Disclaimer: I do not own One Piece.
A/N: The tone of this piece feels weird. I have, however, been taking tips from Usopp and I'm afraid I've caught don't-make-me-proofread-this-again-itis. Sorry about that. But I had fun writing it.
Zoro has just had a particularly vicious row with the cook; a result of the frustration and tension born from a month at sea. It was one of those fights where they don't even come to blows - they just stand two feet away from each other, nakama in name only, vitriol dripping from their lips and their eyes. He doesn't even know how this one started, but it ended with the cook telling him to
"Get. Out."
with as much force behind it as a physical kick. Zoro already feels nauseous even though he knows this will all be over by dinner, apologies on both sides unspoken but understood. However, right now, he just needs to breathe and when the cook's in the same room it's like he doesn't even have enough space to exist. He leaves the cook to his simmering anger and reaches for the door.
A resounding crash echoes across the ship and out into the ocean as Zoro exits the kitchen into bright sunshine. The swordsman resists the urge to shield his eyes as he takes stock of his surroundings. He ignores the area of the ship where the crash came from, deciding he only probably wants to know about it once Luffy has got himself well and truly tangled and calmed down somewhat. There is shade, near where the mikan trees overhang the cabin wall. There is the witch and her familiar, muttering spells and turning their iced drinks in fizzing green potions.
Well, not really, but the nausea has faded to a slight petulance. Muted clanging confirms the presence of a shipwright and a sniper down below, although why Usopp is down there is mildly baffling to Zoro. He's hardly up to Franky's calibre when it comes to the ship, and he knows it. Perhaps he thinks he's keeping Franky company, because sometimes the cyborg talks to his tools. Zoro suspects, however, that Franky wouldn't say a word if he didn't know Robin wasn't listening, somewhere.
Chopper's hiding from the heat of the day in someone's room, under a fan. And it's Brook's turn on watch, so he can't claim that sanctuary. The fellow swordsman's company is pleasant, but Brook is sometimes a little too perceptive and will insist he goes and makes up with his nakama right now. The skeleton isn't quite used to the way Zoro and Sanji work and his own loneliness is so raw that Zoro feels it's something almost tangible, clinging with desperation to that bizarre afro and only loosening its grip if everything is in complete harmony on the ship.
So Zoro makes a bee-line for the shade and flops down, not far from the girls under their floral sun umbrella. Closes his eyes, stretches his legs out and prepares to nap.
Except suddenly he can't, because he feels like he owes it to someone to try and get along with the stubborn bastard. He doesn't know who (Brook, maybe, or his captain), but Zoro has a vague sense he's letting someone down by allowing the arguments to escalate as much as they have in the past weeks. He knows his nakama understand, because by now they're all a little restless, but they never seem to be at each other's throats as much as him and Sanji. Zoro thinks, for the millionth time since that day on the Baratie, that Luffy is truly the only thing they have in common.
Sure, they share goals and values because of nakama. That magical word that made them bound to Luffy as sure as those shackles their captain had freed them from had bound them to their previous lives. But when it came to everyday things, they were operating on such different levels of understanding that they simply didn't get each other. Zoro and the cook were fine if they could just manage to stay out of each other's way.
That they can't is something that baffles Zoro, but he figures the more time he spends sleeping the less time he has to annoy the cook with, which means at least one of them is spared a headache. Himself, in all probability, because Sanji has this annoying habit of thinking himself in circles which ensures the cook is almost never worry-free.
All his own thinking is making him drowsy, and he wants nothing more than to collapse into oblivion, because everything is quieter and easier there, but it is not to be. Another crash vibrates across the boards he is leaning against, and he feels it ripple through his bones. He can hear the Thousand Sunny good-naturedly protesting. He can also hear a red-haired harpy taking it not so well.
"Zoro!" She barks at him. He doesn't bother opening his eyes, and because he knows his nakama he says, just as she opens her mouth to continue her instruction (because he knows, too, that this annoys her), "You do it."
He imagines her expression, and it amuses him.
"What?!" She explodes. "You're First Mate! It's your job to protect and look after him! Go and do your duty!"
She snarls the words at him because she knows these particular ones (First Mate, protect, duty) have an impact. But he doesn't really feel like playing along today, and he doesn't quite have the energy to be outraged. Instead, he cracks open one eye, then the other, and squints up at her. "Protect, yes. Look after? Not so much." He allows one corner of his mouth to twitch up into a smirk. It looks a little feral, but he counts on Nami not to notice, and Robin not to care (she knows them well enough that this will all be forgotten by tomorrow).
Nami instead looks like she wants to throw something at him, but it passes. She breathes, thinks, and then gets a gleam in her eyes that speaks to Zoro of Rapidly Increasing Interest Rates and Payment Demands. In his mind, Zoro groans and thumps his head against the wood of the ship. In reality, he unfolds himself off the ground and stalks grumpily past the table littered with the leftovers of specially prepared drinks. He suppresses the urge to swipe one of the tiny umbrellas and stick it behind his ear.
He is almost around the corner to the storage room when Nami says, "We all look after him, anyway. Like a family with an unfortunate cousin." Zoro does not, quite frankly, want to be regulated to such a domesticated ship and he's always thought of their mutual bond as kind of indescribable. He likes how Luffy made it that way.
He pushes open the door to the storage room, where the noises were coming from. Sure enough, in one corner and inexplicably woven into a series of crates Sanji normally used to store apples, was his captain.
"Hi, Zoro!" He couldn't see the grin, but he could hear it.
Zoro growls, displeased, crouches down beside the mess of captain-and-crate and pokes at a protruding limb, stretched out of recognition.
"Hey, Zoro..." He looks through a slat at around chest level and into the wide-eyed gaze of Luffy. "I'm stuck."
Zoro sighs, because it doesn't matter if anyone hears this particular omission, and begins the laborious job of untangling an already fidgety boy. He is five minutes in and in the process of unweaving toes when Luffy, prevented from any other form of movement, decides talking is a good idea.
"It's all Usopp's fault."
Of course.
"We were helping Franky with Sunny, right, and Usopp bet me I couldn't get his screwdriver set off the shelf in the storage room without stretching."
Toes unwoven, Zoro sets to releasing fingers from the various knotholes they'd been poked through.
"He's wrong, obviously, so I came up here to prove it."
Zoro can see where this is going, and doesn't know why Luffy thinks he needs an explanation, but lets the boy continue talking anyway because removing a left arm that's been stuck through three crates in succession is hard enough without the subject wiggling all the time.
"And I don't know why Franky built the shelf so high, 'cause that's just Stupid, but I couldn't reach it from the ground."
Right arm now, and it's tied in a knot around Luffy's mouth. He frees it, and Luffy's voice doesn't sound so muffled.
"So I piled up the crates to climb on to them to reach it but I must've slipped or something and I ended up like this."
Zoro braces himself against the wall, foot on the offending crate and hands gripped around a rubber ankle that is attached to a foot that refuses to be freed. A quick yank and he's thrown sideways, hard, but at least the foot is out.
The head is going to be a challenge. He picks himself up off the ground, steps back a moment, to observe the logistics, and moves in place to free it.
"Ehhh… Zoro won't talk to me. He's in a weird mood. Maybe Zoro's grumpy."
Zoro thinks the position they're in isn't exactly conducive to leisurely conversation, and uses the opportunity to yank the boy fully out before he can protest. It works, and Luffy regards him bemusedly for a moment, the movement having elongated his head.
He snaps back into place, however, and inspects the bruises left by being intimately acquainted with a stack of fruit boxes. Zoro would have them for a week, but on Luffy, the bruises will disappear by dinnertime.
And Zoro must speak now, to let his captain know that there's nothing to worry about, his nakama are fine, and that his First Mate would never attempt to tell him otherwise.
"Idiot."
It's enough. Luffy beams momentarily at his swordsman, extracts his hat from where it must have fallen when he slipped and looks mournfully up at the shelf where Usopp's toolbox still sits, smugly.
So Zoro walks over, easily lifts his Captain up by the waist and waits patiently as the boy recovers from being suddenly shifted into the air. Although in his opinion, Luffy has no right to look even remotely surprised, as Zoro has lost count of the number of times he's been unceremoniously flung into the clouds by rubber arms and a stupidly infectious grin. Luffy eventually catches on and gleefully removes the toolbox from the shelf. Zoro places his captain back on the ground, expression bored, saying, "See? Usopp's wrong. You got it without using your powers."
Luffy looks put out for about a second, before he comes to the conclusion that if the crates hadn't collapsed (Sanji's fault, for putting them in such an unstable position) and he hadn't got tangled (the maker's fault, for using slats instead of sensible blocks of wood) then he would've gotten the tools for sure and because Zoro is First Mate, it might as well have been Captain's Orders that got them down anyway.
Luffy grins a grin so wide his ears threaten to fall in, bounds out of the storage room, shouts a greeting to Nami and clatters below deck to prove his triumph to Usopp.
Who won't believe him anyway, thinks Zoro, but it doesn't really matter because Luffy isn't bored anymore, Usopp has his screwdrivers and Zoro is feeling a little more relaxed.
He yawns. Ah yes, naptime.