Chapter Text
Zoro waits a full hour after the end of his match this time, sitting in the locker room bench as the players around him slowly trickle out, watching as the string of Perona's increasingly furious texts unravels across his phone. A few people glance his way, mostly rookies who still haven't figured out that Zoro's an asshole yet, but for the most part, everyone knows to leave him alone.
turn on your location, Perona orders him from afar, which Zoro elects to ignore, especially since he has no idea how to do that anyways. He leans over to fish for a protein bar instead, the endless stab of notifications rattling at his back. its in the settings. USE THE SEARCH BAR. i know you're reading these. u are SO DEAD. WORSE than dead—UGLY!!!
Nothing else comes up after that, meaning that Perona's abandoned the diplomatic approach and is now roaming the backstage, attempting to hunt him down. In fifteen minutes, she'll hit the outer limit of her already limited patience, and storm off to find Mihawk, threatening to quit her job—at which point Zoro will sneak out, go home to his mattress and his beer, and live out the rest of his life without having to answer annoying, bullshit questions that nobody likes.
At least, that's how it's always worked out in the past. But this time, when he finally grabs his stuff and shoulders his freshly-showered way out of the locker room, something slams into his side, sinisterly pink.
"I knew it!" Perona shrieks triumphantly, manicured claws sinking into his bicep, holding on tight.
Zoro bites back a curse, jerking away on reflex, just enough awareness left in him to avoid breaking her grip. He has a feeling that the press would have a fucking field day with the news, if he flung his PR manager into the nearest wall.
"How the hell did you even find me?" he demands instead, mostly to buy himself some time, measuring the distance between himself and the nearest exit in the back of his mind. "This part of the venue's for players only."
"Well, I just told security that I was looking for a pitiful, lost little boy who was hiding from the scary people with cameras, and they let me right in. So nice of them, don't you think?"
There's a problem with every part of that sentence, but Zoro decides on addressing the biggest one. "Oi, I'm not scared of them," he clarifies, because this is definitely very important. "I just don't feel like wasting my time."
"Which is why you hid in an empty locker room for an hour?"
"I wasn't hiding either. I was in the shower. Had a lot of…skincare products. And stuff."
Perona gives him a look so withering that Zoro knows he's lost the fight. "Name one," she demands, releasing him in favor of crossing her arms.
Zoro opens his mouth, actually prepared with an answer this time.
"No, your twelve-in-one drain cleaner does not count!"
Zoro decides to change the subject.
"Look, I'm not going." He hikes his bag higher up on his shoulder, spare rackets shifting along with his weight. "I haven't been to a post-match conference this entire year, and nobody's even noticed. It's not a huge deal."
Perona does something with her face at him, a mix of confusion and exasperation and annoyance, all rolled into one. She's gotten very good at that, possibly because Zoro's given her a lot of opportunity to practice. "Um, one, everyone has noticed—it's actually the top story every time you come out of a match, because everyone wants to know where you've weaseled your way off to." She looks him over, clicking her tongue. "Jeez, for someone so gigantic, you really know how to hide."
"I wasn't hiding," Zoro reminds her, helpfully.
Perona ignores him. "And two—" she continues. "Did you miss the part where both of your newest sponsors just ditched you for someone else?"
"So what? Maybe they wanted someone cheaper to work with."
"Or maybe, they figured out that advertising their product doesn't work when their walking advertisement refuses to show up!"
To give Perona credit, that's probably the case. Most of Zoro's sponsorships have been lost exactly this way, companies signing on from his reputation alone, jumping ship once they realized that he couldn't be assed to stand in front of a camera for longer than thirty seconds at a time. In the early days, Perona's predecessors had been able to spin his silence in a slightly more favorable light, making it look like he was just shy and awkward, a rookie who kept his head down and worked hard—clearly dependable.
It worked out for a while. His career got bigger, the money rolling in along with it. Zoro paid some of his debts to Nami, paid all of his debts to Mihawk; he bought a house because Kuina was gone and he hated the dorms, bought an apartment because he hated the house, bought a motorcycle because he hated being home at all. He knew exactly where all the Berri was coming from, and also how much his career depended on it, so he made more of an effort to try. He did his best to play nice with the press.
Now, though, he's got five career Grand Slams behind him, winning everything there is to win in tennis, so he just looks like exactly what he is: a bastard who doesn't like to talk. Avoiding these press conferences is a favor to everyone, because he makes it through about half of a question these days before he gets pissed off.
He says as much to Perona, who looks for a second like she wants to agree with him, before she remembers what actually pays the bills. She shakes her head, a fresh layer of determination setting in.
"Doesn't matter. I'm not letting you not do your job. And this is a part of your job, no matter how hard you're trying to pretend otherwise. Even Mihawk told you that you needed to open up."
Which is how Zoro knows it's gotten really bad, because Mihawk used to charge his students extra if they wanted any conversation, ten Berri per word.
Zoro leans his head against the wall, runs an absent hand through his hair, and tries to think of something distracting to say. He needs to stall for time. "Shouldn't the conference be over by now? It's been an hour. What's the hold up?"
"Well, since almost everyone came here in the interest of meeting you, the whole room unanimously agreed to wait for your arrival when I asked." She gives him a flinty sort of glare. "Don't you feel a little bad?"
"For the press?" Zoro snorts. "Yeah, the leeches aren't getting enough blood. Sucks to be them. Or doesn't, I guess."
"I meant for me!" She puts a hand to her head, very dramatic, eyes growing suspiciously shiny. "Just picture it—it's two years ago, and you're fresh out of university with your shiny public relations degree, and you get paired up with the rank one tennis player in the world…only to find out he's a totally uncute meathead who doesn't listen to anything you say, and sets all your progress on fire every time he opens his mouth!"
Unfortunately, Zoro is picturing it—and he does feel bad. Despite being the most recent of his PR managers, Perona's stuck with him for longer than any of the others, never actually following through on her biweekly threats to resign. He respects the persistence, outside of the moments where she's dragging him to a slow and painful death; it's probably half the reason why he shows up anywhere on time, or at all.
The other half is because of the tactic she's employing now, which is crying on command.
Zoro grimaces, trying to look anywhere except at her eyes, which are fully welling up now, little sniffles tacked on for added effect. "Can you stop that—?" he grits out, swallows down a wince at her next little hiccup.
"No, I can't! It's just so sad—thinking about all those scruffy reporters in the confererence room, who definitely think I lied to them, and are now starving to death. They must hate me by now, and all because I couldn't get you to show up."
She inhales sharply, a sound Zoro recognizes as the prelude to full-on wailing, and his survival instincts kick into high gear, adrenaline surging through his veins. He digs around in his bag a little, finds a half-crumpled stack of restaurant napkins—mostly clean-looking, in the shitty lighting of the hallway—and shoves it into her hands, scowling.
"Shit—fine, okay. Cut it out already. I'll go."
Perona dabs at her eyes with a napkin; none of her makeup is even slightly smudged. "…Really?" She asks, with quavering hope.
"Yeah. Promise."
"Great!"
He has no idea why he even gave Perona the napkins, with how fast the tears evaporate from her face. She gives him a little nudge to encourage him forwards, then runs him over rapid-fire with about a hundred words per minute, debriefing him with the usual pre-conference advice. No swearing, no smiling, no unbuttoning his shirt all the way, no "weirdly suggestive" sayings about coming out on top—and a lot of smaller stuff, too, little details that Zoro will probably lose track of, once he's in the room.
They come to a stop just outside of the entryway, the double-doors tightly closed. Perona circles around him until she's face-to-face with him, her hands pressed slightly below his biceps, which is the highest part of him she can comfortably reach.
"You'll do great!" She says, and Zoro isn't actually sure who she's trying to convince. "Just remember—at least it's not all completely forced acting. You actually like playing tennis."
Zoro rubs at the back of his neck with a sigh, some of the tension easing along his spine. The post-match muscle-strain is always familiar, a soreness that feels strangely good—and it's probably the one thing that's never changed, between the early days and now. He pushes open one of the doors, letting Perona go in first.
"Yeah," he mutters, taking one last look at the rest of the venue, all of the quiet and empty space. "Sure I do."
The East Blue Open's a mid-tier tournament, the smallest of the four internationals, and the bracket's not even in the money yet, still in the round of sixteen—so when Zoro walks in and finds twenty reporters clustered inside the conference room, he already knows they're here for him. The usual press turnout for these kinds of things caps out at five or six, meaning only a handful of the vulture assembly is actually interested in the game, and the rest are all waiting for Zoro to walk in and drink water, for a juicy headline on how he's secretly plotting to piss on his next opponent.
No one's even trying to make a secret of it, either, nearly all the eyes in the room laser-focused on the side of Zoro's head. Zoro squints at the far wall, pretends to be paying attention as the loser of today's match wraps up his side of the interview, trying to remember his name. It was a dumb one. Whiskey, or maybe Gin.
He's a lot chattier than the version in Zoro's hour-old memories, and also much happier, smiling creepily into the corner of the room each time he answers a question, face lighting up as he stares at the only journalist still making an effort to hear him out. Zoro follows the direction of his gaze, and finds the face of a stranger, startlingly blonde. When the man looks up, half-smiling around his next response, the grey-blue of his eyes meets Zoro's own, sharper and much less interested than Zoro's come to expect.
Zoro blinks, a little thrown off, for more reasons than one. The world of tennis journalism, especially at the local level, is small enough that he's forced to see the same rotating set of assholes at just about every event. It's weird, seeing someone he doesn't recognize.
It's even weirder because he's hot.
Tennis journalists should be annoying and easy to ignore, not suspiciously attractive with great legs and a nice ass. The blonde looks like he should be in front of the camera, not behind it, all buttoned-up like he's on the cover of a cologne ad—something not entirely out of real life. Zoro stares, trying to pick him out of a memory somewhere, but he's pretty sure they've never met; no way would he have forgotten those curly eyebrows. Or any other part of him. If he'd seen this guy in a bar, he would have asked to buy him a drink.
"Mr. Roronoa—"
Zoro turns his head on reflex, awareness flooding back in without his permission. Gin's gone, done with his interview in the time that Zoro wasn't paying attention, now off to a corner somewhere to lick his wounds. The scene settles back in on the speaker, a journalist Zoro remembers partly because of his bad hair, and mostly because one of his headlines haunted Zoro's career for about two years. "Yeah, what?"
Behind him, Perona gives the leg of his chair a little warning kick. Too sharp—he needs to soften his tone.
"It's been ten months since you've made any kind of public statement. We've missed you, so welcome back. Is there a special occasion behind this decision?"
Zoro looks towards the wall behind the guy's head, and says, "No."
The man raises a brow, the edge of his smile sharpening. "Really? Nothing influenced you at all?"
An uncomfortable silence stretches across the room, everyone's eyes on him suddenly expectant. This is why Zoro hates this shit. He has no idea what else he's supposed to say, what the right answer is supposed to be, if there's a question underneath the question that he's just not getting. His brain feels like a photograph that forgot to develop—just the concept of an image in an empty blank.
"Yeah, actually," he says, deciding on the first thing that comes to mind, which is the truth, even though it's almost always the wrong thing to say. "I didn't know you were here. Otherwise I wouldn't have shown up."
Perona doesn't even bother kicking his chair this time, instead sinking lower into her own as a murmur goes through the crowd. The man clears his throat, readies up to try again, but Zoro's already reached his stupid-question quota of the day; he goes back to looking at the far corner, at the blonde.
Apparently, Blondie's got nothing to ask him—maybe because he used up all his questions on Gin. He's typing at something on his phone, folding his legs over each other as he shifts restlessly in place, and he keeps looking longingly towards the exit, like he can't wait to get the hell out. Which is supposed to be what Zoro does, hating these conferences; no way does a guy with a fucking press pass around his neck want out of here more than him.
It's confusing and interesting and a little annoying, all at once, words shoving up in his throat before he can trap them behind his teeth.
"Hey. Curly."
The room goes quiet again, Zoro's words cutting one of the background reporters off mid-sentence, Perona shooting him a warning glare, but Zoro doesn't really care. Everyone in the room's looking where Zoro's looking now, watching the realization pass slowly over the blonde's face as he realizes that Zoro's directly addressing him.
"…it's Sanji," the blonde corrects, annoyance cracking briefly across his expression before it flattens back out into the smile from earlier, uninterestingly polite.
"Yeah, but you still knew I was talking to you, so." Zoro lets that hang in the air a moment, grins at the glare that it gets him, strangely energized. He can't remember the last time he felt this awake during an interview—probably never. "Anyways. I want to hear your questions."
Sanji looks around, slightly incredulous and a little desperate, like he thinks the rest of the room might come to save him, but nobody else moves. Everyone's too busy looking at Zoro like he's grown a third head, Perona especially, which is probably because he's said more to Sanji than he has to any member of the press for the past five years. Someone snaps a silent photo, the camera washing out the room in its flash.
"What about the first twenty that you got asked?" Sanji finally points out. "Maybe you want to try those instead? The lady over here had a good one." He smiles off to the side, in the direction of one of the women, surprisingly soft.
"Yeah, I answered those already—"
"When?"
"—and you're the only one here I've never met. So whatever you've got, let's get it over with." He looks Sanji over, a strange sensation sparking to life in his gut, a little like getting into the flow of a particularly close game. "Unless you got nothing."
A muscle twitches in Sanij's jaw, indecision passing across his face. For a second, Zoro thinks he might actually back down, take the coward's way out, like the rest of his camera-carrying kind. But surprisingly, he stands his ground.
"Fine. Hold on," he says, very visibly swallowing down his first response, in favor of a more socially acceptable second. He's much better at that than Zoro is.
In an unfairly fluid motion, he uncrosses his legs, leans over to the nearby chair to dig around in his bag, eventually unearthing a notebook and a pen.
"Question one—" he starts, through his teeth, flipping his notes to the first blank page. "What made you choose to play tennis? Was it because the ball looks like your head?"
The silence from their audience takes on a distinctly stunned sort of edge. Behind Zoro, Perona makes a strangled sound, and he can tell that she's looking hard at his hair.
"No. I picked tennis because I'm good at it," Zoro says bluntly. Thankfully, he's got enough self-discipline to avoid taking the obvious bait. Kind of. "…and it's not even the same shade of green."
Sanji nods, scribbling something across the page, leaning forwards to study Zoro more seriously. "You're right," he says, after a moment. "So maybe you dropped the ball in a really dirty puddle first, and then it matched."
"I'll drop you in a puddle in a second. What do you weigh, like two tennis balls?"
"What do you weigh, with the size of your big head?"
Zoro's about to jump right on that, response flying to the tip of his tongue—something about a very different kind of big head—when Perona kicks his chair again, hard enough for Zoro to finally twist around and look at her.
"What are you doing?" she mouths at him, and Zoro doesn't answer that, because he doesn't actually know. He knows what it looks like: that he's just being his usual self, giving some random reporter a hard time, cutting all attempts at conversation unproductively off. But underneath all of that, they're talking, Zoro thinks.
He turns back around, where Sanji's waiting for him, surprisingly patient, letting Zoro get re-settled before he moves onto the next question on his list.
"Question two," Sanji reads. "This year, Queendom magazine placed you in the list of East Blue's top ten most eligible bachelors. How would you like to respond to these obviously false accusations?"
"Never heard of them," Zoro admits, honestly. "Seems important to you, though. Is that why you curled your eyebrows for a tennis conference? You wanted to show off?"
One of said eyebrows twitches in irritation, the curl of it threatening to fly off Sanji's face. "Fuck you, these are natural. Unlike your shitty moss—"
"Yeah, that's natural too, I got proof."
"Proof? What, like a picture?"
Zoro grins. "Nah. But you could take one, if you want."
"What does that even—?" Sanji starts, and then stops, his gaze dropping involuntarily downwards as he follows Zoro's train of thought, below the belt, an instant flush spilling across his skin.
It occurs to Zoro here that he might have crossed the line, light-years after he's actually blown past it, remembering for the first time in a while that there's an entire room of reporters between them, mental typewriters working busily in their heads. Once, after a match, he'd made the mistake of shaking hands with an opponent for a second too long, and the subsequent dating rumors followed him around for fucking weeks—he can't even imagine the story that's going to come out of this episode. Perona's going to kill him.
She stands up at that moment, seemingly ready to carry out exactly that, chair screeching against the floor, fire in her eyes.
"Okay! What a great conference that was! Everyone, thank you so much for your time, and Zoro, we're just going to—" One of her hands comes cheerfully down on his shoulder, keeping him forcefully plastered to his chair, her other one waving Sanji over, slightly frantic. "Hi, you wouldn't mind coming over here for a second, would you?"
Sanji, who'd been standing entirely still, flushing and paling in alternating intervals, snaps instantly to attention at Perona's call, softening in almost every possible way. He makes his obedient way over as the rest of the reporters filter out, looking at Perona through friendly eyes.
"Did you need something?" He asks, back to being entirely polite, but in a more genuine way this time.
Perona nods. "Yes, I just wanted to say that we—" she pats Zoro with an indicative hand, then tips his head downwards in a semi-apologetic gesture. "—are sorry."
"I'm not," Zoro interrupts, scowling up at her as best he can, but doesn't do much else to resist. Perona ignores him, tightening her grip.
"We should not have insulted you, or your eyebrows, or said weird and potentially creepy things. So, if there's anything we can do to maybe put this horrifying little memory in the past…"
Sanji laughs a little, clear and soft, the sound settling nicely in Zoro's chest. He reaches into the inside of his suit jacket, fiddling around until he finds a cigarette, glancing briefly at Perona for apparent approval before he lights up. "Don't worry," he says. "I've heard way worse, in this line of work."
"Oh, thank god." Perona releases about half of the air in her lungs, and also Zoro's head, smoothing out her skirt and straightening up. She pauses for half a second, admiring her work, then makes for the nearest corner of the room, her phone already having slithered out of her pocket and into her hands. Answering her seventeen-hundred texts, probably, now that she's out of crisis-management mode.
Zoro straightens up too, rubbing at the sore back of his head, watching Sanji's eyes flick towards him, going sharp again. A stretch of silence passes between them, oddly comfortable, Sanji looking him carefully over.
"You know," the blonde says. "I already assumed you were a bastard, because of all your past interviews. So I didn't think you'd be so talkative, up close."
"Yeah, well—with a curly new weirdo in the peanut gallery, I had to say something. And it worked on Gin, too. Never seen him smile so much in my life." He squints a little in Sanji's direction, suddenly curious. "What did you even do to him?"
"Nothing," Sanji says, reflexively, some of the pink tint creeping back into his cheeks. "Well. He looked depressed, because everyone kept asking him questions about some annoying green guy with bad publicity. So I asked him something about himself. That's it."
Zoro snorts. "One question made him look like that? What, did you ask him to marry you?"
"No, you asshole—I'm saving that for the next time I need to get out of being stuck with you."
"Next time.' So you're coming to another one of these."
Sanji doesn't actually answer, just averts his gaze a little, and Zoro feels the swell of something inside of him, his heart kicking up against his ribs. The edge of his mouth crooks slightly upwards, entirely against his will. He feels like he wants to say something, but he doesn't know what he wants it to be, so he just looks at the wall for a while, rubbing at the back of his neck until he hears the now-familiar click of a pen.
A second later, there's a soft pressure up against his ribs, Sanji's hand pushing what looks like a business card into his chest. He's close enough that Zoro can smell his cologne, something faintly citrusy, the edges warm with smoke.
"Here," Sanji says, not quite looking Zoro in the eye. "If you feel like arguing somewhere that isn't a shitty conference room."
Zoro's brain doesn't catch up right away, one hand coming up to secure the card on instinct, his head tilting up so he can blink at Sanji's already-turning back. By the time he thinks to actually look at the card, or maybe use some of his words to respond, Sanji's gone and Perona's leaning around his shoulder instead, eyes wide with disbelief.
The front of the card's got a little cartoon boat on it, kind of stupid-looking, with the head of a fish. On the back, Sanji's scrawled out his number for him, written right underneath the name of the place: Baratie.
There's a tug on his sleeve; Zoro looks to the side, meeting Perona's stunned gaze.
"Who was he?" She whispers, almost reverently awed. "What just happened? I mean, you got a reporter to like you. Even after a full conversation! …do we think he was actually real?"
Zoro shrugs, stuffing the card into his pocket, the ghost of Sanji's touch still warm against his chest. "No idea," he says, truthfully, as casually as he can. But he knows what he might be hoping for, at least.
The Mariner puts the story out two days later: a front-page picture of his public confrontation with Sanji, complete with its eyecatching title, DEMON OF THE EAST BLUE: ANGER ISSUES EXPOSED? RORONOA TERRORIZES ANOTHER INNOCENT MEMBER OF THE PRESS.
Perona mails him a copy of it in advance—express delivery, no letter attached, not even a single resignation threat—then signs him up for three weeks worth of community service events, which is actually on the lighter end of things, as far as punishments are concerned. In practice, all Zoro's going to be doing is teaching tennis to kids, and it's the one kind of publicity stunt that he doesn't hate.
He drops the article on the coffee table without reading it, looks at Sanji's part of the picture for a while, and then dozes off, wakes up six hours later to his phone blowing up, Nami over the line demanding, "What are you doing to Vivi's cousin?"
Zoro pauses, his arm still frozen halfway into the motion of throwing his phone out of the room. After a very blurry moment of thought, he brings it back to his ear, and says, "Huh?"
"Sanji. The blonde. It says you threatened to drown him?"
Confusion shocks him halfway awake, Sanji's name doing the rest of the work; Zoro sits up, dragging a hand down his face. "When the hell did I do that?"
"On page six." There's the rustle of paper over the line, Nami flipping through the magazine at an expert pace. He can tell that she's gone and highlighted her favorite parts already, snippings that'll show up in one of her end-of-the-year scrapbooks. "It says: 'Roronoa became immediately hostile (as per usual) (one of the Mariner's own has experienced his on-sight aggression towards blondes in the past), and stated his intent to locate the nearest body of water, wherein he would deposit his victim's innocent self."
Zoro looks to his own copy, squints at the name underneath the headline, and recognizes the writer from one of the most disastrous interviews in his career, the one that had made his second PR manager quit. Privately, Zoro still doesn't really think it was his fault—Helmeppo's father had bought him an interview slot, that much was obvious, because none of his questions had fucking anything to do with tennis. All Zoro did was point it out. Along with some other shit.
Still, he can't believe it's still screwing him over now—he doesn't even remember Helmeppo having been in that room. He doesn't remember anyone who was there, except for Sanji.
On the other end of the phone, Nami's still expecting an explanation, so Zoro admits, "I said I'd drop him in a puddle. Not the same thing."
"Why? I mean, aside from the fact that you're a mannerless dumbass. You didn't like him?"
Zoro has to be careful with his response; talking to Nami is like digging his own grave sometimes, and he doesn't need anymore blackmail material hanging over his head. He stays silent for a strategic stretch of time, hauling himself off the couch and halfway into his fridge, reaching past three levels of empty space for the last can of beer.
"…he was fine," he says, as neutrally as possible, giving nothing away.
Twenty minutes later, Nami's extracted the full story from him in its entirety, and has also gone upstairs to relay it to Vivi, adding on several extra conclusions that Zoro doesn't remember agreeing to.
"—and so Zoro only threatened your cousin with minor bodily harm, not too bad at all, right Vivi? Don't worry, I'll make sure this idiot shapes up before his date. I won't even charge interest for my valuable time."
Zoro scowls, a hot flash prickling underneath his skin. "I don't need your help. And it's not a date. He gave me his business card. It's a business relationship."
It's rare that he says something that manages to leave Nami speechless, but he seems to have done it this time, because the next voice that comes over the line is Vivi's, Nami having wordlessly handed her the phone.
"You know, I'm actually glad you two met. His publication doesn't usually feature sports as a topic, so the initial story had me surprised. But, hm. It makes sense that you two would get along, I think." Vivi hums to herself in contemplation. "Which business card did he give you?"
Even though Zoro knows the orange witch is obviously listening in, he feels himself relaxing anyways, which is a dangerous trap.
"Don't know," he lies, even though his brain apparently went ahead and memorized both Sanji's number and the name of the place, without his permission. "It was for a restaurant, or something. It's called the Baratie?"
"Oh, his father's restaurant!" In the background, Zoro can hear 'HIS FATHER?,' the connection crackling around Nami's screech. "We spent a lot of time there, as kids. It's a nice place." She sighs, sweetly reminiscing, oblivious to the suddenly stilted nature of Zoro's silence. "So, do you think you'll see him any time soon?"
Zoro turns the business card over in his hand, tracing the whorls of Sanji's handwriting, hesitation sitting uncomfortably in his chest. It's not really like him. Most of time, he never has to think twice about what he's going to do; he just does what he wants, when he wants, and keeps moving on. He wanted to play professional tennis, so he did. He promised Kuina he'd get to the top, so he did that too.
But it was one thing when Sanji was just hot and blonde and fun to tease, another reporter to get a rise out of. Someone Zoro could have fucked around with for as long as they were stuck working together, little flashes of interaction on the court or in the conference room. It's another matter entirely, going to visit him in the light of day. Willingly, for no reason at all. In one of his treasured childhood hangouts, apparently.
Zoro's mouth feels weirdly dry, and no amount of leftover beer seems able to fix it.
"I mean, maybe," he says, evasively. "Might be busy—"
There's a short but urgent shuffle on the other end of the line, Nami rotating herself back into the conversation. "Doing what? After the East Blue Open, you don't have another match for another two weeks. You're telling me you can't even call him?"
"I've got other stuff. Plans."
Nami gives him a silence so withering that Zoro knows he's lost the fight. He has no idea how this keeps happening to him.
"Name one," Nami says. "Outside of tennis."
Zoro doesn't know how this keeps happening to him, either, or how he got to this point in his life, where he spends most of his waking hours getting bossed around by women half his size. He decides to change the subject.
"Why do you care so much, anyways? This guy being Vivi's cousin means nothing. He could be a creep. He could think I'm a creep. Or we could still end up hating each other, and it'd just be a waste of time. Also, he's a journalist. Media events are already shitty enough—I don't need an ex there on top of that."
Nami seems stunned. Zoro's actually a little surprised too, at how much just came out of his mouth.
"…sorry, what? Since when are you the overthinker?" Nami finally demands, genuinely alarmed. "Gods, if only you and Luffy put this much thought into filing your taxes on time—"
"Oh yeah, when is that again?"
"Two months ago." Nami pauses, letting Zoro sit with that enormously unwelcome surprise, then sighs. "I already turned them in for both of you, moron. You signed the papers!"
"I sign a lot of shit. Doesn't mean I read it."
"Yeah, that's a different problem that you should probably work on, and also, if you ever say that in front of Vivi and send her into cardiac arrest, I'll skin you into a handbag." She sighs again, but differently this time, a little dreamy. "Though sometimes, it's nice to see her mad…"
"Weird."
"I don't want to hear that from you, when there's a six-page story of you practically fucking Sanji in front of the press!"
Zoro doesn't have a response to that, mostly because he's eyeing up the article on the table now, a little tempted to look and see if article-him is really doing all that. Maybe he hasn't been appreciating Helmeppo's creativity enough. It gives Nami enough time to calm back down; he can hear her pacing around, shifting her weight restlessly, the way she always does when she's trying to figure out what to say.
"It's because of that photo of you in the story," she says, after a moment. "The one of you publicly harassing him."
He wants to correct her on that, but something in her tone stops him. "Yeah? It's a decent picture."
"You look different in it. Like—" she swallows hard, her hesitation audible. "Like the way you look in those academy pictures. From before."
Zoro feels himself go entirely still, even his heart seizing up behind his ribs. Nami doesn't actually say it, which Zoro knows is because he's never said it—he's never talked about Kuina to anyone out loud, not even Luffy. But the story's still easy enough to find, the pictures forever online, old records of her matches to see her in motion, like she's alive. And even if Zoro never talks about her, the rest of the world sure does, every fucking interview for the first two years of his career always bringing her up, lamenting on how unlucky it all was, asking him how he felt about such promising talent going to waste.
He's silent for so long that he can feel Nami starting to get worried, blinking himself back to awareness to find his nails digging into his knee—the place where Kuina's scar would have been, if she'd actually woken up after going under the knife.
"Hey, Zoro?" Nami's voice again, uncharacteristically gentle, which is almost worse than anything else.
Zoro pries his hand off his knee, curling his fingers into his palm to keep his fist at his side.
"Yeah. I'm good," he says. He doesn't really recognize his voice when it's like this, detached and weirdly flat. "Have to go, though. Tell Vivi I said bye. And—I'll call him, maybe."
He can tell that Nami wants to say more, but she doesn't push it, probably because pushing it hasn't gotten her or anyone else anywhere with him, for the last ten years.
"…alright," is all she finally comes out with. "You should. No, you better do it. Don't think I won't ask for details."
He makes a sound, vaguely affirmative, and then the line goes dead, silence settling thickly over Zoro's empty apartment in her wake.
Zoro leans back on the couch, head tilting up to the ceiling, phone dropping out of his hand onto the cushions nearby. The Baratie's business card is still in his lap, and he picks it up, studying Sanji's number against the light.
For a moment, he thinks about all of it: the thing Nami said; the clear memory of the conference, going back and forth on Sanji's stupid questions, feeling like he was finally fucking awake; the echo of Sanji's soft laugh, warm and weirdly light. Zoro takes in an unsteady breath, shuts his eyes.
Then he tucks the card back in his pocket, looks for his keys, and goes to buy another case of drinks. There's plenty of space to fill up in his fridge.