Bushido watched his younger self pace back and forth, dark eyes blazing with agitation, with a frown. He could relate with his younger self's plight, the wait was agonizing. Not for the first time, Zoro whirled around and exploded at him. "Get going!"
Bushido sighed, massaging his brow. "We've been over this, I want to wait for tempers to sizzle down a bit before I return. SInce you failed and all." It was a low blow and he regretted the barbed words the moment they had left his lips.
Zoro winced, the wind ripped out from his sails. "I tried, okay? If I tried to break the weird mind control, I would've been sucked away into the sword...what the hell did you do to Kuina's sword, anyways?" Zoro's rant started quiet and steadily picked up volume, ending in a yell.
"Some byproduct of the time travel, I think. Whoever holds Wado Ichimonji gets my memories, flashes of my life all the way up to my death."
"That's dumb," Zoro said bluntly, "why?"
FIghting back another spike of irritation, Zoro hadn't stopped asking questions since the two of them had been stuck together, he spoke. "It's not like I researched time travel before it all went down. It was an accident. There one second, gone the next."
Zoro growled, frustration and a tinge of pain overlapping in his voice. "What was happening there anyway?"
"I told you this one already," Bushido reminded him, "it was a girl called Miss Goldenweek, she has mind controlling paints. I let my guard down, she snuck up on me. End of story."
Zoro's gaze was that of a dragon's, burning with fire, as he stared Bushido right down to the soul. "You're being awfully callous about this." To an outsider, the voice was offhandish and bored. But to someone who truly knew him, like his older self, it was full of barely held back shimmering fury. "Do you not care about what happened?"
Banshining away the haunting images of a blood-soaked Nami, Bushido fired back. "Of course I care. I just don't see how needless worrying is going to fix anything."
Zoro's hand instinctively went for the hip, fingers brushing off against empty air as they sought for the missing blade, and he growled. "She could die."
Nami's scream still ringing in his ears, constant and maddening in his head, Bushido glared. "Don't say that. Nami's strong, she'll pull through."
The unspoken "she always has" hung between them in the air.
With one final angry glare, the younger swordsman slipped with grace into a cross-legged sitting pose. "You can't guarantee that. You aren't some god, you clearly aren't omnipotent. Just admit it: things are spiralling out of your control...and that scares you shitless."
Teeth clenched, his voice was a thunder of warning. "Shut up."
"I bet you still don't have a doctor, am I right? Why would you? You already have the perfect person in mind for the position and it's not like you are hurry to get one either, you know exactly when someone gets hurt enough to warrant a doctor. Right? Wrong. It's about time you wake the hell up and realise that not everything is all sunshine and roses, that you being here doesn't automatically make everything okay. That, maybe, your presence is actually making things worse for everyone here." Zoro gestured at himself with a soft smirk on his lips. "It certainly is for me."
Anger didn't even begin to describe the feeling burning in his chest, his blood sung with vengeful lust as it blazed through his veins. Dimly, he heard himself reply. "I don't have to take that from you. I'm going." He swiveled on his heel, striding towards Wado Ichimonji.
"You're like a kid who burned his pissed bedsheets," Zoro called out at his retreating back, "running away from your problems and hoping that they will be magically fixed."
Bushido paused, fingers inch from the cold metal, and spat out. "You know nothing about me, nothing about what happened." Then his calloused fingers were wrapping around the hilt, the weight comforting. There was a tug in his gut and, with a grunt, he was ejected from the mental landscape. For one final moment, he took in the sitting figure of the younger male as the blackness blurred and bleed away.
And then there was pain.
He couldn't breath was his first floundering thought, shaky and sweating hands grasping at his chest. The hole in his throat had shrunken to the size of a marble, glands swollen and absolute, and the mere presence of traces of spit caused him to wince in pain. His muscles sent jolts of protest at every moment, sending paroxysms of pain coursing through his body at anything above a turtle's speed. He hissed, a caricature of his usual voice (no doubt warped by the sore throat.), as his fingers tugged at his sweaty body: heat.
His skin was like a blacksmith's forge, hot and burning to the touch. Hell, he wouldn't be surprised if he his skin started to crack and steam poured out of his veins. It was that warm. Hot didn't even begin to describe it. And now that he was aware of it, he couldn't not sense it.
The heat was ordinate and inescapable.
He could imagine his blood boiling and escaping through his pores, blood red tears running down his body in rivulets. With a fevered certainty that, if left alone with his thoughts and the heat, he would be driven insane. He commanded the exhausted body to move, to obey his will in this if nothing else. A pitiful whine escaped through cracked and chafing lips, the pitiful remains of what was supposed to be a loud snarl.
His right forefinger twitched.
"Get up," he managed to rasp, the action a grating hell on his throat, forcing his swollen tongue to break away from the roof of his mouth, "stand up so I can save them."
Finally, miraculously, the body replied. It rose sharply with a fluidly that something so sickly shouldn't possess and made his head spin, the world spinning in hues of vomit-inducing colours. For a moment he swayed to and fro on the deck with sweat pouring down his body, though whether from the sickness or the effort he couldn't tell, and he feared that a light breeze would knock him over and reduce his efforts to naught.
Then his eyes locked onto Luffy's and such trivial fears were far from the forefront of his mind.
Bushido managed a weak grin, taking an unsteady step forwards. "Hey Luffy-"
The power slammed into into him and send his knees flying out from under him, he fell without a sound. On his hands and knees, Bushido managed to let out a wheeze. "The Haki of the Conquering King...nice."
He was still trying to raise his defences when the second blast of royal power rushed over him, the very air tensing at the alien presence His limbs seized and locked up, jutting out at awkward angles. He fell, skin still burning up, and smashed his head against the wooden deck: hard.
He opened his eye to the black abyss and Zoro's leering face peering down at him. "So," Zoro said, voice light, "how did running away work out for you?
Bushido's arm shot out and buried itself in the younger man's gut, the momentum sending Zoro peddling away with a wheeze. "Oh shut up."
"Message received," Zoro said, grimacing as he clutched at his gut, "still, what went wrong?"
Bushido sighed as his arm flopped back. "I'm, we're, sick."
Zoro's eyebrows knitted together in a frown, the definition of confusion. "...So?"
Bushido struggled to put it into words, his brain whirring as it processed the information. His fingers brushed against his chest, searching for burning heat that wasn't there. Double and triple-checking that the ravenous sickness hadn't followed him back, that crying muscles wouldn't burst out in goosebump and sweat. "It's bad, real bad." The words felt inadequate on his tongue...but they were all he could manage.
A flash of worry in Zoro's eyes. "We're fine though, right?" The doubt he felt of any sickness keeping him down for long was apparent in Zoro's voice. "Plenty of fluids and bedrest and all that nonsense, doctor's orders and all that."
Bushido stood up, some absurd notion to check that all his limbs worked correctly after feeling the sickly tired body he had been contained in. "I wish," he said, flicking his wrist up and down, "high possible of death, if I had to say."
Zoro blanched. "No way in hell am I dying from some mundane cold." Zoro's teeth were set in a snarl, a gleaming contrast to the darkness. "I'm going to be the greatest swordsman in the entire world!"
Bushido managed to let out a laugh. "Sickness aren't known to discriminate based off how great your dreams are, they take anything and everything in their path."
"Don't wax poetry at me," Zoro snapped back sharply, "you seem to be taking this rather calmly for someone who claims we might be slowly dying."
"They'll get us to a doctor in time."
The unspoken "I hope" hung between them in the air.
She was in a nightmare, that was the only the sane explanation. The exotic jungle was bathed in shades of red, from a bubbling shade that reminded her (rather sickeningly.) of strawberry jam to the flecks of cherry red splattered on the leaves.
Except...it wasn't exactly shades of red. Was it?
Blood.
Her blood.
Split by the cold steel of Zoro's sword. Sharp metal carving through her skin like melted butter, the blade grinding deep against her very bones. It was everywhere: pooling and choking in her mouth (the metallic taste permanently engrained on her gums.), dripping down from her hands and mixing and overlapping with her peach nail polish, falling from torn legs and being greedily sucked up by the dirt, and black blood pouring from her butchered chest.
Black blood tainted by betrayal.
Above her writhing form, the blood-soaked blade came whistling down through the air. White hot agony ran through her mangled body, muscles violently twitching and screaming in protest. Zoro's face was an impassive mask as he commanded the sword in a deep diagonal cut across her side, eyes devoid of anything as he completed the task.
The sword was awkwardly pulled out with a squelch, Zoro's boot against her chest helping the movement along. The blade was raised in a deliberate high arc and she knew this would be the end and a small part, a tratious tiny niggling part, welcomed it. Zoro's boot clamped down on her throat. And she realised that she had been screaming the entire time.
The blade swung.
It was a nightmare. It couldn't be real.
Could it?
Consciousness returned to Nami quickly, her eyes snapping open. One second she was awash with blood, the next she was grasping at a blanket on a cot. She sat up or, at least, tried to. The blood rushed to her head as the room spun around her and, with a moan, she slipped back down into her original position.
An eep at the door alerted her to her visitor's presence.
Eyes pressed closed, Nami spoke. "Usopp."
"N-Nami." The voice was strained and trembling. "How are you feeling?"
Whatever witty barb had been on the edge of her tongue died as her tired eyes opened and glanced down at her hands, fingers clutching tightly at the thin blanket covering her body. Shakingly, unbelieving and uncomprehending, she brought the hands up to her face. "Usopp." Her voice was hysteric, a few decibels higher than she had ever heard it go before. "My hands...w-what happened to my hands?"
She heard what sounded like a choked sob. "Nami…"
"These aren't my hands, they can't be." Her voice was dazed and confused, a pleading and puzzled note to her voice. "Usopp, tell me this is some sort of sick joke."
The once perfect creamy skin was gone. Instead, a wasteland of stitches criss-crossed across the remains of beauty. Not even clean stitches (those she could have worked with in a kinky Frankenstein sort of way.), but inflamed bumpy ones created from ugly black thread. The stitches pulled at taut skin, her skin riddled with flashes of angry red and pale spots cut off from any blood flow. The shoddy stitching even curled up towards her fingers, numbing the joints slightly. It was a caricature of her hands.
Fakes.
"This can't be real," Nami breathed out, her world spinning again but because of totally different reason, "it just can't be."
And suddenly Usopp's' arms were wrapped around and, for once, he wasn't the only one shaking. "Oh Nami," the sniper muttered into her shoulder, "it'll be okay. Zoro will pay for what he did to you."
Nami's world tilted on its axle and shattered, leaving her floundering in shock. That had been a nightmare, right? There was no way that had been real...Zoro wouldn't hurt her! No way Jose! But a small part of her, the same traitorous niggling part of her that had welcomed death in her nightmare, thought back to the angry and confused young man she had met in Arlong Park who had looked lost in his own skin. Sure, Zoro would never hurt her…
But the Pirate Hunter might.
And now Usopp was crying, loud sobs echoing through the cramped room as he held his head in his hands. "I'm sorry," he said, "I couldn't protect you at all, Zoro just blitzed right past me. Like I was nothing."
Another horrifying thought came to the forefront of Nami's mind, chilling her to her core. If the Pirate Hunter (not Zoro. Never Zoro.) had actually hurt her...then that mean that everything she had assumed was just a nightmare had actually happened? The pale splotches on her hands, if that was possible, seemed to pale even further. In her nightmare (memory?) the PIrate Hunter had merrily hacked away at more than just her hands.
"Usopp." And Nami was damn proud that her voice didn't waver in the slightest, her resolve hardened to steel. "Bring me a mirror." It was a demand, not a request.
Usopp seemed to moan as he staggered away, as if she had given him the order to march to the gallows, searching for the mirror. Seconds later, and with trembling hands (and oh how she hated herself for the stab of envy she felt when she looked at his unmarred hands.), he returned with the mirror.
Taking a deep breath, and how everything seemed so vivid in that one moment, she picked up the mirror and stared. She thought she had steeled her resolve. That she had been ready to see the fruits of the Pirate Hunter's efforts.
Nami had been wrong. Oh, so very wrong. More wrong, perhaps, than she had ever been in her life.
The mirror fell to the floor, shattering into a million pieces on the floor. Tarnished and broken.
Like her.
The hat had never felt so heavy on Luffy's head.
He mechanically forced down the cold toast, served by Sanji with a pinched half smile almost an hour before, and downed the tall mug of coffee in one scalding gulp (couldn't sleep, the power yearning to be released the second his guard was lowered.). Baggy and tired eyes stared at the scrunched up piece of paper that was was clutched in his hand, fingers tracing the inked words. It had been delivered by the News Coo that morning and Luffy hadn't, couldn't, stop looking at it.
Roronoa Zoro
"Black Katana"
60,000,000
The caricature of his friend, betrayer, mocked him from the crinkled paper. Zoro didn't full out grin like that, he smiled a slight solemn smile. Zoro's face didn't light up laughter like that, the corners around his eyes and mouth crinkled in amusement. And two dark eyes didn't dance with emotion in their sockets, one eye stared pensively out over the ocean waves.
It was a different Zoro. A younger, carefree and happy, green-haired swordsman. A man whose hands weren't stained sanguine with blood.
And Luffy hated that piece of paper for that with a cold anger, too tired to put any real emotion into his ire.
The fact that the bounty was literally double Luffy's also caused the knot of anger and frustration in the base of his gut tighten even further, just another example of his failure. As if sensing his wariness, the overbearing power scratched away relentlessly just under his skin. Luffy winced and his fingers tightened, the bounty poster tearing.
Not for the first time that day, Luffy regretted getting carried away and using the power to blast Zoro.
Zoro had said something before he had lost consciousness: something about another form of Haki? He had known what was wrong with Luffy and the rubber boy had wasted the chance, losing control at the worst possible moment. Plus, he had lost the chance to hear about Zoro's side of the story about what had happened in what was beginning to be referred to as The Little Garden Incident.
And Zoro was sick, potentially really badly sick, the symptoms were obvious: sweaty and cold skin, skin that was burning to the touch yet clammy like that of a cooling corpse. Luffy had also wasted the chance to ask Zoro how sick he was. Still between that and the fact that Nami's crude stitches needed to be redone, and the mere image of Nami's inflamed stitching making him wince, Luffy had decided to play it safe and take a detour to get a doctor.
Between Sanji, Usopp and Vivi they had somehow managed to get by the day-to-day navigating tasks.
A prickle at the edge of his consciousness, a ping against his Observation Haki, made him pause. Luffy stood up, chair clattering to the floor, and focused. The presences, a shipful most likely, was quickly approaching. He cracked his knuckles and grinned, a feral sight. The power for once seemed to be flowing gently in his core like a peaceful lake's waves lapping against the shore, for once in agreement with Luffy's decision.
A loud and arrogant voice rang out. "Bask in the presence of the rightful ruler of the esteemed Drum Kingdom: Wapol!"
Luffy headed for the door.
They never knew what hit them.
But, then again, the weaklings never did.
