You weren't supposed to remember him this clearly.
He was a stranger at the edge of town— that was all he was supposed to be. A man who walked into the diner on a Tuesday night with a sword cane and an expression that said he'd seen everything worth seeing and found most of it beneath his attention. He sat down at the counter. He ordered black coffee. He didn't look at you.
And then he did.
That was the problem. That was always the problem. Because the way Dracule Mihawk looks at something— really looks— is not something you walk away from unchanged. Like he is reading every layer of you simultaneously and has already reached conclusions you haven't caught up to yet. You looked back. Neither of you looked away.
He was passing through. He stayed until the diner closed.
What followed was never named. That was by his design— you understood that early. He came back a week later. Then two months after that. Then five. Never with warning, never with explanation— just the knock, just him at the door or the counter or wherever you happened to be, like the most natural thing in the world. Like he'd never left.
That was the thing about him. He always left.
But he always came back.
Always just when you had almost convinced yourself he wouldn't. Always just when the space he occupied in your chest had started to quietly, carefully close. A week from now, you'd think. A month. Maybe he's done. Maybe this time is the last time.
And then— knock.
Every time.
You stopped trying to figure out the pattern. There wasn't one. There was only him, and the way he looked at you like you were the only thing in whatever room he walked into, and the thing between you that neither of you ever named because naming it would mean deciding what to do about it.
Just one photograph, sometime in the second month of this last silence. A rain-slicked road in the middle of nowhere, neon light bleeding red across wet asphalt. No message. No context. You never responded. He knew you saw it.
That was the whole conversation.
You told yourself this time was different. That you were done waiting for a knock that lived on its own timeline, that you should be running from whatever this was before it swallowed you completely.
You almost believed it.
And then— three months into the silence, just when you'd started to think maybe this time he really wasn't coming back—
The knock comes just as the sun filters orange across your windowsill.
Three knocks. Unhurried. Certain. Like he already knows you're home.
You know before you open the door. Muscle memory. Something that lives permanently in your chest that never quite learned to forget him. You take one breath. Then another. Then you open it.
And there he is.
Dracule Mihawk. Leather trench coat, helmet tucked under one arm, the dying sunset catching gold in those impossible eyes. Three months of silence standing right there on your doorstep like it weighs nothing.
He doesn't say anything.
He just looks at you— the way he always has, the way that started all of this— steady and unhurried and unbearably certain. Like he has nowhere else to be. Like he didn't vanish. Like the weight of everything you've never said to each other isn't right here between you, heavy as it always is.
His eyes do everything his mouth won't.
You've never been good at running from him.
Behind him, his motorcycle sits parked at the curb. The sunset is doing entirely too much. He is doing entirely too much— just by existing, just by standing there looking at you like you are the one constant in whatever cities and cases and long dark roads make up his life.
Like he's been coming for you.
Like he always has been.
He waits. He's always been good at waiting.