A/N: Apologies that this chapter is so short. I wonder what I was smoking when I wrote this, since it is very slapstick: slapstick comedy and you will want to slap me with a stick by the time you finish it. Hey ho!

Recap: Tashigi began reading a book Robin gave her and managed to recover a named sword from a group of bandits but then ran away from the marines and left with the Straw-Hats; Zoro was confused by Tashigi's behaviour, and wondered if she would ever leave his crew.

Chapter 14 – Say What You Mean

Zoro cast Tashigi a withering look, all thoughts of having misjudged her after her performance against the trio of bandits leaving his head. He had spent most of the day thinking about how well she had handled herself in spite of her injuries and her lack of a weapon – after all, being able to defend herself when least prepared for battle was the truest sign of an honourable and powerful warrior – and Zoro had finally worked out a way of explaining to her that she should not have gotten back onto the Going Merry and set sail with them again, since the navy needed someone with her skills. Expecting to find her polishing her newly acquired sword or reading her well-handled sword handbook again, Zoro was more than a little surprised to discover her sprawled in a deckchair, goggles tangled in her hair, one arm hanging at her side, the other loosely holding a book at her chest, her jaw hanging open and emitting small, soft snores, looking as unladylike and undignified as she possibly could.

Tilting his head a little, Zoro read the gold, embossed writing on the cover of book she held, finding what looked more like a novel than any sort of sword or marine book. In fact, he thought to himself, the name of the author sounded vaguely familiar: a writer of dreary, girly romance novels, if Zoro remembered correctly. Which seemed odd to Zoro, as he had never expected a sword-wielding marine like Tashigi to be interested in reading about such silly, girly things. Screwing up his face in confusion, Zoro slowly sat down into a nearby chair, quietly sliding closer to Tashigi. Checking her face to ensure that she was still asleep, Zoro carefully took hold of the book in one hand and began peeling back Tashigi's fingers with the other.

Gently placing Tashigi's now empty hand back onto her chest, Zoro lifted the book away from her, jerking in alarm as she clawed her fist into the material of the shirt she wore, her face creasing into a scowl.

"Oh yeah?" she grunted. "Well you have pink hair!"

"I do not!" Zoro argued back, self-consciously touching a hand to the top of his head.

Tashigi moaned, readjusting herself in the chair before once more softly snoring. Zoro quietly glanced about himself, feeling a little embarrassed at the realisation that Tashigi had been talking in her sleep, and his arguing with her had been both pointless and stupid. Once he was sure that no-one had witnessed his little mishap, Zoro returned his attention to the book he had just acquired from Tashigi. She was apparently halfway through the second last chapter, assuming the pages had not moved since she had fallen asleep. Since Zoro had no interest in romance, far less any interest in reading about it, he turned to the very last chapter, and began reading from there. After all, he decided, if Tashigi was reading the book, it must have something more to offer than just mushy, girly crap.

Tashigi slowly became aware that what was happening in her mind was no longer a result of anything she was reading, but rather a bizarre dream that had stemmed from Robin's book. Rousing from her slumber, the first thing Tashigi saw was the slightly blurry image of Zoro sat at her side, hunched over the book she had been reading. Certain that she must be mistaken, Tashigi hurriedly picked Usopp's goggles out of her hair and placed them over her eyes, even more alarmed to find that her first impression was true: Zoro was, apparently, reading the book.

"Stupid shit," he grumbled, turning the book over and studying the cover for a moment before lifting the open pages closer to his face to sniff cautiously at them.

"What are you doing, Zoro?" Tashigi asked him quietly.

"Gah!" he yelped, jumping in his seat at her intrusion of his thoughts.

Tashigi watched bemusedly as Zoro's sudden, jerky movement caused the chair to snap shut around his spine, pulling him down to the deck. His feet and hands shot up in the air, the book bouncing across the deck away from him as he tried to struggle his way out of the chair.

"What did you have to do that for?" he growled, his eyes flashing at Tashigi.

Tashigi raised an eyebrow at him, wondering how he expected her to take him seriously was he was sandwiched into a deckchair.

"I didn't do anything," she pointed out.

Zoro began grumbling inaudible complaints under his breath, pushing back with his elbows and slowly prying himself from the chair. Tashigi had been about to offer him some assistance, but since he had decided to be so grumpy, she thought better of it, and contented herself with simply watching him struggle on alone. Besides, she thought with a small smile, it was nice to see the untouchable and graceful warrior struggle with clumsiness for a change.

"What are you doing reading that crap anyway?" Zoro asked as he finally stepped out of the chair, allowing it to clatter to the deck behind him.

"What?" Tashigi echoed, frowning up at him.

"This," he said, snatching up Robin's book. "It's crap. That Colonel Brandon's a shit-head. Why are you reading crap like this?"

Tashigi choked out a giggle-snort, half-expecting Zoro to finish by saying that he was only joking; but the look on his face told her that he was deadly serious.

"Why am I reading crap like that?" she asked. "More importantly Zoro, why are you reading crap like that?"

"What?" Zoro yelped.

Tashigi giggled involuntarily as she saw, for the first time, Zoro begin to blush.

"Ah, no, I wasn't reading it!" he hurriedly argued. "I was just…"

"You were sniffing it," Tashigi added.

To her utter amazement, Zoro's face became redder at her last remark.

"It's stupid!" he said moodily, pouting childishly as he spoke.

Tashigi grinned at his response, unable to contain the delight she felt having Zoro feel silly in her presence as opposed to it being the other way around.

"Robin gave it to me," she offered, deciding that Zoro at least deserved an answer to his questions, since he was apparently suffering such a blow to his pride. "She said I should read it."

"Robin?" Zoro echoed, drawing out her name as though it was a new word he was still learning to pronounce correctly.

"Yes," Tashigi replied. "I fell asleep reading it though. But you've read the whole book?"

"No!"

Zoro waved a hand dismissively, shaking his head as though he no longer cared about the book or their conversation.

"I just read the last chapter," he added quietly. "And a bit more. It's a really stupid book."

"I thought so too," Tashigi agreed.

Zoro pulled a face at her response.

"Why are you still reading it then?" he demanded.

"Because Robin asked me to," Tashigi replied, wording her response carefully so as not to reveal that Robin had actually told her to, and she had been too afraid to argue. "She said I might learn something from Marianne Dashwood."

"Marianne Dashwood?" Zoro scoffed. "She's an idiot! She marries the old man in the end."

"She does?"

Zoro looked a little panicked, but Tashigi ignored his concerns. She did not really care that he had given away the ending of the book, since she had struggled to read it from the beginning, and he had merely spared her the pain of reading it any longer.

"I wonder what I was meant to learn from that?" she mused aloud.

"Maybe Robin thought you were like Marianne, since she fell and sprained her ankle too," Zoro suggested.

Tashigi rose to her feet, watching Zoro's through wide eyes, his face slowly reddening under her glare.

"I thought you said you only read the last chapter…" she began slowly.

"I had to read some other bits to understand the ending!" Zoro hurriedly argued. "There was something in there about a guy called Willoughby, and the ending didn't make any sense until I went back to find out who he was!"

Tashigi slowly nodded her head, folding her arms across her chest, a smirk tugging at her lips.

"I see…" she said sarcastically.

"It was stupid anyway!" Zoro added. "It was just a dumb little story about a stupid, clumsy, ditzy girl who fell in love with some young guy just because he liked the same things that she did, but in the end she married an old man instead!"

Tashigi's smirk vanished, Zoro's gross over-simplification of Robin's book making a lot more sense to her than he had intended it to. Suddenly, after hours upon hours of reading seemingly meaningless romantic prose, Tashigi realised the point Robin had been trying to make: and she was not sure she was comfortable with it at all.

"Stupid!" Zoro said, shrugging his shoulders.

"Or not…" Tashigi muttered, frowning thoughtfully.

Zoro, Tashigi concluded, was oddly insightful. He seemed to have a way of capturing things into words that was not befitting with his generally singular and abrasive personality. His summary of the story was brief but to the point, and it seemed to indicate to Tashigi that Robin had been trying to say that she – Tashigi – was just like Marianne Dashwood: in Zoro's words, "a stupid, clumsy, ditzy girl who fell in love with some young guy just because he liked the same things that she did, but in the end she married an old man instead". Obviously Robin was trying to say that she thought Tashigi had fallen in love with Zoro because of his sword skills, but that she ought to forget Zoro and marry Smoker instead.

"Gah!" Tashigi yelped out loud, her mind expanding further on the ideas of both being in love with Zoro and marrying Smoker.

"What's wrong with you?" Zoro grumbled, squinting at her curiously.

"But she's wrong!" Tashigi wailed. "She's so, so wrong! I'm not Marianne Dashwood!"

Zoro scrunched up his face at her remark.

"Why would you be Marianne Dashwood?" he asked. "Unless… Maybe she meant you are like Marianne Dashwood because Smoker is like Colonel Brandon – he's a strange old man who follows you around a lot and probably wants to marry you."

Tashigi gasped, stumbling a little as she yanked off a boot and threw it at Zoro's head.

"Ow – what the hell?" he yelled, rubbing at his head and pointing at where Tashigi's boot landed on the deck. "What the hell are you doing now, idiot?"

"Don't speak about Captain Smoker like that!" she yelled back, stamping her still booted foot at him.

"I was just speculating!" Zoro argued back. "Maybe Robin meant you are Marianne Dashwood and Smoker is Colonel Brandon! And Willoughby is…"

Zoro rolled his eyes upwards, rubbing at his chin thoughtfully.

"Willoughby must be someone young," he began slowly. "With an interest in swords, and someone you are in love with."

Tashigi went cold as she began to fear that Zoro might make the same connections that she already had between Robin's book and her own life. Before Zoro could reach the conclusion that Robin was accusing Tashigi of being in love with him, Tashigi hurriedly pulled off her other boot, flinging it at Zoro. He turned sharply, catching the boot in the air.

"It's just a stupid book, calm down!" he snapped irritably. "What do I care if you don't understand it?"

"It's a very stupid book!" Tashigi replied, her voice several pitches louder than she had meant to it to be, making her sound rather stupid herself. "I never wanted to read it in the first place!"

"Neither did I!"

"Alright then!"

Zoro arched his eyebrows as though he expected Tashigi to continue, but she only wanted to make him forget about Robin's accursed book – in fact, she thought wryly, she wanted to forget about the book herself.

"When you fell and hurt your ankle, I was the one who carried you to your bed," Zoro said slowly. "Does that make me Willoughby?"

Tashigi paused, no immediate answer coming to her mind. If Zoro was Willoughby, that meant that she had feelings for him, so surely the answer was no?

"I don't know!" she blurted out. "Ask Robin!"

"But if I was Willoughby," Zoro continued, much to Tashigi's own personal agony. "That would mean that you would have to be in love with me… And…"

Zoro's face softened, making him suddenly look like a lost little boy as he stared at Tashigi with large eyes.

"Oh…" he said quietly.

"It wasn't my idea," Tashigi said meekly. "It was Robin who told me to read it!"

Zoro's face slowly began to darken, a sly smirk tugging at one corner of his mouth. Yelping indignantly, Tashigi marched away from him, no longer able to face him in the knowledge that his crewmates thought of her as some silly, dreamer of a girl who fell in love with the most unsuitable men for the most frivolous of reasons. She heard Zoro call after her, but she ignored him, climbing up into the crow's nest and curling up into a ball. It was the only place she had been able to think of that Zoro would not follow her nor would she have to deal with facing Robin and her quiet accusations.

"You don't know what you're talking about, Marimo."

"Shut-up and die."

"Do you want lunch today?"

"I don't need to rely on you cooking shit for me."

"I don't cook shit. I don't eat it, either."

"Just shut-up and wash those dishes."

"I got a pot of boiling water here, maybe I'll just pour it over your head."

"And maybe I'll just castrate you."

Zoro smiled when Sanji failed to answer his last threat immediately, momentarily believing that he had won the argument.

"You keep your hands out of my pants, sword-boy," Sanji said quietly.

"You wish!" Zoro snorted, before taking a drink from his mug.

"Speaking about my pants, what did you do to Tashigi last night?"

Zoro choked, slamming his mug to the table and spraying the contents of his mouth across the kitchen. Sanji curled a lip, checking himself for any traces of Zoro's spit.

"What?" Zoro eventually recovered.

"Tashigi," Sanji began, still looking disgusted and concerned for his clothes. "She didn't go to bed last night, and she hasn't come down to breakfast yet."

Sanji nodded at the one remaining plate on the table, his face twisting at what he saw.

"That was Luffy's, wasn't it?" Zoro asked innocently.

"No, but obviously he ate it!" Sanji groaned. "What did you do to that poor pretty lady, Zoro?"

"Nothing!" Zoro shouted. "And she didn't do anything in my pants, either!"

Sanji's face dropped for a moment before breaking into an evil grin. Zoro began to falter as he repeated his own words inside his head, realising how bad they had actually sounded.

"You said something about her being inside my pants!" Zoro hurriedly pointed out.

Sanji shook his head, plucking a cigarette from behind his ear and bringing it around to lodge between his teeth.

"You did!" Zoro insisted, thumping his fists onto the table, causing his mug to slosh a little and Tashigi's empty breakfast plate to ring out a dull note as it bounced against the table surface.

"No Marimo, you did," Sanji said, speaking each word slowly and deliberately, savouring the agony they caused Zoro.

Zoro mouthed out a series of silent words, watching Sanji strike a match and light up his cigarette, his grin permanently in place and his one visible eye dancing with mirth.

"You said she was in my pants last night!" Zoro eventually managed.

"I never said that," Sanji denied, before drawing on his cigarette. "You were speaking about getting into my pants, I think."

"I don't want what's in your pants, love-rat!" Zoro snarled angrily.

"I guess not if you had Tashigi in your pants last night," Sanji calmly replied.

"The only person in my pants last night was me, damn it!" Zoro yelled, standing abruptly. "And that's the way it's gonna stay! No-one gets into my pants but me! I'm the only one who gets to touch my pants, or what's in them! I was alone last night, and my hands were the only hands inside my pants, and I'm very happy with it that way, okay?"

Zoro felt quite certain that Sanji could not have any possible rebuttal, and felt quite self-satisfied when Sanji remained silent. After a short pause however, Sanji's eyes did move purposefully from Zoro's to something beyond him. Turning his head out of curiosity, Zoro balked as he caught sight of Luffy, Usopp, Nami and Robin standing in the doorway, staring at him with wide, shocked eyes.

"Did we miss something?" Chopper asked as he and Tashigi joined the others at the doorway.

"Not really," Luffy replied with a shrug. "Zoro was just telling Sanji that when he's alone at night he likes to put his hands inside his pants and touch himself because it makes him very happy."

"What?" Zoro squeaked, his eyes flitting between the three women, all of whom were slowly backing out of the doorway. "I never said that! I wasn't talking about touching myself, I was talking about touching Sanji!"

"Wow Zoro, I always thought you liked girls," Luffy commented, tilting his head to one side in thought.

Zoro growled in frustration, slapping a hand against his forehead. This was, of course, was all that marine girl's fault – she had been nothing but trouble for him since she had first appeared before him in Loguetown.

Tashigi watched Zoro thump moodily past her, frowning at his back. She sensed that Sanji had been tormenting him again, but Luffy's words were still hanging thick in the air, and she could find no logical excuse for either Luffy's accusation or Zoro's ensuing remarks about wanting to touch Sanji.

"Oh, Robin!" she said, jerking out of her reverie as Robin started to pass her. "I finished the book."

Tashigi held the book out towards Robin, who reached her hand towards it, but did not accept it immediately.

"Did you learn anything?" she asked, arching her eyebrows expectantly at Tashigi.

"Yes I did, actually," Tashigi said with a nod of her head. "But not from Marianne Dashwood."

"No?" Robin asked, retracting her hand slightly.

"I know what you were trying to say," Tashigi replied, lowering her voice. "You think I'm Marianne, Zoro is Willoughby and Captain Smoker is Colonel Brandon, but you're wrong."

Robin withdrew her hand completely, leaning back from Tashigi a little, eying her over curiously.

"I'm nothing like Marianne Dashwood, and Zoro isn't Willoughby and Smoker certainly isn't Brandon," Tashigi continued, moving the book closer to Robin. "I'm more like Elinor Dashwood."

"Oh?" Robin responded, looking suddenly interested.

"Yes," Tashigi confirmed. "You see, Elinor was sensible, and always did what was expected of her, without ever showing too much emotion. And she fell in love with a man who she thought was perfect for her, but then she found out that it could never be because his heart was already taken up by a promise me made to a girl when he was young."

Robin raised her chin, frowning a little as though she did not quite understand Tashigi's meaning.

"Which is what happened to me," Tashigi said with finality. "I was silly once, and I let myself develop feelings over a stupid, girly idea I had in my head. But I was wrong, and it wasn't meant to be."

Robin took a hold of the book, her eyes still fixed on Tashigi.

"Did you read the whole book?" she asked carefully.

"Yes I did," Tashigi replied. "Zoro told me how it all ended, but I read it anyway."

"Zoro?" Robin asked with a small frown. "Zoro can read?"

Tashigi laughed a little at Robin's genuine surprise, but quickly repressed her giggles.

"Anyway," she said with a sigh. "I read it all."

"Because in the end, Elinor marries the man she fell in love with," Robin pointed out.

"That won't happen to me," Tashigi quietly replied. "My story is a little different. The man in my life values his promise to the girl above all else."

Tashigi released the book, forcing a tight smile.

"Excuse me," she said softly, before turning and walking off, leaving Robin behind her.

As much as she hated to admit it, Robin's book had proved relevant after all; but, as she had tried to explain to Robin, her hopes and feelings had to be pushed aside because her life was not a cheerful little romance novel that would have a happy ending.

Next Chapter:

"But wouldn't that only be a problem if you were in love with Smoker yourself?"

Zoro expected Tashigi to have an instant comeback to his question, something along the lines of her never thinking that way about a superior officer, something about Smoker being a moody smart-ass that she could never possibly love – but instead she remained infuriatingly silent.

"Are you in love with Smoker?" Zoro eventually asked, his patience wearing thin.

"No," she answered, her tone flat and lacking in conviction. "But I was once."

Zoro and Tashigi have a little heart-to-heart, Smoker continues his search for Tashigi and the Straw-Hat Pirates, and the Going Merry lands on an island neither Zoro or Tashigi want to set foot on. Chapter 15 – Got Your Back.