Work Text:
Romance Dawn looms over him in the Shatterdome hangar, and from behind the railing, Zoro can’t help but gaze back up at her. He’s got all her specs memorized, often finding himself reciting them late at night when he can’t sleep: 2200 tons of steel, 10TK gyro stabilizers, 08FS coolant, nuclear vortex turbine, Arc-9 chest reactor.
All these things, but still the Romance is not alive. She stands now, dormant, asleep, obedient, as the techs toil away on her. Sparks whip through the air as a pair of mechtechs service one of her arms; repairing one of the swords concealed inside, no doubt. Romance Dawn has three swords, one in each arm and a third that forms from her maw. It was her signature move, the three swords. A samurai monster defending Tokyo port from other monsters was Japan’s pride and joy, a national emblem.
Until.
“Heyyy, Zoro! I knew you’d be up here!”
The voice makes him jump out of his skin; Luffy drops down next to him, his lunch tray clattering to the concrete with him. “It’s so cool we don’t get rations here!” he says, and Zoro’s eyes drop down to his tray. It’s got double the usual amount of mashed potatoes, smothered in gravy, with a huge piece of meatloaf digging into its side.
Zoro sighs, and makes peace with the fact that Luffy isn’t going away anytime soon. “What do you want?”
“To sit somewhere for lunch. The mess hall was pretty full. This is a way cooler spot, anyway.” Luffy leans back on his palms, the string of his ever-present straw hat taut against his neck. He whistles. “ Romance Dawn. She’s yours, right?”
Zoro grunts in assent. “Last of her kind. Mark-3s were discontinued --”
“Last year, I know. The new ones are all digital, which is lame.” He spoons a heaping scoop of mashed potatoes into his mouth. “One power outage and they’re toast.”
Zoro doesn’t know why Luffy is doing this. Why he’s pretending the last Drift-compatibility trial didn’t happen. The PPDC had barely given him time to grieve before throwing him back to square 1, trying to find a replacement copilot as quickly as possible. The Marshal stated that Zoro was too valuable a pilot to be out of commission for too long, so he’d swallowed tears he never got to cry and headed straight for trials. And anyway, Zoro doesn’t know anything else; doesn’t want to know anything else. He’s the best of the best.
But if he were better, he could’ve saved Kuina.
The trials themselves stretched over days, weeks. Zoro was tired of it. It was just confirming what he’d already suspected: nobody would ever Drift with him the way Kuina did. Nobody would ever move with him, anticipate him, react to him like she did. The candidates were too slow, or too hasty, or too jerky, or just too easy. Half of him had died that night on the coast, and now he was doomed to find another half that probably didn’t exist.
He was ready to throw it in. Tell the Marshal thanks, but no thanks. He must have fought the entire Defense Corps before a gangly kid with a gnarly scar under his eye had stepped up, grinning like they were already old friends. Like he had already sensed their synergy from the moment he slipped off his sandals.
“You fight good,” Luffy says, as though he’s reading his thoughts. As though he’s already in his head.
“Thanks.”
“You felt that, right? Earlier today?” Luffy twirls his spoon in his mashed potato mountain. “We’re Drift-compatible.”
Finally, he’d cut to the chase. Nobody could ever really nail down what Drift-compatibility felt like. Lightning in a bottle, a candle in the dark, whatever. It differs from pilot to pilot. But for Zoro, it's like this: where the other fights had been a chore, fighting Luffy was a dance. Zoro is stronger, but Luffy is faster.
He doesn't know Luffy. But he knows this feeling.
“Why are you here?” Zoro asks, and Luffy blinks.
“I told you. The mess hall was --”
“No, not lunch, dumbass. Why are you in the Defense Corps?”
Luffy falls silent for a moment, and Zoro understands why: it’s a sort of taboo question in the corps. Nobody joins the corps just to join. Everyone has a vengeance, an anger, a sadness, a story.
“My dad lost his copilot.” Luffy says finally, and frowns into his tray. “Well, he wasn’t really my dad. But he was important to me like a dad would be, so I’ll call him that for this story, if that’s okay. Anyway… he didn’t die, but one day his copilot just decided to leave the service. He’d spiraled, you see. Let the Drift take hold too much.”
Zoro nods. There are a lot of stories like that, where the Drift takes hold outside the cockpit. It’s not you chasing the rabbit, but the rabbit chasing you. And there’s nowhere to run.
“He said these monsters were never going away, and the Jaeger program was pointless. My dad believed in the Jaegers, sure, but more importantly he believed in the two of them, together . The Jaegers just made them bigger and stronger and faster against the Kaiju, but really … it was them who were winning those fights, together. And together… man, they were unstoppable. They piloted Red Force, you know.”
Zoro knows that one. An older, more utilitarian build, Red Force ’s silhouette was iconic, with the giant sword Black Blade strapped to her back. She had defended the Mexican coastline successfully for 4 years before being decommissioned for a newer model.
“For so long, I wanted to be just like them. Saving the world, with my soulmate. Because that’s what Drift-compatibility is, isn’t it? Your soulmate, one way or the other. There’s something romantic about that, I think. But my dad’s broke his heart, just like that. He quit the corps afterwards. Disappeared. So he didn’t die, but part of him still did, in a way.”
Down below, the techs shout at each other over the buzzing of saws and tools. Luffy exhales.
“So … I wanna believe in a better future. I wanna believe that Jaegers are only as good as their pilots, not the other way around.”
Zoro’s stomach suddenly clenches in a way that he’d tried to push down for the past month and a half.
“I was still connected to Kuina when she died.”
Pilots and feds love to dance around this word, using phrases like passed and expired but that all feels wrong to Zoro. Dead. Kuina is dead and never coming back. “I mean, I was in her head. I was her. At mech school they taught us to carry nothing into the Drift, but I couldn’t help but feel her pain, her hopelessness, her anguish, her entire existence all at once and then … nothing.”
The night comes back to him in flashes, the lightning storm that night illuminating certain frames like a strobe light. The rain pouring in from the gaping hole in the side of Romance ’s head. The way she staggers as Zoro tries to shoulder the full weight of the neural load, going into full-body phantom limb shock, just managing to cleave the Category 3 Kaiju before she stumbles back to the Osaka coast.
Don’t chase the rabbit.
“My point being, when you’re in that cockpit, it doesn’t matter how hard you believe or whatever. You have to work with whoever’s in there with you. Understand?”
By 5 PM today, Zoro is supposed to report to the Marshal with his choice. He hooks his arms through the railing.
“And it looks like that person is going to be me, so … don’t screw this up. Got it?”
Luffy blinks once, twice. Then he beams, a megawatt smile that could probably power up the Romance ’s reactor alone and … Zoro is uncomfortably warm and is almost overcome with an inexplicable urge to throw himself over the railing.
He’d found his copilot.
As for soulmate , the jury was still out on that one.