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It’s an appropriately gloomy day for this. Mist coagulates in the atmosphere, not heavy enough to qualify as rain yet soggy enough to leave anything remotely absorbent uncomfortably damp. Songbirds and crickets shelter their wings inside tree trunks and hedges, their absence dooming the landscape to eerie, stagnant silence.
The sun sets early this time of year, clocking out well before the end of its workday, leaving the cosmos unattended. Soon, a kaleidoscope of stars will take over the night shift, fulfilling their standby duty to light up the sky: but for now, it is dark. Only a hazy indigo afterglow remains of the sunset.
Mihawk drifts inside his castle. Yoru swings in his white-knuckled grip, its baroque cruciform blade slick as an altar in the wake of its ritual. Viscous strands of gore coat his sword like the remains of a sacrifice. Bloody and biblical.
Perona glances up from the couch. Her heeled boots are propped daintily on the coffee table, like Mihawk’s scolded her for a thousand evidently useless times.
“Where’s the other oaf?” she asks him.
Mihawk tries to ignore the twist in his stomach. Impassive, he hovers beside the armchair across from hers. “I’m sure he’ll come inside imminently.”
A teasing smirk. “What, is he sulking?” Her tone is closer to amusement than pity, like a nanny judging another woman’s child for throwing a fit on the playground. “I swear, he gets like this every time he— eek!” She leaps to her feet. “What happened?!”
Zoro trudges inside. His palm is flat against the left side of his face, scarlet seeping through the gaps between his fingers like the floorboards of a sinking ship. “I got cut.”
“Well duh!” Perona zips over to him, frantically inspecting the other swordsman. “How bad is it? Let me see!”
“It's not that bad,” Zoro grumbles, jerking away. “I can take care of it myself.”
“No you can't, you brute,” she huffs, dragging him to the counter as she pries off his hand. “Stop pressing on it, you’re gonna make it wors—”
Perona’s words die in her throat once she exposes the wound. She shoots Mihawk a glare that’s scathing and freezing all at once.
“What’d you do to him?”
Her expression is alive with something almost like fury. Mihawk’s chest tightens.
“It’s not his fault,” Zoro sighs, shaking off the crimson fluid pooled in the sluice of his fate lines. “I should’ve reacted faster.”
Which is not entirely the truth. His reflexes were fast enough, but his already heavily-injured body was not: an old training wound reopened on his way to block the hit, and that was it. A split-second stutter was more than damning enough.
Perona scowls. “Ugh, don’t defend him.” She withdraws one of the first aid kits that must be stashed in every room of the house by now. “Can—can you open it?”
Zoro winces. He fights an uphill battle against his butchered eyelid, waging war against lashes tacky and pasted shut with clotting plasma.
His eventual victory is a pyrrhic one.
Flayed skin tears apart to unveil a vivisected cornea, his left eye reduced to a gruesome red pit reminiscent of a gunshot wound. There’s a deep, dark fissure where an iris and pupil should be, and nothing remains which could be called the whites of his eye. Just red, red, red.
Mihawk’s gut surges with the inexplicable, nearly insurmountable urge to vomit. This is—an uncharacteristically visceral reaction. He’s sliced former opponents to little more than boneless filets, squelched his boots in their disemboweled innards without so much as a blink. The sea of rotting corpses from Kuraigana’s civil war did nothing to deter his settlement on the island. There should be no reason for this nauseating feeling, and yet—
The warlord frowns. How distinctly unpleasant. He usually considers blood a triumphant scent.
Perona covers her mouth in abject horror. “Oh my god,” she says under her breath.
Zoro frowns. “Calm down.” He closes his eye, and it looks like trying to cover a pot with the wrong lid. “This is no different from usual.”
Perona smacks him with a towel. “This is obviously different from usual, you dummy!” she whines, as if calling him childish names will mask her concern. That’s another reason Mihawk knows this is bad: she always insists she doesn’t care about the ‘big green lug.’ “How are you not upset about this?!”
“I am,” Zoro says, the admission scraping out of him through a gravelly sigh, “but there’s no use dwelling on it. What’s done is done.”
"I don’t buy it," Perona shoots back. "There’s no way you’re fine! You sulk all the time!"
“Do not.”
“Do too!”
Mihawk scrubs his ear as their banter becomes increasingly grating. Doesn’t she realize she’s talking to the man who once nearly cut off his own legs over a minor inconvenience?
He observes stoically as their argument escalates: his breathing mechanically steady, almost inhumanly so. Rarely is maintaining his composure a conscious effort, but retaining his poise feels like the tides trying to keep their cadence after the moon has been robbed from the sky.
"Stop freaking out," Zoro is saying when Mihawk tunes back in, and at this point, it is unclear which of them he is truly talking to. “Just fix it.”
Perona's upper lip trembles. "I-I can’t--" she stutters helplessly, and it's clear Zoro knows this from the way he doesn’t argue -- only scowls, brows dipping towards the carnage plugging up his eye socket. "Jeez, I knew something was like this was gonna happen someday. You’re always pushing yourself too hard!"
Zoro's frown deepens. "If I’m gonna become the world’s greatest swordsman, there can’t be such a thing as pushing myself too hard," he explains. "The New World won’t go easy on me, either. And I can't show my face to my captain as anything less than the strongest."
"You're not even gonna be showing your stupid boyfriend the same face anymore!" Perona shouts, and that earns her a proper flinch. "What are you gonna do now?"
A brief pause. "What do you mean," Zoro mumbles, blotting the gash himself when she's too distracted to do so. "This doesn’t change anything. I'll let the wound set, then I’ll get back to training in a few days." At long last, he glances at Mihawk, narrowing his eyes-- eye. Singular. Singular for the rest of his life. "Right?"
Mihawk exhales, well aware that he hasn’t said a word since Zoro entered, that he’s giving them both less than nothing. He doesn't reply.
"I can still fight," Zoro continues, but it’s as if they’re both recalling in unison that Mihawk ended his old rivalry after Shanks tried to challenge him with one arm less. "I can overcome this. I'm still gonna beat you and become the best."
The castle door remains ajar. An evening zephyr passes between them, funeral-solemn and cemetery-cold. Mihawk tilts his head, bisecting his field of vision with the brim of his hat. This is how Zoro will see the world from now on.
More silence.
"You!" Perona's apparently had enough of it, charging up to Mihawk like a bull to a matador. Mihawk has never been capable of waving white flags, only red. "Do you have anything to say for yourself?!"
Mihawk blinks, wondering morbidly what will happen to the bile in his throat if he opens his mouth. He shifts his weight, unable to explain why Yoru feels so burdensome in his grasp, why every pindrop of Zoro's blood beside his feet ruptures his eardrums like a gunshot point-blank.
He works the nausea between his molars, swallows it down to collect himself; the warlord has always excelled at compartmentalizing, yet he's not even entirely sure what he's tucking away.
Eventually, and with far more effort than he'd care to admit, Mihawk huffs: "What’s there to say."
"There’s a little bit to say," Zoro enunciates, slowly rising from his seat. "Isn't there, Hawkeyes?"
It’s not an apology he’s seeking, nor comfort. Rather, a reassurance: that he's still qualified, that he's still worthy. The only one who is, who ever could be. That Mihawk is still waiting for him at the top, holding onto the crown until the day Zoro cuts him from his throne. That nothing has changed, that his life's dream and purpose haven't just been as ruined as his eyesight.
In lieu of saying any of this, Mihawk simply muses, "Ah, is there?"
"I dunno," Zoro prompts, sauntering closer. "Is there?"
Mihawk thins his gaze into raptor-like slits; Zoro grits his teeth in challenge. This is in line with their specific brand of posturing -- because everything is always a competition between them, even if usually one-sided.
For a while, this is as close as they get to any sort of argument: Zoro growling at him like a rabid dog, deadlocked into a staring contest that Mihawk, for the first time, might actually lose.
How unbecoming when Zoro only has one eye left and Mihawk has two.
Perona finally breaks the silence. "Urgh! I've had it with you--emotionally constipated sword freaks!" she fumes with a petulant stomp of her cherry boots. "Fine! If you two won’t talk about it, then I’ll do it for you!" She extends her hands. "Negative Hollow!"
Twin translucent specters erupt from her palms. Mihawk effortlessly swats away the pest -- but Zoro, only halfway to his mastery of haki and ambushed from his freshly-carved blind spot, is not quite so fortunate.
Zoro crumples to his hands and knees. Gore splotches the floorboards beneath his face.
“I don't deserve to have you as my father.”
Perona gasps. Zoro petrifies, and Mihawk thinks, distantly, that this is what it would feel like to take a sword to the chest.
“As your what?”
A long, loud silence. In all the times Zoro has been hit with Perona's signature ability, he has never said anything like this. Historically, he's declared himself an ant begging to be stepped on, apologizing for walking the same earth as everyone else; his words have never sounded this honest, this genuine. Like--like a confession, dragged out of him with hooks.
It is simultaneously the most ridiculous and the most terrifying thing his student has ever said. Mihawk stands before him, chest unbearably tight, waiting for Zoro to take it back.
But he never does.
Forming a sentence is fishing for words in a block of solid ice. Glaring at Perona, Mihawk huffs, "What kind of strange things are you making him say."
Perona tenses. "I-I didn’t--"
"Bandage his wounds," Mihawk interrupts, pointedly avoiding addressing the other swordsman, "and give him water. I don’t want him bleeding out in the middle of my living room."
With a hard swallow, Perona complies. She rushes to the kitchen, the faucet coughing liquid into a crystalline cup. She returns to Zoro's side and helps him to his feet, shoves him back into the stool at the countertop. He's gone silent, pale from more than just blood loss, statue-still as Perona blots his wrecked features.
Zoro reaches for the water, takes a sip. Half of it drenches the front of his shirt. Wincing, he tries to return it to the coaster, and--
And misses. The glass shatters into a thousand unfixable pieces.
Zoro has lost his depth perception.
Mihawk is unsure why this, of all things, is what pushes him past the edge. So comparatively trivial, yet it sends the warlord into a downward spiral, his survival instincts plummeting in freefall. His gut spikes with a fight-or-flight response, every fiber of his being screaming that this is a battle he cannot win. And so, Mihawk does the most shameful thing a swordsman can do:
Retreat.
Mihawk spins on his heels. Casting an icy glance over his shoulder, he only manages a terse, "Clean that up," before marching away.
He doesn't stop until he climbs the grand staircase and reaches his study. He sets Yoru on the antique mahogany executive desk, withdrawing his cleaning supplies to purge his blade of his student's blood. There's blood on the fuller, the edge, the crossguard, under the hilt -- how did it get under the hilt? -- and Mihawk mops it fervently, scrubbing even when the rag comes back pristine and white.
Once he’s finished, Mihawk pops a bottle of burgundy, tries to ignore how his fingers shake. He pours himself a glass then drops into his armchair, taking a long sip that nearly downs the whole serving in a single gulp. He's felt more emotions in the past five minutes than the past five years, his mind a fog of muddled thoughts he can't make any sense of.
He has known for a while that Zoro is an orphan. Over time, he has slowly but surely been offering the boy guidance on more than just swordfighting, yet he never thought Zoro would see him as--some sort of parental figure. Mihawk already barely signed up for training an arrogant young swordsman to someday take his life; he's hardly even Zoro's teacher, let alone his--
Once most of the wine has transferred from the bottle to his stomach, the door creaks open.
Perona slips inside. Her pink curls are loose, trailing down her back. Mihawk stares at the intruder, observant eyes zeroing in on the red spots dappling her ivory funeral dress, the surplus gauze still circling her wrist like a spool of thread. Any other time, she'd call it a fashion statement.
She makes no such claims now.
Mihawk swirls his drink, bracing himself to get chewed out. He supposes he had this coming.
That doesn't mean he has to like it. "What do you want, ghost girl."
It’s voiced more like a statement than a question, but his questions rarely sound like ones. Far be it for him to imply he actually wants a response.
"The mosshead's eye is shot," Perona tells him. "He’s never gonna be able to use it again."
That much was obvious. "I see."
Belatedly, Mihawk frowns.
Word choice.
The irony of his phrasing is not lost on Perona. She makes a face like she’s bitten into a lemon, rind and all. "That’s it?" she snaps, swinging the door shut behind her. Mostly shut. A stripe of light remains between the door and its frame. "I don’t care what that lug says. It’s totally your fault! Take responsibility!"
Exasperated, Mihawk sighs. "And do what, exactly?" he says. "I am no doctor, and you stated yourself that the damage is irreversible. If you’d like to check the wine cellar for a time machine, be my guest."
Perona stomps a vinyl boot. "Don’t sass me!" She’s one to talk. "He was already beat up! Why'd you fight him when it was obvious he'd get turned into-- green spaghetti!"
Descriptive today, isn't she. "Roronoa needs to learn to fight with injuries," Mihawk tells her. "He was correct in saying the New World will show him no mercy." A pensive sip of wine. He could finish his glass, set it down, but he needs somewhere to bury the tremors in his hands. "So why should I."
"Because last time I checked, this isn't the New World!" she declares, which is not technically wrong. "Jeez, why can't your personality match your aesthetic? So uncouth! You’re pushing him too hard!"
"He’s asking me to."
"You could say no!"
"He would hate me if I refused."
It's only after the words have left his mouth that Mihawk realizes how damning they are. Curse his slips of the tongue.
Mihawk can virtually see those pink, frilly gears churning in Perona's head. "Why would that matter?" she asks him. "You don’t care about anything. Why would you care if he hates you?"
"I don’t," Mihawk replies.
Ah, foolish of him to lie to her. He's never been one to dilute his thoughts, and lying is an entirely undeveloped skill. If anything could actually hurt him, he would say he's too honest for his own good: the best lies, he has heard, are rooted in truth, and there isn't much room for it when most of his sentences are less than ten words.
Perona's features tilt into a scowl. "Has anyone ever told ya that you're a real crappy liar?"
Shanks, on multiple occasions. "Actually, yes."
"Then why bother?!"
Because it was worth a shot. "I have no desire to discuss this..."
"Oh, we’re way past that, pal!" Perona's hands prop atop her hips. "You're both impossible! Why am I cursed to be the only reasonable person in this household?" she laments, which is...a generous descriptor. "That empty-headed lout is freaking out more over the fact that he thinks you're not gonna fight him anymore than he is about losing half of his eyesight! That scar is gonna be so uncute!"
Worse than the scar on his chest? "I--" Wait, Mihawk gave him that one too. "I'm still going to fight him."
Perona quirks an eyebrow. "Oh really?" she says incredulously. "Hmph! You can't fool me. Look what a mess you are after taking his eye! You really think you’ll be able to take his life?"
"I'm not a mess," Mihawk grumbles, ignoring the nearly-empty bottle of alcohol beside him, "and yes, I do. Such is the nature of swordsmen's duels."
Apprehension traces across her features. "R-Really?" she falters. "You think you could kill him?"
"That's what I just said."
"And you think--he could kill you?"
Could anyone? "He has a long way to go before that's even a possibility," Mihawk says, "but if Roronoa defeats me, then he defeats me. And death is what that means sometimes."
“How can you say something like that so casually?!”
“I don’t expect you to understand.”
“You’re the one who doesn’t understand,” Perona insists, jabbing an accusatory finger at him. "You two care about each other--I can see on your stupid vampire face that you're about to deny it, but you just admitted to it!" Mihawk's first thought is to be annoyed, but it's soon eclipsed by mild surprise at how quickly she was able to read him. “You’re really telling me that in all this time, nothing has changed?”
Well, of course—of course things have changed. Mihawk’s peaceful existence has been disturbed by two freeloaders who quite literally crashed into his life thanks to a mysterious revolutionary cyborg bear. His uneventful, repetitive days have been spectacularly interrupted by a girl who spends all of Mihawk’s money on clothing she leaves out on the balcony for moths to eat in the name of post-mortem aesthetic, and a boy who still gets lost on the way to his own bedroom despite living here for over a year.
The two of them are constantly giving Mihawk fires to put out, sometimes literally. Truly, Zoro should never be allowed near a kitchen.
Mihawk will concede that he has become accustomed to living beside them, and doesn’t particularly look forward to returning to his old life once they both inevitably leave him. And they will. They will leave him, so it would be foolish to get attached.
It is also foolish how often Mihawk has to remind himself of that.
Thus, things haven’t changed, at least not fundamentally. Mihawk tells her this.
And all it earns him is a scoff. “You really are a dreadful liar!”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Agreeing with me won’t fix this!” That’s a first. “You think you’ve been subtle, don’t ya? But I’ve seen you smiling when you think we’re not looking at you.” Ah, so she noticed that. How inconvenient. “You’re happy, and you know it! But you’re clinging so tightly to your old ideals that you’re just gonna let it slip through your fingers!”
Mihawk’s instinctive response is, what old ideals. Indeed, Mihawk abides by his version of the swordsman’s code, but idealism implies belief in something beyond oneself.
For decades, he has drifted through life like a boat without a sail: freedom and boredom have become one and the same, and neutrality has slowly morphed into apathy. He has no use for traditional morality — he can delineate sin from virtue, yet he’s largely ambivalent to the difference. He does care for honor, but holding back does not equate to showing mercy.
Sometimes, Mihawk feels the label pirate hardly applies to him: he's never cared for treasure, adventure, or power beyond swordsmanship. He maintains his warlord status solely to be undisturbed, heeding the navy’s summons on nothing but his whims. On many levels, Marineford was an exception, yet he could not escape the feeling that everyone on that battlefield was fighting for something, not just fighting.
Except for him.
He attained his dream decades ago, and never replaced it with a new one. You’d really think he would’ve picked up a hobby or two.
As it is, Mihawk lost his sense of purpose the moment his sole remaining worthy opponent’s dominant arm ended up in a Sea King’s stomach. He will admit the most prevalent side effect of being The Strongest is the striking solitude at the top, but being alone doesn’t necessarily imply loneliness, does it?
Mihawk is infamous for being the only warlord without a crew, beholden to no one and nothing. And yet—
It wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as it should’ve been when his one-seater boat suddenly had to accommodate three.
“The day Roronoa and I met, I vowed to hold this seat of the strongest for him,” Mihawk reminds her, reminds himself. Yes, he mustn’t lose sight of this. Nothing has changed. “The end goal of his life’s journey is to surpass me. When the moment of that challenge is upon us, I’m prepared to accept either outcome.” With a nod, he sets down his glass. “If you asked him, I’m sure he’d agree with me.”
“Bullshit!” Perona snaps, and Mihawk’s eyebrows shoot to his hairline. It’s rare to hear her curse: it’s so uncute, she always says. “You’re really telling me you’d feel accomplished if his body was laying dead before you? That you believe he’d feel the same?”
Mihawk has never been good with words in the first place, but the longer this continues, the more it feels like trying to catch a rainstorm in a teacup. “It’s complicated,” he replies. It is odd, however, that when he tries to picture Zoro's corpse, the mental image physically will not compute. “You’re being reductive.”
“And you’re being an idiot!” Perona declares, stomping up to him. “You expect me to feel proud of whoever’s still standing after the other has been cut in half? How am I supposed to be happy for the victor if there’s one less person to celebrate with?”
Her words detonate again and again, a ceaseless cannonade of impossible questions that Mihawk couldn’t answer even if they weren’t rhetorical. “Why are you upset?” he murmurs, softer than he means to. “This doesn't affect you.”
Perona’s orchid irises well with tears. “Yes it does!”
It takes all of Mihawk’s willpower and more not to flinch. “How?” It is another question that is not really a question, another answer he doesn’t truly want. “This is a promise I made to him as a swordsman. I've been waiting decades for this.”
“That’s just— pathetic!” Perona shouts. “So you want to be defeated. Your goal is just to lose? How lame is that!” She squeezes her fists. “Are you really saying a few moments of excitement would be better than the rest of your life with us?”
When she puts it like that, it does sound rather foolish. However: “The rest of my life? That was never in the question.” He refills his wine glass. “You’re free to go at any time, and Roronoa will leave soon regardless." A shallow sip. "This was always going to be temporary. You do realize that.”
In this moment, it's as much to himself as it is to her. He mustn't forget they will leave him someday: Zoro has an adventure to finish, and if Moria is ever discovered alive, Perona will rush back to him. No matter how much he cherishes their time together, every day spent beside them is another closer to losing them. This is an inescapable fact.
The thought makes it feel as if the blade buried in his pendant is carving his heart out of his chest.
And Perona's too, judging from the pained look on her face. “Seriously?” she says in a small voice. “You still believe that after—what Zoro said?”
They’ve been skirting around it this entire conversation, yet hearing the reminder aloud makes whatever mortal wound Zoro dealt with those words start gushing again. “Where are you going with this?”
Perona sucks in a sharp breath. Her eyes are a frozen pond at the spring season's onset, icy surface melted just enough to be wet and glassy. Then finally, in a tone no louder than the softest of whispers, Perona asks:
“Is being a swordsman really more important to you than being our dad?”
Then suddenly, it's all too much. Mihawk doesn’t know what terrifies him more -- the sentiment itself, or the fact that it’s plural. Our dad. A statement that they are not just children, they are his: a role Mihawk is entirely unqualified for, one he would inevitably mess up.
Mihawk swallows hard, his head crossing blades with his heart in a duel they're somehow both losing. Roughly, he clears his throat.
“I have no desire to become part of a family with an expiration date,” Mihawk grinds out, yet he cannot ignore how incredibly wrong the words taste on his tongue; it'd make him nauseous if he didn’t already feel like he's gonna be sick. “Besides, you lost Moria, did you not? So it’s nothing you haven’t recovered from befo--”
Perona’s open palm strikes the side of his face. Pinpricks of heat bloom across Mihawk’s cheek, skin stinging with the lingering burn of taking your fingers off a hot stove just a moment too late. He blinks in surprise, once, then twice, processing her reaction through the alarm that he can’t place when he started letting his guard down around her.
In disbelief, Mihawk touches his aching cheek. “You slapped me,” he says dumbly.
“You meanie!” Perona cries, squeezing her eyes shut. “No matter which of you wins, I lose! I’d never forgive you if you killed him, and I’d never forgive him if he killed you!” Tears seep through the sewn pockets of her eyelids. “I don’t want to hate the one I don’t lose! Because either way, I’ll end up alone!”
Perona buries her weeping behind the back of her wrist. Mascara melts down her face in an aimless black lattice, trickling like streams losing their way on their voyage towards the sea. Mihawk can only watch uselessly, ribcage uncomfortably tight, spine stiff as stone.
"I’ve seen so many stupid, ugly corpses," Perona hiccups. "I don’t wanna see either of yours."
Mihawk's pupils dilate. So she also understands what it's like to finally have something you're doomed to lose; he wonders how long she's felt like this, if not all along.
It's true that she bosses them around to little avail, lamenting about how uncute they are, how she misses her army of adorable zombie servants. Because princesses should have servants, she always says. Yet still, it doesn't explain how genuinely happy she is when they actually carry her shopping bags, when they sit through her fashion shows of clothing she steals and upcycles from Mihawk's own closet.
He complained about it once -- that went about as well as you'd expect. Eventually, Mihawk decided the occasional cropped dress shirt was a worthy exchange for the lack of tantrums.
Her skills as a nurse have steadily improved despite her protests, as if berating Zoro for his lack of concern over his bodily harm will conceal how worried she is: she still sleeps in a chair at his bedside when his wounds are particularly rough. She never fails to swaddle him in bandages, insisting this is the last time, but Mihawk has caught her reading medical books in the library late at night.
Before she arrived here, she’d never stitched up anything alive before.
Every morning, she observes their training like a sports fan in the stands of a team they hate, showering them with random criticisms on their stances, their facial expressions. She simply has no interest in swordsmanship, despite Zoro's many detailed rants about its savage beauty; but she always watches anyway, because apparently, putting up with their 'brutish baboonery' is better than the alternative.
It's the same elsewhere, too, Perona putting up arguments Mihawk has long since realized are perfunctory as they're doing housework, chores, or farming together. The two children will bicker over whose turn it is to spread the mulch, Perona whining about getting fertilizer under her freshly-manicured fingernails.
But she always does it. Always joins, even when she wails that her dainty hands weren't meant for manual labor. Mihawk wonders what the upper limit is -- what she'd take if it simply meant she doesn't have to be alone.
And she was. She was alone. Even beyond the mindless zombies, the poor excuses for family members Perona had at Thriller Bark cannot possibly count: Mihawk and Zoro have exchanged vaguely murderous glances listening to her tales about Hogback and Absalom, both aware she doesn't even realize how twisted they are.
Yet now that she’s found people to be beside her, she is destined to lose one of them. She's been forced to accept she’s not part of the equation, that Mihawk and Zoro’s fated duel will happen with or without her; that she is simply collateral, powerless over the outcome. That now that she finally has something to save, she can't.
Saving something; it's a sentiment foreign to both Mihawk and Perona. Until now, the thing Perona has been best at is making other people sad.
It's inherent to her ability, tugging apart her victims' insecurities and turning their darkest secrets against them. She’s broken so many people: Mihawk can't help but wonder if it started to rub off on her, if she's forced to confront her own worst fears and depressive thoughts every time she sees the hopelessness in their expressions.
How many peoples' will to live must you take away before losing your own?
Mihawk blinks, realizing rather abruptly, that the only person more hollow than him is her.
It seems they have more in common than he thought.
How-- unfortunate. If Mihawk cared enough to have a worst enemy, he would not wish this feeling upon them. And that, perhaps, is why this strange, unfamiliar warmth between their odd little trio has wreaked such havoc on both of him and Perona:
If you hit something hollow hard enough, it collapses.
Soul-deep, Mihawk sighs. His remark was exceptionally thoughtless, even for him. He will readily admit he's been handling this quite poorly, unsure if he even means at least half of what he’s said; because truly, the thought of leaving them behind, or of striking Zoro down and cutting this peculiar, precious bond they share into thirds and throwing it away with his own hands—
Finally, Perona cracks open an eyelid. Black threads stretch between her lashes, as if tugging on one of her countless bear plushie’s button eyes. When she blinks away the haze, she gasps.
“O-Oh my gosh,” Perona exhales, clasping a hand over her smudged lips. “Did I hurt you?”
With a slap? Mihawk has effortlessly tanked cannon blasts. “Of course not,” he replies, but the sigh that escapes his lips sounds strangely hoarse. “Why would you think that?”
A lacquered nail points at his cheekbones. “Because you’re crying...”
Impossible. “That’s absurd,” Mihawk denies, ignoring the way his voice crumbles at the edges. “Do you have any idea how many decades it’s been since I last--”
Before he can finish, the brackish tang of saltwater trickles onto his tongue.
Pupils wide, Mihawk touches the curve of his cheek. “Oh.” He examines the dampness pooled between the ridges of his fingerprints. “I suppose I am.”
Perona bursts back into tears. Mihawk tenses as she throws her arms around him, burying her face into the dip of his shoulder.
He exhales a shuddering breath. Tiny droplets of brine are pushed from his eyes with each blink, like saline from an IV drip. Why has this, of all things, brought him to tears for the first time in over a quarter of a century? He tries to parse his reaction through the thunderheads breaking behind his ribcage, shattering over his waterline in a cloudburst. There has to be a reason for this.
Mihawk gulps. The last time he felt remotely emotional is when Shanks lost his arm.
After it happened, Mihawk couldn’t comprehend why Shanks didn’t even seem mad about it. He recalls harboring resentment towards a boy he’d never met, unable to understand why it could possibly be worth trading a limb for that child; why he had the distinct feeling that if he’d asked Shanks to trade the world for that child, his choice would’ve been the same.
Upon witnessing Luffy’s incredible feats in Marineford, Mihawk had chalked it up to Shanks seeing that special power in Luffy. He told himself that the boy's abilities must be why Shanks gave Luffy his hat and his arm, why Zoro gave Luffy his heart and his soul.
Yet if Mihawk tries to tell himself this feeling is because he saw something special in Zoro that day at the Baratie, he knows instinctively that it is not correct. If he tells himself this feeling is because he was impressed by the power that made Perona a general in another warlord’s army, he knows deep inside that it is a lie. So why?
Mihawk remembers receiving a desperate call from Shanks just over a decade ago after Luffy ate that Devil Fruit, drunk and blubbering like an idiot. Despite that the mischievous child was the one who stuffed his face with it, Shanks was certain blame fell entirely on himself: he should’ve hidden it better, he should’ve locked the chest. He should’ve watched him more closely, he should’ve been there.
Even if Shanks weren’t beyond trashed, Mihawk doubts he would’ve been coherent. He was too beside himself that something could happen to Luffy and it would be all his fault: he’s never gonna be able to swim again, the government is gonna be after him, oh god, Mihawk, I love him so much, what if I've just doomed my own kid--
Ah.
So that's what this is.
That's what this is, and this is quite possibly the worst way to realize it: Perona sobbing her eyes out from Mihawk’s words, Zoro mauled across half his face from Mihawk’s blade. Mihawk has known on a conceptual level that hurting someone you love hurts you too, yet he never knew it would feel as if a hand has reached into the wet cavity of his chest and squeezed the blood from his heart.
This hurts because he loves them. This hurts because Mihawk has hurt his own kids.
And even though Mihawk feels as if his tender guts are being unraveled by the bloody tip of his sword, he finds he would rather endure this pain every moment for the rest of his existence than return to his life before he met them. Finds he would rather experience the sorrow and the guilt and the mourning than the all-consuming nothing he felt before he met his children.
They will leave him, eventually, inevitably. It will hurt like nothing else, but Mihawk will welcome that suffering.
There is a saying he heard, once, that it is better to have loved and lost than never loved at all. Mihawk once thought it foolish, but now he understands.
Love defies reason, takes a knife to logic — there can be no rational argument to why he would not trade this sickening, crippling feeling for anything. He cannot explain why he feels no resentment towards how much power these two children have over him, despite that love is double-edged; why he’d rather grab it by the blade than let it go, uncaring of how deep it would slice him, what parts of himself it would cost to hold tight to it.
Perhaps, then, love can be the only remedy to the wounds love itself causes, and the only thing that could fix all the ways he’s been ruined by Zoro and Perona is Zoro and Perona.
If love is the only battle you win by not fighting it, then Mihawk has been losing for a long, long time.
Tentatively, Mihawk wraps his arms around Perona. He can’t even recall the last time he gave someone a hug, if ever — it cannot possibly be comforting, his hands hovering awkwardly atop the small of her back, elbows bent in skewed directions — and for a moment he wonders if he’s done the wrong thing, because it makes Perona cry harder. But soon, she tightens her grip around his shoulders.
He holds her for a while like that, waiting patiently as her sobs taper into little hiccups. Suddenly, a distant clatter across the castle startles them both.
Perona pulls away, exchanging a puzzled glance with Mihawk. Carefully, he pushes to his feet, Perona trailing in his footsteps as he ventures towards the commotion. The shuffling grows louder as they near the library.
They both walk inside. Zoro is fussing near a toppled bookcase, haphazardly slotting novels back into the tilted ledge with no regard for order. He doesn't seem to notice them enter, Mihawk and Perona shrouded by the blinder of his ruined eye.
Mihawk gulps. The twist in his stomach is worse now that he has realized its origin, wringing his guts nearly tight enough to empty them, acid surging up his windpipe. This is what it is like, he supposes, to love someone so much it's a physical thing, to care so deeply it reshapes the hands of fate in its image. Maybe love is its own type of violence; whose power turns sentient beings into gods, yet simultaneously leaves them utterly helpless. It's wonderful. It's horrifying. It gives purpose to human existence.
They are his children, and they need him. Mihawk is not used to being needed, and it’s terrifying: he can and has failed, he can let them down and hurt them. Mihawk is hardly qualified to be their father, but he doubts that in the beginning, any parents are.
Mihawk clears his throat. "What are you doing in here?"
Zoro startles. He whips his head around, pivoting in a near-complete circle just to look Mihawk fully in the face. The patch of gauze covering his injury is mottled and grungy, drying blood clotting in the lattice of cotton fibers fastened to his cheek. "Oh–uh. I heard Perona crying."
Mihawk sighs. Neither of them are particularly good with words -- but over time, they've figured out ways to say a lot in just a few of them. Zoro's sentence is terse, its true sentiment alluded to but left unsaid: I wanted to comfort her, I wanted to be there for her. Ah, it's so very Zoro to put her first when half his world has just been permanently cut.
Beneath the squabbles over chores and the petty fights, he loves her. Really, it took Mihawk far longer than it should've to realize that the reason they bicker like siblings is because they are.
And because Mihawk and Zoro are alike in their brevity, Mihawk does not say: you are kind, or I am proud of you, or you have become a better person than I could ever dream to. Instead he asks, "Couldn’t you just follow the sound?"
Slowly, Zoro rises, sheepishly scratching the back of his neck as he glances away. "I did..."
Mihawk will never fail to be marveled by his sense of direction. "This is the wrong side of the house."
Then, silence. It is something Mihawk is quite accustomed to, but this silence is wrong: like something is off, or maybe missing. Mihawk pinches his brows, braces himself.
In some ways, nothing has changed. In others, everything has.
When Zoro first got on his knees and begged Mihawk to train him, Mihawk recalls thinking: when a man like you swallows his pride, it's always for the sake of someone else. At the time, it was not a sentiment he thought he could relate to; he had already reached his pinnacle. With no one and nothing to strive for, there was no reason he would ever need to set aside his pride.
Or so he thought.
What's that phrase again?
Like father, like son.
It seems he's beholden to something, after all.
So Mihawk starts, "Zoro. Perona." Perona's breath hitches. Zoro's eye widens from where he's staring at the wall. It is the first time Mihawk has called Zoro by his given name, and he rarely uses Perona’s, either, usually settling for an epithet. "I’m sorry."
Zoro pulls a face. "Sorry?" he repeats sourly. "Don’t be sorry, you asshole, this happened because I—"
But Zoro cuts himself off when his gaze returns to Mihawk. Mihawk doesn't know what Zoro sees on his face, only that it silences him: perhaps he's registering the slight redness on Mihawk's waterline, or Perona's mascara smeared across his shoulder.
Mihawk has only seen Zoro cry once, back when he first defeated him. He'd rather not shift it the other way around. Mihawk can keep it together, for just a little longer. There are only a few more things he needs to say.
Steeling his resolve, Mihawk tells him, "I will still fight you, on one condition." His words barely push through the tightness in his chest, the stinging in his tear ducts. "Survive."
Even with the wound, Zoro's expression lights ablaze. "Oh yeah?" he says with a bright, challenging grin. "Then I've also got a condition. You'd better survive too, old man."
Who does he think he's talking to? "Obviously." He releases the tension in his shoulders. “To prove yourself a worthy challenger to me, you must first master your swordsmanship," Mihawk continues, "but the only thing you have to do to be worthy of being my child is be my child." He glances at Perona. "That goes for both of you."
Perona sniffles. Zoro swallows hard. If Zoro will one day surpass him, if Perona will someday return to Thriller Bark, Mihawk should cherish the time he has beside them. They will not be here forever, but maybe that’s okay: their living situation may be temporary, but family is not. After all, Luffy is no less of Shanks' son despite their distance.
Damn that red-haired menace for being right.
Perhaps having someone out there you love gives you strength, and Mihawk will be all the better for it.
For whose sake did Kuma do this? Zoro's? Perona's? Mihawk's? It’s a shame Mihawk can never ask him, but he supposes it doesn’t matter: they have each other now. To be loved is to be changed, and none of them are the same anymore. Mihawk found his purpose, and that's enough.
Mihawk's hawk-like eyes scan the vertical wound on Zoro's face, the lateral gash across his chest. Koushirou gave Zoro Wado Ichimonji. The only thing Mihawk has given him is scars.
Maybe Mihawk can emulate Shanks, and give him...
As if he's reading Mihawk's mind, Zoro deadpans, "I don't want your sweaty hat."
Mihawk surprises himself when a laugh escapes his lips. Flicking his wrist, he removes his plumed millinery from his head, then puts it on Perona.
"You couldn't pull it off, anyway."