Chapter Text
There are three kinds of secrets: the kind you keep to yourself, the kind you share with others, and the kind that are secrets even to oneself, buried and locked in the furthest recesses of the heart and mind.
Roronoa Zoro’s secrets are of the second variety. His first secret is where is sneaks off to each day, when he skips his lessons with the orphanage’s monks and returns with the sun setting on the horizon. Like clockwork, the shitty old monks beat his back until it burns like his fury, but like clockwork, he persists. Kuina and her father are worth it. But it’s not only them—it’s the art that they teach him, of wielding a blade like an extension of his body. The monks would disagree, Zoro knows. They wouldn’t understand that there is a beauty in violence, in precision and in restraint. They wouldn’t understand the pride that Zoro takes in each swing and strike, because they keep their noses glued to their boring psalms with text so small that it might as well be invisible. Zoro will continue to pass on that bullshit, thank you very much.
His second secret lies in the book he stole from Father Andrius’ personal stash of sinful belongings. Zoro will be the first to insist that reading is a ridiculous waste of time (particularly when one could be training instead), but this book is different. It is an intricate thing, its cover a web of gold leaf and ruby red and emerald green. It weaves the tale of a fantastic city, where the streets are paved with gold and whipped confections of unimaginable splendor sit ripe for the taking on every windowsill. Nobody goes hungry. Nobody is left unloved. These are, of course, ideas that Zoro will never admit to longing for. He has the stale and tasteless food that the monks give him, and he has Kuina. So of course, he has no need for feasts or a family to come home to.
(But still, the secret sits.)
Then, there is the part that captivates Zoro the most—the Tizerkane warriors. They’re fearsome fighters, made up of men (and women—Kuina loves that part) who train relentlessly to protect the city they hold dear. Zoro longs for many of the things that those warriors have: for their skill, their dedication, their comrades, and for their home. Because while Zoro has things to fight for, he is beginning to realize that he, selfishly, wants more.
The book is more of a fairytale than an encyclopedia, and as such mentions the warriors only in passing. Zoro thinks this fact is rather unfortunate. In this, he and Kuina agree.
His third secret is a bind forged in the light of a flickering torch, between shared drinks of sake and voiced by too-young lips. Zoro becomes Kuina’s brother, and she his sister, and he thinks that something has slipped into place, has become right.
Much like secrets, there are three kinds of dreams: the kind that is kept to yourself, the kind you share with others, and the kind that you’ve yet to discover.
Zoro’s dream may be a secret right now, held close to his chest, but he knows that it will not stay that way. He dreams of becoming the world’s greatest swordsman—although secretly, he concedes to himself that he would accept second place so long as Kuina was the one surpassing him. And, as a subset of that dream that he thinks of only in the dead of night, the part that he has hardly admitted to himself: much like the Tizerkane warriors, he dreams of something to protect.
And then, one day, Zoro finds himself in the apple orchard by the orphanage, swinging a sand-smoothed stick in each hand and a third in his mouth. The rain is pouring, drenching him to the bone. Zoro should be shivering from the aching chill, but he’s always run hot, warming himself with the heat of his body and his conviction. He is drilling movements instilled in him by his Sensei—which can be a bit boring, much as he recognizes their importance. But though it makes his training less meditative, it certainly doesn’t hurt when he imagines fearsome beasts hailing from the lost city’s barren surroundings. He thinks of worm-like creatures with gaping, needle-ridden maws, and venomous snakes lying in silent wait beneath a shifting sea of sand. He cuts them down, one after another, his blood singing in that way that he has come to love. He will reach that city someday, and fight them in reality. He will find the city of—
Its name isn’t there. In its place, a filthy, warping thing, a name that is hardly even a name. Weep.
Zoro doesn’t notice that he spoke the word aloud until he feels its overly cloying taste on his tongue, choking out of his mouth like bile. That’s not its name, he knows. Weep. Weep. Weep.
The name does not reappear. He can feel the hole where it once was in his mind, and the patchwork filling that this corrupted word is.
”Shit. Fuck.” If the monks heard him, they would wash his mouth out with lye. Zoro thinks—maybe that would wash out the taste of the word. He shudders, dropping his sticks and to his knees. He feels like he will be sick. He wishes he would be.
Kuina. He needs her, and her levelheaded reasoning. He’ll go and see her first thing in the morning, and then everything will better. She will make everything better.
In the morning, Kuina is gone. Slipped, in the rain.
A grieving Sensei offers her sword to him, and he takes it, hands clinging to its sheath as if he were clinging to Kuina herself. He visits her grave, the last place he stops before he leaves this godforsaken orphanage. It’s simple, but pristine. It feels a little too perfect to belong to Kuina, but Zoro needs to set that aside for a moment.
“Kuina,” he starts, feeling a lump form in his throat. “Sensei—I mean, your dad gave me your sword. I like to think you would have wanted me to have it, in the end, but I don’t know. Shit,” he curses, eyes wet. “The city I told you about—the city with the warriors. Its name is gone, just like you are, and I don’t know what to do. I think I still want to find it, but I don’t want to do it without you. I don’t want to do anything without you.”
A breeze rolls through the grass, softly caressing Zoro’s hair and cheeks. It feels like a familiar touch, and his eyes well up all over again. Go, it seems to say. Live for us both.
Sanji had spent the first eight years of his life sustaining himself on dreams. He spends the next eleven with secrets, heavy and dark but much lighter than they were when he lived them. The Before is a time that Sanji seldom dwells on, only in the nightmares that haunt his evenings and the spiraling panics that haunt his days. It is the After that is important, at least to Sanji. And it begins, like a story ought to, with a boy, a bird, and a feeling.
The day that Sanji falls from the sky is the day that he develops his first taste of hope—sweet and light, like a delicacy that Sanji himself has never tasted. Then, perhaps predictably, he is met with a familiar dose of overwhelming despair. It is a bitter thing, drying his mouth in a cruel mockery of the land he has just escaped from.
The bird had been carrying him, and then it was gone—whisked away like a mist, leaving behind only the faint remnant of sweet perfume. Sanji plummets from the sky, high, high, high and then he hits the water, a dreadful, loathsome blue. Sanji cannot swim. He had no need to learn, where he had lived, and no one would have taught him even if there was a need. Luckily (and what a word that is—luck), there is a piece of driftwood, and he clings to it. He clings to it until the sea begins to whip itself up into a frenzy, and then there is a ship arcing over the horizon, and Sanji feels hope.
Much like the ship, that hope is dashed to pieces against the jagged corners of a rock. Sanji feels himself deposited upon its sun-warmed top, gray and shivering, and it is there that he has his first encounter with Zeff.
Until this point, Sanji’s experience with people had been…lacking. The strange man (whose name he has yet to learn) is large (familiar), domineering (also familiar), and angry (all too familiar). He throws a small sack of food at Sanji, hording the larger for himself, and Sanji wishes the sting of sadness would start to numb. He should be used to it by now, after all.
The sadness starts to matter less when the pangs of hunger take over, and Sanji begins to question if he had every truly known torment before then. (The answer is yes, yes he had). He reaches a point where even a rock-solid and moldy piece of bread is a delicacy, and he wonders—is it still worth it to live? It feels like an imposition, to continue lapping at rainwater and scouring for scraps when there is another man on this rock who deserves it more than Sanji ever will. In desperation, he pulls himself to the other end of the rock, and it is there in the man’s bloody stump of a leg that he feels a foreign feeling that he can’t quite put a name to. It isn’t horror, or fear, because those are familiar. He had felt love, scant though it had been, and this wasn’t quite the same, either. It is a sacrifice, he realizes, one without the foundation of family and affection. It is done without expectation of reciprocation, and Sanji doesn’t know what to do with the overwhelming feelings of sorrow and grief. Is this, he wonders, what a father is supposed to do?
How fitting, Sanji supposes, that the first measly piece of affection that he receives from a man is so violent. It is, after all, the only language that Sanji has ever known, tempered by scant words of affection that he had begun to think were imagined. When a ship finally happens upon them, Sanji’s malnourished body can hardly keep up with his desperation. He and the old man (Zeff, he finally learns) are brought aboard, and Sanji learns what hope truly tastes like—it is the sharp scent of antiseptic for wounds, and the warm glow of mild broth for his shrunken stomach. Sanji learns that it is the best taste in the world.
It is only later, when Sanji and the geezer are left alone in the ship’s infirmary, that Sanji discovers the hole in his heart where a name used to be. “Where are you from, you little brat?” he had asked. And though Sanji harbored no intention of telling him the truth, he thinks it, and it is gone.
The tears begin to fall, and it feels apt. “I don’t think it has a name anymore,” he says, and it is just a little bit of a lie. Weep is its name now, and so he does.