The outline and a few thousand words of this story have been sitting in my draft folder for more than eight years. About a year ago I decided I was going to finish this thing if it killed me. It's a bit out of my comfort zone (i.e. there is an attempt at plot), and to be honest the premise is a beast of a thing that deserves more words than I ended up giving it, but I've done my best. I actually planned this one, that's got to be worth something.

The story is set in a future where all of the One Piece world has travelled into space, which means not only is this space opera but it is space pirate opera. There are no pairings, but the focus is on Zoro and Luffy. Warnings for melodramatic writing.

The fic takes canon up until approximately Dressrosa, and then assumes ~stuff happened~ and Luffy became Pirate King.

Also available on AO3. Please enjoy!

First, he is aware.

Then, he is aware of feeling nothing. Numbness spreads throughout his body, and he can only feel his consciousness.

Then, the numbness fades, and he can feel everything. Every inch of skin, every muscle, every sensation delivered to his nerves, he is aware of it like he has never been before. He is aware of the exact boundary between his body and some sort of liquid – entirely enveloped, unmoving, undisturbed, but fully submerged. It is pressure against his eyelids, which he cannot move, it holds his fingers in stasis. It is in his ears, his nose. It's not water. He can taste it in the back of his throat, and it's filling his lungs. But his chest doesn't burn for oxygen and he's not suffocating.

And then there is a surge throughout his entire body and the silence is shattered by the loud beating of his heart. It pumps the blood through his body, sluggish at first and then roaringly, through his arms and legs, to the tips of his fingers and his toes, and he can feel them, move them. Now he is suffocating – he has no air in his lungs to begin with, and he is immediately drowning. Black clouds his vision and he blindly thrashes. The viscous fluid, twice as thick as water, resists his movement, making his weak throes even weaker. There is no space for reason, there is no time to think, he just kicks and moves and gambles the little energy he has on somehow getting to air.

He's lucky, so lucky. The glass cylinder in which he is encased, suspended in fluid, is not fastened to its pedestal. His movement, weak as it is, is enough to upset the balance, lend just enough momentum to the top of the cylinder so it pitches forward, whereupon gravity greedily takes hold. The entire ensemble collapses, hits the hard, tiled floor and shatters, spilling its prisoner free.

Whose first action is to take a breath of air. But there's no room in his lungs, so he spends the next ten minutes alternatively coughing up lungfuls of the horrid, clear fluid and sucking in great gulps of air until all he's coughing up is spittle laced with blood, and he's giddy from the oxygen.

It's dark. Where is he? What the hell happened? Where are his nakama-

Fuck. Fuck, Luffy. Oh god, Luffy.

Zoro, ill-advisedly, remembers. The floodgates open and memories come galloping back. He remembers the adventures, the fun, the smiles, the tears, the friends and foes, the capture, the desperate race against time, the anguish, the proud tilt of the head, the execution, the

If he had air to spare, he would scream in realisation and grief.

utter soul-destroying despair, the reinforcements arriving far too late, the overwhelming anger, the swords, the blood – his, theirs – the fear,

The memories flow so fast he hasn't got enough time to feel the emotions that flow with them. A sense of overloaded numbness creeps in, with its base in the strongest emotions of rage and misery.

the opponents, their strength, the wounds, the pain, the bullet ripping through his heart, his death and black.

What?

He begins to shake, through cold, realisation, anger, but most poignantly, grief. His captain. His captain. They'd killed him, with fear and violence. Zoro had stood, as helpless as the rest of the crew, and watched as blades entered the heart of the Pirate King, and all light disappeared from his world.

He'd seen such red, as he never had before. He had become a Fury, bent on revenge and destruction. Anything that stood in his way was cut down, and he was the strongest he'd ever been, so the bodies piled up, and the soil turned to mud with the blood he took in reparation.

He'd faced Mihawk and others as strong as him before, and beaten them all. But he'd faced them singly, and their totality of strength was beyond any single person's reach. And they'd beaten him back and wounded him over and over again until he was barely hanging together and he almost smiled when the bullet from some unknown hand travelled through their wall of attack and into him. He'd known all along he couldn't live without his captain like Silvers had – in reminiscence and drink – he'd known that through no conscious act of his own, he'd die soon after. He didn't envy the others the pain they would face, protected now by their allies. He experienced something he'd felt whispers of before, and knew it to be death.

Except that now, here he is, and he is experiencing the pain, the loss, the unbearable ache of grief. Weakly, he splays his hand across his chest, over his heart. He feels no hole. He is alive, and torn apart. He is barely strong enough to stand, and his muscles have the feel of a slight atrophy that comes with long disuse. He wonders how long he's been dead-but-not-dead.

The intensity of the grief is numbing, and even though he still can't breathe properly and it has nothing to do with actual air, he shuts down emotionally. He has the unhappy feeling this blessed detachment will be temporary, but his first priority is to find out what the fuck is going on.

Zoro realises he's been lying in the remains of his prison for several minutes, yet no alarm has been raised, and none of what he assumes to be his warders have appeared. He notices the room has no windows and is dimly illuminated, the only source of light coming from the three other cylinders of liquid in the room. The fluid seems to be phosphorous; he himself glows. The other containers hold bodies, clothed in only a loincloth with elastic around the waist, as he was – is. Unsteadily, Zoro lifts himself to his feet, and has to pause to catch his breath. Unfit. He's never been this unfit. His muscles feel weak and underused, like he hasn't exercised in a fortnight – unthinkable.

Finding wobbly footing, Zoro approaches the other prisoners in their pale tombs and immediately notices they all have one thing in common – death. The first cylinder holds a young man with a five centimetre hole perfectly centred in his chest, and Zoro can see all the way through to the other side. The second prisoner has a tedious, clerky look about him and has had his throat cut so deeply that the head lolls back in a grotesque manner, even supported by the viscosity of the liquid. The third, somehow vaguely familiar, is an old man, emaciated and thin, his skin outlining his bones and his body shrunken such that his head seems too large. He's covered with old scars, and has rotated enough in the fluid for Zoro to see five large splays of scar tissue on his back. There are plaques beneath each cylinder. The first two mean nothing to him, but the third:

Rob Lucci, Ex-Government Agent

Pre-Expansion, Lucci had a promising career in the cause of Justice, rising rapidly through the ranks to become the head of the powerful CP9 task force, due in part to the power of the Neko Neko Leopard Devil Fruit. Despite this promising start, and a later promotion to CP-0, Lucci was doomed to suffer defeat at the hands of the second 'Pirate King' not once, but twice. Although he attempted to flee his worthy punishment, Lucci was caught and kept in captivity until his eventual death. The artifact is kindly on loan from the WGAAR.

Zoro has no idea who the WGAAR are, but he remembers Lucci. Remembers the fight – the first time they declared war on the government, the first time he used Asura, the first time Luffy used Gear. He remembers how close they came to losing, and Luffy to dying (again, and again, and again) and he remembers the cat-like grace, the strength and the ruthlessness. What he does not remember is this broken and starved old man in front of him. The plaque talks of Lucci as if he were ancient history. Lucci looks ancient history.

And then it hits him – this is a museum. The four cylinders and their contents are exhibits – actual bodies representing a much better souvenir than death masks. His body had been one of the exhibits, because he had been dead, preserved for display. Then the question begs: how had they not known he was alive? He has no doubt that they think he's dead, because there are no guards outside the room, and still no one has come to investigate the noise. And he was dead – the bullet had taken out his heart, and it had stopped beating because he had heard it restart. Somehow he had healed – but how and why? – and now he was alive, and raw, and itching for more blood despite spilling gallons merely hours ago.

Except it probably wasn't hours. Luffy's death didn't occur today. Zoro has no idea how long he's been out, but it hasnt been merely a matter of weeks or even months. He'll find out though, get a handle on the situation, find his nakama. If Zoro is going to be denied his martyrdom, he'll take revenge instead. Their enemies are going to fucking pay.

Zoro grabs one of the shards of glass from his cylinder, holding it carefully. On closer inspection, it might not be glass at all, but something much sturdier. He's lucky it broke on impact. The only door leading out of the room is locked or jammed (there is no keyhole), but the flimsy indoor hinges give way to persistent attacks, and the door collapses inwards with a bang. The sound echoes through the building, and Zoro walks out onto an empty walkway. He is on one level amongst many, the walkways circling a cavernous hall with an empty lobby below. The ceiling is high and vaulted.

Zoro takes care to hack the hinges from the outside, and smear the glowing footprints left by his bare feet, so it hopefully won't occur to whoever discovers this that the body walked out of its own volition. There is a noticeboard outside the exhibition room, which advertises an exhibit featuring him, Lucci, and the two others (criminals as well, though not pirates). Zoro fights back a sick feeling.

Staggering slightly, and winded from his exertions, Zoro makes his way in what he hopes is a downward direction. All the windows are shuttered tightly, and it's impossible to tell what time of day it is, though it's obviously not within opening hours. Zoro leans heavily against a door to catch his breath, and is startled when it swings inward. He's stumbled into a bathroom. There's a tiny unshuttered porthole in the far wall of the small room, and it reveals a sky speckled with stars, and no moon. It's night-time.

On his way back out, Zoro catches sight of himself in the mirror. And the face that stares out at him is not the one he's seen on bounty posters. It's not just that his skin is pale and sickly and still glowing slightly. It's not just his softening muscles, and his visible ribs. It's not just the spray of scar tissue over his heart, or the ridged line across his chest that used to be a mark of his first failure. It's the face he remembers seeing in the mirror before he met Luffy. It's rage and frustration and tiredness, and suddenly he remembers the power that came with that part of himself. When the only thing that mattered was getting stronger, fulfilling a vow, wreaking vengeance upon a world that stole so unfairly the life of one so full of promise – Kuina, then.

"Roronoa Zoro."

He tests his name, to see if it still fits this weird image of him. His voice grates from disuse and his violent coughing, but this is not why the words sound strange. They sound strange because he wants to follow them with 'pirate hunter.' Despite refusing to lay claim to that title, it had been repeated next to his name so many times that during his early career it had essentially become him, without him actually realising it. And then Luffy had appeared, and Zoro had turned from pirate hunter into pirate, from lone wolf into nakama, and finally, gloriously, into the World's Greatest Swordsman and first mate to the Pirate King.

And now Luffy is gone, but Zoro remains. He should have died with his King, tried to, to save himself from the grief he was certain would destroy him. Yet here is, despite his best efforts. No longer the Zoro of cheerful grins and nakamaship, but alone and scarred, looking at a face that lived for nothing but the fire of the fight and the sweetness of death dealt.

And this time, revenge.

"Welcome back, hunter."

Out of the bathroom – after having rinsed off the worst of the glowing fluid – and down the stairs, Zoro has a new sense of purpose. His first point of order is to get some clothes, because while Zoro has never been body-conscious he feels the loincloth will probably draw unwelcome attention.

He's trying to find some sense of direction among the corridors when he hears the soft shuffling of cloth shifting. Zoro freezes, and tries to identify the source of the sound. It's somewhere ahead of him, so he creeps forward slowly until he reaches the end of the hallway. Cautiously peaking around the corner, he sees light spilling from a small lamp on a desk in front of him. There's a guard lounging in the chair, feet indolently up on the desk, reading something on the small device in his hand.

Unfortunately, Zoro must have made a noise, because something causes the guard to look up. There's no time for negotiation – in between one breath and the next, Zoro is next to the guard, and then the hapless man is on the floor. Blood spills sluggishly from the wound in his neck, where Zoro has embedded the glass shard he kept from his broken prison. The man is definitely dead.

Ten minutes later, Zoro's wearing the guard's non-descript blue shirt and black pants. His hair is now brown, courtesy of the spilled blood all over the floor – the red mixes with his natural green to form a completely innocuous brown. He has no swords – the only weapon he has is a non-lethal stun gun the guard had on his belt. He does not, at least to the casual observer, look much like the pirate (hunter) Roronoa Zoro.

In the main foyer, Zoro finds a cloakroom which, happily, contains a cloak. It is black and hooded and probably belonged to the dead guard but who really cares. Using the guard's keys to unlock the front double doors, Zoro's out into the night.

The museum's in a deserted part of town, so Zoro weaves his way through streets as surreptitiously as he can until he finds signs of life. There's some sort of dockyard, spilling golden light into the otherwise quiet and dark streets. Zoro insinuates himself behind some nearby crates and takes stock of the situation.

The large vehicle centre stage is definitely shaped like a sailing ship, but there's no water in sight. There are several masts, but where sails should be there's just some sort of sail-shaped empty metal frame. Zoro can see a large engine clinging like a barnacle to the hull (he assumes there's a matching one on the other side) that is vaguely reminiscent of Sunny's cola-powered engines. Whatever the ship is, it's clearly going somewhere, and that somewhere is somewhere else, which is all Zoro needs right now.

Soft fingers of red and orange light are beginning to highlight the edges of the buildings. Dawn is coming, and it's probably not a good idea for Zoro to be in the vicinity when sunlight exposes his bloody jailbreak. There is a buzzing hive of people loading cargo onto the ship, clearly in preparation for an early morning departure.

This is Zoro's chance – when no one's really looking, he saunters out, grabs a random box, and heads up the ramp like he knows where he's going. He ends up in the cavernous hold of the weird ship, full of crates and boxes of all sizes. He puts the box down with its fellows, and looks around for a place to hide. This is not Zoro's ordinary modus operandi. Zoro fights his problems, and then they go away – he and Luffy have this in common.

Had. Had that in common. Luffy is gone and Zoro is abandoned and he has no idea where he is or where anyone else is, so Zoro is going to find someplace to hunker down and stowaway until things resolve themselves into something more sensical.

In the hold there are several adjoining smaller storage rooms whose doors are, much to Zoro's frustration, mostly locked. Except – ah – this one isn't. Zoro quickly slips inside the cabin, which is probably more accurately described as a cabinet, and shuts the door behind him, as softly as he can.

The thick wood muffles the bustle going on outside, and Zoro's breath stutters with adrenaline in the sudden silence. He drags a large-ish box over to block the door – just in case – and sinks with some relief onto the floor in one corner of the room to await the departure of the ship.

There's a small porthole set into the outer wall, and from his corner Zoro watches the light gradually get brighter as the sun rises. A whistle pierces through the entire ship, and the walls and floor rumble and vibrate as the engines are fired up. Through his small window, Zoro sees the roofs of the buildings drop away as the ship, literally, lifts off –

– and Zoro's like, okay, flying ship, sure, he's a man of the world, he's been to Skypeia.

But the golden light of the dawn sky smudges into a deep black speckled with stars as the ship keeps rising and Zoro, gradually, realises something impossible.

The ship is heading into space.

He's a stowaway on a space ship.

In space.

Zoro's mind attempts to make sense of this piece of information. Sure, he's familiar with the concept of space travel – Usopp had a penchant for stories set on different planets, usually involving some sort of ravenous alien life-form – but the Grand Line had seemed weird enough to satisfy anyone's craving for other worlds. And in any case, even top-secret government technology was nowhere near advanced enough for space travel.

It's starting to become less about where the fuck he is, and more about when the fuck he is.

For the past few hours, Zoro had been very deliberately Not Thinking About It. But now, in this dark and confined space where the only sound is that of Zoro's own traitorous breaths, he is forced into stillness for the first time since he woke up.

Zoro's heartbeat speeds up.

Zoro had seen a cargo ship being loaded by a bunch of uninspiring dock workers. Nothing special, nothing monumental. Like this happened all the time. Like space travel happens all the time. It doesn't make sense. All this time couldn't have passed while Zoro lay dead. Luffy had been taken from them yesterday, Zoro had seen it, remembers it, clear as a clean blade-

Stars blur in the porthole, as the ship accelerates to impossible speeds.

Zoro curls in on himself. His breathing is too fast, ragged gasps dragging out of his ribcage. What little strength he's been running on is giving out. And it's unsurprising, if he's been dead for – what? Five years? Ten? His power is not a scratch on what he remembers it, his movements sluggish, his responses slow. He knows he needs to train.

Get stronger. Wreak revenge.

Zoro huddles into himself tighter. His tenuous control is slipping. He is incapable, and as weak and useless in actuality as he felt he was that fateful day. His nakama are missing, Luffy is gone, and Zoro is lost – in space and time.

Grief takes hold of his every spare thought and he's crippled by it – prone on the floor, paralysed with rage and fear. He partly wants to scream and cry and weep just to release the tension that's been building, horrible and intense and the strongest desire for blood he's ever experienced. He's hurting but furious.

How could they take Luffy from us?!

Zoro has no plan. Right now all he knows is the intangible need for destruction. And really, he doesn't care how long it's been. He doesn't care if the crew had wreaked a revenge so horrible his suicidal attack had paled in comparison. He will hunt down anyone remaining – if they were at the execution, if they knew about it, if they obeyed the orders given by the commanders, and the commanders themselves – every single marine would pay. And those that supported the marines, the Shichibukai, the world-government-allied islands, everyone. He wouldn't draw his punishment out, he wasn't greedy. He would live merely on the fear in their eyes as they saw who had come for them, and they knew their death. And if they were no longer alive, he'd carry the sword through to their children, their grand-children, their great-grand-children. However long it took, whatever he had to do, he would be sated.

That Luffy would not approve does occur to him. Luffy had always been more into personalised justice than wholescale slaughter. But Luffy had violated the right to dictate Zoro's morality the moment he'd let himself be killed (and he had let himself be killed). Whatever sway Luffy held over Zoro had disappeared the moment those swords had come down, and Zoro had breathed blood and anger until the bullet severed his heartstrings. He would do this as a favour to himself back then, and come what may.

The Pirate King died, and Zoro owes him nothing.

But this world is still alien. He needs information – who to look for, how to fight against what weapons. He must make some sort of plan, find out what he's up against-

Reason is rapidly drowned out beneath another wave of grief. His self-control is only there to stop himself from self-harm and does nothing to quell his mental agony. He bites his tongue, tastes blood and sees twin blades dripping red. They become his own, and he swears he feels the steel at his throat, damning him for his weakness.

Reliving the memories behind flickering eyelids, Zoro makes no noise. Rigid and hunched, lit by starlight, he attempts to control his own demons – to bend them to his will and turn their power to help him instead of hinder.

Several hours later, Zoro is flat on his back on the floor, sweat-covered and eyes fever-bright. But his heartbeat has slowed to regular, even levels. He is winning, for now.

The space-ship lands an indeterminate amount of time later, and Zoro manages to get himself off the ship and out of the docks – land-locked and sheltered, no sea – without anyone stopping him or even really noticing his presence.

By the looks of the light, it's still relatively early in the morning. Either Zoro has travelled a very, very long way, or he spent more than a day as a stowaway. At this point either possibility is plausible.

Zoro also has no idea where he is, but to be honest, this is not an unusual state of affairs for him. In search of information, or just some sort of clue as to what the hell has happened, Zoro sets off down a street at random.

The destination of the cargo ship on which he'd stowed away is a city with a clear import/export focus. Zoro walks past warehouse after warehouse for several blocks beyond the docks, where a mix of human and obviously robotic peoples are unloading or loading boxes or furniture or strange artifacts. Zoro's met pacifistas before, so he takes the robots in his stride. If he pretends hard enough, this is just another strange island on the Grand Line.

Eventually the scenery starts to change to offices, and then to shops. Zoro picks streets that seem to have the most people, which might be a bad idea – are they not looking for him? – but it also helps him blend in, and, eventually, leads to what appears to be the main square of the city.

There's an incredibly odd looking fountain in the centre of the square. It's a cube, with water cascading down all four exposed sides, but images are being projected onto the water as it falls. They flicker past incredibly quickly – a man smiling, a dog begging, a plate of food, a woman tossing her hair – and Zoro can't actually work out what their purpose is.

A few people mill around the fountain, waiting to meet up with someone or talking on den den mushis. To his left, Zoro sees an enormous shopping complex which he wants nothing to do with, and which looks to be still closed anyway. Ahead of him is a building that is almost certainly the city's administrative offices, because apparently even the architects of the future can't disguise bureaucracy, and to his right is a sleek grey building with neon-etched writing sprawled diagonally across half its frontispiece.

The writing reads 'Library'. Zoro walks in.

It doesn't look like any library he's ever been to – no books, no atmosphere of hushed reverence, just several rows of some sort of viewing machine with a few people seated behind them, typing or reading on the screen. Zoro freezes for a moment in the relative quiet of the building, but no one looks up or accuses him of stealing himself, so he relaxes slightly and heads for a terminal mostly hidden from the front door, ignoring the automaton behind the front desk that twitches to watch him.

Finally, some information. He sits down in front of the unfamiliar interface and stares at it for a couple of seconds. There's a welcome message, and some advertisements for services the library offers, and he's got no idea what to do.

A flurry of activity occurs in his peripheral vision, and he turns to see a small, sticky child of indeterminate gender vault itself up onto the seat next to his. The child stabs at the screen, which morphs into a collection of letters, from which the kid rapidly enters in their choice. Reams of text flash up, which the kid expertly shuffles around until they find what they're looking for, then hops down off the chair and disappears somewhere into the building.

Zoro turns back to his own screen, and taps the same first button the kid did.

'Search'.

Okay.

Right.

Rows of letters pop up. Clumsily, Zoro types what he wants to know about.

M – O – N –

His fingers are almost too large for the on-screen keys, and the layout is non-alphabetical and unintuitive.

– F –F – Y

Press OK to continue.

The screen changes abruptly, and there he sees 'Monkey D. Luffy' in large letters and his captain's bounty poster and reams of text. The library takes a whimsical approach, and has the information laid out as if in a book. Zoro presses the edge of the screen where an arrow is shown, and pages flip in 2D in front of him.

He pages through the information. He knows all this; Luffy's childhood, his known associates, he was there for all the adventures. He gets to the end, the last page.

Death:

Monkey D. Luffy was executed using the twin blades of justice. Despite heavy security, Luffy's crew managed to infiltrate the facility in what is assumed to have been an attempt to prevent his execution. This was to no avail – they arrived perhaps seconds too late. Once the furore of this interruption died down, the Pirate King's body was declared medically dead by the Chief Medical Officer of the Marines and disposed of in an undisclosed manner.

For more information, see:

Execution – Traditional Style

Pirate King – Myth

Death Day Massacre

Zoro growls softly, causing the person seated a few spaces over to look up curiously. Dammit. There is nothing here he doesn't know, that he hadn't seen with his own eyes. That he doesn't remember so vividly it makes his vision grow grey around the edges with recall-

He shakes his head, breathes. He returns to the search box and painstakingly types in 'Straw Hat Pirates', bringing up another wall of text. This entry is briefer than the previous, and is headed by links next to each of the crew's names. At the end, Zoro finds what he's looking for:

The subsequent confusion resulting from the deaths of both Monkey D. Luffy and Roronoa Zoro enabled the rest of the Straw Hat Pirates to escape. In the following years there was much speculation amongst conspiracy theorists as to the degree of involvement the notoriously anarchical crew had in the subsequent massive internal investigation conducted by the World Government and the purging of several prominent Marines. However, there is little to no information of the activities of the Straw Hat crew after they escaped, and the pirate crew appeared to have been disbanded. Isolated sightings of individual crew members would occasionally be reported, but they were never confirmed. It is almost certain that the second Pirate King's crew died in hiding.

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The date on the page blurs before Zoro's eyes, as he stares at the screen uncomprehendingly. His breath stutters out once, and then his lungs stop working.

It's been almost a century.

The crew – his nakama. Not just Luffy, but everybody.

Out with a whimper, whispers his mind, with a by now overwhelmingly familiar edge of hysteria. The grief he'd barely managed to suppress in the dark of cargo ship's hold breaks through his flimsy defences, and Zoro barely makes it out of the library and into a narrow alleyway beside it before he collapses against the wall, heart beating rabbit-fast.

The crew that he should have protected, were dead. The selfishness of his actions, before acknowledged only in the periphery, hits him fully. Every single person he had known, had cherished, had loved, were long since decayed into nothing, an unmemorable death undeserving because he wasn't strong enough to hold it together to hold them together.

Unaware of the keening noise he's making, unaware of curling in on himself with his hand clutched to the scar above his heart, Zoro adds this to his list of sins. He lets the guilt overtake him, and drown him, because feeling as if he's being shot all over again, ripped in two because his family is gone and never coming back – it's not going halfway to making up for the crime of what he's done. And more than that – because Luffy had, after all, left them the same way – Zoro's selfishness in trying to get out of the grief he'd've felt if he'd thought of anyone else but himself. If he'd thought at all.

And this time, Zoro doesn't fight it. He releases everything he'd been holding back, surrenders his self-control, and accepts the punishment from the only person still around to hand it out. Grief, fear, anger, pain, bloodlust, rage, despair. He gorges himself on self-pity, and purges it entirely, he keeps only what gives him strength. Because now not only does he have his captain to avenge, but every single one of his nakama. Reaching deeper in himself to the darkness he sometimes drew his strength from and that constantly calls to him, he feels something in himself slow

and

snap.

Regroup, Roronoa. For real now, he swears, this will be who he is – a manifestation of hell and revenge for the lives of his nakama. He takes the grief he tried to dodge through suicide by marine as due penance, for not standing strong for his nakama, for not holding up Luffy's legacy in his greying years like Rayleigh did for his captain. One last apology: Luffy, Nami, Usopp, Sanji, Chopper, Robin, Franky, Brook-

Brook.

Brook. Who ate the Yomi Yomi devil fruit. Who was (is?) immortal. Who would still be alive if you buried him six feet under. Who was strong enough to have held together throughout the loss and death of his first crew, who would be strong enough to hold himself together through the death of the second. He should be still alive.

Zoro uncurls himself, and finally breathes again. Assuming Brook is alive, and that Zoro can find him, is a long shot, but Zoro's died and been resurrected, and it's as good a place as any to start. He needs an ally, someone who knows this world. And if this time his revenge is to be complete – which it will, he knows this as he once knew he'd be the world's greatest swordsman, as Luffy would be Pirate King – he's going to need some help. This time, he'll do it properly.

Now: if you were a 9 foot tall talking skeleton with a giant afro, where would you hide?

Despite making a resolution about What To Do Next for what feels like the millionth time, Zoro is really not coping well. He wanders the streets in a fugue, this time vaguely picking directions that seem to hold the least people.

The sun makes its passage across the sky. Zoro wanders, and wonders. Where is Brook? Where is Zoro?

At some point during his aimless plodding, he realises that he probably should have gone back into the library and gotten some information about where he is and what's happened to other people since he's been dead.

Why didn't I think of that?

Too late now.

His thoughts are slow, sluggish. He hasn't slept in too long. His tomb in the museum seems like an age away, and apparently the last time he went to sleep could be counted in centuries. Zoro is empty of energy, drained of hope, run out of fumes and eeking madness.

Which is why Zoro is halfway down the block when something his tired brain had noticed makes its way through the haze and gets his attention. He backtracks, until he's standing in front of some sort of tattoo parlour.

The shop's window is crowded with posters, presumably showcasing the wares for sale. Several people are shown with elaborate tattoos – face, chest, arm – and a wide variety of piercings. Others have more esoteric enhancements, like the man with synthetic fibrous lights instead of hair, or the woman with too many fingers. What has arrested Zoro's attention, however, is the picture of the smiling man who is spreading his hands in front of himself, except instead of normal hands, fleshless bone extends out of his shirt cuffs.

Zoro tries the door of the shop, but finds it locked. He backs up and squints at the opening hours, then at the shop's name, then at the sky. Oh. The sun is setting. Close of business.

Since this is literally the only thing Zoro has to go on right now, he can't leave. He knows he won't find his way back. He goes as far as the end of the block, and finds a dead-end alley that all the nearby shops and businesses seem to use for garbage can storage. Zoro finds his way to the back wall, shuffles a few cans around so he's not immediately visible to passers-by, and hunkers down. Crouching behind the garbage cans like a rat, Zoro waits until the sun sets completely, but no one disturbs him.

Deciding he's approximately safe for now, Zoro eases himself onto his side, and stills his body. Forces his heart to beat slower, his breaths to even out. It's not comfortable, or warm, and it smells a bit, but Zoro's slept on battlefields – he doesn't care.

His brains runs in circles for a while, but his exhaustion is so bad that he can't hold onto any thought for more than a few seconds. The last coherent thought he has is that the last time he closed his eyes, he was dead.

Zoro sleeps.

He starts awake for no discernible reason. The sun in back out, and it's at least mid-morning.

Zoro unfolds himself rather stiffly, his muscles deeply unhappy about spending fifteen hours on cold stone. Zoro stretches, rolls his neck and his shoulders, and fruitlessly rubs the skin on the left side of his body, which has gone corpse-cold and half-numb.

Once he has most of his joints back in action, he finds his way back to the tattoo parlour, where the door now opens when he pushes on it.

"Yeah, hang on!" a voice yells from a backroom in response to the jingle of the doorbell.

Zoro waits, standing in the middle of the shop, clenching and unclenching his fists.

"Alright, what can I do for you?" A slim, dark-haired woman steps out to stand behind the counter. Every single inch of her exposed skin is tattooed, and the tips of her two pigtails glow, one pink and one blue. She has a neutral, bored expression on her face, which changes to one of wary suspicion when she sees Zoro. Zoro automatically notices that both her hands disappear beneath the counter, and stay there.

Well, it's not really surprising, is it? By now Zoro's cloak is distinctly ragged and dusty. He's wearing another man's clothes which don't fit all that well, his hair has an unpleasant brittle look to it, and he might smell a bit from his night among the garbage cans. Zoro's not quite sure what he looks like, but it sure as shit isn't like a respectable citizen.

Zoro opens his mouth, coughs, and tries again. "I saw, in your window, the man with the, uh," Zoro spreads his hands in front on him, mimicking the pose of the half-skeleton man in the poster.

"Yeah, we only have the equipment for minor stuff. We don't do bone-jobs. That's more for aesthetic, you know?" the woman says, prepared to be civil but still guarded.

Zoro really doesn't know. "Who does do," Zoro hesitates around the bizarre word, "bone-jobs?" He reasons that if there are people who look like that, then maybe Brook is among them. It's all he's got.

The woman sucks air through her teeth. "You could try Amplio? Man, if you want something done there'll be someone there who's gonna do it to you. Just so long as you pay 'em." The woman gives Zoro a sceptical look at this, which he ignores, because never, in any of his lives, has Zoro looked like he had money.

"How do I get there?"

The woman shrugs. "Find a spacer going in that direction. Ought to be a couple, always tourists and crap wanting to go."

A spacer. Amplio is not on another street, it's on another goddamn planet.

"Where can I find a spacer?"

The woman looks at him disbelievingly. She steps away from the counter and folds her arms, obviously having decided that Zoro is a weirdo, but not a dangerous weirdo.

"Uh, the docks?" The 'duh' is unspoken but heavily implicit.

Zoro looks blank. The woman sighs and, clearly wanting him out of her shop, points down the street. "It's that way. You might wanna catch a cab, it's pretty far."

Zoro thanks her, and heads off in the direction she had pointed. More or less.

Zoro spends another half-day wandering the city. Eventually, and after asking several nonplussed citizens for directions, he does find his way to the dockyard.

Well, a dockyard. It's definitely not the same place he landed at, when he first came to this city. For one, it's a lot less shiny and a lot less clean, and a great deal smaller. Instead of the bustle and noise of ships constantly being loaded and unloaded, there's a lot of not much happening. Lackadaisical dockhands lean on random pieces of cargo and smoke, glaring more by habit than actual malice at passers-by.

Zoro ignores what could generously be called the main reception office where a harassed looking young woman straightens her stewardess hat and thrusts papers at a seedy merchant captain, and instead wanders into a nearby bar. Disreputable, he fits right in. There are maybe only two or three other patrons, quietly undertaking some post-prandial drinking.

Zoro ignores the dinky little robot barman which wobbles up to him, in need of repair. A customer hails it from the other side of the bar and, bumping into Zoro's leg twice it manages to do a U-turn and veer off, in the wrong direction. One of its hover-motors chooses this moment to fail, and it spends the rest of its shift unable to turn right.

Zoro, deprived of dragging information out of a non-existent barman (his usual method) seeks out the most suspicious character in the joint and sits opposite him.

On a two-seater table, in a dark corner, a hooded and unshaven man nurses a tumbler and glowers at the dark-haired stranger opposite him. Zoro doesn't look much like a friendly drinking partner.

"Whaddya want?" comes the slurred objection.

"I want a spacer to Amplio. Know anybody around here going that way?"

"You oughta ask at the reception office. Nice bit o' stuff they gots there, she'll set you straight, once she pulls the stick out of her arse."

"Don't want that sort of ship."

"Ain't no other kind, mate. All legal 'round here."

"I reckon there are ways around that."

"Bullshit. You don't know what you're talking about, greenhorn like you. Probably never even been on a real spacer. You go be cabin-boy to some pansy-ass marine and you'll enjoy it, fucker," the man jeers.

His beverage spills on the floor as Zoro suddenly lunges forward, hands fisting in the other man's lapels and pulling him forward nose-to-nose, sneering into his face.

The robot barman attempts to approach them, but turns left into the men's room instead. It's signals for assistance are registered only by the nearby automatic toilet-flusher as some enterprising patron of the bar had long ago snapped off its main antennae.

The other patrons don't even look up.

"Listen to me, asshole," Zoro says lowly, threateningly, head singing with adrenaline, finally, finally feeling something other than hurt and numb. "I want on a ship. Not a merchant, and sure as hell not a fucking marine. Now something tells me you know where I can find myself a ship like this and unless you spill the beans this minute I'm going to smash your ugly fucking head into this table until you do."

The man had clearly underestimated the mad look in Zoro's eyes. But he did not frequent this bar without some knowledge of the usual activities, so he had his double-pointed half-metre long obsidian dagger at Zoro's throat as soon as his glass hit the floor. Zoro seems to be taking no notice of this fact.

"Well, fucker?" Zoro demands.

"Go to hell!" The other man presses the knife forward.

Adrenaline and blood are Zoro's favourite drugs. In seconds, the double-pointed knife is in Zoro's hand, and one blade is carving patterns on the other man's cheek.

Reeking of terror, the hooded man stutters out "Clem! Clem at Dock 4B!" Satisfied, Zoro slams the knife into the table, one point down, one point up.

And then he drops the man. On top of the other point.

Zoro walks out in search of further information.

The robot barman, reversing out of the bathroom, begins to ineffectually mop up the blood oozing from the man on the table. Malfunctioning audio equipment interprets dying gurgles as an order, and another whiskey and soda is added to the dead man's tab.

Knowing he needs to find Clem-at-Dock-4B is all well and good but there is one glaring problem: money. Zoro highly doubts that 'Clem' is going to give him passage out of the goodness of his heart. Fortunately, Zoro's a pirate, which is close enough to a thief, and he's also an ex-bounty hunter, which means he can spot possibly lucrative criminals only slightly less accurately than Nami.

Zoro finds a nearby bench (it does not, even for a second, occur to him to flee the scene of the crime) and sits down, stretching his legs out in front of him. He waits.

Several hours later (Zoro is good at waiting), darkness has fallen and the bar has picked up quite a few more customers. Zoro's been mediating, not that it's helping pull together the fraying edges of his heart and mind, but hey, it passes the time.

Two men, probably sailors ('sailors'), swing around the corner, laughing and nudging each other. They head into the bar, passing Zoro's bench along the way, and pinging Zoro's petty criminal radar. He gets up, and follows them inside.

The bar is distinctly more lively. Someone's playing music, almost all the seats in the place are taken, and the body Zoro had left behind has disappeared. The small automatic machine barman has been replaced with another robot, though one that is clearly far more sophisticated in order to deal with the night crowd. A human-sized mass of tarnished chrome and attachments, this new barman serves drinks and takes payment with rapid efficiency.

One of Zoro's targets has already gotten the barman's attention, and is clutching a tankard of beer with the eager expression of one about to have a nice, cool drink after a long, hard day's work.

Zoro walks up to the man, grabs the beer out of his hand, and downs the lot in one go. The alcohol burns down his throat like acid, and when Zoro slams the glass dramatically onto the bar he's actually just trying not to throw up. Alcohol on a very empty stomach is not a fantastic idea.

"What. The FUCK?" the man screams at Zoro.

"I was thirsty," Zoro says, in the same tone of voice he uses when Sanji's being a pissy little shit and Zoro wants to start something. (Very carefully, Zoro pushes that thought away before it makes the churning in his gut worse.)

The man hauls back like he's about to punch Zoro in the face, but the barman appears behind him and grips the man's wrist with a pincer like arm.

"You should take this outside," the robot says in a voice completely without inflection, yet which brooks no argument.

"Yeah," says the man, shaking free. "Yeah, let's do that."

He shoves Zoro roughly backwards towards the door, a challenge on his face. Zoro makes an 'after you' gesture, and follows the man outside into the gravelled courtyard.

No courteous duelling here. No sooner than they are outside does the man repeat his motion from before, drawing back and aiming his fist at Zoro's face.

Zoro ducks, and is about to return a punch of his own when, to his mild surprise, he finds his arms locked behind him. The man's friend had followed them out the bar and is joining in, holding Zoro in place. The other man is not small, and he's got a good grip on Zoro's forearms, twisted behind his back.

The first man grins unpleasantly. Zoro has time to notice that his teeth are black, before he tries his punch again. Zoro jerks his head to the side, and the man's fist connects instead with his friend's face.

Amateurs.

Dazed, the friend staggers back, allowing Zoro to duck out of his grip. Zoro rounds on both men before they can gather their wits, grabs them by the back of their collars, and brings their heads together with a violent, fleshy, impact.

The one who had been punched drops immediately to the ground, unconscious. The other one, the man whose beer Zoro had drunk, and clearly the one with the harder skull, is still upright and staggering in a small circle.

Zoro reaches out, grabs him by the shoulder to steady him, and punches him square in the face with probably more force than is necessary. Zoro feels the crunch of bone beneath his fist – definitely broke the nose – and the second man, too, drops down and doesn't get up again.

Zoro wipes the blood off his hand on one of the men's jackets, and then rapidly goes through their pockets. His hunch had been right – the men were in a good mood because they were, momentarily, flush. Zoro turns out several bright blue chips that sparkle even in the dim light and he knows, immediately, that this is money.

In a vague concession to law-enforcement, Zoro drags the men across the way to a stack of large boxes waiting to be loaded onto a ship. He opens two and dumps the men's bodies in one each. Hopefully by the time they wake up – if they wake up, Zoro's not really in a mood to pull his punches – either Zoro or the men will be too far away to cause trouble.

Because this is dockside, Zoro doesn't have to wander far before he finds a motel. The bored looking desk clerk behind a screened off counter barely looks up as he enters.

"Rooms are two-hundred New Beli a night. No hookers, no Slack, no illegals, and no noise past midnight," she drones, finding whatever is one the screen in front of her far more interesting than Zoro.

Zoro slides one of the blue chips through the gap in the window, and then, as the clerk just stares at him, slides another through. She grabs the two chips, and returns a key.

"Room eight, up the stairs, on the left," she says, and then turns away and dismisses him completely.

Room eight is not great. It has a bed, with what only the most generous would call a blanket (no pillow), and the smallest bathroom that Zoro has seen outside of a ship. Given, however, that Zoro has spent last night on the ground next to literal trash, he's not going to complain.

Tipping his haul of blue crystals onto the bed, Zoro counts out twenty-three in total. If each stands for one hundred of whatever 'New Beli' is, his mugging has netted him a total of twenty-three hundred in cash. He hopes it's enough for Clem-at-Dock-4B.

After a quick shower (there's no hot water, and he avoids getting his hair wet), Zoro sprawls on top of the bed and attempts to sleep. It takes a while.

His dreams are not pleasant.

The next morning, Zoro finds warehouses with the labels Docks 1, 2, 3 and then 4; then he finds Dock 4A, and then 4B. Sitting in 4B is a spaceship a good deal smaller than the cargo ship he'd arrived on – somewhere between the size of the Going Merry and the Thousand Sunny – but with the same basic shape. The metal hull is a bit battered and patched, but otherwise the spacer looks to be in decent shape.

There's no one about but a rather emaciated man, sitting on a box next to a ramp that leads onto the ship. Zoro approaches him.

"Are you Clem?"

"The fuck is wrong with you? Do I look like Clem?" the man says, with uncalled for hostility.

Zoro is saved from having to answer this absurd question by another voice which hails from somewhere on the ship.

"Someone down there? Whozzat?"

A round face appears over the ship's railing, notices Zoro's presence, and waves.

"I'm looking for passage to Amplio," Zoro shouts up at him. The other man nods and begins to disembark.

The thin man gets off his box, mutters something foul under his breath, and walks, bow-legged, off in the direction of the warehouse's office.

"I'm Clem," the round-faced man says, appearing next to Zoro and huffing slightly. Clem is shaped like a small ball on top of a large ball. He is, to put it mildly, rotund. Zoro has the vague sense the man should be wearing a top hat.

"Don't mind Mark, he's a bit… old-fashioned about these things. So, Amplio, huh?" Clem looks at Zoro with sharp, intelligent eyes. Zoro nods.

"Well," Clem draws the word out, "I just want to make it clear that our trade here in the import/export business is completely above board and I have the papers to prove it. Completely legal cargo – and passengers."

"Legal cargo," Zoro echoes.

"One hundred percent legal."

Both Clem and Zoro nod at each other.

"Right," says Clem, rubbing his hands together, "now that we've got that cleared up, I can tell you that I can absolutely take you to Amplio. Fare is one thousand New Beli one way, and I'll need to see your papers."

"What papers?"

"It's like that is it?" Clem squints at Zoro. "You aren't in trouble with the law, are you?"

"No," Zoro says. He's not entirely sure if it's a lie or not, because he did use to have a bounty but while the posters are pretty clear on the whole 'dead or alive' thing, they don't say much about 'dead and alive'.

"Well in that case the fare is two thousand, chips."

"Okay," says Zoro, a little relieved that he doesn't have to find another ship.

"It's a fair price for what you're asking, I won't- What? Okay?"

"Yeah, okay."

"Chips now?"

Zoro shrugs his acceptance, and counts twenty blue crystals into Clem's cupped palms. The man's face gets, if possible, rounder and shinier.

"A scholar and a gentleman, exactly the sort of person I like to do business with!" Clem is all affability.

Clem leads Zoro on board the ship, and then into a small room in the hold area. It contains a few benches and not much else. No windows.

"With no papers you'll have to stay down here for the duration of the trip," Clem explains. "Don't go peaking your head out and causing trouble for me. We're making another stop along the way, so it'll be about two days standard before we get to Amplio. Don't worry, we won't let you starve!"

Zoro is reminded that he actually hasn't had anything to eat since he woke. His last meal, he realises with a start, was Sanji's ratatouille.

"We're just waiting for the go-ahead from the dock-master and then we're off. Make yourself comfortable!"

Zoro barely notices Clem leave and shut the door behind him. The roaring in his ears is back. Zoro slumps down on a bench, staring at nothing. He doesn't notice the ship leave, because the grief is awake again, eating him raw from the inside and leaving him hollow.

It has been barely three days since Zoro was resurrected, and found he'd lost his nakama.

The world may have lived decades, but for Zoro, only three days have passed since Zoro watched his captain die.

Did Rayleigh resent Rogers? Zoro sometimes wonders. Gol D. and Silvers; it's hardly like the Universe was being subtle. And yet the first Pirate King had left his crew without giving them any chance at a farewell. Left behind, how did Rayleigh cope with this dark, sucking void Zoro feels in his chest? Was it not the same for them? Rayleigh wasn't there, didn't see it. By choice or by accident – Zoro's never been too clear on that. But the first mate to the original Pirate King didn't see his captain die. Zoro did.

Perhaps Rayleigh's task was always going to be to foster the next pirate king, carry Gol D. Rogers' legacy through in the form of Luffy, after it was made horrendously clear that Rogers' actual son would not be the heir to One Piece. Zoro wonders if Luffy expected the same service of him. But there is still the gaping question underlying Luffy's actions that led to his death. Rogers was apparently dying before his execution anyway – did Luffy's liberal use of Gear, and his trades with Ivankov and Law finally catch up to him? Did he think Chopper couldn't fix him?

But Luffy had bottomless faith in his crew, and Zoro knows self-sacrifice has never been his captain's style (that's more Sanji's poison). The swordsman also cannot comprehend a world in which the marines could actually overpower his King-captain, to the extent of his death. It just doesn't work that way – in Zoro's mind, Luffy is always fated to survive. Perhaps, Zoro thinks, with a sweeping wave of guilt that leaves him short of breath, it was the failure of his crew – of his strongest, his first mate – that meant things turned out the way they did.

Back around again to guilt. The stars flash by as Zoro lives in the past, and slowly falls apart.