Chapter Text
Mihawk likes to dress him in fine things.
It started innocuously enough – Zoro arrived at Kuraigana with nothing more than the clothes on his back, his three blades, and a shit ton of barely-healed, nearly-fatal wounds. Mihawk seemed to find the wounds and the swords equally fascinating. Meanwhile, the tattered red and white striped shirt Zoro was wearing was held in rather more disdain.
He'd peeled it from Zoro’s torso, holding it at arms length between his index finger and thumb as if the aesthetic might be catching, and dropped it unceremoniously onto the stone floor before examining Zoro’s body in minute detail, cataloguing every injury (both old and new) and carefully dabbing a painful astringent onto any place where the skin was broken with a clean, square, folded piece of cloth.
It took a long time. And if Zoro hadn't been so shell-shocked after the events of the last few days – hell, the last few weeks really – perhaps he would've protested a bit more about being fussed over like some sort of invalid. But as it was, he'd found himself spacing out instead, going foggy and distant with the rhythm of it, the strange set of contrasts: the small, repeated stings of the antiseptic, the gentleness of Mihawk's questing fingers, the coolness of his touch on Zoro’s fevered skin, the way Zoro couldn't remember anyone ever touching him with such clinical tenderness, even as a child. The vivid awareness that this was a man who could end Zoro’s life on a whim, one of a vanishingly few people in the entire world he'd think twice about taking on, one of the only people to have ever beaten him. It muddled his brain somehow, made him vague and useless. So that when Mihawk was finally done, all Zoro’s hurts cleaned and cosseted as much as Mihawk desired, it took a while for Zoro to even realise it.
To realise that Mihawk had stopped the first aid song and dance and was now simply petting the long, raised line of the scar he'd gifted him with, back in the East Blue, and watching him with that maddening, idle expression of curiosity on his face, as if Zoro was an especially fascinating zoo animal.
Afterwards he took off the shirt that hung from his own shoulders like a fall of white water and put it onto Zoro, loosely covering his heavily scarred torso with silk still warm from the heat of his body.
Zoro had never worn anything so richly made before in his life. It smelled of Mihawk, of sandalwood and jasmine and the subtle, masculine scent of the man’s body, his heat, his sweat. He’d found himself stroking the open front of it with his thumb, back and forth against that almost-impossible softness, his heavy mind unable to even comprehend it. Mihawk's amber eyes tracked the movement like a predator tracking the nervous twitching of its prey.
“I'll ruin this,” Zoro warned him. He was too big, too clumsy, too covered in open wounds for something so fine.
“But you'll look exquisite doing it,” Mihawk replied. He stood and gathered the few medical supplies he'd brought with him to the room he'd put Zoro in. “Rest. You'll need to recover your strength before your training begins in earnest.”
And with that, he was gone. Gliding like a ghost out into the hallway and off to wherever it was that he himself slept, silver-footed and unhurried.
Meanwhile Zoro lay awake all night long, bleeding into the expensive silk and hearing that one word, exquisite, echo in the dark halls of his mind.
In the morning his old striped shirt was nowhere to be found, so he went down to breakfast still in Mihawk's bloody silk. Perona hid her giggles behind a lace-gloved hand, while Mihawk lounged at the head of the long, ornate mahogany dining table and stared right through him, so that every step Zoro took towards the place laid out for him at that table was painfully exposed. Almost worse than wearing nothing at all.
“You've stained Daddy's shirt,” Perona pointed out, extending her fork towards his chest as he sat down as if to illustrate the point.
“I've asked you repeatedly not to call me that,” Mihawk remarked, in the weary tone of someone who doesn't expect this time to make a jot of difference.
“I'm injured. I can't just decide not to bleed,” Zoro groused. “Besides, I told him I'd ruin it and he put it on me anyway.”
Perona’s heavily made up, eerily round eyes blinked. The blackness of her lashes made them look like startled spiders. “He put it on you?” She tittered again, that ridiculous laugh. “How… intimate!”
Beyond the tall windows that spanned the full length of the far wall, it was raining. Zoro would come to learn that it rained often at Kuraigana; that it was rare for the sun to muscle its way through the heavy cloud the island wore like a mourning veil; that when he was dripping with bloody rain water and sweat after hours of sparring against those damned creatures, Mihawk would lead him silently back indoors and strip the sodden hakama from his body, tend to his injuries just as he had that first night, and re-dress him again in the warlord's own clothing every time.
He didn't know, yet, that the smell of sandalwood and jasmine would become as familiar to him as the scent of his own body after a good fight. That he would wear the second hand fragrance of it like a woman might wear a silk slip - like he wears Mihawk's scar, and his clothes, and his attention.
No. All he knew, in that moment at the breakfast table, was the sound of Perona’s laughter, the weight of the white shirt on his shoulders, and the sharp twin points of Mihawk's yellow eyes fixed on him as he ate and bled under their scrutiny.
Mihawk let him keep the stained shirt. For a week, Zoro fought and slept and sweated in it. And when the sign came from Luffy that they were to stay put for longer than expected – for two years longer than expected – Mihawk set Zoro up with a routine of strength training, drills and sparring practice that would've been punishing even if he wasn't still severely injured, warned him and Perona to behave themselves, then disappeared for seven days.
Zoro did more than double the amount of training he'd been set during that week, and didn't let himself think about why.
He didn’t think about how, by the time they next met, their little crew would have spent more time apart than they had spent together. He didn’t think about Luffy, his captain, the man he had pledged his life and his loyalty to, alone after his brother’s horrific death in his arms, or how he was, even now, training and improving and growing stronger without Zoro. Didn’t let himself remember how it had felt to be helpless to protect them, any of them, in the face of Bartholomew Kuma’s power at Sabaody. Or how even Mihawk had left him, now, hadn’t wanted to be around him, hadn’t even told him where he was going, or when he would return.
He didn’t let himself sleep. Hadn’t he wasted enough time?
When Mihawk returned at dusk on the seventh day it was to a Zoro half-dead from exhaustion, delirious with the infection that had settled into his newly reopened wounds, stitches burst and the white silk shirt unwashed, now almost entirely crimson.
Zoro, for his part, had simply assumed he was seeing things again, and so didn't pause in the series of deadlifts he was slowly, agonisingly working his way through when he saw his mentor walk through the door, gliding near-silently into the stone walled basement room Zoro had taken over for his weights.
Mihawk stood and watched him, impassive, thoughtful, holding eye contact as Zoro lifted and grunted and trembled and lifted, until the fever finally got the better of him and he collapsed with the iron weight still in his hands. The last thing he remembered hearing before unconsciousness took him was the heavy clang of it hitting the bare floor, and the soft, half-imagined murmur, “Oh, Rabbit,” that Mihawk uttered as he fell.
When he opens his eyes he’s back in his room off the east corridor; the one with the heavy, moth-eaten curtains over window glass threaded through with elaborate silver gridwork, and a faded carpet spanning the cold stone floor that must, at one point, have been beautifully made, and the four poster bed that Zoro is now laid out on like a damn corpse.
Mihawk’s sitting in a high backed velvet armchair by the window, reading a newspaper. He looks real – but they all have, at least briefly, the apparitions the fever has haunted him with over the past few days. The light coming in from outside is so grey and diffuse Zoro can’t tell if it’s evening or morning. It was evening when he collapsed, he’s pretty sure, but his internal clock is all fucked to hell by this damn fever. He squints at what he can see of the front cover of the paper, trying to work out if there’s any mention of Luffy.
Mihawk’s as poker-faced as ever. If anything in the news surprises him, he doesn’t show it. He looks exactly as he had a week ago, when he left. If anything of note happened while he was out there in the world, away from the foggy cocoon of Kuraigana, it has left no sign on his face or mark on his body.
Zoro cautiously flexes his muscles in groups, trying to work out where his body is the most damaged and whether he can get away with trying to sit up without pulling any more stitches. His fever seems better. He’s not sure if Mihawk gave him some kind of medicine while he was asleep, or if it’s just that his presence is enough to scare off any enemy, even a bacterial one. Zoro honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it was the latter.
“If you keep insisting on injuring yourself, Roronoa,” Mihawk comments, idly, his gaze never leaving the newspaper as he turns over a fresh page, “then I shall be forced to take matters into my own hands.” His voice is as rich and plummy as the wine Zoro’s been pilfering from the castle cellars. A man could get drunk on that voice.
“You’re real,” Zoro replies, and the words come out as a rusty croak.
Mihawk raises an eyebrow. “You expected otherwise?”
“Thought it might’ve been the fever playing tricks on me again.”
“I see.” Mihawk folds the newspaper and sets it in his lap. “And did your overheated mind conjure the image of me often over the past few days?”
Zoro feels himself blushing and turns to scowl at the post on the far side of the bed. Anything so he doesn’t have to see that infuriating look Mihawk gets whenever Zoro does something that amuses him. Anything rather than admit that, yes, he’d dreamed of Mihawk in the worst throes of the fever; and of Kuina, and Luffy, and even the damned cook – the blood in his yellow hair and the long line of his back as he’d stood between Zoro and Kuma at Thriller Bark – and every time it had been painful to come back to lucidity and realise he was alone.
“Fascinating,” he hears Mihawk say.
Zoro hunches his shoulders. “Where did you go, anyway?”
There’s a pause, during which Zoro isn’t sure if Mihawk is actually going to answer. Then: “Half Moon Island,” he says. “It’s not far from here.”
“Never heard of it,” Zoro grunts, dismayed to hear the petulance in his own voice, as if he resents the stupid island for taking Mihawk's attention away from him.
“It boasts the distinction of being the only island in this godforsaken part of the Grand Line with a passable tailor’s shop.”
Zoro’s turning back to face him before he can help himself. “You were gone for a week… clothes shopping?”
Mihawk rolls his eyes. “Hardly. I had a small business matter to take care of–”
“What business?”
“–and I simply took advantage of the fact that the matter in question happened to be in close proximity to a somewhat acceptable tailor.” He nods at a stack of slender, rectangular boxes on the dressing table opposite the bed, piled carefully in front of the cracked mirror. “You're welcome.”
“You got clothes for me?”
“I’m sorry, did you intend to wear nothing but my ruined shirt for the duration of your stay here?”
Zoro’s smart enough not to walk into that one, at least. “What did you get for me?” He shifts on the bed as if to get up, then winces at the visceral pull of the new stitches that have appeared in his body since his collapse, replacing the old ones he’d broken while training.
Mihawk lifts an imperious hand, and Zoro stills under the unspoken command of it. “Do not get up, problem child,” he cautions. “You’re to stay in that bed another twelve hours at least.”
Twelve hours. Ugh. Zoro can already feel his muscles wasting.
“Or what?”
Mihawk gives him an unimpressed look. It’s an intimidating thing, being caught in the crosshairs of those unusual eyes. “Or I will tie you down to the bed frame and force you to rest.”
The hairs on the back of Zoro’s neck prickle. He tells himself it's his body warning him of danger, and tries not to imagine how it would feel; Mihawk's hands on him, his rope on him, tying knots with all the skill of a man who has spent his life on the sea.
Zoro eyes the packages on the dresser wistfully, but he knows better than to disobey his mentor’s instruction – and after all, he’s nothing if not well practiced in wanting things he isn’t allowed to have.
“Patience,” Mihawk tells him, and his voice is more soothing than it has any right to be. “You'll get what you want soon enough.”
Zoro isn't sure whether they're still talking about the clothes.
By all rights it should take a fortnight to recover from the fever. Zoro’s up on his feet again after the twelve hours he'd promised Mihawk, as soon as the grandfather clock in the hall begins its soft chime.
It's early. Not long after what passes for dawn on Kuraigana, pale and insipid.
Mihawk's not here. He fucked off after Zoro fell asleep again (stupid, weak) but Zoro’s not waiting a moment longer than he promised. He holds tight to one of the four posters of the bed and drags himself to his feet with nothing but a bitten-back moan at the pain in his gut, and the unsettling feeling of his insides rearranging themselves, trying not to fall out through the new stitches.
He's naked. And he's never given a shit about who sees his body and what they think of it, but the cool air of the castle hitting his tender, injured, over-sensitised skin has him shivering, thinking of Mihawk stripping him, peeling his own filthy, blood-drenched shirt from Zoro’s body and tutting at the mess. He wonders if it made him frustrated, seeing his expensive silk shirt wrecked like that. He wishes he'd been awake for it; though the thought of Mihawk's hands on him while he was out cold, manhandling him, tending to him, makes him feel hotter and dizzier than the fever did.
He makes his shaky way to the dressing table, unsteady as a newborn foal, and carefully lifts the lid from one of the boxes. His fingers linger on the softness inside – Zoro has never touched anything so soft in all his cursed life – and he brings one of the expensive little bundles of fabric to his face.
Breathes in deep.
The shirt smells new, and clean. And vaguely, ever so vaguely, of Mihawk's sandalwood.
Zoro feels something in him settle.
He takes the shirt back to bed, buries his face in it and breathes that vague, familiar scent until he falls asleep again.
Later, he finds Mihawk in the garden.
He's sat by an ornate wrought iron table under a pergola, sipping from a small porcelain tea cup, a pair of soiled gardening gloves discarded on the table beside him. It's the first time Zoro’s seen him drink anything other than wine.
There are three roses in a slim vase on the table, deep red against green, the heads of the flowers wide open and sugary sweet smelling.
“Ah, you're wearing them,” Mihawk says, with the very smallest nod of approval.
And Zoro feels heat flare on his cheeks. “You didn’t need to get stuff this fancy.” His throat still feels sandpaper-rough from the fever, his voice coming out all tattered and low.
“And let you wander around my home in rags? I think not.” Mihawk’s lower lip juts out minutely, a plush, dusky pink – the only visible sign of his displeasure.
“Why not? Not like it makes a difference to you.”
He turns his head to look fully at Zoro, at that. Runs his eyes over him in a way that feels like a physical touch; makes Zoro’s spine go liquid and loose, makes him feel the ache of every one of his stitches.
Then he strokes the slim, almost translucent white handle of his porcelain teacup with one elegant finger. “I enjoy finely made, aesthetically pleasing things as much as any man,” he says, in a tone that sounds like he's bored, and Zoro can’t follow what he means by it. Or work out why it makes him blush deeper. “I won't see them wasted, or kept in ill-repair. Do you understand me, Roronoa?”
“No,” Zoro replies, bluntly.
“Well. You’re quite welcome to go naked, if you prefer,” Mihawk says, mildly, and sips at his tea.
Zoro feels himself blush, and it makes him angry with himself, angry with his body that he still can’t control it the way he needs to. “Fine, I'll wear the damn clothes. It's your money, waste it if you want.”
“You’re welcome.” Mihawk’s eyes are laughing at him over the rim of the teacup. It makes Zoro burn with frustration. He watches him set the damned thing down with a muted clink. “How are your injuries faring?”
“They’re fine.”
A raised eyebrow. “That seems highly unlikely.” He beckons imperiously with two fingers. “Come here, let me look at you.”
Zoro wants to resist whatever it is that tugs in his gut, pulling him relentlessly towards that obnoxious summons. But he can’t. He’s spent more than half his life so far moving towards this man like a lodestone. How can he resist, now? His traitorous feet take him across the few steps between them, and then Mihawk is taking him firmly by the hips and tugging him the rest of the way, positioning Zoro between himself and the table.
He doesn’t stand up from the wrought iron chair. This puts his face directly at Zoro’s chest height, his hands still tight on Zoro’s hips, and that’s… kind of a lot to take in. He’s perfunctory, though, when he unbuttons the new shirt and gently pushes it apart to give him an unobstructed view of the heavily bandaged torso beneath. His fingers brush Zoro’s bandaged skin incidentally, a barely-there moment of contact.
Zoro thinks he might never be able to breathe normally again.
The silk shirt he’s wearing is similar in style to the one Mihawk put on him when he first arrived, the one Zoro bled through – only that one was the colour of milk, while this one is a deep green, many shades darker than Zoro’s hair. The trousers, meanwhile, are made out of something slippery-soft and black, laced at the waist and loose in the leg before tapering in at the ankle again so they won't trip him up when he's fighting.
There's a woven sash tied around his waist. It's an impossibly pale, textured green, this time much lighter than his hair, and it’s sturdy enough to carry his swords, and Zoro can’t stop touching it, fiddling at the upper edge of it with his fingertips, feeling how the tightly wrapped, inflexible length of cloth confines him, holds him fast, like a man's greedy arms around his middle.
Mihawk runs a finger down the layered white of the bandages, like he did with the fragile handle of the teacup. “Hmm,” he says, consideringly, and his eyes never leave Zoro’s body. “You’ve not bled through this time, at least. That’s promising.”
“I told you,” Zoro says, and he hardly recognises his own voice from how breathy it suddenly sounds. “I’m fine.”
Mihawk gives him a sceptical look. “That remains to be seen.” He deftly finds the tucked-in end of the bandage and starts to unwind it, slowly baring Zoro’s skin. His nimble fingers remind Zoro of the cook’s, the way they dance over the chopping board whenever he’s slicing shit wickedly fine.
Zoro’s skin, he knows, is a fucking mess under the bandages. The swelling’s mostly gone, but he’s livid with bruising and there are deep lacerations all over his torso, originally stitched by Chopper and then re-stitched by Mihawk when Zoro burst them all open again. None of them are as long or deep, as permanent or defining, as the cut Mihawk gifted him on the dock of the Baratie. Instead they’re just a messy spatter on his body, ugly and meaningless.
Mihawk fingers the edges of them curiously. His touch is so gentle it hurts. Zoro doesn’t know what it means, his fascination with Zoro’s wounds and scars, the way he can’t seem to stop petting them. “You never told me exactly how you became so badly injured,” he says. And Zoro can hear how carefully he’s not actually asking. “When I first marked you out for future greatness, I believe my instructions to you were to become stronger. Not to destroy yourself in as many pointless skirmishes as possible.”
Zoro’s teeth clench. He can’t quite speak; the words keep swimming away from him. Mihawk’s hands are still stroking him so confusingly gently, and his head is suddenly full of Batholomew Kuma and the deal he’d made with Zoro, back at Thriller Bark – trading Luffy’s life for Zoro’s torture. Transferring Luffy’s agony to him, so he could bear it instead.
It had seemed fitting, at the time. It’s what he was born for, after all; for loyalty, for pain. If he couldn’t do this for Luffy, then what was the use of him?
He’s always been an act of violence, a blunt force. He’s good for nothing else. He knows this.
But Mihawk is touching him like fine porcelain, delicate and worshipful, and Zoro doesn’t know what to do with that. Doesn’t know how to slot it into his mind alongside all the hurt he’s been carrying.
“Have you never had a captain?” he manages to grit out, eventually.
Mihawk’s head tips to one side, like a bird of prey. “So this is his responsibility?” he says, instead of answering the damn question. “Interesting.” He picks over that one word like a vulture picking over bone.
“No!” Zoro has no fucking idea how or why Dracule Mihawk has developed this, this weird territorial thing over him, but he knows that he can’t, won’t, let him blame Luffy for what Kuma did. “I made the deal, it was my choice. Luffy was out cold, he still doesn’t even know about it.”
“I see. So in other words, he was incapable of protecting you from it.”
Zoro snarls, his devotion to his captain capable of burning through even the heavy fog in his brain, the overwhelming confusion of Mihawk’s tender petting at his painful wounds. “It’s my job.”
“To suffer for him?”
Zoro wouldn’t phrase it exactly like that. But fuck it. “Yes,” he replies, and his breath catches in his throat. Just for a moment, Mihawk’s touch hardens. Turns into something almost cruel, almost punishing. Zoro can’t help the bitten back whimper, can’t help arching his back ever so slightly, closing his eyes, pushing his hurts harder into Mihawk’s hands.
Mihawk sighs. His hands gentle again, he thumbs the long diagonal of the scar he put on Zoro’s torso. “What am I going to do with you?” he asks.
And Zoro has no answer for him.
*
When Perona sees him walking along the hall that evening towards the dining room she laughs that stupid, annoying, loud laugh of hers over and over, until he threatens to behead her favourite weird teddy bear with his katana.
“Aw, don't be grumpy,” she says. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“Shut up. You didn’t.”
She ignores him. As usual. “You actually look very nice in your new things. For you.”
Zoro bares his teeth and growls. She isn't scared off; she keeps floating along behind him like an obnoxious pink and black rain cloud.
“Daddy has a good eye for menswear. Though I still think he should have put you in a dress – it would've been so cute!” She sighs, as if she considers herself very hard done by. “Still, this isn't bad. Much better than what you were wearing when you arrived.” She titters again. “Not that it could get much worse.”
“I mean it, Perona. I will cut open Mr Fuzzmodeus the Defiler from ear to fluffy ear.”
“Ugh, you're such a brute.”
The thing that really pisses him off is that he knows she's right. He's never looked so good in his life as he does in these clothes, even with the injuries marring him. Never had anything anywhere near this expensive against his skin.
He’s left the shirt open since earlier, when Mihawk decided he didn’t need to keep the bandages on any longer and dismissed him. Open right down to his navel, where the sash is tied. The deep vee of it frames Mihawk's scar in a way that seems intentionally designed to draw the eye.
Zoro sees Mihawk's eyes linger on it at dinner that night, and he thinks they look hungry despite the food. Possessive in a way that should piss him off, but instead only makes him feel… oddly proud.
Perona and Mihawk dress for dinner every evening, putting on fancy clothes that look no different, to Zoro, than the other fancy clothes they wear all day. They've done it tonight; Perona’s wearing some fluffy black and pink monstrosity of a dress, while Mihawk has on yet another of his milk coloured silk shirts, one with a fall of ruffles along the vee of the neck, and an ornately embroidered black waistcoat that nips his impossible waist in so tight Zoro wants to punch something.
He wonders if Mihawk still has the shirt Zoro spent the last week bleeding through, or if he's disposed of it. Thrown it out, or burnt it, or fed it to the fucking humandrills.
Zoro tells himself he doesn’t care either way. He shifts in his chair, the cool air makes the healing wounds itch.
Mihawk stares at him openly throughout the meal, and drinks more wine than Zoro’s ever seen him put away at a time before. Meanwhile Perona giggles daintily into her napkin every ten damn seconds, and outside the long wall of windows the rain begins all over again with a soft, distant groan of thunder.
“You're not eating, Rabbit.”
Zoro doesn’t know when he stopped objecting to that nickname. He lets his fork clatter down onto the plate. He'd not been doing much with it anyway except pushing morsels of exceptionally rare steak around.
“I'm not hungry.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I'm not lying, I'm just not fucking hungry.”
Perona’s big, fathomless eyes flick back and forth between them, the smirk on her face barely hidden by her napkin.
Mihawk's eyes narrow.
“Fine,” he declares, after a tense silence, and tosses his immaculate napkin – the same milk white as his shirt – onto the table. He stands. “If you're not hungry, we clearly haven't done enough to work up your appetite. Come, Rabbit.” And he sweeps his black cloak onto his shoulders and strides from the room without once looking back to see if Zoro’s following him.
Zoro follows him.
*
The thing is, he's gotten used to having other people around him basically all the time.
It hadn’t always been like that. He was alone for a long time, all through those years when he was pirate hunting and searching for Mihawk. People called him a demon, back then, and treated him accordingly; no one would go near him, not even the marines who paid him his bounties. And before that he was very nearly alone – back at the dojo, training had been his life. Nothing else had existed, no one else had existed, after Kuina.
But then there was Luffy.
Luffy who made himself Zoro’s captain and wouldn’t let him turn it down. Who touched Zoro easy as breathing, manhandled him, who touched him like he wasn’t afraid of Zoro, casual and warm, a warm hand squeezing the back of his neck, or his chin tucked over Zoro’s shoulder to see what he was doing, or slingshotting his skinny, rubbery body directly into Zoro from the other side of the room just cos he'd noticed him standing there and wanted to come say hi.
And Nami. Who mocked him and took his money, and leant shoulder to shoulder with him against the mast after a couple of drinks, the two of them chatting bitchy nonsense for hours. Who would stroke her quick fingers through his hair on the rare occasions he'd drunk enough to be maudlin and sleepy, his head in her lap, and listen to him drunkenly complain about how hard it was to get laid on a ship with no other gay dudes.
And Usopp, who would fully climb Zoro like he was a tree just to get a better view, or hide behind him from enemy fire.
And the cook, who would spar with him whenever, wherever, matching him barb for barb, blow for blow. Fuck.
Sometimes Zoro feels like he only knows who he really is when he's fighting. He needs the sheer physicality of it, of slamming his body into the brick wall of someone else's body, hurting and being hurt, being taught the shape of himself by the outline that an opponent leaves around him, and for months now Sanji’s been that for him on the days when he’s needed it.
How is he supposed to go without it for two years?
Mihawk’s been refusing to fight him since he arrived here, not letting him fight even the humandrills until his injuries heal up. Zoro wants to fight him, god, he’s wished for it, begged for it. Laid in his dusty old four poster bed at night thinking about it, imagining Mihawk driving Yoru's thick blade all the way into him in one firm, ecstatic thrust. It's been weeks, now, and he's going out of his damned mind, dysregulated and touch starved, not even able to meditate any more.
Maybe that's why he's been such a little bitch lately, pushing at Mihawk's buttons, pushing himself until he collapses from it, making that Mihawk's problem.
He can’t regret it now. No, all he can think about is the way Mihawk had swept Yoru up on his way out of the dining room and settled the long blade in its customary place on his back.
Zoro’s eyes are on it with every step they take.
He's not sure where they're going – fucking hallways and staircases in this place all look the same – so when they walk out through a heavy door Zoro doesn’t remember seeing before and out onto an actual, honest to god rampart, he feels genuinely light headed for a moment with the surprise of it all.
That, and the lingering effects of the infection. And the blood loss. And the way Yoru spans Mihawk's back like dark wings.
Mihawk doesn't pause, though. He leads Zoro along the walkway across the top of the rampart to a place where the stonework flattens out, forming a sort of square, empty rooftop terrace, circular turrets rising irregularly around them like they’re waiting for the show to begin.
The ground, far below, is obscured by heavy mist and still falling rain. There are no barriers around the outside of this terrace. No fencing, no rail. Nothing to stop them from plummeting to their deaths should they make a wrong move.
The rain's grey drizzle has already dampened Zoro’s new shirt. Turned the dark green of it a shade darker still, made it cling to the shape of his muscles, raindrops and sweat mingling on his bare chest at the front where the healing cuts and mottled bruises are exposed, running in thin rivulets along Mihawk’s slanting scar.
Mihawk comes to a stop in front of him there on the rooftop. He turns to face Zoro, striking an unmistakably confrontational stance that has something in Zoro perking up like a dog.
Fuck, it's been a tease like no other having Mihawk near him, all around him, the sight and smell of him, wearing his damn clothes, and still not being allowed to fight him. Fighting Mihawk is a treat, a rare delicacy, worth it even if it kills you. Zoro tried it once and nothing has ever quite been able to satisfy him since.
Maybe now, at last, he’ll be allowed another taste.
He feels his feet take up their familiar opening stance, and he strips his bandana from his wrist and ties it above his eyes, a grin just starting to play out at the corners of his mouth. He unsheathes Wado, lets her familiar weight settle in his hand.
She’s patient, Wado Ichimonji. But she’s also hungry. Zoro can feel her relief, now, at the prospect of being useful again after so long lying idle. He feels the same relief himself.
“Let’s play a little game,” Mihawk says, voice all soft and liquid under the grey noise of the rain. “If you can mark me in any way, you win. If you can’t, I win. Simple, yes?”
It does, indeed, seem simple enough; all Zoro has to do is cut him. He suppresses a shudder at the mere thought of it. He hadn’t managed to land a single blow on Mihawk before, back at the Baratie, but now… he’s had months of experience, months of improvement. He’s cut steel. Surely now there’s a chance.
“Yes,” he breathes. Finally…
… and then Mihawk unsheaths the Kogatana from around his neck with a flourish.
Zoro feels his heart sink.
“I'm expecting to be impressed, Roronoa.”
“Then why're you still underestimating me?”
“Is that what I'm doing?”
The humiliation of it turns into anger in his gut, heavy and hard. “I’ve improved since Baratie. You know I have. But you’re still fighting me with a fucking letter opener.”
Mihawk's eyes fall on the small glint of the blade in his hand. “Yes,” he agrees. “And you'll thank me for it.”
“Like hell I will.”
Without waiting for an invitation, Zoro lunges for him.
Easily, Mihawk bats his attack away one-handed. “Young men who behave like little sulking boys will be treated accordingly,” he says.
Zoro roars, and rushes at him again.
He's clumsy tonight, he knows. He's usually better than this, quicker, cleverer; if there’s one thing that sparring with Sanji has taught him it's good footwork. He doesn’t know why he can’t channel that now.
His limbs won't respond to him as he wants them to; everything's rusty and sore, all out of practice, and he’s hyper-aware of every movement he makes, what it must look like to Mihawk.
Mihawk side-steps him easily. He trips Zoro as he goes, for good measure – one expensive boot sweeping Zoro’s feet out from under him.
Zoro crashes to the stone, and his injuries are a dozen small lines of fire. His new stitches feel like they'll burst again. He loses all of the breath in him in a rush.
“Get up,” Mihawk instructs, and his voice is harder than before.
Zoro grits his teeth, and obeys.
At least it hurts properly now. Somehow, that calms him. Helps him to focus. On his next thrust he feints left then ducks right at the last moment, dancing out of reach, spinning so that he’s just behind Mihawk’s shoulder – his left shoulder, his non-dominant side – and jabs forward neatly, aiming Wado right at his back.
Quickly, too quick to be human, for fuck’s sake, Mihawk evades, turns, and counters, striking Wado with the tiny little Kogatana so precisely and forcefully that Zoro feels the reverberation of it travel up his wrist, his arm, into his fucking jaw.
It aches.
Yoru seems to be laughing at him from over Mihawk’s broad shoulders.
Zoro clenches his teeth, and attacks again.
He loses the game, of course. Not when he falls, and tears something soft in his elbow. Not when he missteps, and Mihawk sticks his little prick-tease blade into the meat of his upper chest, thrusting it into him so sharply it makes Zoro grunt and nearly drop his own sword. Not when the deep laceration on his belly starts bleeding again, heavy and sluggish, staining the pale green sash at his waist and making Zoro feel dizzy with the blood loss, his ears ringing strangely, his steps growing slower and clumsier than before.
No. He only loses when Mihawk eventually makes a helpless noise of frustration in the back of his throat, glares at Zoro – by this point weaving on his feet where he stands, trying to stay upright – and flicks his left hand. Then something happens. Something like a strong wave rolling up onto the shore, flattening everything in its path.
And Zoro finally drops to the floor like a stone; blessedly unconscious.
*
He half-wakes in Mihawk’s arms, dazed and barely conscious. He’s being carried through the endless, confusing corridors of the castle, the way lit by flaming wall sconces that throw deep shadows onto the stonework; he thinks he recognises a moth eaten tapestry that hangs outside his bedroom, but Mihawk doesn’t stop there. He continues on, around a corner, then another, and Zoro starts to feel nauseous from the dizziness. He tucks his head into Mihawk’s shoulder and closes his eyes, clinging to him tightly. For a moment, he thinks he feels Mihawk pause, then resettle Zoro’s weight slightly.
Zoro lets himself drift back down into unconsciousness.
When he wakes again only a few seconds later he’s being lowered onto a wide, comfortable bed. He presses his face into sheets the colour of milk. They smell of sandalwood and jasmine, and something like wood ash. He breathes in deep, sighing to himself. Yeah. Yeah, he can sleep here. No problem.
He dimly remembers that he’d been doing something… fighting someone? Fighting Mihawk? But he feels impossibly detached from it, now. Like it was something that happened in a dream.
Somewhere he hears someone clearing their throat pointedly. “Don’t get too comfortable. We need to get you changed before you ruin another perfectly good set of clothing.”
“Mm,” Zoro agrees, but his brain feels slippery; he can’t quite get a coherent thought to stick. Everything is soft and hazy, and his body is sinking into the plushness of the bed.
He likes it here. It’s cosier than his own room. And it smells better. He plucks at the milk white linen underneath him, pulls a handful of it close and rubs it against his cheek.
“What am I going to do with you?” a voice murmurs. Mihawk’s voice.
That’s the second time he’s asked that question. Why does he expect Zoro to know the answer to it?
He feels a tugging at his arm, someone trying to remove his new shirt one sleeve at a time. “Nooo.” He frowns to himself, eyes still closed because even the quiet candle light in here is too loud. “‘s mine.”
“I’m not robbing you, foolish boy. I gave these to you, remember?”
Zoro grumbles, but allows Mihawk to tug the shirt from his body.
He thinks the movement of it, tugging him about this way and that, should hurt some of his wounds. But he feels no pain; only that syrupy laxity from before, and a bone-deep tiredness. Every part of him wants to sleep.
“Suggestible little thing, aren’t you?”
Zoro doesn’t know what that means. “Dunno what that means,” he says, and his voice comes out slurred at the edges, like he’s been drinking.
“It means that I wanted you to give in and let yourself rest. And here we are, with only the barest of nudges.”
Well, that’s what Zoro’s currently trying to do, isn’t it? Rest. So Mihawk should be happy. Zoro’s being good.
“I’m being good,” he says, and he gets a deeper sigh than before in return.
“You’re going to be the death of me.”
“That’s the plan,” Zoro mumbles into the bed sheets.
He thinks he might be allowed to sleep, now, at last – but no. No, Mihawk insists on tipping him onto his back, instead, so his clever fingers can work at the sash, freeing it from Zoro’s waist. Zoro makes a needy noise, and Mihawk tuts, and sets Zoro’s swords down close beside him.
Zoro doesn’t have to open his eyes. He can feel them there, right next to him. He sighs in contentment.
Then frowns when he feels hands unfastening the lacing of his new trousers.
Those are his trousers. He likes them. He likes that Mihawk gave them to him.
He bats clumsily at the hands, trying to shove them away.
“I assure you I have no designs on your virtue,” Mihawk says, wearily. “I’m simply getting you changed for bed, since you’re nothing like conscious enough to manage it yourself.”
Zoro doesn’t really get that. Why would he get changed just to sleep? Ugh, Mihawk is so weird. Different clothes for sleeping, for eating, for fighting. It’s so unnecessary.
Still, he goes limp and lets him tug the trousers down and off.
“There we go. Good boy.”
Zoro shivers. The stone wicks heat away from the rooms in the castle; he's found he can get his bedroom to a comfortable temperature as long as he keeps a strong fire going in the grate, but when the fire goes out the heat very quickly goes with it. He guesses there’s no fire burning in this room; it’s fucking freezing.
Mihawk’s hands, though, are warm. Warm and strong where he slips an arm behind Zoro’s shoulders and raises him up enough to wrangle something over his head – something silky and loose and long, like a tunic.
Zoro grouses at the movement, at still not being allowed to just sleep like he wants to.
“Don’t pout, Rabbit. It’s unbecoming.”
At least the silky loose thing smells good, like the sheets. Zoro could curl up and live in that scent, burrow into it like a vole in last year’s papery fallen leaves and hibernate.
“There,” Mihawk says, finally releasing him after tugging the thing down past Zoro’s thighs. “Done. Try not to bleed into any more of my nice things, Roronoa, if you please.”
“Mm,” Zoro agrees, happily. The memory of Mihawk making him bleed is one of his favourites. He smiles sleepily at the thought of it.
There’s quiet for a moment. And then, “God help me,” Mihawk says, quietly, and he sounds kinda annoyed about something.
Zoro doesn’t bother trying to work out what. He’s more asleep than awake, now. His mind is heavy, pulling him down into the safe, silent dark.
Just before he’s fully out he feels the duvet being pulled up and over him, thick and warm and all-encompassing, and a hand sliding his bandana off and smoothing his mussed hair back from his forehead. The hand lingers.
He doesn’t dream.