Chapter 2: Not a Rematch
Gorran's men come at the sixth bell, the way they do every other week, and they come early, which means somebody told them the Lantern had a big night.
You're behind the bar slicing limes when the door opens and the room goes quiet the way rooms only go quiet for one kind of trouble. Three of them. Big, bored, wearing the cheap red armbands that pass for a uniform among the kind of men who collect "harbor fees" on islands too small for the Marines to bother with. The one in front is Dask, who has a broken nose you gave him two seasons ago and has never forgiven you for it.
"Busy night last night," Dask says, leaning on your bar. "Heard you had pirates in."
"I have pirates in every night. It's a port."
"Heard you had a billion-berry pirate in." He smiles. He's missing a tooth there too. "That's a lot of trade. Gorran figures the fee goes up."
Across the room, slumped in the corner booth with his boots up on the table and his swords propped against the wall, Roronoa Zoro is asleep.
He's been asleep for an hour. He turned up at the fifth bell, ate an entire plate of pickled radish, told you the rematch would have to wait until he'd had a nap, and was snoring inside two minutes. You found it, against every instinct you have, unbearably endearing. You're less charmed now.
"The fee is the fee," you tell Dask. "Same as always. Same as my grandmother paid, even though she hated your boss's guts."
"Your grandmother's dead."
"I'm aware."
"Gorran says three times the usual."
There's a cudgel under the bar. Oak, iron-banded, your grandmother's. It has opinions. You put down the lime knife and wrap your hand around the cudgel's grip, out of sight, and smile back at Dask with every one of your teeth.
"Tell Gorran," you say, "that if he wants to renegotiate, he can come down here and drink for it. Like a man."
Dask's face shuts. Behind him, one of his boys slides a short sword out of its sheath, slow and showy, the way men do when they've never actually had to use one.
What happens next happens very fast.
You come over the bar with the cudgel. You've done this before. Dask goes down with a crack across the forearm, howling, and the second one stumbles back into a table. But the third one, the one with the short sword, is quicker than he looks, and he's already swinging for you, and you know with sudden, horrible clarity that you're not going to get the cudgel up in time.
Steel rings.
The short sword stops an inch from your shoulder. Not because the man has changed his mind. Because there's a blade under it. White hilt, plain guard, a straight clean edge that catches the lamplight like water. You follow the blade up to the hand, up the arm, to Zoro, standing beside you in his socks with sleep still creasing one side of his face.
You didn't hear him move. You didn't see him wake up.
"Oi," he says to the man with the short sword. He sounds mildly annoyed, like someone has stepped on his foot. "She's busy. She owes me a rematch."
The man looks at the sword. Looks at the face. The color drains out of him so fast it's almost funny. "You're…"
"Yeah." Zoro flicks his wrist, barely, and the short sword is suddenly not in the man's hand anymore but quivering in your ceiling beam. "Get out."
They get out. Dask goes last, clutching his arm, shooting you a look over his shoulder that promises he'll be back with more friends. The door bangs shut behind them.
The bar is silent. Then old Fenno, at the end of the counter, who has been drinking here since before you were born, lifts his mug and says, "Well. That was worth the price of admission."
The room laughs. Somebody starts clapping. You're still holding the cudgel. Your hands have started to shake, a fine tremor you can't stop, and Zoro looks down at them, then up at your face, and slides the sword back into its sheath with a quiet click.
"You alright?" he says.
"I had it."
"You had it," he agrees, without even pretending to mean it.
"I had most of it."
"You had two out of three." He tilts his head. "That's good. For someone who isn't a swordsman."
"Is that supposed to be a compliment?"
"Yeah."
"It was terrible."
"I'm not good at those."
You laugh, and it comes out shakier than you'd like. He hears it. He doesn't say anything. He just reaches past you and takes the cudgel out of your hand, gently, and sets it back on the bar, and then he leaves his hand there, over yours, heavy and warm and steady as the island's bedrock until the shaking stops.
The rematch does not happen.
You close early. You tell the regulars it's because of the trouble, and they nod and grumble and go. You tell Zoro to wait in the brewhouse while you lock up, and he goes without arguing, which should have been your first clue that neither of you is thinking about sake.
When you open the brewhouse door, he's standing between the cedar tubs with his swords leaning against the wall and his coat thrown over a sack of rice, looking at the place like it's a temple. The air in here is warm and close and smells of yeast and wood and the sweet fog of fermenting rice. Lanterns throw amber light up the curved staves.
"This is where you make it," he says.
"This is where I make it."
"It smells good."
"It smells like rice going bad on purpose," you say, and shut the door behind you, and lean against it. Your heart is going like a drum. "Zoro."
He turns.
"Thank you," you say. "For earlier. I mean it. I know I said I had it."
"You did say that."
"I didn't have it."
"I know." He crosses the floor toward you. He's not in any hurry. He moves like he moves everywhere, unhurried and absolutely certain, like the ground will arrange itself under his feet. "I wasn't going to let him touch you."
"Because I owe you a rematch."
"Yeah." He stops in front of you, close enough that you have to tip your head back to keep looking at him. His good eye is dark and steady. "That's the reason."
"Liar," you say softly.
And he kisses you.
It's nothing like the kiss in the rain. That one was drunk and startled and sweet. This one is slow, deliberate, deep, like he's been thinking about it for a whole day and has decided exactly how he wants it. His hand slides into your hair and tilts your head where he wants it, and his mouth opens yours, and when you make a sound against his lips he answers with a low hum you feel all the way down to the soles of your feet.
You pull at his sash. It's wrapped about four times and knotted in a way that's clearly designed to defeat enemies, and you make a frustrated noise, and he laughs into your mouth and does it himself, one-handed, without looking. His shirt goes next. Your hands find his chest, broad and hard and crossed by a great pale scar that runs from shoulder to hip, and you trace it, slowly, and feel him shudder.
"Hawk-Eyes," he says, before you can ask. "Long time ago."
"Did you win?"
"Not yet."
You kiss the top of the scar, just below his collarbone. His breath goes out of him like he's been hit.
He lifts you onto the edge of the brewing table like you weigh nothing, and maybe to him you don't, and the cedar is cool through your skirt and his hands are hot on your thighs, pushing the fabric up. He doesn't rush. That's the thing that undoes you. A man who fights the way he's said to fight should be all impatience, but he takes his time, like this is something he wants to learn properly. He works the laces of your blouse open with his rough fingers and kisses down your throat, along your collarbone, over the swell of your breast, and when his mouth closes around your nipple through the thin cotton of your shift you grab the edge of the table so hard your knuckles ache.
"Tell me if you want me to stop," he says against your skin, his voice gone rough.
"If you stop," you say, "I'll put your name on the board."
He laughs, a short helpless sound, and then he pulls your shift over your head, and he stops laughing.
He looks at you for a long moment in the lantern light. Just looks. Nobody has ever looked at you like that, like you're a sword he's been told about his whole life and never thought he'd hold.
"Zoro," you say, and your voice cracks on it.
He sinks to his knees on the brewhouse floor.
You've had lovers before. A sailor or two, a fisherman's son when you were twenty who was sweet and clumsy and apologized afterward. None of them prepared you for the focused, absolute attention of a man who has trained his whole life to master one thing at a time, and has decided, tonight, that the thing is you. He opens you with his fingers and his mouth, slow at first, reading every catch of your breath and every tightening of your thighs on either side of his head like a fighter reading a stance, adjusting, pressing, until you're arching off the table with one hand fisted in his short green hair and the other slapped flat against a cedar barrel stave for balance.
When you come it's with his name cracking out of your throat, loud enough to rattle the lids on the tubs, and he doesn't stop until you're shaking and pushing at his head because it's too much.
He stands. His mouth is wet. He looks smug about it in a way you'll make him pay for later.
"Your trousers," you manage. "Off. Now."
"Bossy."
"I'm the champion."
"Co-champion," he says, but he does what he's told.
He's hard and thick and flushed, and when you wrap your hand around him he swears, a short, filthy word, and drops his forehead to your shoulder. You stroke him slowly, learning him, feeling the way his hips jerk and his breath stutters, and it's a heady thing, having the most dangerous man you've ever met braced against you with his hands shaking on your hips.
"Please," you say. "Zoro. Now."
He pulls you to the edge of the table and pushes into you in one long, slow stroke that steals every thought you have. For a moment he doesn't move. His good eye is closed, his jaw locked, his whole body trembling with the effort of holding still while you adjust to the stretch of him.
"Okay?" he grits.
You wrap your legs around his waist and pull him deeper. "Move."
He moves.
It's not gentle, once it starts, and you don't want it to be. He drives into you with long, deep, relentless strokes, and the brewing table creaks under you, and the cedar lids rattle, and you cling to his shoulders and meet him thrust for thrust with your heels digging into the small of his back. He kisses you through it, messy and open-mouthed. He murmurs things against your neck, rough and half-formed, your name, a curse, "so good, you're so good, fuck." When you come again it catches you by surprise, a long, rolling clench that makes you cry out against his throat, and he follows you over with a groan torn up from somewhere deep in his chest, his hips stuttering, his arms locked around you so tight you can barely breathe.
For a long time afterward you just stay like that, tangled together on the table in the warm amber dark, both of you breathing hard. The rice ferments quietly around you. Somewhere outside, a gull cries.
"That," Zoro says finally, into your hair, "was not a rematch."
"No."
"We should do the rematch."
"Tomorrow," you say, and he makes a satisfied grunt.
Someone pounds on the brewhouse door at dawn.
You jerk awake in the loft, where the two of you ended up somewhere around the third time, tangled in your blankets with his arm thrown heavily over your waist. Zoro is already awake, already reaching across you for the nearest sword, already sitting up with every muscle gone still.
"Zoro!" It's Nami's voice, sharp with panic. "Zoro, are you in there? I swear, if you're in there…"
"I'm here," he calls back.
There's a short, loaded silence on the other side of the door.
"I'm not even going to ask," Nami says. "Listen. Your little friends came back. They brought their boss. And they brought a Marine captain from the base on the next island, and a lot of very big guns. They're down at the harbor right now, and they're saying the Lantern was harboring pirates." A pause. "They're saying they're going to burn it."