Disclaimer: I don't own One Piece, Eiichiro Oda does, and there is no financial gain made or sought by this.

Notes: Canon divergent, reincarnation, language, and Zoro badassery.

A for Awareness: Of the Dawning Kind

By the fourth time that idiot had tittered behind his hand as he strolled past the execution yard, Zoro had caught on. That hot fizzing in her chest wasn't her empty stomach finally giving up on her spine and moving on to cannibalize her more tender lungs – it was that Feeling, only magnified. By a lot.

Normally, it was just a light bubbling, like swallowing down a foaming head of beer. She'd think she'd have to burp but remember she was broke and beer-less and suddenly she'd just know. Like with Johnny and Yosaku. The sorriest pair of stalkers she'd ever seen, not worth fighting and not worth beli – yet she'd knocked her knuckles against her chest after seeing them get their asses handed to them, realized she'd spent her money on a whetstone – not alcohol, and then known them. Somehow. Knew that Yosaku wielded his sword left handed but couldn't be trusted to get food to his mouth without poking his eye out unless the chopsticks were in his right hand. Knew that Johnny couldn't climb even a single stair without compulsively counting it out under his breath.

Or when she was very young – it tickled in her chest like a cough or a laugh or too much fun. And she'd been praised for learning her words so quickly and kata so smoothly, and the whole time it felt like instinct. Bubbly, tingly instinct that grew most uncomfortable right before the shittiest moments of her life. (While she knows that her parents would have loved her all the same, she's still pissed that she spent what amounted to their last day together being a grump about the riot behind her ribs. She hadn't understood, then, what it meant.)

But this heat was new. As was the slow escalation. Probably why she didn't recognize it for what it was the first time that kid walked by looking disingenuous. Judging by how it now felt more like a volcano birthday party in her chest than a happily shaken bottle of cola, he was actually going to kill her.

Or attempt to.

Zoro had a man to find and a promise to keep; trying to honor what was turning out to be an honor-less deal just made her a sucker. So, when the yard was clear, she flexed a few muscles, relaxed a few others, and twisted just so and the ropes binding her to the cross slipped to the ground in a puff of dust. She hadn't even needed to listen for the Breath of them to find the weakness in the knots – because apparently, what they weren't teaching the marines at a marine base with a marine detention facility was how to properly restrain prisoners.

"I guess if you just throw enough rope at it and hope for the best…" she mumbled, tripping on a coil as she staggered toward the base to punch that kid in his stupid chin and find her swords and hijack a ship off this island.

That had been the plan. A good, foolproof plan.

Rika, the thoughtful little mite, hadn't figured out the plan. And when her worried little voice called out, "Wait miss! Are you okay? Where are you going?" Zoro's world spun wildly out of control as she turned to scare Rika back home where it was safe.

"Whoa miss, take it easy ok? You haven't eaten in two weeks!"

Zoro could feel little hands tugging her shoulder and a little heart fluttering in panic, "You shouldn't be here," Zoro croaked, "get lost, you won't panic if you're with your mom, safe."

"I want to help! You helped me, so I made you these rice balls and you look like you really need to eat them. Please! You can't even stand up!"

And hey, maybe the girl was right. Zoro's cheek was mushed into the dirt and the world was still spinning and someone had moved the base because it wasn't that far away from the cross and so Zoro shifted an arm and made a gimmie motion with her hand. Two bites into the sweetest rice ball ever, Zoro heard several footsteps and realized that at some point she'd stopped monitoring for presences around her.

"Ho what do we have here? Are you helping this criminal, little girl?"

One set of footsteps was getting closer, out of Zoro's range of vision, but she could feel the wilted aura of stupid-chin approaching the back of her head. Well, her plan had had a rough start, but spiraling horizon or not, hungry or not, sacrificial rituals of fire and death in her chest or not, Zoro had four good limbs and a terrific right hook. . . . Just . . . she just needed to find the energy dammit.

"You know this is punishable by death yes? Is that what you want? Yes, I think I'll have to tell my daddy you were caught feeding a criminal! You there! Cuff her. And you, give me those, they look delic—ahh!"

Zoro stood over the prone body of the blond kid, fist still clenched, Rika behind her, and growled at the huddle of marines a few meters away, "Do not lay hands on the innocent and defenseless."

It was right at this juncture that Zoro's preconceptions about her path in life were well and truly tossed out the window. She wouldn't realize it for days yet, but it was this sequence of moments that redefined everything.

As Zoro eyed the unconscious kid and wondered why the bedlam in her chest was reaching fever pitch instead of fizzling out with the threat gone, and the marines – taking advantage of her distraction – scurried back to the base, a bright laugh erupted behind her.

And stopped time.

"Shishishi, I knew it! You're a good person."

Stopped everything but the thundering, crackling firestorm in her chest and the sound of light steps coming toward her.

"Your reputation just scares people, so they think you're a bad guy."

Stopped her breathing, her thinking, her everything. Everything but that inferno that kept pounding to the beat of luffy luffy luffy luffyluffyLuffyLUFFY TURN AROUND. Zoro turned around.

"But you're not! So, you're going to join my crew, shishishi!"

She knew him. Knew that hat. And oh how she knew that smile. More than Johnny and Yosaku. More than Sensei. More than Kuina. Kuina who'd made her chest ache like the cold fingers of Death himself was slowly snapping each rib open to pull their friendship right out of her. But that had lasted only minutes, only long enough for her to tear through the training grounds to crash into the dojo to the stricken face of her Sensei. She knew Monkey D. Luffy and even knew each and every word that was about to come out of his mouth.

"Hi! I'm Monkey D. Luffy, the man who'll become Pirate King!"

And like the turbulence hadn't existed at all, her chest . . . was warm. And calm. And suffused with a feeling she had no name for or experience with.

"Eh? Are you ok? Maybe you should sit down and have some meat, I'll get your swords."

And Monkey D. Luffy laid a hand on each of her shoulders, pushed her to the ground, rummaged through a pocket, and gave her a haunch of meat. Gave it to her. Freely. Zoro let slip a mad giggle as Luffy shot off to the top of the base – stretched his arms to get up there even, and though she knew, in that unfathomable way, that he could do that, it did nothing to buttress the brittle scape of her mind just then.

It was . . . too much all at once. How oddly the Feeling had come and lingered this time. This recognition that meant more than it had for anyone else, accompanied by this warmth that was spreading to her fingertips and toes and sinking into her marrow and was utterly foreign. Completely . . . overwhelming. And the meat. It was a gesture that she understood held more meaning than just an offer of food to someone starved.

She'd never seen or heard of a Monkey D. Luffy in her life. And she would remember an aura like that. (Except she does remember an aura like that, bolder, brighter, heavier, wilder, and just as familiar all the same.)

Zoro sat there, stunned, meat in hand and eyes unblinking until a chorus of cocking guns snapped the stupor off of her.

"Learn to read the atmosphere!" She yelled and chucked the bone from the meat she'd instantly crammed into her mouth at the nearest marine. But she was done trying to figure out the significance of these new and unusual feelings anyway, so she packed them away and shoved them down to be dealt with later. If at all. A quick scan of the execution yard, then the perimeter wall, and then dozens of meters beyond, showed that Rika had made it far enough to be out of danger – possibly with that trembling little aura that Zoro thought might have been here with Luffy earlier.

Luffy's aura, she could sense, was in the upper levels of the base, hugged closely by Wado and the malevolent aura of Kitetsu.

"Roronoa Zoro, you are to be executed for the crime of betraying Captain Morgan!"

Zoro grinned and said, "Go ahead and try."

With a lightness and barely suppressed glee that baffled her, Zoro wove through all the bullets fired at her and moved toward her captain's (and how had she not even put up a fight about that?) form that was streaking to the ground from a broken window.

And right on cue Luffy yelled, "Duck!"

Zoro ducked for the kick as if she'd done it a thousand time before and then launched forward to snag Wado from Luffy's back and slice that ridiculous axe off the arm that was raised for a blow at Luffy's unprotected head.

"Even your idiot son could be a better marine than you," she spat at, presumably, Axe-hand Morgan, Captain un-extraordinaire.

"~Zoro~, that was so cool! I saw you do that in Gray Terminal too! How do you dodge bullets like that?" Luffy, unheeding of the howling, bleeding man at their feet, was nearly blinding her with the stars in his eyes as he hopped around waiting for an answer.

Zoro snorted and had a feeling that she'd get nowhere unless she just showed him, so she said instead, "Food and sleep first yeah?"

"Woo meat! Yes!"

So her plan didn't go exactly as she envisioned. Zoro still punched a stupid chin, got her swords, and was getting off this island. The piracy, the smile, the attack of feelings, this ridiculous boy – those were all details. (Luffy, she knows, can never be considered just a detail, but she's not ready to examine any of that just yet.)

It wasn't until several days into their drifting at sea that the seed of an idea, planted during her daze in the execution yard after meeting Luffy, sprouted a suspicion that she could finally grab onto and develop.

Zoro stroked her thumb along Wado's hilt-wrapping thoughtfully as she watched Luffy play tug-of-war with some enormous fish on the other end of the fishing line. A fishing line on a fishing pole that she'd suddenly felt very strongly about bringing. Zoro rarely thought about fishing, and usually only in the context of old men and tall tales.

For her to have the foresight to take along a means for Luffy to feed his ever-churning appetite, without even knowing what provisions he had on his tiny skiff . . . the uncharacteristic action stretched even her casual acceptance of instinct and coincidence. And she'd been happy to lump even the inexplicable premonition of Kuina's death into the Instinct-and-forget-it category. But now, the little flashes of knowing with Luffy were taking on a prescient quality that was unsettling. It wasn't just knowing that he'd happily eat a fish raw, fins and scales and bits of seaweed and all, and that he'd be even happier if she skinned, boned, and fileted it into huge sashimi pieces for him. It was that she had also known what words he was going to say when he introduced himself. It was that she'd known when he was going to kick out with his Gomu Gomu no Whip. It was the bubbly feeling stirring up her chest these last few minutes, not for a moment of insight to come, but for a specific wariness that Luffy was about to do something silly, any minute now, that would take him from her sight.

"Hey Zoro," Luffy hooted as he yanked a barrel-sized tuna onto the deck, "hmmm, I'm not very good at this meditating thing, so at the next island, just fight me ok?"

"Yeah, sure." Zoro cut up the tuna and snatched a few pieces for herself before Luffy could stuff them all into his cheeks. Luffy was more than just 'not very good' at meditating, he was terrible at it, and Zoro had suggested it more to get him to sit still and give her some moments of peace to pick through her thoughts than in any hope that it would help him hear the Breath of Things. "We'll blindfold you so you can't rely on your eyes."

"Aph! Fohkphy!" Luffy agreed around the 60 kilos of tuna in his mouth and clapped his feet together.

Sensei, though, didn't seem to think that the ability to predict incoming attacks or sense the location and 'flavor' of peoples' auras was a natural progression of Breath-listening mastery, since he'd never met or heard of anyone doing the same. He thought it might be something entirely different. Zoro didn't care if someone wanted to classify it as a higher level of the Breath of Things or as a form of interpretive haiku, it simply involved focusing your senses in a particular way and all that mattered was that Luffy learned best if he was literally fighting for it.

Because she knew things like that about Luffy. And as Zoro watched him chew his food, eyes darting to her, to the sea, to the sky, she knew that his mind was wandering to more food, to Roger, to the bird coming toward them, to the color of her hair, and why she had three swords – why not four or five or ten. She was accepting of his questions in a way she hadn't been able to tolerate Johnny and Yosaku's curiosity. And his constant, often irritating, presence was comfortable, like Kuina's sword at her hip was comfortable.

In fact . . . Zoro knew him like she would know an old, beloved friend.

"Whoa! Zoro, that bird is HUGE, shishishi, I'm going to catch it!"

And Luffy flew through the air toward the truly massive bird. Zoro rolled her eyes and grabbed the oars because she knew he wasn't coming back down.

As she rowed after the bird, tracking Luffy's aura, she couldn't ignore the evidence piling up. The thing about old, beloved friends was: she didn't have any. She had no basis on which to make a comparison like that, much less know it for the truth it was. This was more than instinct. More than coincidence. More than some type of clairvoyance. The only conclusion she could make, given the whole of her life's coincidences put together, was that she'd been down this life before.

And that displeased Zoro enough that she had a split-second thought to turn the boat around in a great big Fuck-you to whoever thought they could guide her choices for her. What if she didn't want to be a pirate and world's greatest swordsman to the Pirate King? Had the smarmy echo of her previous life that fizzed in her chest ever thought of that? She probably hadn't liked cheating just as much in that life as she detested it in this one, but that's a lot what this Feeling seemed like. An unfair advantage. And maybe that's why Sensei had no real answers for her powered-up Breath of Things. Because she was brining it with her from a life already fulfilled.

Despite the anger that she wasn't in full control of her own life though, Zoro didn't turn around. Because she couldn't. Because of that staggering crush of feelings that swamped her on the execution grounds when she'd turned to see Luffy. To see his face.

Because up until that very moment she had been searching for a particular man with a restlessness and urgency that drove her to train recklessly, leave her village earlier than Sensei wanted, hijack ships – pirate and merchant both, and search every island from shore to shore. And that man, she had believed, was Mihawk.

But seeing that smile. That straw hat.

Zoro realized she hadn't been looking for Mihawk at all.

She sped up the pace of her rowing, ignoring some shouts for her to slow down and help. That odd and unknown warmth in her chest that had nothing to do the Feeling was billowing up and she thought her ribs might split and crack outward from all the pressure there. Because even though this feeling was new to her, it wasn't. Even though Luffy was a stranger, he wasn't. Whatever bond they'll have is etched into her soul because it followed her here. And that meant it was worth fighting for. Worth protecting.

Seeing Luffy changed nothing in the pursuit of her dream to be the best of the best so that heaven would have no choice but to hear her name. But it changed everything about her perception. And that made all the difference. Because the necessity of getting better, faster, stronger had been . . . rudimentary, had been for a promise that, while a catalyst, wasn't shaped and nourished by anything other than grief and a sympathetic sadness for a girl that was going to let expectations define her.

But she understood, now, what her dedication was for, it had taken on form and meaning in the shape of a straw hat. Zoro needed to be stronger not for herself, but for Luffy. For that bone-deep glow called devotion. A devotion so strong that it was leaking from her stupid eyes.

Seeing Luffy at Shells Town changed nothing and everything, and it was . . .

It was the gentle breeze of an uninhabited beach tugging at her bandana as she napped while familiar voices and laughter drifted up from the shallows.

It was the lap of waves against the hull and the soothing creaks of the ship, anchored, watchful, and safe under a cloudless night sky.

It was the slap of sandals and the grind of a pestle and the scratch of a quill and the rapid staccato of a blade on wood.

Seeing him for the first time in her life, it was . . .

It was coming home.

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