Here have my quickly written contribution to the ZoTash prompt week 3 on our Discord. It's not the best thing you'll read today, I'd rather consider it a writing practice from being rusty...
My wielder is known for his strength and fierceness. He has proven time and again what a strong fighter he his, that he’s dependable, ambitious, and brave. His strength comes from years of hard training, from his strong will to be the best and strongest swordsman in the world.
Quite a journey lies behind him. Before he joined this pirate crew, he was widely known as the demon of the east blue, back then he was still a bounty hunter. He managed to build himself quite a reputation, willingly or not. He doesn’t exactly wield me with grace. He relies on sheer force, on his bodily strength, and he uses techniques one can’t learn in a dojo, techniques he invented himself, and he keeps improving them as he conquers the world, while creating his own style of fighting, and he gets better every day – that’s how good he is.
My wielder uses three swords at a time if he finds himself battling a strong opponent. That’s my time to shine. He usually keeps me sheathed, only needs my help when he has to overcome a particularly strong opponent who is difficult to defeat. Not because he doesn’t trust me, or because he doesn’t like to have me by his side – he wants to protect me. I’m the link to his dream, I’m the partner he wants to carry with him until the end, the reminder that he can’t allow himself to give up, that he can’t allow himself to be weak, and he cares a lot about us, about me and my friends, he takes care of us, and he doesn’t like it when anyone touches us. Nobody is allowed to touch us except for him. Maybe he’s jealous. Maybe he’s overprotective, either for us or for the person he wants to avoid getting hurt for not knowing how to handle us properly. We’re deadly weapons, after all.
Sometimes, I am worried about him. My wielder keeps throwing himself into battle after battle, without caution, but with a willpower in his mind, a thrill for a good fight, that has him charging forward no matter what. He never backs down. He never escapes. He keeps fighting until he can’t fight anymore, until his body gives in and forces him to rest. I have seen him sacrificing himself for his crew without even thinking about it. I have seen him bedridden, covered in bandages, laying in unconsciousness, and I have been waiting by his side, patiently. I have heard him screaming for his nakama, screaming for us, when he thought he would lose anyone of us. I have seen him paying respect to the dead, and I have seen him grow, and he keeps growing. I have rarely seen him really losing his composure. He has a bad temper at times, but he chose to be the solid rock, the foundation of this crew, unwavering, supporting them, helping them back up when they’re down. He never demands that for himself. He keeps giving without ever taking much, to show his love for his friends who he loves almost unconditionally. I am proud to be by his side.
My wielder is resilient and stoic, and almost never scared. He has a good perception and is hard to throw off tracks. That’s why his encounters with a certain person are all the more interesting. I am not sure why exactly that is. I’m only a sword. I don’t know much about these things. But I noticed that this woman, this female swordfighter causes some distress within my wielder. He kept justifying his behavior towards her by saying that the marine woman looks like the girl I once belonged to, and it’s true – he refused to let go of his grief for a long time. He chose to bottle up his feelings, and the marine woman unfortunately was the tip of the iceberg for him, and he lashed out on her, and the aura I sensed that surrounded him was so different. And when he fought against her, I noticed something different again: the way he wielded us, his swords, the way he never swung us down as hard as he does with any other opponent, the different way of his stance, the way his grip around me isn’t as hard and tight, it’s softer, and he made sure to not hurt her seriously. I kept thinking about this. And I can tell that he did, too. And when he were on Mihawk Dulacre’s island together, and when my wielder worked on himself to eliminate his weaknesses, he had to face his past, to overcome his fear of fighting her, and during his years of training and improving himself, he cried, once. It was the second time I have ever seen him crying, and during both times, he held me firmly in his hand.
My wielder is not scared of fighting the marine woman anymore, but a part of his fear stayed. He changed, grew, became stronger. He learned much about himself and about his understanding of different things. He learned to accept her existence and he respects her for who she is – a strong swordswoman who is unafraid to wield her blade towards any opponent she comes across. She is like him, in a way, in many ways even, maybe. And maybe that was what he could not stand when they met. Maybe he saw his own weakness in her, the weakness he never knew how to overcome. And she grew a lot, too, and he sees it as well. I noticed that his perception and opinion of her changed. I like her. She does know a lot about us swords, and when he listens, he can learn a lot about us from her, the same way I learned so many things about him. She can hear our voices, hears our thoughts, reads our souls, and I know he could hear us, too, if he listened.
When he carried her over his shoulder, I noticed that her perception of him changed, too, but in a different way. Again, I do not know much about it. I’m only a sword. But I know about fate, and that fate has the habit of not revealing its plans right from the beginning, and I can sense that fate is what will bring them together time and again, and I hope that, one day, they will connect with each other the same way they connect with us, their swords, and that they will hear each other’s voice, read each other’s souls, and gather strength from each other.
theartofmadeline
gummygunk
jimmyeatworldofficial
