Zoro's POV
I knocked on the door, trying to make the lump in my throat vanish, but my attempts were in vain. I opened the door of the galley to see a head of blonde hair sitting at the table.
"What do you want , Marimo?" The voice asked. "There's no Sake if that's what your after." I wasn't after Sake. I was after something much more precious. I swallowed thickly and watched as the cook turned to face me, the moonlight acting as the only light illuminating the small galley of the Merry. I had resolved to do this. I wasn't about to chicken out now. My nervousness must've appeared on my face, or shown in my violently shaking hands that I hid behind my back, because the blonde titled his and and asked.
"Marimo? What's the matter with you?" My weary eyes glanced around the room, avoiding the blue gaze as much as possible. I took an intake of breath. Don't stall.
"Sanji." I spoke. The lump must've been big because it came out as a choked whisper. I saw his expression, it was bad. It was shock. Mainly because I said his name but my paranoid mind buried that thought under a Tsunami of others. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see his face as he rejected me. I opened my mouth but no words came to me. I had this all planned out in my mind, why wasn't it playing out as I wanted then? The words I had scripted died on my lips as I cracked open my eyes and they dropped to my boots. Why was it so hard?
"I-I-I need to tell you this." I said. It was a silent plea to him that I could not voice. 'Listen to me, this is important and I need to you to not say anything.' it said. He somehow understood my cries as he nodded sharply and shut his open mouth, He was obviously going to say something.
"I-I've never felt this way before. Not Robin, not Nami, not Tashigi, not Kuina. Nobody. So then, why am I feeling like this now?" I blurted. "Why? Why do I feel like this?"
"Zoro," my knees felt suddenly weak, just from my name dancing on the Cook's lips. "Are you in love?" He asked. I nodded, my throat feeling dry and parched. "May I ask who?" he asked. I wondered as I nodded 'why does he care? he would just flip me off and send me to the Crow's nest.'
"You." I choked out.
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I stood drenched in the battlefield. Bandanna covering my forehead, it's rough texture replaced with the sticky feeling of blood soaking it's black surface. Bodies of Marines lay around me, they were foolish to try to oppose me, even if i did use the back of my blades against them. Their attack kept coming, I couldn't keep knocking them unconscious, they would only rise to fight me again. The battle cries of my Nakama surrounding the air around me filled me with positive vibes, by positive I mean my version of positive. IE the urge to beat up more Marines. I saw the blonde cook, his ass in the air as he most likely killed 50 marines in a spinning handstand. My gaze locked onto the blonde as I check out my boyfriend. Yes, You heard, read?, me right Sanji~hopeless-womanizer~ Blackleg is gay. We had been together for around 2 months now, nobody knowing of us though. A weird gas leaked from the floorboards and my limbs felt heavy, the world began to spin and I hit the deck, hearing my lover call my name, I smiled as unconsciousness took a hold of me, locking me away from the world that he lived in.
~timeskip~
I cracked open my eyes to a sight I had became used to being a pirate. I was in a dungeon. Neither light nor darkened vision can penetrate the gloom in this chamber. An unnatural shade fills it, and the room's farthest reaches are barely visible. Sat in the corner of the chilled room, I can faintly make out the sharp corners at each edge of the room but manage through he cracked darkness. The walls, painted red with blood, dried many years ago, connecting each corner forming a perfectly shaped square room. One way in and out, a wooden door always locked. The isolation was total and the stimulation was zero. No sound, no light, no furniture or cloth of any kind. Thick cobwebs fill the corners of the room, and wisps of webbing hang from the ceiling and waver in a wind you can barely feel. One corner of the ceiling has a particularly large clot of webbing within which a man's bones are tangled. A crack in the ceiling above the middle of the north wall allows a trickle of water to flow down to the floor. It pooled in a corner I shivered, the air was thin, like when you walk out on a snowy day and the air is crisp with frost and cold of winter, but this was a bit different. The cold was weighted down by a background taste of dampness and dust. The stench was worse than the taste of the the air. It smelled like rotting corpses, I was right because near the room's center, you can just barely perceive a lump about the size of a human lying on the floor. Rats inside the room shriek when they hear the door open, then they run in all directions from the putrid corpse lying in the center of the floor. As these creatures crowd around the edges of the room, seeking to crawl through a hole in one corner, they fight one another. The stinking corpse in the middle of the room looks human, but the damage both time and the rats have wrought are enough to make determining its race by appearance an extremely difficult task at best. I looked up to see a man.
He's wearing a clean shirt buttoned it up fully to support the graceful, perfectly tied, cravat he is adorning. On top of the shirt he's wearing a chic vest with 3 buttons, it has a fairly deep v-line, which causes the vest to line up perfectly with the ink black jacket's v-line when it's button up. The jacket fits him like a glove, a tailored glove. The 4 buttons of his double breasted jacket are all buttoned up, it's the best way to wear a jacket like this after all. The jacket is the same length all around, it has no vent, there's a pocket on either side and there's a breast pocket which has been left empty. He's wearing pants which have the same color as the jacket, but a slightly different pattern and they create a perfect balance with his shoes. He's wearing a lavish pair of polished black brogue oxfords. To top it all off he's wearing a classic belt, which can be accompanied by an ancient, and precious looking, golden pocket watch. He had the thinnest eyebrows imaginable, only visible because of his bone white skin that could rival Sanji's in paleness. Pale as a glass of milk, pale as the moon and stars , pale as the chalk cliffs of Dover in a full moon. A scratched voice wheezes, whines, whimpers, like sandpaper against sandpaper, making comments that make a shudder roll down my spine. His nose was quite large, sitting above thin red lips that were barely a line on his bone-white skin. His slicked back hair was a ruby red, specks of brown littering here and there. Dark shadows under piercing eyes of palest icy blue, like a creature who's spent it's life in perpetual shadow. His eyes were like they were electrically charged. His eyes were intense, and unlike the rest of him they weren't at all expressive, they were cold, like ice. Most blue eyes are so captivating I swear that you could just dive into them with the peak of awe nipping at your facial features, but when I peered into his frozen irises I felt an electrical chill run down my spine, through my body making my features numb, like ice. But not the electric shock that paralyzed me or crawled under my skin and slithered in my muscles, but the kind that made my blood dance. Those were shifty eyes. Eyes you could not trust. Every tendril of various shades of incandescent striking white-blue staying lined up next to one and other making his eyes themselves seem like a white tundra, its as if a blizzard is eternally raging on with a black void in the center that are his pupils. They don't capture light, but defy it, they're so blue that they literally glow. But when he smiles sickeningly the eyes scrunch up and their glow is lost, turning into a vile indigo and the silver specs turn black, giving him the eyes of a demon. He was tall and muscled, his arms and legs perfectly proportioned for his body, his feet looked stumpy and awkward to walk on. But he had unnaturally long thin fingers, each like the tendril of a parasitic plant, reaching and searching. (Sorry I got carried away with the descriptions.)
"Well then." He sneered, "You must be hungry." I restrained the urge to nod, to give this sick man what he wanted. He would give me something vile, and watch me suffer eating it, but my stomach had other ideas, growling loudly. "Disgusting." He growled as he lashed me over the bare chest with his whip, which was laced with thorns, crossing over the scar I obtained from Mihawk. I felt the beads of blood form on my skin from the burning cut.
"Why am I here?" I wheezed as I coughed up a bit of blood, he didn't' hurt me that bad, but malnutrition of, god only knows, time I was unconscious sure amplified the pain. He whipped me again, harder this time, my body reeling in pain.
"You will address me as Master. You have been here for just over 2 weeks now." He said as he turned up his nose at me. He grabbed a knife from his assistant and stalked over to my form. dread was building in my abdomen. he slid the knife along my forearm, I didn't flinch, weirdly it soothed me. I remember back at the dojo, after Kuina died, I cut myself. Sensei had found out and I stopped, with his help. So the pain didn't affect me. His face twisted in confusion at my expression of boredom, cold and still. He dug the knife in deeper, it still hurt but it didn't affect me as much as the thorny whip. Confusion etched more onto his face he asked.
"Why aren't you feeling pain like the whip?"
"I'm used to this." I answered him. he dug the knife deeper again. "Master." I added with a sneer.
"Your cremates abuse you?" He asked in a mocking tone.
"No." I spat. "Don't talk about them. You have no right." He huffed and grabbed a dagger. He span around once more and stabbed my stomach. This time I felt it. He must've put acid on it because It sung like fire lapping at my wound. He twisted the knife in my stomach and pain seared through my abdomen better than a branding iron, my mind conceding to the torment, unable to bring a thought to completion. Without meaning to my body curled into something fetal, something primeval and all the while the pain burned and radiated inside me. He laughed and pushed a bowl of something towards me. He was still chuckling as he descended the stone stairs and his voice gradually faded. The subsided a little and I grabbed the bowl. It was stew, It was a yellow-cream color with grey chunks in it. I ate the meal, trying to convince myself it was chicken, but to no avail as I only threw it back up. Later that day he came back, armed with acids and iron bars and lighters. I had found out that his name was Chaos Dread. That's what he called himself at least, his real name was Arc Blackwood.
Every day for three months he would come into my room and ask me about my crew, where were they? How powerful? I never told him, I bared the pain for them. Some wounds started to heal, but then they would just open up again. My throat hurt from screaming, I would get water once a week, food once a month. During the first month he tied a collar to my neck, attached to a chain. During the second month he put 6 dogs in the cage with me, they would bite me but I would normally kick them away. I was lucky if I got any sleep. Sometimes, if the drunk guard remembered, I would be allowed to shower and use the bathroom. Once I used that chance to run. I ran and ran through the streets of some town we were in, it was pitch black, as if someone shut out the lights on the world. I ran as fast as I could in my malnourished form. My legs ached from running. And I we put of breath. Damn I was out of shape. My bare feet slapped against the stone cobbles beneath me. Arc had noticed because I heard his shouts from behind me. Adrenaline coursed through my veins and I ran faster. He eventually caught up with me and two of his men grabbed me by the arms and poured a green liquid in my eyes. It stung, it burned, it ate away at my eyes, leaving them sightless and broken. I screamed in pain, thrashing about to get it out of my eyes, I felt them pour it on my chest too, that hurt, it burned and I knew it would be there for a while. I had ran quite far so the men stopped after transporting me. They fell asleep, idiots. I stood up and I walked this time, I held my hands out in front of me and walked the way to the town, or the way I thought at least.
~TIMESKIP~
I clambered onto a boat at the docks in a town I found. The town was small but on the coast. It was a shame I couldn't see, I would've loved to see the crew again. I boarded the boat, It's build felt much like Franky's work. I fell onto the grass deck and sighed. It felt so much like the sunny, the grass deck, the painted number 1 inside a wood circle the railings. I looked up and opened my eyes, forgetting the fact , that bastard Arc poured acid in my eyes, and I heard gasps.
"Shit!" I whispered. I scrambled back, hitting my head on the railing. I curled up into a ball, with my hands over my head and knees tucked into my chest with closed eyes. Voices started to talk, faceless voices, but all too familiar.
"Zoro?" One asked, it sounded silky and masculine, full of concern but with a hint of relief.
"Zoro! You're hurt!" A squeaky voice exclaimed. I felt a pressure on my right arm, like something grasping it. I swung my arm out, hitting something as I crawled to the left.
"Don't touch me." I growled, low and threatening, even though I could barely hurt a fly in this condition, never mind kill anyone.
"Zoro?" A female voice asked.
"Who are you?! And why do you keep saying my name like I know you?!" I exclaimed. "You guys work for that bastard Arc, don't you?! Tell him to go fuck himself!" Whispers floated around me.
"Do you not recognize us?" I looked up so they could see my face.
"I can't see you dumb ass." I spat. I heard a few giggles.
"You've got your eyes closed." One voice pointed out. I opened my eyes. looking around I saw nothing but black,the darkness engulfed me, and at that moment I knew. I would never be able to see them again.
"I'm blind." I announced, truly knowing it for the first time.