Chapter 3: The Last Cask
You go down to the harbor with your grandmother's cudgel in one hand and your boots unlaced.
Zoro tries to stop you exactly once. He plants himself in the brewhouse doorway, three swords at his hip, and says, "Stay here," in the voice that presumably makes grown men drop their weapons and swim for it.
"It's my bar," you say.
"They've got guns."
"It's my bar, Zoro."
He looks at you for a long moment. Then he steps aside. "Stay behind me."
"No promises."
"Tch," he says, which you're learning is his whole vocabulary for "I respect you and I hate it."
The harbor is full.
Not just with Gorran and his red armbands, though they're there, fifteen or twenty of them lined up along the quay with cutlasses and a few rusted flintlocks. Not just with the Marines, though there are a dozen of those too, in crisp white, standing behind a captain with a thin moustache and the expression of a man who has been promised an easy promotion. The harbor is full of people. Your people. Fenno from the end of the bar. The rice-terrace farmers who sell you their harvest. The fishwives, the dockhands, the woman who mends nets, the cooper's whole family. They've come out of their houses at dawn in nightshirts and work clothes, and they're standing in a loose, muttering crowd between the Marines and the street that leads up to the Lantern.
Gorran sees you and smiles. He's a heavy man with rings on every finger and a coat that cost more than your roof.
"There she is," he calls. "The pirate's whore."
The crowd mutters louder. Beside you, very quietly, Zoro puts his thumb against the guard of the black-hilted sword at his hip and pushes it a half-inch out of its sheath.
"Not yet," you murmur.
"He called you…"
"I heard. Not yet."
You step forward, out from behind him, which he'll complain about later. You walk right up to the line where the crowd meets the Marines, and you look at the captain, and not at Gorran at all.
"Captain," you say. "Do you know whose bar you're threatening?"
He blinks. "I'm told it harbors known pirates."
"It's a port bar. Every bar in the New World harbors known pirates. Including the one on your base, I'd bet." There's a ripple of laughter in the crowd. "My grandmother built the Drowned Lantern. She paid Gorran's fee every season for thirty years, and so have I, and he has never once lifted a finger to protect this harbor from anything. Not storms, not raiders, not the time the sea king took out the north pier." You point back at the crowd. "These people did that. And these people drink at my bar. So if you want to burn it, you're going to have to go through them first. And then you're going to have to explain to your admiral why you opened fire on a town full of civilians on the say-so of a racketeer with rings on every finger."
The captain looks at the crowd. The crowd looks back. Fenno spits on the cobbles.
Gorran's smile has gone sour. "She's stalling. Captain, that man is Roronoa Zoro. He's worth more than your whole base."
The captain's eyes go to Zoro, and you watch the greed kindle in them. Oh, you think. Oh, no.
"Take him," the captain says.
The Marines raise their rifles.
And Zoro sighs, the long-suffering sigh of a man who has been asked to do a small chore before breakfast, and steps in front of you, and draws.
You've heard the stories. Everybody in the New World has heard the stories. You still aren't ready. He takes the white-hilted sword in his teeth and the other two in his hands, and for a moment he just stands there, perfectly still, and the air around him seems to tighten. Then he moves.
"Santoryu," he says around the hilt. "Oni Giri."
You don't see the cut. Nobody does. There's a flash and a sound like a great bell rung underwater, and then every rifle on the quay falls apart in its owner's hands, barrels sliced clean through, stocks dropping in halves onto the cobbles. The Marines stare at their empty hands. Behind them, the mast of the captain's sloop slowly tilts sideways and topples into the harbor with an enormous splash.
Zoro is standing exactly where he was, three swords sheathed, looking bored.
"Next one's not the guns," he says.
The Marines run. The captain runs with them, shouting about reports and reinforcements, and Gorran's men scatter after him like rats off a sinking hull, and Gorran himself turns to bolt and finds you in his way.
You swing the cudgel.
It catches him across the knee with a satisfying crunch, and he goes down onto the cobbles with a howl, clutching his leg, and the crowd closes around him, and it's over.
Behind you, somebody whistles. You turn. The rest of the Straw Hats are sitting on a stack of crates at the end of the quay. Sanji is smoking. Robin is smiling. Luffy is eating an apple and grinning so wide it looks like it hurts.
"That was so cool!" he shouts. "Both of you! Do it again!"
Zoro looks at you. You look at Zoro. Your hands are shaking again, and you're breathing hard, and you have absolutely no idea what your face is doing.
"Not a swordsman," he says. "But not bad."
The log pose sets tomorrow at noon. Nami tells you this that evening in the bar, sitting on a stool while she counts a truly obscene stack of berries she apparently made betting on the harbor fight. She tells you casually, without looking at you, like it's just weather, and you nod and say "Safe travels," and go on wiping the counter, and she watches you for a moment over her money with a look you can't read.
You close early again. You don't tell Zoro where you're going.
He finds you anyway, which is astonishing, given the harbor incident and the brewhouse incident and the time this afternoon he tried to walk from the bar to the outhouse and ended up at the cooper's.
You're on the roof. Not the brewhouse roof. The roof of the Lantern itself, above your grandmother's room, where she used to sit on summer nights with her pipe and her feet hanging over the gutter. You have a cask between your knees. It's small, black with age, sealed with wax and stamped with a character you've been afraid to touch since the day she died.
He climbs up and sits beside you, his legs dangling next to yours, and looks at the cask.
"Last one she made," you say. "I've never opened it. I was saving it."
"For what?"
"I don't know. A wedding, maybe. Mine. Or a funeral. Also mine." You laugh a little. "Or a rematch. I think she'd have liked you. She'd have hated you on sight, but she'd have liked you."
You crack the seal.
It's the best sake you've ever tasted. Older and deeper than the Black you make, with something under the cedar like smoke and plums. You pour two cups. You drink them slowly. Nobody counts.
"I've never drawn before," Zoro says, after a while, staring out at the harbor where the Sunny bobs at anchor with her lion's head lit up gold. "Not once. Not with anyone. I win or I lose. Losing makes me stronger. Winning means I was strong enough." He turns the cup in his fingers. "I didn't know what to do with a draw."
"And now?"
He turns his head. His good eye catches the moonlight. "I liked it."
You set down your cup.
You kiss him on your grandmother's roof, under a sky full of stars, with the taste of her last sake on both your mouths, and this time it isn't hungry or desperate. It's slow. It's a question and an answer at once. When he pulls back, you take his hand and lead him through the window into the room you've never once slept in since the funeral, with her shawls still folded on the chest and her pipe on the windowsill, and you open the shutters to let the moon in, and you make it yours.
You undress him by moonlight. Slowly, this time. You want to see all of him. The great scar across his chest, and the smaller ones, nicks and slashes and one ugly puckered mark on his side that he says came from "a guy with six arms," as if that's an explanation. The scars around both ankles that he looks away from when you touch them and doesn't explain at all. You kiss every one you can find, and he lies back on your grandmother's old quilt and lets you, his breathing growing ragged, his big hands fisting in the blanket.
When you finally climb astride him, he grabs your hips and holds you there for a moment, just looking up at you.
"You're really something," he says again.
"You said that."
"Still true."
You sink down onto him, slowly, inch by inch, and watch his face as you do. His good eye falls shut. His head tips back. A long, low groan comes out of him, raw and unguarded, a sound you're fairly sure no enemy he's ever faced has heard. You start to move, and he lets you, his hands sliding up your waist to your breasts and back down again, guiding but never pushing, until neither of you can stand it, and he sits up and wraps his arms around you and holds you against his chest and moves with you, deep and slow, his mouth at your ear.
There's nothing between you. No bet, no rivalry, no board, no chalk. Just the heat of him under you and inside you, and the moon through the shutters, and his voice rough at your ear saying your name like it's a technique he's going to practice until he's perfect at it. It builds slow and deep and enormous, and when it breaks you hold onto each other so tightly that the old bed frame creaks, and you feel him come apart with you, shuddering, his face pressed into your neck.
Afterward he lies with his head on your stomach, your fingers combing through his hair, and is quiet for so long that you think he's fallen asleep.
"I'm going to be the greatest swordsman in the world," he says.
"I know."
"It might take a while."
"I know that too."
"When I am," he says, and sits up, and reaches for his left ear. He unhooks one of the three gold earrings and holds it out to you on his palm. "I'll come back. And we'll settle it."
You stare at the little gold drop. Your throat has closed up entirely.
"You'll get lost," you manage.
"Probably." He takes your hand and presses the earring into it and closes your fingers over it. "I'll still get here."
You don't sleep much. Neither does he. The window goes grey, then gold, and you're lying tangled together with the earring warm in your fist when someone pounds on the bar's front door so hard the whole building shakes.
"Hey!" Luffy's voice, impossibly loud for the hour. "Hey! Sake lady! Are you in there?"
Zoro groans and pulls the quilt over his head.
You wrap yourself in your grandmother's shawl and stumble to the window and lean out. Luffy is standing in the street, straw hat pushed back, beaming up at you like the sun has come out just for him. Behind him, Nami has her face in her hands.
"We're leaving at noon!" Luffy shouts. "Sanji says your sake is the best he's ever had! Nami says you made her a lot of money! Zoro says you're scary, which is good!"
"I never said that," comes a muffled voice from under the quilt.
"So I decided," Luffy goes on, cheerful and absolutely certain, "you should come with us! Be our brewer! Join my crew!"