Been, what? Like, 2 weeks? That's not too bad, considering it's me. xDDx So yeah. Left you guys hanging (as per usual) and now I'm fixing it/throwing oil on the flame. I guess you'll just have to read and see, now won't you? *smug face*

"What... the hell?"

He shouldn't have done that. He shouldn't have. Stupid. Stupid move. It was so sloppy. He was too good, too experienced, to do something like that. He'd just completely outed himself, plain and simple, and then the world stopped turning. Standing in the presence of not just one, but three, humans who had all seen better days, Zoro was frozen. Just standing there, in all his rapidly healed glory, holding the cook, a human, by the shoulders. Comical, almost, if it weren't me and him...

He tried to move, but he couldn't. And, he couldn't say anything either. All he could do was wait. Anxiously. For Sanji to react beyond a slack jaw and a blank face. He would hope, yes, but he didn't expect it to be good. Or gentle. Honestly, if the silence dragged out any longer, he didn't even expect any reaction at all. He couldn't decide if it was better that way. Not until it was too late.

"I don't... What?" Sani stuttered, pausing and reaching out to the aged scar that should have been a fresh wound. His fingers shook horribly as they brushed the corner of the diagonal scar on Zoro's shoulder. "Is this some kind of trick? How...?"

Zoro couldn't move away from him, not even if he wanted to. He couldn't access that power inside himself that would wipe the cook's memory and save his own ass. It just wasn't coming to him. Despite the fact that his internal voice was repeating ohshitohshitohshit, Zoro didn't believe he was even thinking anymore. Or breathing. Was he breathing? It might be better if he remembered to do that.

Clammy, trembling fingers traced his scar slowly, disbelieving eyes following all the way down to his hip where the slightly indented stripe marring his skin ended. Words were coming back to Zoro in foggy blips of thought and he was almost sure he'd said something to Sanji, but the cook didn't react, so he mustn't have. Probably better he didn't. He could make it worse.

"You..." Sanji started again, pulling his hand back rather quickly. "How did you do that? Was that- was that staged?" The cook's eyebrows furrowed together over his wide eyes as he spoke.

He might have choked a little. He felt like he choked. "I-I... this is- wh-what it looks like, I-" The demon tripped over his words, looking Sanji straight in the eyes. He could practically see the wheels turning in Sanji's mind. Too much longer and the phenomenon of his rapid recovery would be converted to long-term memory. He wouldn't be able to erase it as easily. Sani would remember everything if he didn't act fast. "I- this happened years ago," Zoro lied, pointing to his chest with one hand and leaving his other hand on the cook's arm.

"Then what was with that-" He paused for a moment, appalled before he even said the words. "With all that blood? Were you just pretending?" Sanji looked sick to his stomach, likely remembering the event in question.

"No!" Zoro answered quickly. "No, that-" How do I explain this?! "I wasn't pretending!"

"Really? Then, what was that?" Sanji asked, taking a wide step back. "Because, I don't understand. Did you just chicken out of your fight? Was that weird guy with the hat in on this little illusion?"

"Of course not! I'm not a coward! I wouldn't do that!" Zoro defended himself, gesturing a bit too violently for his still-sore injury. "I never run away from a fight!"

"Then what? There's no way you got that today! There's blood all over you, but no open wound! What the hell am I supposed to think?" Sanji shouted, sounding just a little eccentric. "The only explanation is you faked it!"

Shit, he's one of the worldly ones... "No, that's not the only explanation! I healed! Is that too hard to believe?" He shouldn't have said that. Before becoming guardian of the island, he'd been told that some humans just couldn't wrap their heads around the idea of demons and that, when faced with the reality of their existence, those who couldn't understand it either had a massive aneurysm in their brain, or they went crazy. For that reason, demons were not allowed to tell humans about the species living right under their noses.

Sanji's face was blank again, devoid of the anger and confusion it had held moments ago. One second. Two seconds. Five seconds. Five minutes. How long? He didn't know. He tried to count, but it didn't work. Why couldn't he do anything? "C... come again?" Sanji questioned quietly.

Against his wishes, Zoro's mouth kept moving. "I said I healed. I... do that. I, uh, heal good."

The cook recoiled away from him, insulted. "How stupid do you think I am?" he asked incredulously. Zoro noticed the human was holding his side and breathing heavily. Bad signs. "That isn't possible, asshole!"

"It is!" He cursed his mouth and whatever on earth had decided his words should come back right then. "You can't, of course, but I can do it. I heal quickly like that all the time."

Taking unsteady steps towards the other humans, Sanji said, "You're crazy! And, if you argue that you aren't again, then you're a fucking liar, too!"

A feeling he likened to a switch being flipped appeared briefly inside him and Zoro found himself standing in front of Sanji, blocking his way. "You can call me crazy all you want, but I am no liar. I'm telling the truth, shit-brow. I don't know why, but I am." He did it again. That talking without meaning to thing. Shit. He should just walk Sanji to the insane asylum himself.

"Then, how? Explain it to me, Marimo, I implore you," Sanji demanded in a firmer voice than he ought to have with his ghostly pale, mystified and scared face. Zoro could hear his heart pounding painfully hard. "If there is any reasonable explanation for this, any at all, then I must be the crazy one. Seeing things or some shit."

Zoro was vaguely aware that he'd gripped the human's arms tightly. "You are not crazy. You're not going crazy and you're not going to have an aneurysm, do you understand me?" He felt the heat behind his eyes that signified resistance. His mind powers weren't working. He hoped to God that they weren't working because Sanji was resisting, not because he couldn't do it.

"Aneu- The fuck?! Of course not, bastard!" Sanji snapped, batting Zoro's hands away with a pathetic strength that didn't match his fiery attitude. "You're insane!"

"Listen to me, Sanji! I'm not crazy, you're not crazy, neither of us are crazy, understand? None of this happened. You never encountered me, you have no idea where your friends took me. Your friends told you my wound wasn't as bad as it looked and when you next see me, it'll be nothing but a scar and that will be completely normal, do you understand?" It didn't feel right. As far as whether it was working or not, it felt just fine, but morally it felt wrong.

The cook had a dazed look on his face, completely zoned out on the magic words Zoro was speaking. "I understand..." he mumbled.

The demon's chest tightened painfully. He hated it. Hated. He didn't think he could do it, even though he already had. He couldn't handle it. He wasn't supposed to do that. Not to Sanji. It wasn't right at all.

Suddenly, a light came back to Sanji's eyes and he shook once all over violently. He looked around shakily for a long few seconds and finally turned his head back to look at Zoro. He seemed to have trouble forming words for a moment before his voice finally came out, quiet and wavering. "What ju-ust happened?" Sanji asked, coughing in the middle. Before Zoro could answer, confusion was flooded with revelation in Sanji's eyes and he gasped. "What the hell was that?!" the cook shouted, his voice going up at the end.

Zoro had thought it was bad before. He'd thought the only thing worse than Sanji's previous reaction would be an aneurysm. But the atmosphere became so very much worse just then. Sanji stumbled back away from him, caught between rage and fear in such a way that Zoro couldn't see which was winning out. "The fuck was that?!" Sanji screamed, clutching his own hair and losing his balance a bit. "Some kind of mind control?! Fucking shit!"

"Calm down! Stop shouting, idiot," Zoro ordered, taking a single step towards Sanji, but stopping when he saw the cook automatically take a few more stumbling steps backwards. It had been a long time since anyone last recalled their memory being bent and even longer since it happened before the bending had even finished. Though he believed at the time that he'd never forget something like that, Zoro couldn't remember how to, or even if he could, make a human calm down. "It's alright- Seriously, I'm not trying to-"

"Shut up! Just shut the hell up!" Sanji snapped, pacing swiftly in a ten-foot line back and forth. He muttered to himself about "unholy" and "fucking mind control" and he held his forehead with his left hand, occupying the other with holding in whatever he thought might be out of place in his ribcage. Turning on his heel to face Zoro, Sanji shouted, "What the fuck are you?"

The first thought to swim its way coherently through Zoro's frantic mind after Sanji asked that was finally, the right question! He didn't know if he would answer it, if he could answer it, but that's what Sanji needed to ask all along. Inquiries about whether Zoro was crazy or faked the injury were all completely off-base, Zoro realized, and that's why he couldn't handle it earlier. He didn't know how to answer all the wrong questions, but "what are you" was different. He knew exactly how to answer that. He just didn't know if Sanji would accept his answer.

"Well?" Sanji goaded impatiently. "I'm waiting!"

Taking a deep breath and preparing himself for the renewed verbal-assault of "you're crazy"s he expected to get, Zoro answered quietly, "A demon. I'm a demon, Sanji."

Oh, God. The words tasted strange coming off his tongue. He was almost certain he'd never said the words out loud, let alone to a human. He was feeling a little shell-shocked about it now that he'd said it. Zoro had never thought to ask anyone of his species, but right then he wondered if demons had time-travel powers so he could go back and un-say his foolish confession.

"-elieve that!" Sanji shouted, sounding to Zoro like he'd just started talking there, but looking like he was out of breath and expecting an answer.

Zoro mentally cursed himself for getting trapped in his own head. "Wh... what? I don't-" He wasn't quite sure how to say he wasn't listening when Sanji probably just yelled at him about being crazy again. "What are you saying?" Zoro tried, hoping the question made even a bit of sense with what Sanji said.

The cook adopted a kind of incredulous look, standing closer to Usopp and Nami than to Zoro. His mouth fell open just a bit and that was Zoro's first clue that he'd said something wrong. Sanji took long strides towards him. That was his second clue. Probably the biggest clue was the cook throwing a powerful kick at his head.

"Whoa!" Zoro couldn't help the shout and the curse that followed as he ducked under Sanji's attack. "What the-"

"This is what I'm saying! You fucking lied to us!" Sanji snapped, flinching slightly as he threw another kick. "It's completely and utterly wrong that I believe that, but it makes shitty sense and that just makes it worse!"

Zoro caught his foot and Sanji doubled over, clutching his middle and coughing up blood. "I didn't lie about anything, cook," he said in a long shot attempt at getting Sani to listen. "Calm down before you hurt yourself! It's good you believe me, but-"

"'But' nothing! It's terrible that I believe you, bastard! Everything you've said has been ludicrous and unbelievable, but I understand all that weird, stupid shit now!" Sanji pushed away from Zoro violently, knocking himself off balance. "That shitty journal and everything... I thought it was strange the way you randomly show up and the way you act, but this... So fucking stupid of me to believe it, goddamn-!" The cook ran his hands through his own hair roughly and let out a stream of curses mixed with a thought process Zoro couldn't understand. All the swordsman caught was that Sanji believed him.

Somehow in Zoro's mind, clouded with a mysterious joy, he found the need to say, "You'll hurt yourself if you keep freaking out like that." His tone was passive and his demeanor moreso, and Sanji's eyes snapped up to look at him.

"Excuse me? I'll hurt myself?" Sanji jeered, slapping a hand to his chest with a smack. "What about you, huh? A demon bastard with hell on his heels! Nothing like this has ever happened to us before, nothing where our opponents called us 'humans!'" Sanji shouted, startling at the end and looking off somewhere with shocked, thoughtful eyes. "They did. That means they were... Oh, God," Sanji mumbled to himself with a nauseated expression.

"I didn't cause this," Zoro told him calmly, trying not to shout. He didn't want to alarm the cook beyond his current state of shock, but it was difficult to remain so level-headed when something that had presented itself to him as a good thing was taking a tail-spin. "You have to believe that. I didn't want you, any of you, to get hurt! I had no idea those demon pirates were gonna be here, I swear."

Sanji half-glared, half-gawked at Zoro. The swordsman couldn't tell what was going through his head, but he had a sinking feeling in his gut that told him it wasn't good. It wasn't supposed to go like that. He couldn't take much more misfortune in one day. "I don't have to believe anything. I've bought into this 'demon' thing, I don't have to believe you're innocent," Sanji said, his voice lowered dangerously. "I don't have to believe a single word you say! Ever since you showed up, strange crap has been happening, unimportant little things, I thought, until they all led up to this! We've been in fights before, loads of them, but none so strange or bloody as this. And that's on you."

His cool was going down the drain. "What part of that is my fault? Who's to say that asshole human wouldn't have picked a fight with you anyway, even if I weren't around?" Zoro asked, attempting to exonerate himself in the cook's eyes. After what Robin said, he wasn't sure he believed that it wasn't his fault that Krieg bastard was on his island, attacking his humans.

"I don't- Wait a second, you were there?!"

Shit... "I didn't... say that," Zoro grunted, avoiding the cook's eyes at all costs.

"You may as well have! How else would you know that Gin challenged me? The only answer is that you were at the school when it happened!" Sanji shouted, striking a low shot at Zoro's legs and tripping him. "Have you been following us?!"

Damn it. Around every turn, he was digging a deeper hole for himself. "No, I don't do that, I-I'm not some crazy stalker!" Though I basically live on your roof... "I just- I heard it! During the fight, I heard-"

"You weren't there either! You fought that feather-cap swordsman and then- fuck, I don't even know what! You hit the ground and Nami and Usopp took you away from the field! The fight hadn't even started, we had barely exchanged words with Krieg and his minions before you were taken away, how could you have heard that?!"

Sanji had him backed into a corner, almost literally, as the cook stood and glared down at him with the face of someone who doesn't trust, let alone believe. "You have been following us around, haven't you? Un-fucking-believable! What the hell is wrong with you?!"

"I wasn't following you guys, I was just passing by-"

"Passing by where? The school? The park? Some random, green-haired asshole roaming around town and coincidentally running into us in several places? I don't fucking think so!" Sanji spat, kicking Zoro hard in the ribs and sending him rolling a few yards away from Usopp and Nami. The cook stalked over to his unconscious friends and put Nami over his shoulder gently and then grabbed Usopp around the waist like a sack of potatoes. "You are nothing but bad news, shitty Marimo. If I see you even come near my friends again, I will kick your ass."

Zoro coughed, feeling something bruise inside him where Sanji's foot had connected. "I didn't do this!" he told Sanji loudly. "I have nothing to do with those pirates! And, if I hadn't followed you, then maybe-" he came up short. If he hadn't followed Sanji's scent, then, what? What would have been different? Because, Mihawk wouldn't have intervened if Zoro hadn't butted in, and Nami and Usopp would have been conscious and able to help. Things would only have been better if he hadn't shown up. The island's voice wasn't technically wrong about the human blood being shed part, but he hadn't saved anyone. He had only put them in more danger.

"Shut the hell up! I thought you were a suspicious bastard before, but this? This is too much. I can't even-" Sanji shook his head, unable to bring forth the words to say what he meant to say. He leveled a piercing glare at Zoro and inclined his head slightly, showing absolute seriousness. "As of this moment, you are no longer friends with Luffy, Nami-san, Usopp and me." With that, Sanji walked off without looking back and Zoro felt sick in every part of his body. Things were not supposed to go like that. Not with Sanji.

oOo

Sanji couldn't recall much right away. When his eyes opened, he was simply himself in his bed, waking up after a shitty night's sleep. But, then he looked at the clock and saw that it was two-seventeen in the afternoon. In the process of looking at the clock, just before he started to get worked up, the pains in his body from his head to his toes, skin to bone, all came back to him. He cringed away from the pain, but it only hurt worse. He tried to sit up and his back promptly screamed. Then, as he lay himself back down carefully, the memories came back.

The fight with Krieg, Gin and Pearl. The violence that preceded the fight. Injuries. Revelations. Blood. Everything came flooding back to him in disheveled order. Not the worst thing to have back first was a hazy recollection of Luffy walking up to him after his own fight ended. Sanji could hardly remember Luffy's action-packed narrative of the outcome of his fight, but that was fine by him; the important part was that he won.

One of the first few things to come back to Sanji was a painful memory of almost tripping over Chopper with Nami slung over his shoulder and Usopp hanging like a ragdoll at his hip. He remembered putting them down, maybe upon Chopper's request, maybe because he couldn't feel his body anymore. The boy with a blue nose had been conveniently carrying a medical bag and Sanji recalled insisting that he help Nami and Usopp while the little doctor kept saying that Sanji needed immediate medical attention. Somehow connected to that snippet was the memory of Luffy walking up to him, only he asked if everyone was okay before launching into his account of his fight with Krieg.

Sanji could remember Chopper wrapping him in bandages and gauze, rattling off in his adorably high voice about things that were supposed to be reprimanding. They just went in one ear and out the other. He was more focused on an emotion that he couldn't name at the time and still couldn't quite place. And the pain. Everywhere. Chopper had listed several of Sanji's major injuries that he'd treated, but the cook couldn't remember all of them. Six broken ribs, fractured hip bone, something or other about bleeding. If Chopper had been reciting the names of Santa's reindeer, it would have been about the same to Sanji.

Among the whirlpool of events spinning around in his head, Sanji saw Zoro. Zoro. What was it that had to do with him? Sanji started to remember that Zoro was injured, but his mind corrected him. Zoro was fine. How was Zoro fine? How could anyone be fine after being practically slashed in half? But, he was okay. Sanji remembered that. Zoro was okay. Zoro was okay? Yeah. Zoro was completely... Sanji's though train came to a screeching halt and he tried his very best to keep away the memories he'd been trying to access that explained why Zoro was okay. He didn't want to know. He took it back. He didn't need to remember it.

But, the words didn't go away. The thoughts and images, they were all there. He could hear it, see it, feel it, hell, he could smell it. Why was he so unfortunate? He shouldn't have remembered. It would have been so much better. It wouldn't disappear completely, not ever, but he wished he wasn't faced with it so soon. He didn't have the necessary willpower and stability of mind and body to handle it. He didn't even have that when he first received the information. His life would look so much brighter if he could just expel that thought. But, it lingered still.

Zoro's a demon.

:O Kidding, I knew that already. So, what does this mean? Will Zoro stay away? What will become of the Mugiwara crew without their Marimo? Why is this sounding more and more like the closing line of a shoujo drama?!