Chapter 3: The Way Back
"Left!" you shouted.
Zoro went right.
Of course he went right. He went right like a cannonball, straight into the first three bounty hunters as they burst from the tree line, and you saw the moon flash on steel three times in less than a second, and then the three bounty hunters were lying in the leaves with their weapons in pieces and their clothes neatly sliced to ribbons, and Zoro was already turning to the next ones.
"Your other left!" you yelled.
"That's what I did!"
"That's not even possible!"
The big one with the net came at him from behind. You opened your mouth to shout a warning, and Zoro, without turning around, put Kitetsu behind his own back and the net fell apart in four pieces around him like wet paper. The big man stared at the useless rope in his hands. Zoro looked at him over his shoulder.
"Go home," said Zoro, around the sword in his teeth.
The big man went home. Very fast. Crashing back through the maples and screaming for his mother.
That left four. They'd been smarter than the others, which was not hard. They'd spread out in a ring around the clearing with rifles, and one of them, a skinny man with a mustache and a very nice hat, had his barrel pointed straight at you.
"Drop the swords, Pirate Hunter," he said, "or your lady friend gets..."
You threw a bottle of ink at his face.
It was the good ink. Nami was going to kill you. It broke on the bridge of his nose and turned the whole top half of his head midnight blue, and he screamed and fired straight up into the air, and in the second that every one of his friends looked at him, Zoro moved.
You'd seen him fight before. In Wano you'd seen him from a distance, across burning rooftops, a green blur cutting through things the size of buildings. You'd never seen him this close. It wasn't graceful the way the old swordsman's prints in Robin's books were graceful. It was more like weather. Like a squall coming across open water, gone before you could brace for it.
"Santoryu," you heard him say, very low. "Oni Giri."
There was a sound like a sail tearing. When the wind settled, four rifles lay in the leaves, cut cleanly in half. Four bounty hunters were sitting on the ground in a daze, unhurt, staring at the stumps of their guns. Zoro straightened up, took the sword out of his mouth, and sheathed all three, one after the other, click, click, click.
"Amateurs," he said, sounding deeply disappointed, and turned to you.
You were standing on the boulder with your arm still raised from the throw, your second ink bottle clutched in the other hand, and his green robe hanging off one of your shoulders.
He looked at you for a long moment. Something moved over his face.
"You threw ink at him," he said.
"He was going to shoot me."
"You threw ink at a man with a gun."
"It was all I had!"
Zoro looked at the blue-faced man, moaning in the leaves. He looked back at you. And then, for the second time that night, Roronoa Zoro laughed, a real one, head back, loud enough to echo off the trees.
"Okay," he said, still grinning. "Which way, navigator?"
This was the thing about the moss. It wasn't a trick. It was the oldest thing your father ever taught you, sitting on the rocks under the lighthouse with a dead crab and a stick, drawing lines in the wet sand. In the northern seas the sun comes from the south, so the north side of anything stays wet and shady, and that's the side the moss loves. Your Log Pose had needles that could be pulled. Your compass had a needle that could be fooled. The moss couldn't. It didn't care about lodestone. It only cared about sunlight, and the sun went the same way it always did.
So you walked, and Zoro followed you.
You walked north through the maple forest by moonlight, keeping the sea on your right. Every few minutes you put your hand on a tree trunk and felt for the soft cold cushion of moss and corrected your course. When the forest got too thick to see the sea, you climbed a boulder and found the moon and checked it against the time on your watch. When you came to a stream, you followed it downhill, because water knows where the sea is even when people don't.
Zoro didn't argue once. That was how you knew he'd been listening, back at the fire.
"Why north?" he asked, at one point, ducking under a low branch.
"Because Nami's not stupid. Something made her move the ship. Probably a tide warning, the harbor's shallow and the Sunny's heavy. The closest deep anchorage on the coast is a cove on the north tip. I saw it this morning from the crow's nest." You glanced back. "If she moved it, she moved it there."
"You saw a cove this morning, and you still remember it?"
"It's my job to remember coves."
"Huh." He was quiet for a few steps. Then: "Mine's to remember fights. I remember all of them. Every one." Another pause. "I don't remember roads."
"I noticed."
"Doesn't feel like a bad trade, though." He said it to the back of your head, like it cost him something. "You remember roads. I remember fights. Between us, we get there."
You didn't turn around. You were afraid of what your face might be doing.
The sky was going gray at the edges when the trees opened up at last, and there it was below you: a narrow crescent of beach, a deep blue cove, and riding at anchor in the middle of it, its lion figurehead gleaming in the first faint light, the Thousand Sunny.
You stopped on the hillside above it and just looked. You couldn't help it. The lawn deck. The crow's nest where you'd sat with your sketchbook yesterday morning, a hundred years ago. A lantern glowing in the galley window, which meant Sanji was awake, which meant breakfast. Your whole body went loose with relief.
"Told you," Zoro said beside you. "We got there."
"You told me nothing. You told me north was up."
"Still got there."
You turned to him to say something cutting, and found him closer than you'd thought. He was standing a little behind your shoulder, one hand resting on Wado Ichimonji's hilt, looking down at you instead of at the ship. There were maple leaves stuck in his hair again. There was a long scratch on his arm from a branch and ink on his knuckles where he'd caught your arm on the boulder. He looked tired and rumpled and more awake than you'd ever seen him.
"You can have your robe back," you said, starting to pull it off your shoulders. Your voice came out odd.
"Keep it."
"Zoro, it's yours. You've had it since Wano."
"I know." He didn't take it. Instead he reached out, almost carefully, like he wasn't used to doing anything carefully with his hands that didn't involve a blade, and tugged the collar of it back up around your neck where it had slipped. His knuckles brushed your jaw. They were very warm. "It looks better on you."
You had nothing to say to that. Absolutely nothing. You, who had a smart answer for Nami and Sanji and Luffy and every merchant on the Grand Line, stood on a hillside in the dawn and could not think of one word.
"I wasn't lost," Zoro said.
"You were extremely lost."
"I wasn't lost," he said again, stubborn, and then he scowled, at himself or the ground or the whole situation. "Okay. I was lost. The tree moved."
"The tree didn't move."
"The tree moved, and I was lost." He looked at you, and his one open eye was dark gray in this light, and steady, and a little bit scared, which you had never seen on him before, not in front of a Yonko, not in front of anything. "But I didn't mind. Being lost. With you. That's the stupid part."
The wind came up off the cove and rattled through the maples, and a hundred red leaves came loose and spun down around the two of you.
"That's not stupid," you said quietly.
"It's a little stupid."
"Okay, it's a little stupid." You were smiling. You couldn't stop. "I didn't mind either."
He looked at you for a long moment, the way you'd seen him look at an opponent before a fight, measuring the distance. Then he closed it.
He kissed you the way he did everything, straight on and without hesitation, one hand still on his sword and the other coming up to the back of your neck. It was brief and warm and tasted like maple sake. And then, when you grabbed the front of his sash and pulled him back down, not brief at all. Somewhere far away, a gull cried. The leaves kept falling. You forgot about the ship entirely.
When you finally came apart, his forehead was resting against yours, and he was breathing like he'd just fought eight bounty hunters, which, to be fair, he had.
"So," you said.
"So."
"Does that come out of my pay?"
He started to laugh, and from the deck of the Thousand Sunny, very loud and very clear, a voice carried up the hillside on the morning wind.
"THERE you are! Do you two have ANY idea what time it is?"
Nami was standing at the rail with her arms crossed and her Clima-Tact in one hand and her Log Pose gleaming on her wrist. Behind her, Sanji had come out of the galley in his apron with a ladle in his hand, and he was staring up the hill at the two of you, at Zoro's hand still on the back of your neck, at the green robe around your shoulders. His cigarette fell out of his mouth.
"MARIMO," Sanji howled. "I'M GOING TO KILL YOU."
"Try it, curly-brow."
"Both of you," Nami called up, "are docked a week's pay! Each! And you owe me a bottle of ink!"
"How does she know about the ink?" Zoro muttered.
"She always knows," you said, and took his hand, and led him down the hill toward home. He let you lead.
He didn't take a single wrong turn.