"Oi, Robin! Where are you?"
"I told you to come and find me."
Darkness, darkness and darkness.
The swordsman followed the sounds, and travelled deeper into the woods, it seems. Thankfully he could trust the weak moonlight so that he wouldn't be so unlucky to fall or trip anywhere.
"Robin, stop it!"
But as his one and only open left eye scanned the raw nature in front of him, he didn't seem annoyed – though his speech might contribute to otherwise.
"I told you to come and find me."
His footsteps went dead a few feet away in front of a big, old tree trunk. "Robin, stop this nonsense."
But he smiled.
"You found me." Her wraparound green sarong – today, with Indonesian batik motive - hung after her little feet in the air. She didn't seem like she wanted to come down from the tree branch any soon, but she smiled at the swordsman. "Congratulations for not getting lost."
"Tch. What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing." She tossed her silky long hair back, and leaned to her side, against the tree trunk. "Come, climb up. It's really nice up here."
"No, thanks. I'd rather stay down here. What are you doing out here anyway?"
"I was feeling a little bored at the party. Aren't you too?"
He shrugged, clueless of how to answer. "I guess. Dunno. Depends."
And what followed was a short silence. He decided to adjust himself to the tree trunk, sat on those humongous roots and leaned against the hard wood, hoping the bark didn't stain his green robe.
She jumped down, shortly after. She hugged herself for heat.
He noticed. "Oi, you cold?"
And she nodded. "It's quite cold up there, I suppose."
He immediately took of his comfortable green robe, and passed it to her. "Wear this. I'm not that cold."
She said thank you, and threw it around her body. She secured the robe with his red cloth belt. Now she looked like she was burying herself in a deep green blanket, she thought, but it doesn't matter. She thought it was kind of sweet of him.
She sat by him in silence, and thought he had fallen asleep or anything, until she realized his body was trembling, his folded hands were quivering. "Are you cold, Zoro?"
"This is nothing," he told her, though a little of his manly ego sang through his teeth.
"Do you want your robes back?"
"No. It's fine."
Worried, she pulled her wrap batik sarong from underneath the long green robe, and freed it from her feet. She passed it to him, anyway. "To keep you warm."
He received it with a quiet thank you, and threw it around his shoulder. It took him fifteen seconds to realize that it was hers, another five seconds to realize how kind of her to lend him her sarong, and another three seconds to secretly look at her long feet emerging from his own robe.
He could only assume what's underneath, but he kept it to himself.
Another twenty seconds passed, and she removed the red cloth belt. "I'm not that cold anymore." She returned his robes, placed them on his lap as he gulped.
"You want your skirt back?" He asked her, but his gaze was locked on her feet and only her feet.
She shook her head. "Not that cold anymore." She smiled. "In fact, it's a little hot." So she lowered the zipper of her blouse, down perfectly to the end of her cleavage.
And the swordsman, now as if cutting down the invisible internal human cables that connects the brain and the heart, threw his green robe messily on the dirty, fallen-leaf filled ground. He pulled her to lie down on it, and he – to Robin's surprise, probably – smiled as he climbed on her.
"I told you to come and find me."
"I think I've found what I'm looking for."
Heartbeats raced. Moonlight swarmed in. Clouds moved in. Little creatures of the night woods sang a love sonata. The tree silently smiled as the lovely archaeologist kicked her shoes off her feet. The damp fallen leaves, brown on the ground, danced as the swordsman's breath flew passed her neck.
He took her right ventricle and kept it close to his, as if locked in a safe. She breathed harder for oxygen, her heartbeat sped up, the only remainder of her heart worked faster to pump blood throughout every inch of her vein, to continue living.
Exactly what love felt like, apparently.