Title: Sophisticate
Theme: #14: Theatre
Claim: Zoro
(Words:) 3,787
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Language (Zoro is mad in this one lol) but that's it.
Disclaimer(s): I do not own, or pretend to own, One Piece or any of its subsequent characters, plots or other ideas. That right belongs solely to Eiichiro Oda. I do not own the prompts either—those are assigned by 30_OnePiece.
As soon as he heard they were landing on the island of Theaomai, Zoro couldn't shake the feeling of undisguised dread from the pit of his stomach. He'd heard stories about this place from his days as a so-called bounty hunter from other bounty hunters, and if any of them were even remotely true, he had a feeling he was rapidly going to come to hate the place.
Sadly, he soon discovered that very few of the rumors had been embellished. Theaomai, it seemed, was well known for two things: some of the most breathtaking theaters and skilled acting troops in the Grand Line, and its enormous bounty hunting districts. Zoro knew his crew well enough by now to know that entertainment plus potential danger would inevitably lead to trouble for them.
He was right about that too, of course. Unfortunately, nobody wanted to listen to him.
"Oh, come on, Zoro!" Nami said in frustration, glaring down at him with her hands on her hips. "The Lady of Dusk is supposed to be one of the most amazing plays written to date, and the playwright himself endorses the Scornstone Troupe here on this island as the best presenters of the play, ever!"
"I have heard it is so beautiful it makes even pirates shed tears," Brook added enthusiastically. "I myself would like to see it—the play was written long after I died. Though, of course as a skeleton I'll shed no tears myself, yohohoho!"
"I've never seen a play at all," Chopper joined in, eyes big and bright and voice pleading. "I really want to see what one is like!"
"Then go ahead," Zoro said in exasperation, and closed his eyes before Chopper's impending waterworks could really grab hold. "I'm not stopping you. I ain't getting dragged along to see some stupid play, though."
Nami scowled. "You know it's not that simple," she said. "This place is supposed to have tons of bounty hunters—especially hunting teams. That means it's dangerous for pirates. And I scrounged up a few rumors that some of the theaters are in on the hunting business—they draw pirates in with the promise of entertainment and food and drink and then catch them when their guards are down."
"Then don't go," Zoro countered, shaking his head in disgust. "That's the smart thing to do, right? 'Specially if you don't know what theaters are in on the hunter alliances." Honestly. This wasn't that hard to figure out.
Robin chuckled in amusement, and Nami threw up her hands in exasperation. "That's not the point, Zoro!" she growled. "All we need to do is just bring a bodyguard with us to keep watch while we watch the play!"
"Then take one of the others," Zoro said, with an idle hand-wave in Luffy's general direction.
"I would be happy to take the place of this moss-haired ingrate and protect wonderful Nami-san and Robin-chan!" Sanji offered enthusiastically. "I'll gladly sacrifice my entire day to bring you to as many theaters as you desire!"
"No," Nami said insistently. "We've only got a day on this island until the log pose resets, and I want all our food stores to be taken care of. We don't want to spend too long here if there's so many bounty hunters. Sanji-kun, you'll spend the day getting the ship's stores ready." The cook trilled in agreement, more than happy to do anything the witch desired.
Zoro rolled his eyes. "So take—"
"Luffy is not coming," Nami said. "Somebody has to watch the ship, and Luffy's got the attention span of a goldfish, anyway. I don't think he could sit still through a whole play." She snorted. "Besides, you're the fabled Demon of the East Blue. Having an ex-bounty hunter along is a great counter against a bounty hunting team. We'll be able to see The Lady of Dusk without any worries."
"I never called myself a bounty hunter," Zoro protested in exasperation. "And going to the theater is a damned waste of time. Besides, it's a shit play anyway—the swordplay sucks, and who the hell sings when they get stabbed, when they can just stab the guy back?"
There was a stunned silence as most of the crew stared at him in surprise. Robin chuckled slightly, placing fingers delicately to her lips. Zoro blinked and realized too late what he'd spouted in an unthinking moment of protest.
Shit. I did not just let on that I've already seen the fucking play, did I?
"Zoro," Nami finally said, shocked, "I had no idea you even knew how to do anything remotely sophisticated!"
"Hey!" Zoro protested automatically, and then felt like kicking himself a second later when he realized he was only digging himself deeper. "It's not like I wanted to," he added, a little sulkily. "It was Johnny and Yosaku's fault." Which it actually was. They'd gone through a phase years ago when they'd wanted to come to this very island, after hearing all the rumors, and figured "sophistication" was a part of the bounty hunter's mark. Zoro could've cared less, but those two could be obnoxious when they wanted to be, and hadn't let up until he'd joined them.
"Good," Nami said, looking suddenly triumphant. "Then my earlier argument still stands. You've had bounty hunting experience in a theater, as part of a bounty hunting group no less. That means you're coming to be our anti-bounty-hunting bodyguard. No buts!" she added, when Zoro started to squawk in indignation. "If you know how to be a sophisticate and you're used to the theater, you won't get distracted, and you are not allowed to get out of this. If you try, I'm fining you ten million beris!"
Zoro groaned in frustration, but when Nami started handing out her ridiculous charges to get her way, he knew he was sunk. He growled and swore and protested vehemently as Chopper and Brook cheered and Robin chuckled and Nami smugly told him to go put on something a little more acceptable for the theater, and made his extreme dislike for the situation very apparent. But there was nothing he could do to get out of it, and that was why an hour later he was sullenly trailing along behind the four, with nothing to look forward to but hours of torture in a cramped theater with crappy food and worse entertainment.
Great.
As it happened, the theater Nami led them to wasn't nearly so bad as the run-down place he'd been forced to attend back in the East Blue. This one was much larger, with a lot more space and way more elaborate decorations, like enormous crystals chandeliers and pricy-looking paintings on the walls. It was a wonder the place hadn't been looted by pirates yet—well, maybe not, Zoro reflected, considering the enormous community of bounty hunters on the island. Pirates were probably smart enough to lay low and not draw attention to themselves here, if they had to dock at all.
It was expensive as hell to get into, too, though considering the decor and the enormous crowd waiting to get in Zoro was hardly surprised by that. He was surprised by the fact that Nami generously paid for everyone's admission, even his own. He would have seriously started to consider if she was sick or not, except that Nami cheated her way out of paying for Chopper's ticket by claiming he was a child (and thus, free), and the deliberate money-related swindling put him at ease somewhat. It meant Chopper had to sit on his lap (in addition to being free, kids apparently didn't get seats), but all things considered his lap was a wonderful alternative to his head, Chopper's usual perch, so he didn't bother to complain.
There were concession stands as well, but since food wasn't allowed in the theater itself Nami insisted they'd be waiting until the intermission. Pity, really; Zoro could have done with a bottle or ten of booze to get through the whole damned ordeal. They filed into the theater and found their seats, and Zoro absently listened to Chopper's excited babble and Nami, Brook and Robin discussing the various rumors about the play while he waited for the large room to fill up with patrons. He didn't care one whit about the play starting—he was more interested in scanning their fellow theater-goers, to see if anybody looked suspicious or potentially threatening. Not that he particularly cared about Nami and the others getting to see the whole show uninterrupted, but anything was more entertaining than the play itself.
But he didn't see anything unusual, nor did he sense any malicious presences or intents. When the lights finally went down and the first of the actors stepped onto the stage Zoro deemed the place safe, at least for the moment. Figuring if some opportunistic bounty hunter tried to make a grab for his friends he had enough familiarity with the area now to sense it coming, the swordsman promptly went to sleep.
Or tried to, anyway. The theater was dark enough, the seats were definitely comfortable, and Chopper's weight on his lap was barely felt (but then, he was used to sleeping through snowstorms on a wooden deck, so anything was better than that, really). The environment wasn't the problem; his crew was.
Thoroughly excited about his first theater trip ever and anxious to make sure he understood everything, Chopper would frequently whisper questions to Zoro, asking about the characters' intents or what they meant by certain words or why some of them talked so funny. As if Zoro was supposed to have any answers. He'd barely understood the play the first time he saw it, and he wasn't paying attention now. He made up a few half-asleep responses whenever Chopper asked him something, and apparently these were satisfactory, because Chopper would quiet down for all of five minutes before something new caught his attention and the process started all over again.
At least his sleep-interruptions were non-aggressive. Every time Nami caught him falling asleep (or worse, heard him snoring), she'd punch him angrily in the shoulder and whisper warningly that bodyguards were supposed to stay awake and pay attention. Occasionally, when Nami was engrossed in the storyline, Robin would wake him with a few disembodied arms instead and give him an amused look. Thank goodness Brook, at least, kept to himself. His yohoho's of delight whenever a female actor stepped onstage were obnoxious, but something Zoro had long since learned to deal with.
So Zoro struggled through an entirely unrestful first hour of the play with nothing to show for it but a bruised shoulder, and by the time the first intermission rolled around he was almost wishing a bounty hunter would attack so he'd have something more interesting to do. Nami bought some sweets for Chopper and popcorn for the rest to enjoy, but denied Zoro his request for booze, insisting that bodyguards had to be sober and on their best behavior to earn anything (apparently she was still smarting about the sleeping thing).
Zoro was not impressed, and complained foully throughout the entire intermission. Nobody listened.
They filed back into the room with their seats when the intermission was over, and the second act was nearly the same as the first—for Zoro, at any rate. Based on Chopper's excited gasps and Brook's enthusiastic yohoho's he suspected something big had happened in the play, but Zoro himself couldn't care less. There were no hunter attacks, much to his disappointment, and another torture-filled hour passed with him still unable to get a single wink of sleep. That, and he had a severely bruised shoulder now (Nami apparently did not approve of snoring in the middle of key dialogue or whatever, but really, when did she ever need an excuse to hit him anyway).
Halfway through the third act Zoro was beginning to seriously consider getting up and leaving; nothing had happened, and any bounty hunter teams would have pretty much lost their chance by now. He tried to get up twice, and found himself suspiciously held in place by a number of arms that definitely didn't belong to the chair, although Robin appeared to be perfectly absorbed in the play. Thoroughly disgusted, Zoro resigned himself to having to sit through the whole damned thing, and decided that theatergoing ought to be registered as a legitimate form of torture.
The play was just getting around to its climax, a huge on-stage battle filled with pathetically fake-looking swordplay and way too much talking, when Zoro caught sight of the movement out of his peripheral. He kept facing forward like he was absorbed in the terrible choreography, but let his senses roam carefully to the left, and noted with interest that several of the theatergoers appeared to have been replaced in the third act. He had to admit it was clever—wait for the targets to get adjusted to the theater setting and drop their guards, and then swap out placeholders for bounty hunters. A relaxed, happy, and probably entirely drunk pirate would never notice the difference.
Zoro was not relaxed, happy, or drunk, and he had no intention of getting caught. In a theater no less. How terrible would that look in the newspapers? Pirate Hunter Zoro, captured by other pirate hunters at one of the sappiest plays in the history of ever. No, thank you.
Still pretending to be absorbed in the play, while in reality keeping an eye on the bounty hunters that were carefully and quietly beginning to leave their seats, Zoro elbowed Nami and said out the corner of his mouth, "We've got company."
"Now?" She hissed in frustration. "But we're at the best part! It just figures that they'd interrupt the big fight."
"You've been in plenty of big fights, you know how it'll end," Zoro growled back. "There's at least eight of them, maybe more, and they're sneaking up on us right now."
"Bounty hunters here are supposed to be quite skilled," Robin said quietly (Zoro didn't even begin to question how she'd heard the whispered conversation). "If we must fight, we don't want to do it here."
"Agreed," Nami said, "But let's try to leave subtly, like we're just going for snacks or something. Zoro, that means don't piss them off or challenge them to a duel or whatever."
Zoro scowled at her. "I'm not that stupid!"
"You never know. Let's go, hurry!"
Brook, at the end of their row, shuffled out first, somehow looking forlorn at the thought of having to leave the play before it was finished. Robin, Nami, and Chopper followed, with Zoro bringing up the rear, keeping an eye out for their pursuers. For a moment it looked as though they might actually escape without incident; the bounty hunters had spotted them leaving, but couldn't make a ruckus in the theater, and it seemed they hadn't expected the Straw Hats to notice them so early.
But then several more bounty hunters appeared in the doorway Brook was heading for, weapons bristling as they cut off potential escape. Brook backpedaled immediately and tried to lead them towards a second door, but this too was blocked off by hunters, and added to the ones behind them they were suddenly out of options for running.
"Crap!" Nami swore, and promptly turned on her heel, leading them in the only other available direction: towards the stage. The others followed, with Zoro bringing up the rear, drawing all three swords in preparation as the bounty hunters charged after them, shrieking for them to stop. Two got a little too close for their own good, and with several ringing steel clashes Zoro sent them sprawling in the aisle, forcing their companions to jump over them. The audience, startled by the swearing and the noises, turned to watch in confusion.
"Backstage should have exits, right?" Nami yelped back to her crew-mates, even as she reached under her skirt to retrieve the pieces of her Clima-Tact.
"They generally do," Robin called back, as she deftly cracked the backs of a few more charging bounty hunters with her extra arms. "The actors would need access without being viewed by the audience, after all."
"We're not supposed to go onstage, I thought!" Chopper squeaked frantically. "That's against the rules, it said on all the signs!"
"Too bad!" Nami called back. "We're pirates anyway, who cares about rules?"
"Amen to that," Zoro muttered under his breath. It was just too bad they couldn't have ignored the rules three hours ago.
They piled onto the stage, where the actors were, to their credit, still staging their mock battle to the best of their ability despite the unusual interference in the audience. Zoro ducked under the swing of an entirely fake, floppy prop sword from a surprised-looking man dressed all too awkwardly in tights, and followed after the others as they tried to shove their way through the crowd of false combatants. Unfortunately, the bounty hunters were a little too professional to let their prey escape that way, and leapt up onto the stage as well, blocking the left and right exits and ordering the actors to make themselves scarce immediately.
"It seems we must fight after all," Brook observed, as he calmly drew his own cane sword. "Alas, and we were having such a wonderful evening! The Lady of Dusk was such a wonderful sight for sore eyes—although I myself have none, yohohoho!"
"Just great," Nami complained, even as the tip of the Clima-Tact began to spark dangerously. "Something always gets in the way, doesn't it."
"I didn't know plays ended like this," Chopper observed meekly, as he shifted to his Heavy Point.
"They generally do not," Robin assured him, as she crossed her arms. "We are just unlucky, or possibly fortunate, that way."
Zoro would go with the latter, personally. This was the first great thing that had happened all night. He grinned nastily around the hilt of Wadou Ichimonji as the bounty hunters surrounded them and demanded they drop their weapons and submit quietly.
"Yeah, right," he answered them scathingly, and charged into battle.
Twenty unconscious bounty hunters and one raincloud-drenched slippery stage later, Zoro slipped his swords back into their sheathes with a feeling of extreme satisfaction. The fight had definitely taken the edge off of his otherwise terrible day, and it had been nice to let off a little energy by using it to beat the ever-loving crap out of people he didn't much like. The others had all come out of the fight unscathed as well, with Nami was still muttering irritably as she slipped the Clima-Tact away again and Chopper babbling excitedly about how the experience was nice and all, but he'd rather see a real play all the way through without a fight in the middle.
Zoro smirked in amusement at the smallest of the crew, and much to his surprise, heard a collective gasp in response. Blinking in confusion, he turned his head, and found several hundred people staring back at him, wide-eyed, slack-jawed, and all with identical expressions of shock on their faces.
Well, shit. In all the excitement of the fight he'd sort of forgotten that they'd plowed on-stage in the middle of the climactic moment of the show with their escape attempt. If Nami was pissed with it being interrupted for them, Zoro was sure these hundreds weren't too impressed with their interruption, either.
"Um," Zoro began, as the others slowly began to catch on, "I think we've got a problem h—"
The entire theater hall abruptly burst into cheering and screams of delight, and Zoro heard more than one voice calling for an encore, or for them to take a bow. He exchanged stunned glances with his crew mates, and even with a few of the actors that were still on-stage (the ones that hadn't been accidentally knocked out in the real fight anyway), but they seemed just as confused as he felt.
But the cheering continued, and buried in it Zoro could now also hear enthusiastic praise for the amazing special effects and stunt coordination. That was when it hit him: because they'd started the fight in the middle of a fake one on-stage, everyone in the audience thought their real fight was a part of the actual show.
The others seemed to be reaching the same conclusion as him now. Robin looked vaguely amused, Chopper had already been reduced to his usual blushing, swearing insistence that he was not happy, and Brook was in his element as a performer by providing sweeping, elegant bows with his little top-hat in one skeletal hand. Zoro just shook his head in exasperation. Really, what were the odds?
"At least they got a better fight scene than anyone else'll ever see again," he commented idly, as hooked an arm around Brook and Chopper and hauled them off backstage after a very insistent Nami and a still chuckling Robin.
Two hours later they were back on the open sea with the Sunny and the rest of the crew, Brook and Chopper enthusiastically sharing their theater-going tale with the occasional input from Nami and Robin. The others seemed thoroughly amused with the unusual turn such an innocent-looking pass-time had taken, and Luffy seemed especially disappointed that he'd missed fighting as part of a play.
"That's not even the best part," Nami said in amusement. "When we were leaving out the back door, the owner of the theater himself blocked our way. We figured he'd be furious, but it turns out he wanted to offer us jobs as actors for 'fictional combat.' Apparently our fight was real popular."
"Especially Zoro-san," Brook added cheerfully. "He thought the three-sword style would be extremely popular and bring in a number of viewers."
Zoro scowled in disgust at the memory all over again. As if he'd even consider stooping to the level of peddling santoryu for money. He was never setting foot in a theater ever again.
"He wasn't paying enough, or I'd have considered it," Nami added brightly. "But next time we're hurting for cash, I think I've got a great idea for ways to bring in a few beri." And she grinned rather greedily at the swords on Zoro's hip before glancing up at the swordsman himself. Zoro groaned, and mentally resigned himself to the street performing he'd inevitably be doing one day, if Nami's fines had anything to say about the matter.
Not the easiest prompt, but it came out okay I guess.
~VelkynKarma