extended author's note: trust fall

Mar. 1st, 2026 03:52 pm
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first and foremost, if you are Here, thank you for going on this fic journey with me in whichever way you’ve done so. this has been a really interesting writing experience for me, and i had a ton of fun posting something weekly again.

i said this over and over in the posts i was making as i worked on this fic, but i tried a lot of new things, and it was really challenging. i think this was the most challenging fic i’ve written, maybe ever, just because it required me to consciously do a lot of things i don’t usually do rather than just being on my bullshit as per usual. P vs NP and no quarter, the only other fics whose word counts and complexity this one rivals, were a lot easier to write, relatively speaking, because, like, it’s just (""""just"""") halo lore. it’s just action/adventure bullshit (affectionate). however, nothing about the plot structure of this fic came naturally to me, so it took some real effort to get this to be what i wanted it to be.

starting off with some miscellaneous notes:

i chose to be pretty on-the-nose with this island as a setting, in the way that oda is: the thistle is the national flower of scotland; “esorrodut” is “tudorrose” backwards; castle rock is the wedgelike geological formation upon which edinburgh castle sits. more than anything, this island as a setting was a way to scratch the pseudo-regency itch without jumping ass-first into an AU, and, more so than that, an excuse to give sanji a lot of clothes to think about when it was his turn to be the POV character. at this point i feel like i should also admit that i’m kind of an afternoon tea hater. i’ve been to a few english-style afternoon tea places and like, man, the ambiance and experience is cool, sure, but i don’t want to pay big money for a bunch of finger food and a pot of tea. i’m too We Have Food At Home for this. i will instead be making myself tea in the teacup that has my cat’s portrait on it, thank you very much.

i’m also really surprised at how much respect i dredged up for buggy over the course of writing this fic. i genuinely can’t say that i’m a buggy fan the way some people are Buggy Fans, and i’m not really into shanks/buggy either, but man… these last few arcs… sometimes the writing is just on the wall. like, i don’t really ship it, but also, like, come on. in any case, i went with buggy for this fic because he’s what made the most sense; he’s mostly comedic but can definitely be played seriously, and he would recognize zoro and sanji immediately. he’s also enough of a threat via cross guild for zoro and sanji to not just brush him off. no matter how much they needle him, they never aim to actually piss him off.

my obs haki headcanon is that sanji processes it as sound, and zoro as color; luffy gets it as a synesthesia-like blend of both sound and color. there ended up being much more zoro haki in this fic than sanji haki despite the even mix of POVs, but that's the way the cookie crumbles, i suppose. i’ve got some other misc. hot takes i employed throughout this fic, namely that kitetsu is not actually cursed and that swords shouldn’t be referred to with she/her the way one does to ships/boats/etc., but those are probably more fitting to be their own Poasts rather than extending this author’s note even further.

i set some very specific rules for myself while writing this fic, mostly with the goal of not sending myself inextricably down rabbit holes:

no dates, no times, no timeframes

this was really fucking difficult for me. i broke this self-imposed rule precisely once: in chapter two, when someone asks zoro how long ago they got married and he replies with “about three weeks [...] twenty-three days” (and i have strongly considered going back to change that). that’s not what the rule was for, though; the rule was to keep me from writing with a countdown timer hovering over my neck. i was really careful not to mention any specific timeframes throughout the fic—no “we have three days left” or “four days ago” at all. time is not tracked over the course of this fic in any way. i didn’t even name a specific span of time for the log pose! i didn’t use the words tomorrow or yesterday at all, and i only used “last night” four times (once in chapter two when they’re finding their feet, and thrice in chapter seven, when sanji is hungover and bemoaning his very specific actions). i am a deeply logic-driven writer and i’ve done this kind of time-mapping extensively for other fics (P vs NP and no quarter in particular), but it was not going to serve me here in any way. it was really hard to not do this.

no names for side characters

…okay this one was definitely way less challenging, since i find coming up with names really hard, lmao. i think this would not have gone as well if i didn’t have a bunch of specific titles to refer to people with; in zoro’s POV, i could have gotten away with him not remembering anyone’s name, but not with sanji. using titles gave me a way to distinguish between side/background characters, and a way to make the cast of the manor house feel bigger than it actually is by dropping whatever random position title came to mind first. this was also an extra added benefit of the pseudo-victorian-or-edwardian-inspired-ish setting, as in a true [pick a typical histrom time period] setting, (almost) everyone would have addressed each other by title. the only time i felt like this was actually a challenge was with the other swordsman, because that’s a much flimsier epithet than a (job) title.

no serious “worldbuilding” or canon embellishment

i obviously had to do some amount of “world” building in creating this setting, but again, i only broke this rule seriously once, with the idea that a sword can be given or exchanged as something similar to a wedding ring. i very specifically did not want to get myself into a rabbit hole of canon-compliant contrivance in order to make the fake relationship work in this setting without breaking canon, but i did need to come up with something that buggy would instantly and unquestioningly accept as a symbol of marriage. this one really fell into my lap in a bolt of inspiration and i’m really pleased with how i managed to make it shake out.

earlier drafts of this fic were a lot more serious; i tied myself into knots trying to come up with this whole plotline about one of the city councilmembers using buggy to engineer a power-grab that would put this island under the world government’s thumb with the councilmember at the head of it, countered by an organized rebellion that sanji, zoro, and nami would end up supporting, but… that just kept spiraling way and way further out and i was very literally losing the plot. that kind of planning worked for P vs NP and no quarter, and i’m certainly not incapable of doing another round in the ring, but the crucial difference is that the world of halo (and, within it, rvb… to a degree. sort of.) is the type of grounded sci-fi that expressly allows for a political thriller to live within its confines. one piece is about as opposite as you could possibly get. oda’s storytelling operates on big-picture rules and i have never been good at that (what forest? let me keep inspecting each tree individually!) so setting out to write this fic with the core goal of not accounting for every single dusty corner of it was genuinely one of the most difficult things i’ve done while writing.

simpler transitions

i read an article several months ago (that i completely lost track of; i’ve tried searching for it multiple times to no avail) about “tv writing” or something similar and the urge to overexplain what is physically happening; it stuck with me, and in light of that, i tried to cut down on the urge to write “and then they walked out of the room and down the hallway and into the other room”-type passages. i think there’s certainly a time and a place for that—to bring up no quarter again, when the POV character is a soldier who has lived his whole life at war and the majority of it fighting, it’s entirely sensible for them to be making note of every motion through every space. did i do that on purpose for NQ? not necessarily, but it still works. with this fic, though, i wanted to be much more vague; or, maybe, much less rigid, in the same way as with the worldbuilding and dates/timeframes. i’m happy with the way i established the manor house as a setting in the first chapter, because anyone can plug in their mental version of a stuffy aristocrats’ house and make it work for the whole fic.

chapter titles

these were fun! they were a pretty late addition, actually. sanji’s chapters are a very abbreviated list of steps for baking bread, and zoro’s are elements of a waza in iaido.

sanji’s are a little simpler to explain; obviously, they’re just… steps you take when baking bread. there is a lot that can go into bread baking, especially when you’re going the route of a levain, cold proofing, yadda yadda, so paring these down to five was actually pretty hard (“gluten development” is doing a serious amount of heavy lifting). i used to bake bread semi-regularly about 10 years ago, and in a much less intensive way to boot, but now i’m very fortunate to live near a ton of amazing local bakeries so it’s kinda, like, why would i bake bread… i can just get some from that one bakery…

as far as zoro’s chapters, there are generally four or so accepted elements of a waza in iaido, but even those aren’t necessarily universal across all waza (or all schools… i think). really, the only universal thing in wazas is the drawing and the sheathing. nukitsuke is the defining “feature” of iaido—the draw-and-cut—but if you want to get very technical, nukitsuke is drawing and cutting in response to a threat, whereas nukiuchi is drawing and cutting in anticipation of a threat (i.e., preemptively). but even so, not every waza starts with nukitsuke or nukiuchi; some start with a draw into a block rather than a cut, or pushing with the kashira, or manipulating the saya as a tool. anyways. kirioroshi is the “courtesy cut,” performed after the initial cut (again, assuming there has been one) to cleanly end your opponent’s life. chiburi is any of the many actions taken to remove blood from the blade, most often by a type of sharp flick (side note: THANK YOU OPLA for good sword choreo that included chiburi, good lord). nōtō is the act of sheathing, done very literally in reverse of the draw. you can see them all in the first waza of this video performed absolutely masterfully.

the fifth one i chose to use as a title, zanshin, isn’t a move, but i had to pick something. there are plenty of “moves” i could have used to pad this out to five—e.g., furikaburi often precedes kirioroshi, and kirioroshi is not always followed by nōtō—but i wanted to keep it broad. zanshin is one of those CoNcEpTs that’s difficult to translate as a one-and-done since it can differ between contexts; jisho has a good set of basic definitions, and this blog post does a great dive into zanshin and its role in budō (and there’s another iaido link in there with another beautiful nōtō). awareness without hypervigilance, readiness without anxiety, acceptance without defeatism; or, as dave lowry put it, vigilant calm.

i've had these notes written up for a while and figured i'd have something to add on the dawn of the final day, which i sure do now since AO3 has been down for the majority of the day. WHOOPS. probably the funniest chapter break for this to happen to—it already felt like a gamble to split a sex scene into two chapters and two POVs, and i was charged with (checks notes) two counts "diabolical," one count "evil," and one count "should be against some human convention to finish a chapter like this," so adding in the AO3 downtime when i actually was quite ready to post in the morning feels extra hilarious. in any case! this was actually, really, genuinely supposed to be 10 chapters. i kind of oobh i got plany off time'd myself with the last two chapters and left a bunch of gaps to fill in (in chapter 9 more than chapter 10; i finished out the smut from zoro's POV in one go, and struggled much more with sanji's); i had considered ending on a third-party POV initially and scrapped that because i didn't have a strong direction to go with it, but nami's chapter came together just perfectly for me when i was wrapping everything up from zoro's POV.

and to wrap this up, some music i was listening to while writing this:

specific songs that fit The Vibe:

and if you've gotten all the way down here: thank you for reading! ❤

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