Moss Head
Summary: If anything, Roronoa Zoro was a swordsman. Making this distinction was very important, especially since people always freaked out after they realized she had boobs. OC Insert, eventual Zoro/Mihawk.
Disclaimer: I don't own One Piece.
Chapter One: Change
There was no transition.
One moment, she was thirty-five, married, with three kids. The next, she was eight years old, had green hair, and was currently getting the snot beat out of her. It was jarring to say the least. She was both Merriam A. Kendal, and Roronoa Zoro. Loving wife and mother- starving street rat. She didn't understand what was going on, not then, not in that moment, but the instinctive drive to fight and claw her way out from under the punishing kicks was enough to get her small body moving. She rolled, kicking at knees, scratching at exposed skin and biting at a large hand with tiny, blunt teeth. A sharp, sudden impact to her head sent her flying, but even in the dazed aftermath, she was somehow able to get to her feet to run. She plunges away from the pain and angry shouts, sprinting mindlessly through twisted, dirty streets, skirting around buildings and dragging herself through the mud beneath fences, pushing her tired, aching body to wheeze as much air as she can through burning lungs. She stops only because she collapses, and falls into black, blissful sleep where she lays.
She wakes to a world of open seas speckled with islands, pirates and monsters (scaled or otherwise) roaming free, corrupt governments, and small fishing villages smack dab in the middle of bum fuck nowhere.
Some things come naturally, other's do not. The language is difficult, even if she understands it, so she chooses not to talk. Any skill she can learn with her hands comes easily, more like a memory than something new. She finds herself waking in strange places.
For six long months she wanders, coming to grips with this dream world, just as she does with her newly acquired (stolen) sword. But she is always in a haze, dark eyes clouded, sometimes there, sometimes not.
So when it starts, she is surprised; surprised and terrified.
She had never felt such pain. In her delirium, she thinks of genetics and changing chemicals in the brain, lymph nodes and glands that control fluctuating hormones. It all makes perfect sense in her head, but in her more lucid moments, cowering in the shack of some backwater, she thinks she is dying.
The dick falls off. Like the body expelling diseased tissue, like an umbilical cord blackening over time before flaking away to reveal a new, round scar of folded flesh in its place. Except, not, because it hurts, and she's feverish the whole time because something like this is only supposed to happen in the womb or under a surgeons' knife, but it peels off like a dead thing, leaving parts that are much more familiar behind but no less horrifying because a part of her body just fucking rotted and fell off, and she should have died of blood poisoning or something, not developed a whole new reproductive system if the pain in her abdomen was anything to go by, because that fucking hurt and this is fucking insane.
But this is also a world where a fucking fruit can turn a man into rubber, so why the fuck not a spontaneous sex change?!
In fact, she blacked out for most of it, which she is grateful for, because not being able to piss for days hurt and the strange discoloration on her penis and balls made her think she was going to die anyway. But it's not all easy afterward either, not with the mood swings and chills, the tremors that rock her body for hours. It burns for weeks down there every time she has to urinate and it hurts somewhere deep inside where she can't reach unless she cuts herself open like a squealing pig.
She was not ashamed of her body as it had been either, because it was just a body, a child's one at that, and she would have dealt with it as she always had, even if it had been odd to walk about with dangly bits for the first four months after she'd woken up as a homeless, starving boy with an eye for sharp things and no sense of direction.
After this... when she grew up...? She would never be a beauty like the women typical of this world; too broad shouldered, too muscular. At best, she would be considered handsome. At worst, well... this body had started out male. It was in her blood, her bearing. Even if her soul (or God or Fate or some weird-ass One Piece physics) changed it to fit better, she'd make due.
Besides, Zoro had always wanted to be a swordsman anyway.