Of all the things in the world of which Lucy was ignorant, sacrifice was not among them.
Sacrifice was spliced into her from an early age, with her grandfather invoking things like conviction and adulthood and sometimes our dreams pull us away from each other, Lucy.
She saw it in Ace, over and over again. Ace who was so scared to let her in, who faced ostracization and the anger of strangers with his back to her, fists raised, who gave up a dream to rule for the love of a father, a family on the seas.
She found sacrifice in herself—in her training, in her devotion to her dream. She knew at seven that she would sacrifice everything, anything she had in pursuit of a goal, with her life on the line and her heart pumping closer and closer to its inevitable end.
It was in Usopp, Sanji, Chopper, Franky—all of her crewmembers, really—who gave up safer lives and people they loved to sail with her, a reflection of her own determination as they pursued their dreams at her side. In Nami, who sacrificed everything for a village she loved. In Robin, who nearly lost herself to sacrifice, who nearly became a sacrifice herself. In Merry, who carried them as far as she could before breaking under the weight of her love for them.
In herself again, when she was willing to put her dream and her life and whatever heartbeats she had left on the altar of her whole identity in exchange for Ace's life.
Ace died for her anyway, giving everything he had and more.
So no, Lucy is not unfamiliar with sacrifice.
Vaguely, Lucy registers that she doesn't know Zou's forests well at all, that the party has long-since faded into the foliage behind her and that her crew was, in all likelihood, looking for her at this very moment.
Guilt pricks at her. She remembers Zoro's offer, I didn't lose.
She hangs a left at the next fork in the warney trail, and picks up the pace, nausea curling in her gut.
Distance, pain, a dream, a life—Lucy knows sacrifice like the negative image of her history, an imprint of everything bright even as she holds that strange burden in her palms and pushes further and further into it every time she trains or fights and with every bond she forges, deepens, cherishes.
There was only one thing that she claimed as hers that she wasn't willing to give up, ever, and that was her crew. Her crew, who she promised would never be alone, who she loved so much they helped her reclaim her sanity even in the worst moment of her life, and who she promised to aid in their own quests if they would aid in hers. She was uncompromisingly selfish about them, always.
So how—how—could she have missed this?
Zoro tried to die for her. Made a deal for her. Would have died, if not for the strength he carried in him like the air he breathed. And he did it when she was weak, unknowing, useless.
And Sanji tried to do the same.
What kind of captain allows such a thing?
An ignorant one. A weak one. One who definitely wasn't the Pirate King.
She remembers Zoro, bloody and limp, like something exploded inside him, the squelch of his bandages as Chopper removed them from glistening tissue, tacky with blood and yellow with iodine.
Lucy snarls aloud and lands a punch in the center of a gnarled trunk. The bark shatters beneath her fist, wood splintering, and it does nothing to abate the howling fury, the red at the edges of her vision, the fuzzy white noise in her head.
She didn't even look for the threat, back then. She can't remember if someone told her it had passed. Lucy assumed Zoro had beaten it, whatever it was.
And yet.
And yet.
Zoro only lied to her once. Lucy always knew it was a lie, knew that when he said No, no clue, he was keeping something important from her. Lucy knew and she didn't push him, trusted him and the others, even when Sanji got all twitchy and Robin went quiet while the others speculated on what could have possibly laid their swordsman out for weeks.
Apparently, the answer was Lucy. Lucy and her own weakness, her own pain and fatigue.
It would kill me, if I took it all on myself.
Lucy wants to scream, so she does. A few birds squawk in irritation and escape beyond the forest canopy, leaving Lucy to sink slightly into the rough, hoary skin of Zou. She shakes a bit, aching in ways she doesn't understand, and prowls deeper into the forest.
Zoro had no right to that pain. It was hers, she earned it, he didn't have the right to take the burden from her and die in the process.
And she knows he didn't die, but it's only because Zoro is strong, stronger than anyone she knows. He was supposed to die for her, and Lucy almost doesn't swallow the marrow-deep urge to check on him with her Haki in time to save herself from opening up to the aching infinity of Zou's presence.
Now is not the time to pass out. She has somewhere to be. Zou rumbles deep and eternal beneath her, steady and blinding like a dying sun, and if she tries to use her Haki now she's going to melt her brain.
Lucy takes a deep breath—or tries at least. The draw is shaky and the exhale is too harsh, but she does it a few more times until she can trust herself not to destroy anything else.
Zou's forests smell vegetal and damp. Almost cloying. It makes Lucy want to scratch at the itch beneath her skin.
The urge to go protect her crew is strong, nearly overwhelming, but there is nothing for Lucy to defend against. Her opportunity to do something about this is two years and change in the past and all she did was clean his fucking swords.
The scar on her palm burns, the already bittersweet memory steeped in a new layer of horror, of sacrifice. No wonder Kitetsu cut her open. He was probably furious with her.
That was fair. Lucy remembers being pretty furious with herself at the time. Remembers using those memories of Zoro's wounds—the pool of blood they found him in, the stillness of his body—as a reminder on Ruskaina. She can recall the images easily, the pain of them sharp like the jagged edges of broken glass, even now.
Whatever anger, guilt, protective wrath she felt then and in the years between, it wasn't enough. It was nowhere near enough.
Was she really so careless, then? Was she really so willing to let things go, with consequences so narrowly avoided?
And Zoro—Zoro was supposed to be pursuing his own dream. He's going to be the World's Greatest Swordsman, and he can't do that if he's dead. The first promise between them was a deal, an oath, for Lucy to lay down her life if she ever got in the way of his dream. And sure, maybe neither of them expected the way their relationship developed but did Zoro really come back only because he loves her? Does he even believe in her as a capta—
Lucy pauses in her rampage, fists clenching in an effort to grasp for calm. There's an inoffensive branch in her face that disintegrates right down to the trunk when she unleashes her frustration on it, packing undue wrath into the punch.
Zoro wouldn't follow someone he didn't believe in. It was as simple as that. He'd find her after achieving his dream if that were the case. He wouldn't have met up with them in Sabaody if he didn't wish to follow her. At the very least, he wouldn't patronize her like that.
No, Zoro is on her crew because he wants to be, because he believes she will be Pirate King, because despite her own weakness putting him and his dream at risk, he is somehow still loyal to her, in the way only a first mate can be.
It probably doesn't hurt that he loves her, but she's sure he still believes in her. She's sure of it.
And—she's known for a long time now, almost since the deal was struck, that their original pact had morphed into something new and aspirational. That their dreams would be achieved together or not at all.
Lucy just hadn't known her life managed to surpass his dream entirely. Maybe she should have guessed, but. She didn't.
They're not separate things. She gets that. Her life and his dream and his life and her dream—they're all tangled up together now, in each other, in the rest of the crew. But when she asked them to join her, when she asked them to follow her to Raftel, she was asking them to risk their lives for their dreams. Not hers. She thought, then and now, that she'd be able to guarantee their lives with her own for anything else.
It hurts to realize that she was too late, that one of them had already suffered for her weakness. That two of them tried to take it on their own shoulders.
Lucy takes a deep breath, forcing the fury to dissipate. There is nothing to hurt, nothing to protect her crew from. There is just the strange, ornery wildness of Zou, and the soft noises of the nocturnal wildlife. The air is humid, and beneath her feet is the titanic pressure of a creature as old as the millennium.
Lucy takes another deep breath and tries not to recall the way Zoro's blood looked, soaking into the earth on Thriller Bark.
She's so angry. But there's nothing to be done about any of it, because he was injured and healed and recovered and far stronger by the time she even knew she'd committed a crime against him. That is how completely she's failed her swordsman, even if he doesn't see it that way.
Lucy bites her lip in a bid to stop crying. She fails. She scrubs her eyes with her fists and presses on.
She wants Zoro. She usually does, at times like these. But right now she has a job to do, and she's filled with a sickening terror, and she's so—angry because Zoro tried to die for her.
She'll talk to Zoro, eventually. Just…not this second. She has a job to do. She needs to make sure none of this happens ever again.
No one dies for Lucy. Especially not her crew. They are the one part of herself she will not sacrifice to her dreams, the one thing she must protect. The need to ensure this is almost overwhelming, consuming in its totality.
Her skin itches. The weight of Shanks' hat is keenly felt even in its absence, and the night air is thick around her as the gnarled boughs of green-grey trees moan in the wind. The quiet murmur of the forest is devastating, isolating even as Lucy crashes through it, and far above her head the sky hangs black and heavy.
Lucy hasn't felt so alone since those solitary nights on Ruskaina, when the stars looked so far away and eternally out of reach.
The stars are dim tonight, too weak to guide. Lucy hurries on, tears falling in a steady, uncontrollable stream, saltwater thick on her cheeks.
It takes about five seconds after Lucy's footsteps disappear down the infirmary hallway for Zoro to realize he shouldn't have let her go. This is mostly because he has no earthly idea what she's about to do with this information and despite his shock, despite the panic making a home in his chest, and every other goddamn thing about this day, he's not stupid enough to think Monkey D. Lucy would just walk away from a fight angry without some sort of destination in mind.
God, her face. Zoro did that.
"Fuck," Zoro whispers, making for the exit "Fuck, fuck—"
"Go after her, dummy," Nami agrees. Her amber eyes are wide, her face pale and drawn. The panic he sees in her does nothing to calm his own. Lucy's straw hat hanging around Nami's neck seems to mock him and his stupidity.
Zoro sprints out the door, and discovers rather quickly that the forests of Zou were not terribly amenable to a person attempting to locate someone who didn't want to be found. The foliage is dense, full of endless nooks and crannies a person of Lucy's size and ability could tuck themselves into, and there's just enough animal activity to prevent him from hearing much past the squelching of his boots in elephant hide. And between that and his occasional cursing and cutting of trees and vines, Zoro makes enough noise to actually be the damn elephant.
He hopes Lucy isn't mad enough to run away again. Lucy is pissed, agile, and spent her gremlin years leaping around a hostile jungle and somehow not dying. A one-sided game of hide and seek would not be in his favor here without Haki to help.
As it is, he has only a vague idea of the direction she went, and every time he tries to sense it he's plagued with an uncharacteristic uncertainty. He can only hope luck is with him, as it hasn't been this entire goddamn day.
It isn't lost on Zoro that this whole revelation could have gone…better. Or never would have happened at all, maybe, if he just kept his damn mouth shut. He probably wouldn't be stomping through the woods following nothing but a vague and not-working-so-great gut instinct to locate his wayward girlfriend if he just told the sea witch to mind her own damn business.
(He would have, except he was drunk and didn't want to be fighting with her in the first place.)
Fuck. He wouldn't have let her leave at all if he'd realized she was so freaked she was fucking off into the forest. He just…wanted to give her space. If that's what she needed. It seemed like what she was asking for, and he was surprised enough he wasn't sure, but her face…
Lucy was never meant to know about this shit. Especially not now, after everything that happened with her brother, when it could hurt her more.
He swallows, remembering Lucy's terror, the flatness of her voice. His palms itch with an animal desperation he doesn't know how to resolve. His hands fist reflexively, his teeth grinding. Zoro can't quite convince his jaw to relax, and elects to ignore it while Kitetsu slices through another thorny bramble. Kitetsu's hilt burns, hot enough to sting, a howl in the edge of the blade.
He doesn't regret it, is the thing. He can't apologize for something he doesn't regret. He regrets telling Nami anything about it, regrets that Lucy overheard. But he can't regret taking her place in Kuma's deal, can't regret his conviction, his belief in her dream, his scars. They're proof of his loyalty, his devotion, his willingness to face any challenge.
He won't apologize for protecting her. He can't.
Part of Zoro wants to blame the Cook for this, for leaving at such a stupid time where they couldn't go after him like they should. But it wasn't Curly-brow who let the secret slip after one too many drinks and a headache that threatened to split his skull in two. Zoro is the only dumbfuck that caused this mess.
He should have read Nami in ages ago. That would have…prevented all of this. Lucy wouldn't have gotten that look on her face.
It was…worrying. Lucy walking away like that. Lucy hates being alone, only does it when she's trying to keep her vulnerabilities to herself. She lets Zoro in at times like these though. Lets him guard her soft spots, lets him take care of her, lets him offer comfort.
She's never run away from him before, never rejected his company. It makes an anxious knot twist in his gut. Her distress was…palpable. Like a distant thunderstorm, encroaching on the horizon as ozone charged the air. He could taste it like lead on his tongue.
The fear in her eyes, like all her worst nightmares came to life. He's almost glad he can't use Haki on Zou without passing out, that he couldn't feel whatever she did in that moment, that he won't have the memory of it. That look on her face—he never wants to see it again. Especially not because of him, like he broke something inside her. Something important.
He wonders if she's alone right now. If she's blaming herself.
At the thought, Kitetsu burns, grinding in his chest like hot metal, and the blade's screams churn and scrape against Zoro's own impulse to flatten the whole goddamn forest in an effort to find one 5'2" captain, because he doesn't know where she is.
Zoro always knows where Lucy is. He's always been able to find her, no matter the circumstance. And he's not sure if it's his closed-off Haki or his budding hangover or his general misery that's preventing it, but—
The forty-fifth branch Zoro bats out of the way snaps back and hits him in the back of the head. He scowls, curses, and uses Kitetsu to hack off the branch, and verbally condemns this fucking moldy scab of a country on the back of a deafeningly loud elephant to every level of hell there is.
He adjusts his grip on Kitetsu, his knuckles creaking with tension. He turns to the right, where the way is clearer, and suddenly the burning hilt in his hands goes unnaturally cold, like ice, and altogether too noticeable in the muggy heat of Zou.
Zoro pauses, eyeing the katana with suspicion. He listens a little harder to the bloodthirsty wailing of his most quarrelsome blade. There's no indication of attitude—well, no more than to be expected—and no vicious outpouring of bloodlust into his soul. Just the blade, relatively quiet, if responding to Zoro's own anxiety.
Curiously, Zoro turns back to his original heading, straight into some alien-looking bramble. Kitetsu's hilt grows blisteringly hot, like holding onto solid flame.
Zoro raises a skeptical eyebrow at the katana, a wild, desperate notion churning in his thoughts.
"Are you…leading me to Lucy?"
There's a slight waver in the discordant wails that makes up Kitetsu's presence in his head, but otherwise nothing, not from any of Zoro's katanas.
Zoro frowns, purses his lips. He turns to his left this time.
The hilt goes cold again, the change in temperature dramatic and clear. Zoro goes from holding flame to holding ice in a millisecond.
Zoro frowns harder, thinking quickly.
His blades have always been fond of Lucy. Weirdly fond. He assumed it was an extension of his own feelings for his captain, his own affection. His blades were keyed to his emotional state, after all. It's why they spent a year plus on Kuraigana screaming at him non-stop, before he admitted he loves her.
It doesn't make sense though. Kitetsu shouldn't know where Lucy is right now, or how to find her. And even if it did know, it was…weirdly accommodating of the blade, to clue Zoro in.
Then again, Kitetsu is a cursed blade. It's constantly trying to get him murdered. And if it's thirsty, then Zoro's blood would quench it as well as an enemy. It could be leading him into a trap, or away from Lucy.
Zoro hesitates for a moment more, and then starts hacking at the brambles, Kitetsu's hilt burning in his palm.
Zou is a relatively safe island. The Minks were cheerful and friendly and the people happy, so far as he could tell. The danger was already dealt with by the Twirly Hat crew, and the land here seemed…protected, in a way most of the islands they visited weren't. He was unlikely to run into real danger aside from his angry girlfriend.
Hmm. Maybe Kitetsu is trying to kill him.
Zoro presses on, his progress no quicker through the dense brush, but at least it wasn't directionless. Following his cursed, murderous katana is not the weirdest thing he's ever done for Lucy, and it's not like he has a better option at the moment.
The forest passes by under his feet, the sick feeling in his gut making the distance feel endless, even as he picks up his pace. There's something wild about Zou's forests, something incendiary lying dormant amongst the organic cycle of growth and decay. It vibrates in the air around him, a strange balance of frenetic expansion and equanimous calm that does nothing to slow his frantic heartbeat.
Did you win? Lucy asked him. The fact that he can't say he did, even two years after the fact, pisses him off, and he barely feels the burn of Kitetsu's hilt. Somehow he's ended up playing hot and cold with his stubbornest katana in a near-impassable forest, and he doesn't even know what he's going to say to his missing girlfriend once he finds her, because he regrets nothing about Thriller Bark except his own weakness.
Zoro cuts through a vine, stumbles into a tree, and nearly gouges out his one good eye with a branch because this is just the best. Fucking. Day.
Above him the waning moon hangs fat in the sky, draining all light from the stars, and Zoro keeps moving despite the dread and guilt mixing with the panic in his gut.
Lucy starts sprinting as the forest thins out. With the wind given enough space to breathe it digs its fingers into her clothes, brushes the heat off her skin. It's gentle, reassuring, and carries the scent of the sea.
Lucy ignores this, pelting full tilt down the slope of Zou's back. When she sees the pale marigold of the city gate, she reaches out and slingshots through them, just for the minor burst of speed it brings.
She doesn't expect to spot Franky, Robin, and Brook on the other side, looking down the back legs of the elephant, but they're there all the same. And when Lucy lands a few meters behind them, it's Robin who notices her first.
"Sencho?" Robin calls, her voice carrying a note of alarm. Robin rarely calls her that anymore, not since they got her back from the Marines.
Lucy must look terrible, if she's concerned her crew that much.
Lucy doesn't look away from her goal, but she does nod to Robin in acknowledgement. It does not put her archaeologist at ease, if the way she stands and turns to her is anything to go by.
"Uh, Aneki. Where are you goin'?" Franky gets to his feet as she walks past her crew, shadowing her as she strides up to the edge of the elephant.
"To get Sanji," she replies brusquely, looking over the edge. Sunny is colorful enough that she can spot her even in the dark of the waves. The trick will be getting the timing right so Lucy lands on the deck, or at least within gum gum range.
"It's the middle of the night, Lucy-san." Brook says it gently, but there's a question there. Lucy doesn't really have time for it.
"Have to get Sanji," she repeats. Kin'emon and Kanjuro are about halfway up to the elephant's back, almost to where the leg met the hip.
"Well, yeah, Aneki, but now?" All three of them are on their feet, forming a loose semi-circle around her back. "Why not wait until morning?"
"Because I have to bring Sanji back here." Okay, she's got the timing down. She's spent a lot of time examining how fast she free falls. "Then I'm going to tie him and Zoro to a tree until they promise to never do that again."
Conqueror's Haki cracks her voice, and it startles Zou as it ripples out from her, shuddering to a standstill in its surprise. Far below her, Kin'emon and Kanjuro flip over backwards on whatever the blue blob is supposed to be. Oops.
"What?" Franky asks, bewildered. "What did they do? It can't be recent."
Eh, they'll be fine. Kanjuro can just draw them a giant trampoline or something. Yeah, look, big raft, orange blob, and now they're climbing again. Lucy will have to apologize for ruining their progress on the way down.
Alright, jump when the leg is fully extended, in three, two, one—
"Wait, Aneki—"
Lucy jumps, but before she's even dropped a meter fifty disembodied hands grasp her limbs to stop her progress.
She can't break the grip of the hands without hurting— "Robin. Let me go."
Robin does, but only after Franky's giant metal hand closes over Lucy's torso and pulls her back from the edge.
Lucy struggles in his grip, glaring daggers over her shoulder. Lucy could break the hold, but not without a genuine fight. The cyborg brings her around to face the three of them, concern and confusion written all over his face, and mirrored on the other two's.
"Franky, let. Me. Go."
It's not quite an order, not yet. Lucy doesn't want to have to make simple things like this an order. A good captain doesn't need to.
There's conflict written all over Franky's face, like he wants to comply but is equally afraid of releasing her. She intensifies her glare.
Franky lets her down, but he's careful to put the three of them between Lucy and the Sunny. Lucy can't find a way past the rage burning through her to care, and punches a tree so hard it falls over out of sheer frustration because even now she can't just walk away from her crew when they're begging her not to.
"Lucy-san," Brook asks gently, his voice soft, like she's something fragile right now and not a hairsbreadth away from exploding. "What happened?"
And it might be the way he asks with kindness, compassion, and honest confusion. It might be the guilt still lingering in Franky's expression for stopping her. It might be that Lucy can see Robin's hands clenched at her sides and her furrowed eyebrows, tension in her body that Lucy isn't sure she's seen before. But somehow the question gets through to her, and Lucy feels the rage seep out of her slowly, like a punctured balloon.
Lucy's being a bad captain right now. She's making her crew worried and insecure.
So Lucy takes a deep breath and explains. Haltingly, and in as few words as possible, because even recounting the story is making something like a black hole open up in her chest.
How dare he? How dare he?
When Lucy finishes, Brook and Robin share a look Lucy doesn't understand. Franky just sighs, his big shoulders drooping and a frown etched onto his face.
"What a mess," he mutters. But then he looks Lucy in the eye, bearing a strength that Lucy takes pride in even now. "I get you're upset, Sencho. And Cook-bro would need a good talking to even without all this. But you can't leave tonight."
Lucy narrows her eyes.
"Sencho, the Minks are in danger as long as we're here. The samurai shouldn't be here at all." Franky looks tired. "We can't wait here for you to bring Cook-bro back. The crew needs to leave within the week. Less even. And we don't have a plan for Wano yet. I understand why you're mad. We need to back up Cook-bro. But we need you here for at least a little longer."
Franky stares her right in the eye, his voice serious and low. Lucy feels her resolve cracking, even as her anger rages.
"There are decisions we can't make without you, Lucy," Robin reminds her. "We need you here."
"I am sure Sanji-san will hold his own until we arrive to retrieve him, Lucy-san."
Lucy blinks at Brook, slow and uncomprehending. "We?"
Brook shifts, like he does when he's uncertain, like he's afraid of overstepping boundaries. "I would like to go with you, if I could. I feel responsible for not helping him resist Big Mom's crew when they came for him."
A heart is a strange thing. A heart wracked with anger and hurt in one moment can expand with affection the next, and it can be a painful sort of beating as a heart adjusts to holding both things at once, the pain and the love. And Lucy will never, she hopes, get truly used to it.
Lucy scrubs her eyes with the heel of her palm before new tears can overflow, and gives Brook a small, proud smile with lips pressed together hard, and nods. His long frame relaxes, and his bony hands curl over the neck of his guitar with grace, not anxiety.
"I'll wait," she agrees quietly. She looks at Franky, who gives her a broad smile. And Lucy loves him, she does, but it makes her feel like a terrible captain.
She worried them. She shouldn't do that. She wouldn't have, under any other circumstances, because she would have gone to Zoro or he would have found her and held her until she could pull herself together, make good decisions. If she were upset about any other person, any other issue, then these three would not have had to talk her down from a literal cliff. She wouldn't have needed to be reminded she still had duties to the crew on Zou before she could go haring off.
But Zoro tried to die for her, and she's not sure how she's gonna forgive him for that.
"Lucy, have you…talked? To our swordsman?" Robin asks this delicately, with a carefully neutral expression. Lucy hates the hesitance she sees there, and only responds by shaking her head to the negative. If she speaks she's afraid her anger will further concern the archaeologist.
Franky whistles, and looks a little disappointed in her. Lucy hates it and looks away, not wanting to be scolded like a child.
"Well," Franky says slowly, "I guess we know where our next stop is."
Lucy frowns and starts to look back up at him to ask what do you mean, but then a giant mechanical hand catches her by the back of her jacket and something hard closes around first one wrist and then the other before he tosses her unceremoniously over his large, round shoulders.
It takes her a second to realize the cuffs around her wrist are sea stone. The same ones Law had on Dressrosa. She vaguely remembers Zoro handing them to Franky back in that shack.
Lucy squawks in protest and looks to Robin and Brook for help even as she pounds on Franky's back with both locked fists (though not hard. She knows his back's his soft spot, upgrades or no. This is undoubtedly why he's carrying her this way).
"OI. FRANKY. PUT ME DOWN."
"No can-do, Sencho," Franky sings—so cheerfully Lucy struggles and kicks him on reflex, because the sea stone cuffs around her wrists might prevent her from using her fruit, but she's still strong. "You're probably tired from running all over this kingdom. Gotta let you rest while I take you to Sword-bro."
Lucy stills for half a second, and then stares at her cyborg's ears in horror. "Franky."
"No need to thank me, Aneki. This is just what bros do!"
Lucy looks at Robin and Brook for help, trying to communicate even a fraction of her desperation to not have this conversation to her crew, to beg for an intervention.
Robin is smiling. Genuinely, which is good to see. It would be heartwarming if it wasn't at Lucy's expense.
Brook, maybe predictably, just laughs. "Yohohohoho! I will prepare for our journey, captain!"
"Franky. Let me go."
"Sword-bro is this way, right?" And Lucy really has no idea where Zoro is but Franky swaggers toward the city gate regardless. Lucy kicks him again. Robin waves to her and Brook just laughs again, skeletal fingers patterning out a riff on the neck of his guitar.
Lucy really hates this goddamn day.
Zoro is following his katana. Really, he is. But it's been almost two hours now and he hasn't seen hide nor hair of Lucy, no flash of red in the brush or the trees.
"You're just leading me in circles, aren't you?" Zoro accuses. Kitetsu wails in his head hard enough to send him to his knees, equally accusatory. Zoro stumbles on his next step and growls.
He debates giving up on the stupid game of hot and cold he's playing with the sword, but. Well. It's not like he has a better idea at the moment.
Zoro swears, and hacks down a vine to his left just out of spite.
"Franky."
"Yes, Aneki!"
"Put me down."
"I agree the forest is lovely this evening!"
"Franky."
"Yes, Aneki?"
"Put me down."
"Wow, look at the stars, Aneki, aren't they pretty tonight?"
Lucy cranes her neck around and squints. Pale, opaque clouds cover the moon and the gaps of sky visible between the grey-green tree boughs.
"This is mutiny." She rattles the sea stone cuffs for emphasis. They're lined on the inside to prevent the metal from burning and blistering the user's skin, but they're still draining, energy wise.
"Is it?" Franky asks mildly, and it's an honest question. He'll let her down and unlocks the cuffs if she makes it an order.
Lucy seriously considers it for a second, staring at the squishy trail Franky leaves behind as he treks through the woods.
She can't make it an order, dammit. Franky's just trying to help her. The fact that his "help" involves kidnapping is just proof that he's a Straw Hat, through and through.
"I don't want to talk to Zoro right now," she growls. Franky's gait doesn't stop its steady progress, but she does hear a hum deep in his chest.
"I gathered as much," he says cheerfully. And because he's a member of Lucy's crew he has exactly zero shame about abducting her.
"So put me down."
Franky huffs a laugh, even when Lucy lands a proper kick to his ribs, but otherwise doesn't reply.
The thing is, they both know Lucy isn't trapped here. If she didn't want to let Franky carry her through the forest, there wouldn't be anything Franky could do to stop her, cuffs or no. She wants him to let her down, she doesn't want to talk to Zoro, and yet she's still allowing Franky to drag her along.
It's because she's tired, maybe, and overwrought. Or because she just doesn't know what to do, now, if she's not going after Sanji this instant. She will eventually though, and she's going to beat some self-worth into her boys' heads if she needs a nine iron to do it.
Against her will, angry tears well in her eyes. She scrubs at them with the heel of her palm, smearing dirt and sappy tree bark across her cheek. Lucy curses quietly, because the more she cries the more she actually does want to see Zoro but she can't right now because—
"I don't know what to say," Lucy whispers. And there's a lot of reasons for that.
Franky hums, low enough that it makes the shoulder she's slung over vibrate. "Maybe he does."
Lucy scrunches her nose and thinks about that for a second.
"No, Zoro's dumb too," she disagrees.
Franky laughs, and Lucy's lips twitch into an approximation of a watery smile, if only for a moment.
"I've never been mad at him like this before," Lucy confesses. "And the more I think of it the madder I get."
Because every time she lets her mind drift she sees gore splashed over the earth and rocks and Zoro's bandana, and she remembers the burning scent of antiseptic and she feels Zoro's scars under her fingertips and all she can think is how dare he, how dare he, how dare he?
Conqueror's Haki coils in her spine, but Lucy unwinds it between one breath and the next, her control less frayed than it has been all night.
Franky is a soothing presence, and his silence is sympathetic.
"Have you ever dated anyone, Franky?"
"Oi. You're talking to a paragon of masculinity here."
Lucy giggles, just a little, then sobers. "How would you feel if they did what Zoro did?"
Franky makes a contemplative sound in the back of his throat, and then shakes his head in answer. "Probably about like you do. Mad and guilty as hell."
Lucy flinches. Black, sticky guilt sits leaden and restless in the pit of her stomach, a physical, desperate ache she doesn't know how to resolve.
"But I'd try to understand. Put myself in their shoes." Franky squeezes her ankle. "You're usually good at that, Aneki."
Lucy bites the inside of her lip. There are a lot of reasons why she can't just understand. Most of them have to do with the scars on her chest and the twisted tissue strewn all across Zoro's belly that should have been hers.
But most importantly—she's the captain. And she failed her first mate in so many ways.
Hot, angry tears burn down her cheeks and Lucy huffs in frustration even as she scrubs them away. It's harder to do than it should be because of the thick cuffs.
"I'm the captain, Franky," she reminds him. She can't see much, hanging upside down and staring at Franky's back like this, but it seems like the forest might be getting lighter as dawn approaches.
"Sencho," Franky says seriously. "Sometimes a man—anyone really—has to protect the things he loves. Or he can't live with himself after."
And Lucy knows that. She does. So why does it seem like she's being protected all the time, rather than doing the protecting?
"I don't want anyone to protect me," she whispers, knowing Franky can hear her anyway. "Not like that."
And Franky sighs. "Yeah, well. I suspect there's only one person who could."
There's an image of Zoro that Lucy can't stop seeing—he's sweating profusely, gasping for every breath as he struggles under his weights with blood soaking through his bandages, anger in his eyes, and it's not Franky's fault but that doesn't make it any easier to swallow the scream of frustration lodged in her throat.
Lucy's the one who did that. Lucy's the one who set him back from his goals, who made him weaker when Sabaody—
Roronoa Zoro. Still alive, I see.
Thanks to your mercy.
Lucy closes her eyes against her grief.
It was a line she always found odd, but she never had the context for it. She only barely heard it, only remembers it from branding it into her memory over years of sleepless nights on Ruskaina, picturing the frame of Zoro's shoulders and the line of his back in the moment he was ripped from her.
Kuma never planned to leave him alive. Zoro merely beat the odds, betting everything on the slim possibility that the warlord wouldn't come for her head after.
"Is this what Smokey and Jimbei meant?" She wonders aloud, "When they said I shouldn't be with Zoro?"
Franky actually does stop walking at that, and in a deliberate fashion, plucks her off his shoulder by the collar of her jacket and holds her up like she's a stray kitten. The look on his face is one of concern and an almost grave seriousness.
"Lucy," he starts, and her name sounds odd in Franky's mouth. "You gonna break up with Sword-bro?"
Lucy flinches like she's been slapped, and every vein in her body fills with revulsion and denial. Breaking up with Zoro would be like cutting off a part of her heart and still expecting it to beat. It would be like tearing her hat in two and ripping up part of her dream. Lucy can't even imagine what that would be like, because every part of her belongs to him, and everything she feels for him is equal parts greedy and intimate.
Being just friends with Zoro? She doesn't know how to do it, because she's loved him since she's known him. But. But—
"If it keeps him alive," Lucy grits out, ignoring the physical ache in her gut. She ignores the fresh tears on her face, this time cold with the terror this whole idea fills her with. She and Zoro being anything less than what they are fills her with sickening panic. She hates the idea, hates the thought of being able to see Zoro every day and not being able to touch him, or give him a secret smile that he returns, or fall asleep on him, or any of the thousands of tiny things that color their relationship. She doesn't know how she'll get through a single minute of it. The thought of it is like standing at the edge of an abyss, one with sharp rocks on the bottom to pierce and cut and hurt, forever and ever.
Zoro dead, for her sake? There's nothing. No future. Just a void, just the end of Monkey D. Lucy as she knows herself, and the end of any dream she might have had of being Pirate King.
Whatever Franky sees on her face makes him soften in sympathy, and he throws her over his shoulder again, a little gentler than before.
"Love comes in a lot of forms, Lucy. And pushing away our feelings doesn't make them disappear." He starts off down the trail again. "You and Sword-bro weren't together when this happened, yeah?"
Lucy grimaces, but stubborns herself against the point. "Maybe he can move on." She certainly wouldn't.
Franky actually laughs loud enough to startle a bird they had already passed.
"Ha! That'll be the day," he cries. His shoulders are still shaking like she's just told him the funniest joke he's ever heard. "Sword-bro will get over you around the time he throws his swords in the ocean, swears off alcohol forever, and asks Cook-bro to teach him how to make artisanal bread."
Lucy pouts at Franky's back, even as the corners of her mouth turn up at the thought. Zoro in an apron and yelling at bread is actually a pretty cute mental image.
She immediately feels terrible about it, though, because then she thinks of Zoro in bandages, just after Thriller Bark, and how he couldn't even walk up the two stairs to get out of the infirmary, that first day he woke up.
"For what it's worth, Aneki," Franky adds gently. "I think it'd be silly to push away someone you love, in the hopes that they stop loving you."
Lucy bites her lip to keep the sharp intake of breath quiet. She doesn't even bother to try and stop the tears.
"As for whatever those two said, I doubt this is what they meant," Franky continues after a moment. "They were speaking of crews that would put their dreams before each other."
Lucy sniffs quietly, trying not to tip Franky off even though he almost certainly knows. "Seen a lot of those on Water 7?"
Franky, thankfully, doesn't point out her tears. "A fair few, sure," he says lightly, and there's a smile in his voice when he adds, "My crew's different though. My captain wouldn't let it be any other way."
Lucy's smile is a little firmer this time, warmth and affection so raw it almost hurts curling around the bleeding in her heart, even through her tears.
But her shipwright isn't done yet.
"I know how it feels to have someone die for you. I know how I'd feel if someone tried to do it again." Franky squeezes her ankle in reassurance. "I know you're scared. I know how hard it is to not be scared. But Aneki, you're the bravest and strongest person I've ever met. Sword-bro's got what it takes to be the person you need him to be. And you know that I think."
Lucy squeezes her eyes shut, and as payback, wipes a little of her snot on Franky's shirt.
"It's hard," she admits, because it is. It's hard to trust that her crew will be okay without her, which is why she stretches her Haki to its limit on every island except this one, and why she reacts so viciously now if they're seriously threatened.
Zoro she trusts to win, because he promised. She trusts him because he's strong, because he's always been strong. And she believes—or used to—that if nothing else, he would live because he's too damn stubborn to die before achieving his dream.
But she doesn't know how she's going to trust Zoro not to harm himself for her sake after this.
"Of course it's hard!" Franky agrees loudly. "But love? Love is a risk. No matter how you express it, to love someone is to live with part of your heart outside your body.
"We're pirates, Aneki. We're used to a little risk."
And Lucy goes limp with defeat, because he's right. Of course he is.
Sometimes she forgets that Franky is older than her, more experienced. That he had a whole life prior to piracy, that he was a leader of a bunch of goofy thugs before he became her shipwright. It's funny how that wisdom peeks out at times, brash and silly as he is.
Lucy needs to be a captain worthy of someone like Franky.
In the distance, Lucy can hear branches breaking and a low, steady stream of curses. Lucy's eyes widen and her stomach bottoms out.
She'd recognize that voice anywhere. She's not ready.
Franky plucks her off his shoulder, and gives her a look.
She's not ready, but she needs to be. Because she needs to be the captain her crew deserves.
"None of you are allowed to die for me," she orders, firming her gaze. "Captain's orders. No one dies for me."
She can't make them promise not to die at all, because they're pirates and they're human or at least close to it, and she told them all when they joined they were taking their lives in their hands, that living as a pirate was to risk everything at once.
But if a single one of them does this again, Lucy won't be held responsible for her actions.
Franky looks her up and down, and then reaches out to unlock the cuffs. They fall off her wrists and into his hands, and Zoro's cursing is getting louder as she rubs her wrists and relishes the strength returning to her arms.
"Aye, Sencho. But remember," and here Franky pokes her in the forehead, right between the eyes, a smile on his face. "My dream can't be accomplished without you."
And Lucy smiles back, even if she's sure it looks terrible and pained, because she remembers. Of course she remembers.
"I have a good ship," Lucy tells him, grinning. "I won't abandon it."
Franky stares at her from behind his sunglasses, his face slacked with just a hint of surprise, and grins.
"Super." He nods toward Zoro's much louder cursing, and it's only a thick copse of trees that protects them from his sight. "Don't run off now."
Lucy sighs, but nods. Franky turns back the way he came, his pompadour disappearing behind the trees within a stride or two.
There is a brief half a second where Lucy considers running off anyway. The shadows are too long, or she's too angry, or maybe Zoro doesn't want to talk to her either right now, maybe he's just blowing off steam. There are a thousand manifold reasons she could give, and maybe some of them might even be true, but every single one of them would be a lie.
Lucy doesn't know if she's ready to talk to Zoro about this, or if it wouldn't be better to wait until morning. But if she runs away now, it'll be because she's scared, and Lucy is a lot of things, but she's never been a coward.
The clouds have separated and moved on, and between them a waning moon is visible, baring down on Lucy like an eye frozen mid-blink. The palm of her right hand tingles, and Lucy runs her thumb over the scar there.
A good captain doesn't run away. A good girlfriend doesn't let her partner stumble through the woods alone.
"Zoro," She calls, because her idiot is going to wander off if she doesn't, "Zoro, that's you, right?"
The cursing stops, the luminary eye blinks behind a cloud, and beneath Lucy's feet the elephant trembles hard enough to rattle her skull.
Lucy looks up, fists clenched in righteous anger and heart bleeding and tender, and finds the grey eye of her swordsman blown wide and thinks love is a risk. Of course it is.
We pirates are made of dreams to risk, and hearts to lose.
Franky just did more shipbuilding 😎…I'll see myself out.
I'm still not thrilled with this chapter, but it's goin up anyway. Sorry for how inexcusably late this is, if anyone's still waiting for updates.
Sometimes in my outlines I have funny blurbs for the scenes just so I know what the scene's supposed to do/link to. This was the blurb for Zoro's first POV scene in this chapter, you have to put it to that song from Robin Hood
Zoro and Kitetsu, stomping through the forest, cussing back and forth over what the other one has to say
Next two chapters are written, so I'll probably post chapter 20 in a week or two, depending on how much of Whole Cake Island I write.
Let me know how you liked it! And if you're still reading, lol.