Chapter 2: Moss Grows North
Here is what you knew, sitting on a cliff in the dark with Roronoa Zoro and two jugs of maple sake:
One. The Thousand Sunny was not in the bay where you had left it.
Two. Nobody on the Thousand Sunny would leave without the two of you, because Luffy didn't leave anybody behind, ever, not even when it would have been smarter. You'd seen him go back for people into situations that should have killed him. You'd seen him go back for Zoro specifically about nine times.
Three. Therefore the ship had moved for a reason, and was somewhere else on this island, and you just had to figure out where.
Four. You could not see the rest of the coastline from here, because it was dark, and there was no moon yet, and your Log Pose was still spinning like a top.
Five. Zoro had built a fire.
That last one surprised you. You'd been sitting on the edge of the cliff with your knees pulled up, staring at the empty bay and doing increasingly desperate math, and when you turned around he'd gathered a pile of dead maple branches and dry leaves in a hollow between two rocks, and struck a spark off Kitetsu's guard with a piece of flint from his sash, and now there was a small bright fire crackling in the dark.
"You know how to make a fire," you said.
"I was lost a lot. Before." He fed it another branch. "Before the crew. I was a bounty hunter for a while. In the East Blue."
"I know. 'Pirate Hunter Zoro.' Nami told me." You came and sat across the fire from him, holding your cold hands out to it. "She said you were trying to find a man named Mihawk and kept ending up in the wrong sea."
"Never ended up in the wrong sea."
"She said you couldn't find your way back to your own village, so you started hunting pirates for money to eat."
Zoro scowled at the fire. "She talks too much."
"She charges me a thousand berries per story."
"She charges you for that?"
"She charges me for everything. She charged me for the lesson on how to read a weather vane. It's a pointy arrow. It points." You opened Sanji's box lunch. Inside, arranged with a lot of love, were rice balls shaped like little stars, slices of grilled fish, pickled plum and a tiny heart-shaped tamagoyaki. You held the box out across the fire. "Here."
"Cook said not to share."
"The cook isn't here."
He looked at the box for a second, then took a rice ball. Then another. You split the fish. You let him have the pickled plum because you'd seen him eat them off Sanji's plate when he thought nobody was looking. You kept the heart-shaped egg, because even you had limits.
Somewhere in the forest behind you, something large hooted. The fire popped. Out over the dark sea, the first stars were coming out.
It got cold fast after that. Autumn island cold, sharp and clean, sliding in off the water. You'd come into town dressed for a sunny afternoon errand, in your light coat with the patched elbows, and by the time the fire burned down to coals you were shivering so hard your teeth clacked.
"Here." Something heavy and warm landed on you. You looked down. It was his robe, the dark green one he'd worn out of Wano, still warm from his body. Underneath it he had on only his sash and his haramaki and about an acre of scar tissue, including the long one across his chest that you'd heard Mihawk had given him, back when he was just a stupid swordsman in a rowboat.
"You'll freeze," you said.
"I don't get cold."
"Everyone gets cold."
"I trained in the snow." He sat back down on his side of the fire, arms crossed. "Wear it."
You put it on. It came down past your knees and smelled like steel polish and sake and something underneath that was just him. You pulled it close around you and tried not to think about that too hard.
"Why'd you join?" Zoro asked.
You looked up. He wasn't looking at you. He was looking at the coals.
It was, you were fairly sure, the first personal question he had asked you in a year.
"My father kept a lighthouse," you said. "On a rock in the West Blue. There was nothing else out there, just the light and the gulls and ships going by. I used to sit on the gallery all night and watch them and try to guess where they were going. I'd draw maps of places I'd never seen from what the sailors said when they came ashore for water. Most of the maps were wrong. I didn't care." You pulled your knees up inside his robe. "When I was twenty I stowed away on a merchant ship. Ended up on Fishman Island, broke, with no way home and a sketchbook full of wrong maps. And then this ridiculous ship with a lion on the front showed up, and their navigator saw what I was drawing and said, 'These are terrible. Who taught you?' And I said nobody. And she said, 'That's going to cost you.'"
That got him. The corner of his mouth went up, actually up this time.
"Sounds like her," he said.
"She's teaching me the currents of the New World. Nobody's ever charted all of them. They change. They move. I want to be the first." You shrugged inside the robe. "Nami wants to draw a map of the whole world. I want to draw the part that won't sit still."
Zoro was quiet for a while. The fire ticked. You thought maybe that was the end of it, and you didn't mind. It was more than you'd ever gotten.
Then he said, "I made a promise to someone. That I'd be the greatest swordsman in the world. For both of us."
You held very still.
"She's dead," Zoro said. "A long time now. I don't talk about it." He looked down at Wado Ichimonji, lying across his knees, and his thumb moved once along the white-wrapped hilt. "But it's why I don't lose. Why I can't."
You wanted to ask a hundred things. You didn't ask any of them. Instead you said, "You're losing to a forest right now."
He looked up at you, startled. Then he laughed. It was short and rough and caught him by surprise, a real laugh, the first one you'd ever gotten out of him that wasn't at somebody's expense. It changed his whole face. You felt it somewhere under your ribs, like a missed step on a staircase.
"Shut up," he said, still grinning. "I'm not losing. I'm taking the long way."
"You're always taking the long way."
"Gets me there, doesn't it?"
"Not on time."
"Never said on time."
You must have dozed. When you opened your eyes, the fire was nearly out, and the moon had risen, huge and orange over the sea, and Zoro was sitting with his back against a rock a foot away from you, Enma unsheathed across his lap, wide awake.
"Don't move," he said, very softly.
You didn't move.
"There's eight of them," he said. "In the trees. Behind you. They've been there for ten minutes."
You stopped breathing.
"Bounty hunters," Zoro said. "I can smell the gun oil. Amateurs. They've been arguing about who gets the head." He sounded almost bored. "There's a big one with a net. He thinks he's being quiet."
"What do we do?"
"I cut them. You hide." He tilted his head slightly. "Then you get us to the ship."
"I don't know where the ship is!"
"Yeah, you do."
"Zoro, my Log Pose is spinning, my compass is pointing at a mountain, I have no idea where..."
"You figured out the downhill thing." He finally turned his head and looked at you, and in the moonlight his one open eye was dark and steady and completely sure. "You'll figure out the rest. I'll handle them." A beat. "Navigator."
From the trees behind you, a voice yelled, "RORONOA ZORO! OVER A BILLION BERRIES, DEAD OR ALIVE! SURRENDER AND WE'LL LET YOUR LADY FRIEND GO!"
"Wow," you said. "They don't even want a bounty on me."
"Insulting," Zoro agreed.
Then he put Wado Ichimonji between his teeth, stood up in one smooth motion with a sword in each hand and the moon behind him, and you looked past him, out across the bright water, at the dark shoulder of the island curving away to the north.
The moon was rising over the sea. The sea was east. Which meant the coast that curved away on your left went north. And on the side of the boulder you'd been sleeping against, in the moonlight, there was a thick soft cushion of green moss.
Growing on one side only.
"Oh," you whispered. "Oh, you beautiful idiot."
Zoro, sword in his teeth, said something around it that sounded a lot like "Which way?"
And behind you, eight bounty hunters came crashing out of the trees.