Chapter 1: Forty-One Names
There's a chalkboard behind your bar with forty-one names on it, every one of them crossed out.
Pirates, mostly. A few marines on shore leave who thought the uniform made their livers stronger. One very large woman from the southern isles who lasted until the second hour of the morning and then fell asleep standing up, which you respect. Your grandmother started the board when she opened the Drowned Lantern, and when she died she left you three things: the brewhouse, the recipe for the house sake, and the chalk.
You have never once had to hand the chalk to someone else.
So when the door bangs open on a warm, wet night in the rainy season and a green-haired man with three swords at his hip walks in, looks straight at the board, and says, "Who's the champion?", you don't even look up from the cup you're drying.
"You're looking at her."
"Huh." He leans on the bar. Up close he's broad through the shoulders and narrow at the waist, with a long scar running down over his left eye, which stays closed. Three gold earrings in his left ear catch the lamplight. There's a green sash wrapped around his middle and a black bandana knotted around his bicep, and he smells like salt and steel and whatever cheap rum they keep on their ship. "You're smaller than I thought."
"You're stupider than I thought," you say pleasantly, "and I didn't think much."
Behind him, a redheaded woman in a very short skirt makes a sound like a delighted cat. There's a whole crowd of them filing in out of the rain: a blond man in a suit who immediately starts complimenting your bottles, a long-nosed man explaining to nobody that he once drank a sea king under the table, a small reindeer in a pink hat, and a lanky young man in a straw hat already asking if you have meat.
You know who they are. Everyone on Kurakaze knows who they are. Their faces have been papered across every noticeboard in the New World since Wano.
You also know exactly which one of them is staring at your chalkboard like it owes him money.
"Roronoa Zoro," you say.
"Yeah." He sounds faintly surprised to be recognized, which is funny for a man with a bounty north of a billion. "What's your house sake?"
"Kurakaze Black. My grandmother's recipe. Rice from the terraces, water from under the mountain, three years in cedar." You set the cup down. "It's not for amateurs."
"Good," he says. "Pour two."
The terms are settled by the redhead, whose name is Nami, and who, it becomes clear inside five minutes, has a gift for turning any situation into profit.
"If he wins," she says, "the crew drinks free for the whole time we're docked. If you win…" She looks at Zoro. "What's he putting up?"
"Whatever she wants," Zoro says, shrugging out of his coat.
Nami's eyes go round. "Don't say that, you idiot. She could ask for anything."
"She won't win."
You consider him. The arrogance is so total that it loops around and becomes almost charming, like watching a dog try to fight the tide. "If I win," you say, "you work my bar for a week. Apron and all. You fetch, you carry, you mop, and you smile at the customers."
The blond one, Sanji, wheezes so hard that the reindeer has to pat him on the back.
"Fine," Zoro says.
"And I get to write your name on the board."
That one gets him. His jaw tightens a fraction. His good eye narrows. "Fine."
The bar fills fast after that. Word of a contest moves through a port town like fire through dry thatch, and by the time you've set out the cups, there's a crowd three deep and Nami is taking side bets on a slate she must have produced from nowhere. Luffy, the captain, has climbed onto a rafter so he can see better and is eating a whole roast leg of something, cheering for both of you at once.
You pour.
Kurakaze Black goes down like cold silk and lands like a slap. It's a sake that makes grown sailors blink. Zoro drinks his first cup like water, sets it down, and taps the bar for another.
You match him.
The first hour is easy. The crowd talks. Usopp tells a story about a giant goldfish that nobody believes. Zoro doesn't say much, but he watches you over the rim of every cup, steady, unbothered, like he's taking your measure the way he'd take an opponent's, looking for the tell.
The second hour you start to talk, because you always start to talk in the second hour, and he starts to listen.
"Why sake?" he asks, out of nowhere, between the nineteenth cup and the twentieth.
"Why swords?"
"Because I made a promise." He says it simply, like the weather. There's a story under it, a big one, and you can see him decide not to tell it. "You?"
"Because my grandmother could drink an admiral under the table and she taught me everything she knew before she died," you say. "And because it's the only thing on this island that's mine. You want to know a secret?"
"No."
"I don't even like most sake. I like this sake. Mine. The rest of it tastes like apologies."
That surprises a laugh out of him. It's short and low, and the sound of it slides down your spine in a way that has nothing to do with alcohol. Several of his crew turn to look at him like they've never heard it before.
The third hour, the crowd starts to thin. People have work in the morning. Chopper falls asleep curled on a barstool. Luffy is snoring on the rafter.
The fourth hour, it's just you, him, Nami with her slate, and Robin, the tall dark-haired woman who's been reading a book in the corner all night and occasionally looking up to smile at nothing.
Zoro's cheeks have gone faintly red. That's the only sign. You can feel the heat in your own face, the loose, warm hum in your fingers, the way the edges of the lamps have gone soft.
"You're good," he admits, somewhere around cup forty.
"I know."
"Nobody's ever lasted this long."
"I could say the same."
He looks at you then, really looks, and the stare changes. You've been watched by a lot of drunk men across this bar. You know the difference between a man looking at a challenge and a man looking at a woman. This is, inexplicably, somehow, both.
You pour another round. Your hand is steady. Barely.
"If you need to stop," you say, "nobody will think less of you. Well. Nami will. But she seems to think less of you already."
"I do," Nami says, without looking up from her slate.
"I don't lose," Zoro says.
"Everyone loses eventually."
"Not me." He lifts the cup. His good eye holds yours. "Not to you, either. Not tonight."
You drink.
Dawn comes up grey through the shutters, and you are both still sitting, and the barrel is empty.
Nami stares at the slate for a long moment, then at the two of you, then at the dry tap, and announces with deep professional disgust: "It's a draw. A draw. Nobody planned for a draw. Do you know how much money I'm losing on a draw?"
"Not a draw," Zoro says. "We ran out."
"That's what a draw is, you moss-headed…"
"I've got another barrel in the brewhouse," you say.
Everyone looks at you.
Your heart is beating hard and slow. You don't know if it's the sake or the way he's still looking at you, like the contest hasn't ended for him either. "But it's dawn," you go on, "and I have a delivery at noon, and I'm not wasting another barrel of Black on a man who can't hold his liquor."
"I can hold my liquor."
"Then come back tonight and prove it."
"Fine."
"Fine."
Nami throws her hands up and goes to wake the reindeer.
You think that's the end of it. You lock up, sweep the floor half-heartedly, and walk back through the yard to the brewhouse where you sleep in the loft above the fermentation tubs, because the room upstairs over the bar is full of your grandmother's things and you've never been able to make it yours.
You're barely through the door when someone knocks on it.
It's Zoro. Of course it's Zoro. He's standing in the rain in your back courtyard with his swords at his hip and his coat over one shoulder and a look of faint, honest confusion on his face.
"Where's the harbor?" he asks.
You stare at him. "You walked out the front door of my bar twenty minutes ago."
"Yeah."
"The harbor is downhill. Everything on this island is downhill from the harbor. It's literally the lowest point."
"I went downhill."
"How did you end up behind my brewhouse?"
He frowns, as if it's an unreasonable question, as if the island has done this on purpose to inconvenience him. "Your streets move."
And you laugh. You can't help it. It's dawn and you're drunker than you've been in years and the most dangerous swordsman on the sea is standing in your courtyard, soaked to the skin, glaring at your cobbles like they've personally insulted his honor, and the laugh just comes out of you, loose and helpless.
He watches you laugh. Something in his face goes quiet.
"You're really something," he says. It's not a compliment, the way he says it. It's a statement of fact, like the time of day.
You stop laughing.
The rain patters on the courtyard stones. Neither of you moves. Then he takes a step forward, slowly, giving you every chance to step back, and you don't, and he's close enough now that you can see rainwater running down the scar over his eye, and feel the warmth coming off him even through the wet.
"I should go," he says, not going.
"You'll get lost," you say, and take a fistful of his shirt.
The first kiss tastes like Kurakaze Black. Cedar and rice and heat. He kisses like he fights, you'd guess, though you've never seen him fight: direct, no flourish, utterly committed. His hand comes up to the back of your neck, rough-palmed and calloused from a lifetime of hilts, and when you make a small, startled sound against his mouth he backs you into the brewhouse door with a slow, solid weight that makes your knees forget what they're for.
Your back hits the wood. His hips settle against yours. Rain runs off the eaves and down both your necks, and you don't care, and from the low sound he makes when your nails drag through the short hair at his nape, he doesn't either.
He pulls back first. Barely. His forehead rests against yours, his breathing rough.
"Tonight," he says.
"The rematch."
"Yeah." His good eye opens. It's very dark. "That too."
Then he lets you go, turns around, and walks confidently, decisively, in exactly the wrong direction.