Archive of Our Own

Pain. And an overwhelming pressure.

He was currently falling. Sinking, really, looking at the keel of a ship he would desperately like to go to. But when he tried to engage his limbs for that very purpose, his arms circled, slow, uncoordinated. Propelling him nowhere. Bubbles burst out of his mouth and he reflexively inhaled water.

Oh.

Well.

There were all sorts of things his body was telling him. That he should be worried, anxious at the least. That he should start enacting plans for his own self-preservation. But his mind said something different.

As long as everybody made it out safe, I don’t regret this.

He repeated this over and over, even as adrenaline urged his malfunctioning body upwards, even as something primal clung desperately for life. As long as everybody made it out safe, I don’t regret this. I don’t regret this. I don’t regret this. I don’t regret this…

Sanji stood on the deck of the Sunny.

The thing was, he didn’t really remember why he was standing on the deck of the Sunny. Judging by the position of the sun, this would be the time he would be making lunch. In the kitchen. Something major would have to tear him away from the stove, such as a surprise attack or a sudden storm or the end of the world. But there was none of that here; no rain, or rain of cannonballs, or rain of fire. So. He was out here...to find someone?

That didn’t sound right. That sounded extremely not right. Though the whole thing wasn’t right to begin with, just finding himself standing here. He glanced around the deck, saw Usopp sitting on the railing, hunched over a fishing pole, and strode over.

“Hey Usopp,” he said, right as his hand passed through Usopp’s shoulder. Usopp shivered, but kept his eyes on the water. Sanji flinched back.

Oh. That’s right.

He died.

And that was when Brook walked out into the sun, looked at him, and screamed.

Usopp dropped his fishing pole and almost fell after it. All around the ship came the sounds of a mad dash to where Brook was. Zoro jumped off the crow’s nest with all his swords already out. Franky barreled his way out from below deck, almost wedging his huge shoulders in every door along the way. Robin simply appeared on the second floor. Nami burst out from the dining room, and Chopper followed a second later. Luffy jumped out of the men’s quarters and swung his fists around wildly, only to find no one to punch. Usopp got solid footing on the deck again and sputtered out, “What? What? What’s going on?”

They all clustered around Brook, still tense, still glancing around for any enemy, and Sanji watched as all their eyes passed over him. And the only one with no eyes at all raised a shaking hand and pointed straight at him. Brook’s teeth chattered like hyperactive maracas as he managed to stutter, “G-g-gh – “

“Ghost?!” Usopp supplied with a squeak.

“Sanji-san,” Brook said.

They all moved into the dining room. Most everybody needed a seat anyways. But once organized, nobody seemed to know what to say. Brook, center of attention, tapped his fingers in an irregular rhythm.

It was Luffy who started. “He’s here?”

Brook glanced to the side and sucked in a breath. “Yes.”

“It’s really him?” Chopper pressed, his voice on the precipice of tears.

“It...looks very much like him. He’s...” He looks like he’s underwater, the way his hair’s fluttering in imaginary currents. He’s wearing the same clothes he wore back then. He’s right here, but he sounds so far away. “He says he’s sorry.”

After a moment, Chopper’s face broke and he started to cry. Franky collected him in a light hug, but ended up crying even louder than him, which just started a downpour indoors, where everybody was either sobbing their throats raw or were keeping deathly still and blank. None of them had looked particularly great before (red-rimmed eyes with bags that dragged under, frazzled hair and a fragile look), but now they looked worse. Physically ill, or getting there. Brook bowed his head, crossed and uncrossed his legs, waited. Then he looked to the side and mumbled, “Eight days.”

“What was that?” Luffy demanded, furiously rubbing at his face and smearing what was on there all over.

Brook jumped. “Well...he asked how long it has been since...his demise,” he finished.

“Is there something he wants? Does he need us to do something?” Robin asked, her voice terse.

“Ah, yes. Well...his final wish...”

The air went colder. Was it just the atmosphere, or was it Sanji’s presence?

“...is for you to show me your panties.”

Brook got hit by several different things at once, including a lightning bolt, some dangerous projectiles, and a lot of significant verbal abuse.

“I – I’m sorry!” Brook wailed. “The mood, it was simply so dark, I thought maybe if I lightened the air – “

“I swear to god, if this whole thing was a fucking joke,” Nami hissed, standing with her fists clenched at her side and her eyes filled with involuntary tears.

“No no no, it wasn’t, really, I – bweh!” Brook’s soul suddenly went careening away from his body, which...didn’t collapse. It stood, staring at its own soul, and if it had eyelids it might have blinked before slowly gazing down at its spindly, bony hands. “Holy fuck,” it said, and then the body crumpled to the floor.

Everybody stared at the pile of bones. Brook was preoccupied with staring at the far wall until he remembered he was currently a pile of bones, and with a polite “excuse me” he slipped back in and stood again.

Luffy laughed, loud and hard, his face glistening with leftover snot. “So Sanji’s back!” he said through a smile, though the smile was strained closed rather than open as it usually was. “Hey, maybe he can be like Brook!”

“He can’t,” Nami snapped. “His, his body’s at the bottom of the ocean. Sanji-kun, you’re an idiot and I hate you, also, if you try to peek at me or Robin – “

“Why can’t he,” Luffy whined.

“He says he would never dare,” Brook translated.

“Uh, so, wait. He just possessed you, right? That was a possession? Can he posses us?”

“He can’t because he’s at the sea floor,”

“He says he would rather not possess anyone.”

“Is he okay? Does he hurt anywhere?”

“in a place we wouldn’t be able to find, under tons and tons of pressure,”

“He doesn’t appear to be in pain...”

“and Brook’s only here because of a Devil Fruit! If everybody could be a ghost”

“I suppose we’re all living on a haunted ship now.”

“Don’t say it like that, that’s way too creepy!”

“and get back to their bodies, it’d be all over the world!”

“Hey, if he can possess stuff, maybe I can make him a super robot body!”

“That’d be awesome! Do it Sanji, do it, do it!”

“At least listen to me!”

“Ah, he said a rude word, and then no.”

“Saaaaaanji, you have to – “

Zoro slammed a palm on the table, silencing everyone. For a moment, it looked like he would flip it, but he shot to his feet instead and strode out of the room like a storm cloud.

Luffy pressed his lips together, but turned back to Brook. “If Sanji gets a robot body, then he can cook again!”

With Brook as the only real conversational partner on the ship, Sanji found himself hanging around him the most as he acclimated to his new life (death) situation.

“This one.” Sanji pointed at a drawer and Brook pulled it open, dug around near the back, and pulled out another box of cigarettes. Nobody had cleaned them out in the eight days he’d been gone, so he was cleaning them out himself. Kinda.

It looked like nobody had really been in the kitchen at all, actually. Not that anyone had been starving. It’s just that nobody had been eating anything that required cooking. Mostly sandwiches and booze, Brook explained.

It was understandable. It ached to see the kitchen so inactive, without him, even though he was actually there. Sort of.

The boxes of cigarettes were starting to look like a cityscape. “Really wish I could fucking smoke.”

“Did you perhaps have a packet in your pocket when you died?”

He dug through his pockets and came up with soggy cardboard and a lot of water. “Figures,” he groused, tossing the useless box. It faded away before it could hit the ground, which made Sanji’s stomach churn in uncomfortable ways, not that he had a stomach, and oh god he made a skull joke.

“What shall we do with them?” Brook said, gesturing to the counter.

“Doesn’t really matter to me, does it.”

“They are your possessions.” Possessions. Was he baiting him? Ignore it. Sanji rubbed at his face.

“I guess. You could just...toss ‘em. Or give ‘em away at the next island.”

“Perhaps someone would like one for a keepsake,” Brook suggested, and Sanji scoffed.

“What better keepsake of me to have than me?”

“You are a member of the crew,” Brook replied softly.

“Not really.”

Brook went silent. Sanji tried to remember if he had hid any more boxes anywhere. It would be easier if he could check himself, but.

“If you would like to smoke, you could through me, I believe.”

Sanji glanced over. “No offense, but your body really freaks the shit outta me.”

“We all made it out alive,” Brook said.

The change of topic blindsided him and in the ensuing whiplash, Sanji could only manage to say, “Yeah?”

“I just...are you really alright with the way things are?”

“If you’re asking if I’m okay with everybody being alive, then yeah,” Sanji replied snidely, because even if he was dead, his sarcasm wasn’t.

“No, nothing like that. Simply...well, the typical lore of ghosts mention that they manifest because of – “

“I don’t regret anything,” Sanji gritted out. He wasn’t staring at Brook, just at the towers of his old cigarettes. “I knew what I was getting into. I did it because I was fine with what’d happen, as long as everybody was okay. I don’t regret it.”

Brook didn’t say anything to that, and his eternal smile made it difficult to tell what he was thinking. Sanji ran his fingers through his hair and turned around. “That’s all the cigarettes, okay? Just throw them out or something,” he said, walking around the counter and moving to the door with quick strides. His hand went through the door handle, and he stared at it for a moment.

Brook was already following him. “Ah, if you want, I could,” but Sanji held his breath, or a facsimile of one, and pressed himself against the door, through it, and out.

He wasn’t sure what he had expected, but he had expected to feel something. The smooth surface of the wood against his face. Some sort of resistance, like walking through gelatin. Maybe even something like the dispersal of his form, like smoke seeping through the cracks, rather than the unobstructed walk that it was. All he felt was the flip-flopping of his brain and the intense need to feel sick. At least Brook had the tact to not follow him out.

Luffy was sitting on the figurehead. Other than that, there was nobody out on the deck. The atmosphere was oppressively empty; Sanji suspected that this was how it had been for a while. Without Brook to confirm his own existence, he walked to the front of the ship.

Luffy shuddered when he joined him on Sunny’s head, and then whipped his head around wildly. “Sanji? That you?”

“Yeah,” he said, and then hovered a hand above his shoulder. Luffy suddenly clamped his hand at the same spot, then smiled that tight-lipped smile.

“It’s gonna be fine! You’re back, so we’re all together again, and you can still find All Blue! So stay here, okay?”

Sanji glanced back at the deck. It was probably going to be a long while before everything was fine. But the way Luffy’s voice sounded made him dearly wish that the process would be fast.

He looked up at the sky. It should be dinner soon. When he pulled away, Luffy swiveled around and said, “Huh? Where’re you?”

And how the hell was he supposed to answer that? But Luffy didn’t even have that fragment of his smile anymore and he had to do something, so he grabbed Luffy’s arm and stayed there until Luffy relaxed and said, “Okay.” And then he turned back around to his silent surveil.

Usopp would be downstairs, most likely. Sanji paced around a bit, took in a breath, and managed to sink through the floor in a very reluctant manner and got himself in the workshop below. Franky was there, holding something that looked suspiciously like a suited torso. Usopp was across the way, tapping a pencil against a pad of paper, which remained stubbornly blank. Sanji ignored the monstrosity that Franky was working on (for now) and moved to Usopp and then...uh, and then he had no idea, because honestly he didn’t think this through all the way.

Ah hell. Sanji kicked him in the leg and Usopp stiffened and looked around.

“What’s up, bro?” Franky said as Usopp continued to turn his head about.

“Uh,” he replied. “I think...um, Sanji? Sanji is maybe up. I mean, here. I think?”

C’mon Usopp, Luffy got it immediately, are you really gonna be dumber than him? Sanji stuffed his fists in his pockets and kicked him a few times in the arm. Usopp’s shoulder jerked and he started waving his hand around like he was hoping to knock a gnat out of the air. “I think...I gotta find Brook.”

Franky waved a wrench. “Alright. Let’s talk more later.”

Sanji trailed behind Usopp, skittering through closing doors, until they got back on deck and Usopp immediately turned the wrong way. “Oh my god,” Sanji said, and then furiously grabbed at Usopp’s elbow.

Usopp jumped and turned around, eyes flickering in his general direction. “Cut it out!” he hissed, then glanced around like he was worried that someone else would hear. “That’s really freaking me out, whatever it is!” Usopp stomped in the right direction, went past the kitchen, then went in the kitchen when Sanji started shaking his shoulders figuratively.

They both walked in and Sanji immediately belted out, “Unfortunately, you’re my only form of communication, so tell this shithead that he’s cooking an actual dinner and if he messes up I’m haunting him for the rest of his life!”

At the same time, Usopp said, “I can’t tell if Sanji’s here or not but I think he’s been like doing ghost things at me so can you tell him he’s bothering me a lot so he can stop doing that?”

Sanji took a swipe at his head and shouted, “I can hear you, asshole, just tell me yourself!”

“Oh my god he just did it again, I don’t know what he’s doing but it feels wrong Brook please help me.”

Brook looked up from making a fort out of Sanji’s cigarette boxes. “Oh. Usopp-san, Sanji-san is asking if you could cook dinner today, please.”

Usopp stiffened. “Uh. Dinner?”

“I need to look in the fridge to see what you got,” Sanji called, already in the kitchen, tapping his foot like it would actually make a sound.

“Yes, Usopp-san, if you don’t mind. Could you open the fridge for him?”

Eventually, Usopp circled around the counter and into the kitchen, walking like his feet had gone painfully numb. The look on his face was hard to categorize; not quite scared, not quite blank, not quite sad. Sanji looked at the fridge instead. “Okay, shit. I guess I gotta tell you the – “ he said, right as Usopp keyed in the code for the lock and opened it up.

Usopp dug through the innards unimpeded. Sanji stared. “Why does he know the code.”

“Ah, we thought it more convenient if everybody knew,” Brook said from the other side of the counter.

Usopp ducked out of the fridge. “What?”

“The code for the lock.”

“Oh. Yeah. I guess he wouldn’t know that. It’s really easy to remember. And also really predictable – agh, stop that! I’m holding eggs!”

“We didn’t give it to Luffy-san, by the way.”

“Yeah,” Usopp said, examining a pound of pork and letting it slam onto the counter. “Some things never change.”

There was a weight to that cliché that Sanji subtly ignored. He studied the stock instead. “We’ll do something quick and easy. It’s already late as it is. Tomato and egg soup...better use these eggplants before they go bad...we can get away with defrosting this scup in warm water...Brook, start writing this down for him.”

Sanji had scribbled down recipes before, stuffed them in drawers and books and sometimes absently in his pockets. For some reason, as organized as he was, he just couldn’t seem to be anything but disorganized when it came to recipes. So it would be much faster to write a new one than even attempt to find the relevant scrap of paper that might not even exist.

Brook handed over the transcribed recipes and Usopp started to boil a pot of water. He skimmed the page. Squinted. “Is this really all he said?”

“There were some elisions I made, as certain vocabulary didn’t seem to pertain to cooking.”

“Right. So he said, ‘put sesame oil on fish.’”

“Indeed.”

“How...much sesame oil.”

“He says the amount that looks right.”

“This is the most unhelpful thing I – stop that!”

Dinner stuttered to completion, between Usopp’s varying competence and Sanji’s unseen supervision, and so Usopp opened the door and announced it.

The word bounced off into the void of silence, answered by too-tepid air, and then Luffy jumped off the figurehead and bellowed, “DINNER!!!” before zooming straight inside. Some things really never changed.

The others trickled in with uncertain steps and faces; seeing the table all set up was a shock, the cooked dishes a delusion, but there it was and here they were and Luffy was already eating so they all took their seats.

Sanji watched them all take a bite and then. Stop. He glanced at Usopp. Did he make a mistake? But Sanji had been watching and insisted that he taste it before serving, and even if the technique was amateurish the result appeared to be fine, but if that was the case, then why, but then Franky let out a clipped, amazed laugh and continued eating, prompting the others to dig in.

Nami looked around and set her eyes on Usopp. “This was made by...”

“Me, kinda. With, help?”

Luffy was already on thirds. “It’s sooooo good! Thanks Sanji!”

“Thanks Sanji!” Chopper echoed, slurping down his soup. Nami flinched at the name. Zoro made a derisive snort, chewing slowly.

All in all, it was a quiet affair, something much too bizarre on this ship. At least they were eating, and eating together. And yet.

Zoro set his fork down. “We need a new cook.”

It was like the world stopped. Except Luffy was still stuffing his face even as he stared back at Zoro. “Why? Sanji’s back.”

Zoro was leaning back in his chair, but his squared shoulders still made him look like business instead of a slouch. His brow was darker than usual. The way his jaw was set looked like he had had this conversation before.

“Whether the idiot’s back or not doesn’t mean a thing. We need a new cook.”

“Well if you don’t like the food, then I’ll help myself~”

Before Luffy’s hand could reach his plate, Zoro stood up and threw his arm to the side, sending the plate flying into the wall, where it shattered, exploded, really, and Usopp yelped and ducked. The food it carried did nothing so dramatic and slid its way down. Zoro slammed both hands on the table. “Dammit Luffy, you know we can’t stay like this! If you’re in mourning, fine! I don’t care! But you do your job!”

Luffy looked carefully at the remains of Zoro’s dinner, then turned his gaze back to Zoro himself. He was still chewing.

After a moment, Zoro stalked his way to the door and slammed it open so hard that it rebounded and he had to slam it again so it didn’t hit him in the face. Luffy only stared after. When the door closed again, Sanji let his figurative breath out. It sounded like everybody else did too.

“I can clean it up,” Robin said, scooting the chair back gently and moving for the mess even as uneven arms already started the job.

“Usopp’s closer,” Sanji muttered, but it looked like Usopp was still in the process of ducking and unlikely to resurface any time soon. And it wasn’t like anybody could hear.

Luffy ate the discarded food, because of course he did, and Chopper looked like he wanted to leave but quietly offered to do the dishes, soon joined by Usopp. Nami leaned back in her chair and covered her face with her hands, then stood and moved towards Luffy. “Look,” she started, but Luffy pulled his brim down and marched outside. She hesitated, then followed after, fists clenched and voice going louder, until the two were muffled sounds in the distance. Franky hung around pretending to be engrossed in Brook’s cigarette fort. He took a box and set it down again. Brook stayed seated by Sanji.

It felt like the whole world was moving around him while he stayed still. Which was perhaps true, in a sense, but that truth wasn’t the same thing as this feeling, and he wanted a table to lean on or a wall to lean against but there was nothing for him here, nothing but people walking by and if he was lucky he would get a glance, or rather, they would glance in his general direction. How long was this supposed to go on? How long could he even keep this up?

“You need a new cook,” said Sanji. Brook stared straight ahead.

Something like panic clutched at Sanji’s heart. “Don’t ignore me.”

“Yes...I’m sorry,” Brook whispered. Franky and Robin turned to look at him, then turned away again. Sanji paced, but it just seemed fruitless when nobody could see. He sat in a corner and watched as everybody worked. Left. Brook was the last one out. He paused as he stood, said out loud, “I will have to retire to bed now, Sanji-san. I shall be up at five, as usual. Would you like to go outside?”

He was holding open the door. And it was stupid, because walls didn’t mean anything anymore, but his one sanctuary was starting to feel like a coffin, something he couldn’t escape, and so he jumped to his feet and hurried onto the deck.

“Good night,” Brook said before he disappeared into the men’s quarters.

Nights had never been this long.

Sanji stared at the stars. They didn’t move much. He walked up and down stairs, wondering how was it that he could stand just fine without sinking through the floor. Maybe it was just a thing. He walked all around, staring at doors, ladders, windows, until he finally found himself back at the mast looking up at the crow’s nest and figured, what the heck. He oughta learn how to fly.

Learn was a strong word, though. It was more like, he decided to stop thinking that he still had to follow the rules of physics like a human being. It came natural after that. He just. Took a step up, and now he was in the air. He didn’t really know how ghosts actually propelled themselves around; swimming motions worked, but it also felt really stupid, but at least nobody could actually see him or anything, just him and his own judgmental mind.

Sanji raised a hand to push against the hatch, another useless gesture. His head peeked through the floor of the crow’s nest and there was the marimo, staring out to sea. It was first watch. It was still first watch. He felt like hours had passed, roaming around, but first watch hadn’t even ended, and nights had never been as long as this.

Sanji got all the way in and stared at the seats, wondering if he could approximate a sitting position without falling through. Out of the corner of his eye, Zoro bristled and looked around.

“Cook,” he said, though he couldn’t have expected an answer. The silence seemed to have satisfied him, though, because he sank back into his seat.

He wasn’t pumping weights, or doing push-ups, or whatever else he did to make his body burn with muscles. Just sat there. Sighed through his nose.

“If you really had to die, at least have the decency to stay dead.”

“Well fuck you too,” Sanji said, because when it came to Zoro, he always forgot how to say sorry.

It seemed like that was all he had to say. Sanji gingerly touched a cushion, passed through it as expected. Stepped on it instead and stood, then carefully curled up so that he sat like a child in time-out or something.

“It was nice, though,” Zoro spoke to the window, looking nowhere in particular, “eating your food again. Even if you didn’t cook it.”

The sudden burst of inaggressive honesty almost made Sanji fall right out of the room. Nice? Nice??? An unprecedented word, from the lips of a meaty mossball who shouldn’t have even known the meaning of nice. His only defense was more insincere sarcasm. “Was it nice when you threw it against the wall like a goddamn animal?”

Zoro scratched at his head with an annoyed hum. “You’re probably complaining about me knocking it off the table. Whatever. Bet it didn’t go to waste.”

“The plate did,” Sanji shot back, because even if Zoro’s accurate prediction surprised him, bickering was just a habit at this point, an addiction that survived the process of death, unlike his other one.

Zoro didn’t really say anything for a long time. “I can’t really do anything about the plate.”

“Asshole. You suck the fun out of not being able to hear what I say.” Sanji was looking in the opposite direction now, across the sea to the horizon. They probably looked like a reversed image. Synchronized opposites. Some things never changed.

There was apparently nothing else to say. Zoro alternatively sighed and scratched at some body part or another. Stretched his legs out. Just lounged around. It was boring company but company nonetheless.

“I’m gonna have to leave the crew over this,” he sounded out to the empty air. His tone was tired. Like this was his job. “I don’t know if I can.”

“If you leave just because of me, I’ll kick your ass.” Even though he understood. Both statements spread themselves in front of him, logical and ugly.

Zoro didn’t say anything else after that.

The night passed in this manner, someone coming up to take over the watch and sitting in silence, whether they could feel Sanji there or not. Usopp had walked towards him, stopped, and spun on his heel to another seat. Chopper had haltingly went towards him, hooves held out like he was expecting to bump into something. He managed to find his way right next to Sanji and just sat there, focusing on his own breath, like he was trying to get used to the sensation of something. Nami was almost the same. But after the initial pause, she sucked in a breath and strode straight to the seat she had been aiming for. She was always focusing on something else, anything else, the sea, her nails, the lights. She never glanced at his direction during her whole shift. Franky was the loudest. He spent his time alternatively staring out the window and scrawling something on paper, something that Sanji pointedly didn’t look at, before he just crumpled it up until it disappeared into his fists, made to throw it, rested his hands between his knees instead. “Why’m I getting so excited about this,” he muttered, and Sanji wondered if he shouldn’t be listening in, but Franky didn’t say anything other than that.

Brook greeted him when the sky was preparing for the sun, and sat down next to him without hesitation. “How are you?”

“I’m dead.” And no wonder those things were called negative hollows, because he sure felt like a negative, hollow space.

Brook hummed and tapped a finger on his knee to show that he was contemplating a response. “Being dead is not necessarily bad.”

“Being here is.” Sanji stretched his legs out and leaned back to glare at the ceiling. “Why the hell did I come back.”

Brook went the opposite way and leaned on his knees, the angles he made acute enough to imply a burden on his back. A sigh rattled around in his ribs. “It was bad before you arrived.”

“But it’s worse now that I’m here,” Sanji shot back, and Brook couldn’t give a direct response to that. “You should’ve just ignored me.”

“I could never do that,” Brook answered firmly, but that was the only strong declaration he had, and the mood slowed back to languid remorse. “To be honest,” Brook mumbled, “I was too optimistic. I can see you so clearly when the others can’t, and yet...because I could see you so clearly, I thought everybody else would eventually...act like they could too. Or something akin to that. I just wish they could have my perspective.”

“Not that anything would’ve changed.”

“Not that anything would have changed,” Brook repeated to the floor. With something between a sigh and a groan, he sat up straight. “Sanji-sa – aaaaaaAAAAAAAAGH!”

Sanji jumped to his feet when Brook clattered to the floor, scanning the sea for some sort of threat and seeing nothing. “What? What is it?!”

Brook, eventually, managed to click his jaw closed. “Ah...you...were sinking through the chair, and...”

There was a moment where Sanji just stood there, legs braced for nothing, and Brook sat, sprawled for no reason at all. “Oh my god, Brook,” Sanji groaned out, trying not to let on that he hadn’t noticed at all. “Would you grow a backbone alrea…”

Brook paused in the middle of getting to his feet and then. Raised his skull. And looked directly into Sanji’s widening eyes. “No,” he whispered, wanting to look away, but it was like the moment right before watching a plate smash against the ground, and he was nowhere near catching it but he was trying anyways when he should probably just accept that gravity would take its victim, but he was stuck willing his hand closer to just prevent the whole thing. “No, don’t you dare,” he said louder, but Brook was already opening his jaw.

“Ah, but I have plenty of backbones already! If I grew any more, I’d have a third leg! SKULL JOKE!” he bellowed, then cackled madly as Sanji sunk his face into his hands and was it too late to go to hell?

Brook was still laughing. He probably wouldn’t stop, not without intervention, considering that he didn’t even need to pause for breath or anything. Sanji actually had to engage him in conversation now and traverse through the rhetorical minefield to get him to not make another goddamn joke. “Yeah. Okay. Real funny. Can we be serious now?”

Brook stopped and looked down at him with an inscrutable expression.

“I don’t think you enjoy my jokes at all. You see, you are...wholly transparent to me!”

“You’re the only one I’m not transparent to! That’s why we can have this stupid conversation in the first place!”

“Please do not be upset, Sanji-san. I must say, you are making quite a...”

“Don’t.”

“...Specter-cle of yourself!” Brook almost toppled over from the weight of his own laughter and if Sanji could, he would have pushed him the rest of the way down. As it was, all he could do was press his face into his hands and imagine himself back-flipping out the window. Which was a thing he could actually do at this point, but then that meant that Brook would win (win what, he couldn’t say) so he muffled a scream into his palms and shouted, “You’re killing me! I’m already dead, and you’re killing me!”

“That’s the spirit,” Brook said through a grin and Sanji flew up into his face and tried to strangle him. “Ah, oh, that I didn’t mean as a pun.”

Sanji’s hands stayed around Brook’s throat for a few long seconds. He pulled them away and realized with a start that, uh, he was actually literally face-to-face with Brook. He looked down and made a self-conscious descent back to the floor.

Despite the recent nonsense, Brook managed to achieve a refined air once more as he tapped his cane thoughtfully. “It’s very easy, I think, to wallow in such morose thoughts after death. I vastly prefer to make light of my circumstances. Self-reflection may be all and good, but once in a while you ought to make a joke to lift your spirits! That one I meant as a pun,” he added.

“It loses the impact if you tell it twice.”

“Try it.”

Brook was giving him an encouraging nod. Sanji stared at him, willing for him to stop, please, but he was as unmovable as death itself. “I’m not great at jokes,” Sanji warned, but he just motioned him to go on. Crap. He leaned his head back and sighed through his nose. Paced a little. A joke. A joke about being a ghost. A joke about dying and living on in an intangible existence for an indefinite period of time. A joke about being unable to be seen or heard, except by the only other dead-alive person in the world he knew. A joke.

Sanji coughed into his hand and glared sullenly at the floor. “Wh...at. Does a ghost. Use for transport…a boo-cycle...”

Brook maintained his poker face. “A valiant start. Of course, the next step is immortalizing your good humor in the form of a song,” he continued, taking a violin out of his ribcage. “I am not sure what sort of tune we can make out of a boo-cycle, but – “

“I gotta make breakfast,” Sanji shouted much too loud and then back-flipped out the window.

To be completely accurate, Usopp had to make breakfast. But Sanji had to wake him up for that to happen since the lazy lug didn’t even contemplate getting up until at least eight in the morning.

It would have been easy to just tip him out of the bunk. Easy in a past life, anyways, but for now Sanji had the only way he knew how to interact with people – stabbing them with various spectral appendages until they paid attention to him. He did just that.

Usopp frowned and rolled over, but didn’t get any more conscious. Sanji scrunched his nose and tried stirring both arms in his innards, which did make Usopp shiver, but not much else. Okay.

“Dammit Longnose, what the hell’s it gonna take to wake you up?” Sanji hissed (like he even needed to) before just grabbing at his head and

a field. A uniform green, boundless. Grass. Thin strands. A cliff, overlooking an equally boundless ocean. Usopp. Usopp turning to look at him Usopp squinting.

Sanji clutched at his shirt. This shirt was blue. This shirt had been rendered unsalvageable, back on Skypeia, but he was wearing it here. He felt. Corporeal. He felt...alive?

No. Not really. There was something wrong...with his senses…

“Oh fuck,” Sanji said, looking up at Usopp. “I’m in your dream.”

At these words, Usopp blinked, squinted again, focused. “You’re. Haunting my dream.”

He sounded like he wasn’t quite sure if he should be pissed or not, which he should be because holy shit was his only way of actually interacting with people through invading their privacy?

He didn’t know whether to start crying because Usopp was actually seeing him, talking to him, or because his un-life was a comedy of fucking errors and in the end he elected not to cry at all, thank you very much, and approached Usopp with his hands raised.

“I didn’t mean to, okay?” Sanji hissed, grabbing at Usopp’s shoulders instinctively, and his hands didn’t pass through and his breath skipped a beat, even though it wasn’t quite right, the texture not quite there, the warmth only an idea in his head. “I was just trying to wake your lazy ass up to make breakfast! How the fuck do I get outta here.”

Usopp’s face scrunched and he brushed Sanji’s hands off. “Excuse me? How do you get outta here? You’re the one who came in!”

“I didn’t even know I could do this, okay! This is my first time being a fucking ghost! It’s really freaking me out!”

“It’s freaking you out?!”

Okay, okay, Usopp had a legitimate reason to be more freaked out over this than him, but he shouldn’t be here, he shouldn’t even be able to be here, because dreams weren’t a physical place to be in, dreams weren’t real but then again ghosts weren’t exactly physical to begin with so what did this mean for his current existence? He was just thinking of himself like air or something but air didn’t go in dreams! Did this mean he was operating on a completely metaphysical plane of reality? Did this mean he could interact with thoughts, or ideas, or

“Okay, wow, you really are freaking out,” Usopp said carefully, taking Sanji’s hands so that he stopped pulling at his hair. “Forget about metaphysical planes or whatever for now.”

Sanji squinted at him. “Did I say that out loud?”

Usopp shot his eyes from side to side, as though the words would be hanging in the air. “Uh. I don’t actually know? Anyways, you’re in my dream, and I would really like you to get out. How did you even get in here?”

“Uh,” Sanji said, glancing down. Usopp realized he was still holding Sanji’s hands and flinched away. “Uh. Shit. I was trying to wake you up, like sticking my arms in you or whatever – “

“That’s what you’ve been doing!” Usopp shouted, pointing an affronted finger.

“Shut up. It didn’t work, so I just kinda grabbed your head and then,” Sanji flung his arms out wide, not even sure what he was gesturing about, “this shit happened. So.”

Usopp crossed his arms and bit his lip. “Uh. Okay. So you just need an exit? Like a door or something?” The concept of his words materialized in the air and there was a door helpfully marked ‘exit.’ It felt like it had always been there, but also didn’t. Sanji opened it, saw fields, slammed it shut.

“It doesn’t actually go anywhere, idiot!”

“Well who’s the idiot who opened it!”

Sanji grabbed at his hair and dearly wished for something to throw besides grass. He kicked the door over, which helped a little. So did arguing. Arguing was normal. Normal was great. He’d had so little of that lately.

He let out a huge breath. “Okay. This isn’t even a, a place. So it’s not like there’s an exit door for me, or like I could just fly up and out of your head or something. I think you have to stop dreaming and, y’know, wake up.”

“So. You’re just gonna wait here until then? I dunno how long that’s gonna take...”

Sanji kicked Usopp off the cliff.

As he watched Usopp go screaming down to the dream-ocean below, it occurred to him that, shit, how was he gonna tell him what to cook? And he shouted down, “Look in my locker!” before Usopp landed and

Sanji was gently wheeling in the air, away from Usopp’s body. Usopp was harshly wheeling straight to the floor, which he hit with a yelp and a groan. His consideration of everybody’s sleeping schedule kept him from being too loud as he steadied his bunk and made his way to change out of his pajamas, but he still muttered very inconsiderate things about Sanji.

When Usopp started pulling his shirt off, Sanji turned around and ended up staring at his own empty bunk.

He had always made it nice and neat, unlike the other assholes on the ship, and it was nice and neat now. Quilt smoothed and folded right where it met the pillow. Pillow pumped for the perfect shape.

He turned back to Usopp again, who was buckling up his overalls and he thought, why the fuck is it always overalls, and then he struggled to continue that train of thought but it turned out that there wasn’t much to think about overalls. He ended up listing seasonings in his head, very loudly.

When Usopp shut his locker and turned around, Sanji worried for a moment that maybe he hadn’t shouted fast enough, or maybe the entire dream was already fading away in the sleepy haze of recent wakefulness, and shit, how was he gonna tell him through pokes where to go, but Usopp blinked and adjusted his trajectory towards Sanji’s locker. For a moment, he just stared. Then he rubbed his face with both hands and slowly opened it up.

“Alright,” Usopp said, weary. “What’m I supposed to do.” Sanji edged to his side and peered in as well. It was all so recognizable. Untouched. Probably the first time it had been opened, since his demise, and Sanji suddenly felt a surge of gratefulness for what Usopp was doing now, something else he couldn’t communicate through pokes.

“Okay, so. I’m just gonna. Go through this, and you tell me when I got what you want. But don’t stick your creepy ghost hands in me, okay?” Sanji prodded at him to get going. For his part, Usopp didn’t flinch, but he did let out a long, slow breath, and then started by running his hands over the hanging clothes, making them all swing in a way that just seemed stiff.

If he just started from the top, it would take forever. Sanji thought for a moment, then nudged Usopp in the leg. Usopp paused, his hand clutching at the sleeve of a pink dress shirt, sending wrinkles running up and down. “Uh. Lower?”

Nudge nudge

With some trepidation, Usopp crouched below the hanging clothes and reached for the mass of folded clothes on the shelf below.

Nudge nudge nudge nudge nudge

“Okay, okay, I get it!” Usopp snapped, and kept going down. Past more boxes of cigarettes, past a drawer of ties, down below the layer of shoes, until.

Usopp stopped just above the goal and slowly closed his eyes. “Oh my god. What the hell.”

Nudge nudge nudnudge nudgenudge –

“I hate you. Why are you doing this to me.” But Usopp rested his hands on the prize and drew out a stack of magazines that had various women in various poses on their covers. Usopp shut his eyes again and massaged the bridge of his nose, which required some complex maneuvers considering the length of it. “Sanji. It’s extremely early in the morning. I didn’t want to wake up to this.” When no answering nudge came, Usopp looked at the stack again with great reluctance. “How did you get so many? Why did you get so many? Is this the only thing you buy besides cigarettes and food? When would you even have the time to look through these? I mean, this isn’t really surprising, but I really didn’t want to know about your secret library. I would rather live my life without ever knowing about your secret library. You freaking bookmarked these too, why – “

Poke poke poke poke poke poke poke poke

Usopp paused, took a deep breath like he was diving to the bottom of the sea, and flipped a magazine open. Stared at the bookmark. Squinted at the bookmark.

“Why. Do you use recipes as bookmarks. For your porn.”

Poke poke pokepokepoke

“Okay, okay,” Usopp muttered, waving Sanji’s arm away only to shudder as they passed through each other. He slid out the scraps of paper he saw, then piled the magazines up all neat again and set them back in the locker. All in all, the paper outnumbered the magazines, and Usopp struggled to wrap his hands around them on as he tried to move to the kitchen, eventually just balancing them horizontally on his arm and holding them lightly against his chest. Sanji followed him into the kitchen and watched as Usopp found a drawer to dump the recipes in and started flipping through them. Occasionally, he’d pull a card out and place it in the front. It didn’t happen very often, and Sanji wondered if it was due to the apparently shitty way he wrote recipes or Usopp’s self-perceived skill.

“It was, nice. Seeing you,” Usopp voiced out loud, looked around like he would be able to tell if Sanji was there. Sanji helped him out by poking him in the back, and he relaxed. “Like, maybe if I had some warning or something...you could do it again, if you want.”

Sanji was pretty sure he was saying that just to be nice. And besides, it probably wasn’t healthy, for Usopp or anybody else, if he just went around and...existed in their dreams. He had made enough of a mess just by being here as it was. But he gave Usopp an understanding prod anyways.

Breakfast went much better than last night, in that nobody threw a plate against the wall. But Zoro left as soon as he shoveled the plate into his mouth, left before he was finished chewing, and Luffy simply stared at the door in silence and everybody else said nothing at all, except for the occasional loud yawn from Usopp.

And on top of everything else, the Navy attacked.

It was probably the worst time possible for something like this, but despite missing a crewmate (in more ways than one), despite whatever disagreements bubbled under the surface, everybody simply...fell into place. Zoro standing by Luffy, mowing down the front line. Usopp standing high and sniping any cannoneers he could see, no matter how many hours of sleep he’d had. Nami in the back, raining lightning down on anybody unfortunate enough to be standing under suspiciously low-hanging clouds. Everybody just working together just because there wasn’t room for anything else if they wanted to stay alive.

Sanji found himself automatically kicking out at a marine who had climbed on board and was charging at Chopper’s back, with predictable results. At the very least, the marine stopped, looking uneasily over his shoulder, before getting caught in a large rack of horns and flung back overboard.

Sanji planted both feet on the deck and swept his gaze all across the ship. He was dead. He was useless. But they were okay, right? He didn’t have to, he couldn’t,

Someone ran right through him and he got a glimpse of eyeballs, the inside, the back of, thin reddish webs all around, meat, bone, the porous insides, folds and folds of gray matter, and then the scene in reverse, ending in the back of a marine’s coat.

He staggered. He saw the marine stop, but he didn’t think that their experience of that too-intimate moment was as alarming as his. Sanji stepped back. But the Sunny was being invaded, inundated, with eyes, muscles, skulls, brains, vibrating throats, pulsing hearts, flesh, bones, blood and bones and fat and brains and muscles and eyes and flesh and stomachs and partially-digested meals and ribs and hearts and spines, fuck fuck fuck

He was below deck and he could hear the fight going on above and shit. He was the one in the least danger and he was hiding away, curled up, trying to remember that he had a specific shape, here were his legs, here were his hands, he wasn’t just an indistinguishable mass of, of just space hanging in the air, nothing like that, and god he was just so pathetic, what kind of shitty ghost was afraid of people, he had to be the absolute worst, just running and leaving the fight behind, not that he could do something but it was the principle of the matter you can’t just abandon people, you just don’t do it, and he just abandoned the people he fucking died for and he was staring at the floorboards, the wood grains, following lines up and down, until he finally heard a cautious, “Sanji-san?” and he looked up to see Brook standing there for who even knew how long.

“Uh,” he said, looking up and taking his hands away from the sides of his head. “I’m.” But he wasn’t sure what he was trying to say.

“We’ve fought them off,” Brook supplied. “It’s just us now. Would you like to head up?”

No more sounds of fighting. No yells or screams or anything, no people, so Sanji forced himself to his feet and looked somewhere to the side of Brook’s face. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“No need,” Brook answered, and if he was curious about why Sanji was down here in the first place, he didn’t ask.

Zoro was sitting right by the door when they emerged from below and he opened an eye and focused it on Brook. “Found him?”

Very quietly, Brook said, “Yes,” and Zoro closed his eye again and sighed through his nose.

“Dammit cook, what’s it gonna take for you to move on?”

Sanji didn’t even have a smartass response for that because he would really like to know himself.

When they cleared the doorway, Luffy came careening by and Sanji jumped back a good several feet to avoid a collision – or, he supposed, the opposite of one – but Luffy skidded and fell over in the grass and came crawling back up to his feet and towards where Sanji was approximately at.

“There you are!” he declared, like he found him, and he flung his arms out wide. “It’s raining!”

It certainly was, and not one of those storms that was so common around here, but the perfect light drizzle with a shitty rainbow to match. The rain was so fine that he could’ve said the air was shimmering instead. Usopp was just sitting at the garden, dangling his legs down and looking up, letting the rain drip down his face. Nami was at the swing, peering at the clouds for anything more dangerous than this but leaning back, satisfied. Franky was very noticeably trying to squeeze all of himself under an umbrella, grumbling something about rust probably, but still staying with everybody else. Chopper was sitting with Robin, a book in his lap, which was being protected by an overhand of arms, but he was poking his nose out to the sky. Brook was standing by, as always, and Zoro didn’t look like he wanted to go anywhere.

Only Luffy was really playing around in the rain, but that seemed right. It seemed natural, in the middle of this moment of peace, for Luffy to be the most active of all. He smiled with his teeth, all wide and bright, and he really seemed to be looking straight at him, and he said, “Is it raining for you too?”

It was a weird question, and Sanji tried to think about what it could mean, forgetting for a moment that it was Luffy who was asking and it wasn’t like the goof asked things anything other than directly. There wasn’t a poetic bone in his body, unless you counted the poetic defeats he doled out. And though Sanji could see the rain, it all simply went through him and if he closed his eyes, he wouldn’t even be able to tell. So the answer was no.

But Sanji was all poetry, all embarrassing lines and self-destruction and layered metaphors. And ever since he came back, this was the most unified he’d seen everybody. Quiet not because of tension, but because of companionship, because of a collective enjoyment of being here, being alive, being in such rare weather. And he could feel that. Whatever residue panic Sanji had melted away, like the rain was washing him off, and it would be nice if this feeling could last forever, but it was already nice enough to simply know that this feeling could still happen. That something in all of them wasn’t just irreparably broken. And because of this, Sanji answered, “Yes.”

It was the next day that Chopper and Robin approached and said, “We would like to try some experiments.”

The word ‘experiment’ didn’t bring to mind any pleasant imagery. But even if his friends were willing to dissect him, it wasn’t like they could dissect a ghost, and it would be a break in the monotony of wandering around watching everybody else and occasionally feeling sorry about himself. So Brook, Robin, and Chopper commandeered the library and Sanji hung around, tapping his fingers on his arms.

“I researched some books about ghosts ‘cause I wanted to understand more about Sanji’s condition.”

“My condition is I’m dead. Don’t tell them I said that,” Sanji hastily amended, and Brook kindly didn’t make him sound like an asshole.

“Robin helped me with some of the scary books. So we both have lists of things that books say ghosts can do, so I was hoping that it’s okay for us to try to see if Sanji can do them?”

“If anything, we were hoping to uncover an easier form of communication,” Robin added. Both of them had notepads in their hands, and Sanji walked behind them to peek at one, but Chopper’s fur bristled and he clutched the notepad to his chest.

“No peeking!” he shouted. “The subject can’t have any bias beforehand!”

Sanji threw his hands up and backed away, around to his own side of the table. Robin laughed like she could see him, but probably she was just laughing at Chopper’s consternation. Once Brook assured Chopper that there was absolutely no cheating going on (though Sanji wasn’t really sure how you could cheat this), he lowered the notepad again.

“Well, we can start with what we know,” Brook offered. “He certainly exhibits the typical ghostly abilities of flight and intangibility.”

“I just don’t do it much,” Sanji added for nobody in particular. Or for himself, to at least feel a part of this conversation about him.

“And there’s certainly a chilling atmosphere when he’s nearby. Which would imply a presence, a form of manifestation. It’s also an observable effect on the physical plane, so perhaps there is some level of interactivity he can have in the world.” Robin was already writing things down, though what she could possibly be writing, he didn’t know.

“Um, there are loads of stories where people actually see ghosts, so maybe there’s a way Sanji could become visible?”

Brook glanced at Sanji. Sanji glanced at himself. Clothes dripping wet. A constant reminder. “I don’t think anybody would wanna see me like this.”

“Perhaps you could alter your appearance?” Brook suggested, tilting his head back towards Chopper and Robin.

“Considering that there’s no real physical form involved, it’s a possibility. But generally speaking, the lore does not account for that. Ghosts are meant to be stuck on the memory of their own death. That’s largely why they appear in the first place.”

“But it doesn’t hurt to try!” Chopper chirruped.

“Yeah. Just like changing clothes. Except the clothes don’t exist.” But still, how could he say no? So he pressed against his eyes and tried to think himself through it, methodically, logically. Clothes soaked. Time to change them. Dry clothes looked like, looked like...the clothes still hanging in his locker. Nothing dripping, nothing heavy, nothing cold. Though...he didn’t really feel any of that anyways. But he could remember, couldn’t he? It wasn’t that long ago. He could remember sinking into the sea, gasping for air but only getting water, couldn’t even choke because there was no room to, and his lungs grew weighty and dragged him down all the more; detached panic, detached awareness, detached body; nothing.

So he could remember that. So he should be able to remember dry fucking clothes. But he couldn’t describe to himself what warm felt like, just that it was, warm, y’know? He couldn’t think of what the opposite of wet was, because it was too abstract for him to chase after. He tried to think what it had felt like in Usopp’s dream, but that had, in the end, felt like nothing. Dreams didn’t feel like anything. He had just come out with the impression that he had been in dry clothes, but his brain couldn’t tell him what that meant. And it’s just so fucking frustrating, because it wasn’t like these shitty clothes were even real, hell, he was barely real himself, so why couldn’t he just brute force his appearance, mold everything the way he wanted to, but as he grabbed at a sleeve and pulled at it, he couldn’t help but think about what if his clothes really were mutable, didn’t that mean that he was mutable as well? And if he made one change, would that just set up a constant decay, as he tried to keep himself together, tried to keep himself Sanji, and if he could forget what dry clothes were like then couldn’t he forget his own shape? Until all he could remember was the ocean, sinking, water, drowning, panic, acceptance

“Sanji-san,” Brook said sharply, and Sanji snapped back to the library once more.

Brook was standing, clutching at his shoulders, or at least making a go at it. Robin was also on her feet, a hand halfway up, like she had wanted to reach over to him as well. Chopper had backed further into his seat, eyes perched over his notepad. After a moment of silence, all of them settled down and Sanji tried to take a few long breaths. “I...I’m sorry, I dunno why...did, uh, something happen…?”

“Is he okay?” Chopper asked at the same time, and Brook looked to each in turn, like he was deciding who he should answer first. Robin had started scrawling something down on paper, but she was using an ancillary arm to do so and had her main focus on the space where Sanji was standing.

“I think, Chopper, that I would like to hear your experience first,” Brook finally announced, folding his hands on his lap. “While the sight is still fresh.”

Oh boy. Just the fact that there had been something to see put Sanji on edge, and the way that Chopper was clutching his notepad wasn’t helping. Sanji let himself fall to the couch, yelped as he sank through, and did the same trick he had done last time in the crow’s nest.

“I...saw him, sorta. But it didn’t look like him...it’s just, there was something over there, like fog? Or a mirage, or something. And there was wind, suddenly, and I thought I heard...moaning. Or a storm. Brook, is he okay?”

“Yeah,” Sanji breathed out, wrapping his arms around his legs. “Great. Fantastic.”

“He’s calming down,” Brook said.

Robin set her notes aside and leaned back, looking more worn out than before. “I believe a recurring pattern in ghost lore is how their existence is tied closely with their emotions.” She closed her eyes, as if reciting. “Ghosts typically result from traumatic deaths. And whatever intense emotions they feel in their trauma, whether anger, mourning, or regret,” Sanji bristled at that word and glanced at Brook, who said nothing, “these emotions tie them to this world. And, typically, whatever can resolve the binding emotion frees them. I think,” Robin hesitated, started to slow, “that the way they are able to interact with the world is also largely tied with trauma and emotion. Vengeful spirits are said to appear to those who have done them wrong, or appear to bade their relative to enact revenge in their name. Mournful spirits may end up performing their own death, over and over, for everybody to see. When ghosts move objects, usually it coincides with intense anger or upset, rather than with intention. Having said all that...it would seem that on his own, Sanji would not be able to interact with the world consistently, unless he experiences intense emotions.”

Chopper waited for a moment in case Robin wanted to say anything else, then jumped in. “So Sanji was angry? Or sad?” He looked at Brook, who looked at Sanji, who blinked and set his chin behind his knees.

“Uh. I don’t really think I was...either? Just was thinking about this whole shitty ghost...thing. It’s just been messing with my head.”

“So it would be the traumatic experience of dying and reviving as a ghost that set you off,” Brook concluded, and that sounded right enough. He just would rather his mind not throw some tantrum every few minutes or whatever so he could at least have a peaceful afterlife. Though being a ghost automatically meant he wasn’t at peace, he supposed.

“Well, we might as well skip over everything to do with direct interaction with the world, at least for now,” Robin said, picking up her notes again. “I’d rather not cause undue stress.”

“But there’s other things we can do! ‘Cause ghosts can also communicate indirectly, like through Brook!” Chopper, bless his heart, was keeping up his stalwart optimism, and he felt himself getting grounded again, so to speak, coming down from whatever it was that he’d been freaking out about.

“The most well-known method is probably possession – “

“No,” Sanji repeated, because he wasn’t gonna fucking budge on that, no matter how desperate he got.

“– if not through a living being, then through an object.”

Sanji glanced around. “I don’t think I can do much talking through a book.”

“Not many objects really have speaking capabilities,” Robin also conceded.

“Maybe whenever Franky finishes with the robot?”

“Oh god no,” because he wasn’t going to budge on that either.

“Also, while they may or may not have any merit to them, Ouija boards could be a possibility to examine.” Not that he knew how that was supposed to work, if he couldn’t actually move anything, but sure.

“Oh, and also some books say ghosts can go into dreams!”

Oh.

Right.

Brook stared at him as he took much too long to answer. “He is not voicing an objection,” he said, the bastard.

“That method would have to be tested on your own time, I’m afraid. Though I can tell you that there would be many willing to assist. Nami has shown interest when I shared my studies with her...”

Ah hell. Now he had to, didn’t he, couldn’t keep Nami waiting. Robin, you beautifully conniving meddler.

“In the meantime,” Robin continued, leaning down and pulling a Ouija board out from under the table.

“Ah...Robin-san...did we always have that…?”

Robin just smiled, and Sanji wasn’t sure if he would rather believe that she had just procured the board out of thin air or that she had bought it long ago for this exact occasion.

Had he ever been in the women’s quarters before? Once, perhaps, back on the Merry. But never on the Sunny, really. It was a stronghold, a sanctuary, never meant for him except in the most dire of circumstances.

Or if invited.

Which, it was not an explicit invitation, not really, but he was reasonably sure it was an inexplicit invitation, so that made his trespass okay, and besides, he wasn’t going to look or anything, he didn’t have ulterior motives, there wasn’t anything to even see because it was all covered up, and even if he was a particularly tenacious creep (which he wasn’t), then he’d have to stick his head through several objects to see anything and that would be really really weird.

It was already weird enough having to press himself through the closed door. Or maybe he should say, it was still weird. He should probably learn to be a better ghost or something. Stop getting freaked out by his own ghost-ness.

It was the shift before Nami’s. That seemed to be the best time, just to make things convenient, since she’d have to wake up anyways. He hoped there wouldn’t be any cliffs involved, he couldn’t bear it, but that was something he’d have to figure out later so he just wove his way towards that beacon of bright orange hair and prepared himself and stuck his hands

in. He was in an ornate bedroom, wallpapered with a deep red, carpeted with the most plush of carpets. There were lots of stuff that implied itself to be highly expensive and surely exquisite in whatever meaning of the word applied. The bed itself was a four-poster, curtains for days, and some of that see-through stuff for good measure. And he was pretty certain this room was meant to be in a castle, somewhere isolated, intimate…

He heard giggling. Two sets of giggling. And he saw flashes of legs, tangled together, that familiar orange hair, that familiar...blue hair...with skin that spoke of deserts...and…

Sanji made a strangled gurgling sound and spun around, hands over his eyes, which was redundant but it felt like a good kind of redundant, like if there was ever a time to be redundant then this was it, and the sounds from the bed came to an uncomfortable halt and he heard someone sit up and he knew it he knew this was a bad idea, why was it that he could only communicate by invading people’s privacy someone kill him now.

“Oh, it’s you,” Nami said. She didn’t sound particularly upset. Just a little annoyed? But she slid out of the bed and tapped him on the shoulder. “You can turn around now.”

Sanji did so, very carefully. Nami had decided to clothe herself in lacy negligee. Back in the bed, Vivi stared blankly. Sanji shielded her from view. “Uh. Does she...it’s a little...”

Nami glanced over her shoulder and gave a dismissive sort of wave, and Vivi slid down under the covers and slept. Or looked like she did. Nami looked back at him, scrutinizing. “So how can I tell whether you’re here or I’m dreaming that you’re here?”

“Uh.” He hadn’t thought of that, actually. “That’s...I don’t really...”

“I guess if I was dreaming Sanji-kun in this scenario, then he’d have wanted to join in instead of acting like a weenie.” He had nothing to say to that because he did, essentially, act like a weenie. “Either way...”

With a wind-up so huge that Sanji couldn’t even tell what she was going to do, Nami swung an uppercut straight into his chin, sending him up and crashing into the wall. “Ow,” he said, more out of politeness than anything else.

“Have a seat.” There was a table now, white and elegant, and two chairs. Nami was already sitting with a teapot in front of her, though no cups. It was there more for looks, probably. She was much better at this dream thing than Usopp was.

Sanji rubbed his jaw like it had hurt and slid awkwardly into the empty chair. Nami’s face wasn’t upset or pissed off or anything, really. It was more like...judgmentally bored. The sort of way cats looked, when they were at rest and unimpressed with any attempt to interact with them. She didn’t say anything, so Sanji took the opportunity to bask in the feeling of being here, since he had been a little distracted the last time he had done this.

He was wearing a pink dress shirt. No tie. It meshed well with the wallpaper. He rubbed his thumb against his fingers and felt the impression of touch, of warmth. He breathed in and a simulacrum of air flowed into his nose, filled his lungs, and went out again. There was weight to him and he just knew that gravity was pushing down on him, that the laws of physics applied to him. He existed. He was punchable. He was alive.

It was enough to be addicting, and he knew plenty about addiction, but he couldn’t let himself go there.

“It’s really you,” Nami said, eyes staring half-lidded as she leaned on her arm. “So. You’re a ghost.”

Given that this had been his existence for the past few days, none of this was news. But the way Nami said it was, and his voice sounded as numb as she looked as he said, “You didn’t believe in me.”

She looked away at that, didn’t answer, and that was an answer all on its own. Could he even be upset? Not really.

“Did you think Brook was just...making it up? Or...”

“No. I just...it’s complicated.” And didn’t that just summarize this whole damn mess. Nami still wasn’t looking at him, just frowning off to the side. “Before, it was just Brook talking to air. This is different. And it’s just...you’re dead. For sure. I didn’t want to believe it, you know? But now I have to.”

“I’m sorry, but...there was no way I could’ve lived.”

At that, Nami scoffed, a sad little thing that barely moved the air. “You wanna know what he said? ‘Sanji’s such a good swimmer.’ ‘Sanji could’ve washed up on an island.’ ‘Sanji’s smart, he could catch up to us, someday.’ And it wasn’t like there was a body, and he just...drew me in. We’ve managed impossible things before. But here you are.”

At some point, Sanji found himself holding the teapot. Just to have something in his hands. Something to look at besides that face. “Well, this is rather impossible on its own.”

He chuckled. Nami didn’t.

She pulled on her hair, bit down on her lip. And then, all at once: “I really fucking hate you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But you went and died, so I just feel like shit for hating you.”

“I’m okay with you hating me.”

Nami slammed a fist on the table with a sound so loud that Sanji thought the table would just fall to pieces, but it stayed standing. She was looking at him now, her eyes hot and watery. “Do you even get why I hate you right now?”

He could hear the sounds of a storm, somewhere outside the walls, and the roar of a Sea King. The longer Nami stared, the louder it seemed to get. Sanji kept holding the teapot. He was gripping the handle too tight. He tried to relax his hand. “I do.”

“Then why the fuck did you do it.” She wasn’t shouting. She was muttering, growling, challenging. He heard waves crashing into him, or into something else outside of him, and he squeezed his eyes shut.

“Because it was the only way – “

“Like hell it was. You could’ve trusted me. You could have tried trusting the goddamn navigator to get everybody out! Without anybody dying!” Ah. There goes the table. Sanji held the teapot closer. Opened his eyes again, because Nami deserved at least that much. She wasn’t quite standing yet, but it was enough for her to loom over him. “You could’ve told us your plan. You could’ve waited for someone else to help you! You could have at least weighed other options before just diving into your death like the idiot asshole you are!”

But no, no, it couldn’t have been any other way, and he had been cruel, he knew, but it just wasn’t possible for anything else to have happened. He could have given every counterargument under the sun for every single point that Nami made or ever will make, and it wouldn’t be enough, not for her, not for anybody else on the ship because, whether or not they knew, at some point they all got an ingrained belief that everything would turn out fine, someway, somehow. And his only belief was that one day, it would all come crashing down, and he had to be ready to keep the casualties to himself.

And there was no way he could say any of that. So he just said, “I don’t regret it.”

“You’re dead! You’re a fucking ghost! You’re haunting us, and you still think that maybe you didn’t make a huge mistake?!”

But I don’t regret it. Really. Honestly. You were worth it, all of you, because my heart had never been full until I joined you, and I would do anything just so that you could keep going, and I did, and here you are, so I don’t regret it, I never will. But it felt like the wind was picking up, and the ocean was here, in this room, and he could feel the Sunny pitching hard on the waves, the roar of a Sea King, the roar of cannons, both of them, together, and he was drowning, drowning, as he clutched at the teapot, and Nami was standing up now but with a far different expression and she was asking, “Sanji-kun?” in a way that he didn’t like, and the teapot shattered but he couldn’t tell if he had dropped it or just squeezed it too hard, she was repeating his name, over and over, with varying urgency, and he was repeating in his head, I don’t regret it, I don’t, I don’t, I could never regret it, and

Nami shot up in her bed. Sanji didn’t even look at her face as he flew out the room as fast as he could, still repeating that mantra to himself, until he was able to recognize that there was no storm, there were no Sea Kings, nothing like that now. He pressed his palms against his eyes and sank under the deck, listened to the creaks and the slosh of gentle waves.

No more dreams. Never again.

“Land ho!” Luffy shouted, and the idea of being able to get off the ship for a while eased the atmosphere. Sanji couldn’t say that it eased him any, because land might have towns and towns might have crowded streets and he really would rather not deal with crowds at all, but they needed to restock and he was still the only one who best knew what to buy so he hoped that sticking close to Brook would ward most people away.

When asked about whether he could really project himself into dreams, Sanji evaded the question and just hoped that neither Usopp or Nami would ever mention it later. He wasn’t subtle about his avoidance, not at all, but Brook dropped the subject anyways. He was so accommodating. Too accommodating. It wasn’t like Sanji required anything at all, or even deserved any of it, so he just kept feeling a beat of gratitude and dependency and love whenever he was given accommodation, and he just wished that it wasn’t Brook he was feeling this to. Life continued to be a joke.

Zoro was staying to watch over the ship, and Franky had gone to his workshop first thing after breakfast and was unlikely to come out. Everybody else was ready to disembark. Sanji followed them down the gangplank. Or, actually, Sanji followed them halfway down the gangplank and just. Stopped.

Brook turned around, prompting the others to pause as well. Luffy, frowning at the head of the group, said, “What’s up?”

Sanji wanted to put into words what, exactly, was up, but he couldn’t figure out how. It wasn’t like there was an invisible wall, or a feeling tugging him back, or anything he could really pinpoint as the reason why he stopped. It was just. He couldn’t.

“He cannot seem to leave the ship,” Brook reported, and Sanji thought he was done being surprised by shitty ghost bullshit already but of course there was more shitty ghost bullshit. There was always more, wasn’t there. What a fool he was.

“Hopefully the Sunny won’t ever sink and drag him down to an afterlife on the ocean floor.”

“Don’t say that around Franky,” Usopp muttered dryly.

“I could stay on board.”

“No, you don’t have to...go enjoy yourself, alright? I’ll be fine. Just make sure to get groceries.”

Brook stood silently for a moment when he gave him a casual wave, then said, “If you insist,” and walked onto shore with the others. Sanji waved them off and moved back to the deck, and that unsettling feeling faded away.

He’ll be fine. It wasn’t like he was alone. Sure, the two other guys on board he couldn’t stand hanging around for several reasons, but that’s fine. Even if he was alone he’d be fine. There was just so much shit to do. Like thinking about shit until he freaked out again or telling himself that he should get used to all this ghost shit but still getting mentally stuck on the way he had moved when he was alive. Debating whether he’d be losing something if he gave in and just accepted that he didn’t have to walk anymore, why was he even still pretending. Somehow dragging his thoughts back to death and freaking out some more.

“So many choices. I’m a regular busybody, ‘cept I don’t have one.” Sanji laughed hard for a long moment and then suddenly cut himself with a horrifying realization. “I’m going insane.”

He made a sincere go at not going insane, but it became clear that he just couldn’t trust himself being alone anymore when he found himself in the ocean, halfway out the hull, making up conversations for the passing fish to have. With different voices and everything.

Zoro was right out. So that just left Franky to hang around, and Sanji pulled himself back through the hull and prepared himself for whatever mechanical monstrosity he’d have to see.

He hadn’t really gone in the workshop for the past few days just because he didn’t want to see anything there. Franky was affably harmless at his best, but sometimes he sort of teetered on the edge of ‘mad scientist,’ and building a robot body for the ghost of a recently-deceased friend was definitely mad scientist material, and it didn’t help that the guy had been spending pretty much all hours down there, unseen and unheard, only coming up for meals and sleep and looking more haggard every time.

Sanji felt bad about it, but he really did hope that Franky never finished, because he wasn’t sure he could bring himself to say that he would never ever step foot in a goddamn metal piece of shit ever, especially after all this work. Franky seemed to be doing his best to accommodate that wish since even after all this time, he didn’t seem to make any progress and just seemed to come out even more disappointed than before. It was odd, really, since one of his major good points was his ability to work fast. But robots were probably harder than shit like bridges or stairs or something.

There was no robot in the workshop. No completed robot, anyways, just a bunch of metal parts collected in the corner. There was a cyborg, and he was drawing something on paper with wide sweeps of his hand, something he had been doing for a while, judging by the litter of paper discarded around him. The only discernible robot part was a torso and a leg, both of them set separate from anything else in an alcove, the wall around them peppered with apparently approved sketches of ideas and designs, none of which were comprehensible. In front of the alcove was an ashtray, with a smoking cigarette standing straight in it. So that’s where those went.

It looked a lot like a shrine. Which was somehow weirder than the robot body, but so many things were weird lately that this just didn’t faze him, not anymore. He stepped closer to peer at it and saw that the torso was hollow, which didn’t seem like the sort of way you’d build a robot, but he wasn’t an expert or anything.

At this point, Franky looked up and around, sucking in a breath automatically. “That you, bro?”

Sanji responded with a poke, and Franky settled down, leaning back from his desk and tapping his pencil against the paper. Sanji peered over his shoulder and saw a vague figure and a lot of measurements, more detailed parts, scrawled notes, some things scribbled out. It looked like a goddamn mess.

“Been tryin’ to work out height and weight and shit,” Franky started. “Figured that it oughta feel right. It’s hard, though. Getting the weight down. Probably impossible. Metal’s heavy as shit.”

There were intricate drawings of gears, hinges, joints. Notes for the future, to figure out one logistical problem or another. Was that a fucking rocket in his leg? What the fuck, Franky, you could probably take that out if you’re so worried about the goddamn weight.

“Oh. Hey, actually, here’s a speaker. Still dunno how you deal with machines and stuff, so maybe you could try fiddling with it? See what happens.”

Franky set the small device in a relatively clear area on his workbench. Hm. Right. Possessing objects. He hadn’t tried that yet.

His first thought was, I can’t fit in there. His second was, you shitty idiot. For a while, he just hovered his hands around the thing, trying to figure out some sort of approach. Franky went back to drawing whatever he was drawing. It’s just. Did he just, go in? There weren’t any eyes on this thing, would he still be able to see? Or, just, could he kinda just...manipulate it, from outside? Not that he had any goddamn idea how these things worked, so he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to make it make sounds. But. Like…

Sanji got up on the table and tried stepping on it. Tried to sink into it, but not through. Or maybe he could think of it as like, haunting it?

It turned out that possessing objects had the same sort of concept as possessing people, but a different sort of perspective. With people, it was like slipping into another skin and becoming that person entirely. With objects, it was more like...melding with it, looking at it from afar, but somehow getting information about it. Being aware of its inner parts, and aware of himself powering it, aware of where the channels of his energy was going and where it could go.

But he still didn’t know how it worked, and this became evident when the speaker blared out an unholy screeching sound instead of actual words. Franky covered his ears and cursed. Sanji flinched, breaking his connection.

“Alright,” Franky said slowly, lowering his hands. “You should. Probably practice that.” But he looked relieved, and why not? This was confirmation that Sanji could actually do things other than ‘float’ and ‘fuck all.’ If everybody carried around speakers, then he could actually talk directly to them without fucking around in their heads or anything. He just needed practice.

“But practice out of earshot? Please? Here – try this.” Franky held out something spindly, with sharp points, and it was only when he sat it down that Sanji recognized it as a robotic skeleton of a hand.

This one wasn’t as intuitive as he hoped; just sticking his own hand in and trying to flex his fingers didn’t work. He had to think about the way that the gears should turn, which ones, the force required...it was all about focus, an all-encompassing awareness of the minutia and the whole. It was really freaking exhausting, but it felt like progress and Sanji continued practicing because there was no other way to get to the point where he could do this without a thought. If he could get the hang of this, then…

...Fuck. He was starting to sound like he did want the goddamn robot body. Which he didn’t. But the idea of actually being able to be seen, in some small way, to be heard, to exist spatially...he got carried away.

As though sensing his killjoy thoughts, Franky leaned back and flung his pencil on the table with a rough sigh.

“I’m a real asshole,” he said to the ceiling, and Sanji paused, ready to bolt if it seemed like Franky wanted to talk to himself in private. But Franky glanced towards the skeletal hand. “I said I’d do this. I really wanna do this! Building robots is my jam! But somehow, I...can’t.” He flicked up his sunglasses to rub at his eyes, and they were bloodshot red and looking a bit watery. Though not nearly as watery as they could be, not by a long shot. “I got loads of ideas for these super cool features, and I get jazzed up when I think about them. But when I start building...it just doesn’t measure up. I still remember how you look, and nothing I build’ll ever look right. But I’m still sketching these shitty ideas ‘cause I don’t wanna just go up there and say I give up. So I guess I’m saying, I just don’t want you to get your expectations up, ‘cause I’m a stubborn asshole and – “

The speaker suddenly screeched, drowning out any words in the vicinity, and Franky had to plug his ears until it stopped. “Jeez! What the hell! I’m spilling my guts here trying to apologize and – “

Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech

“Ow, stop!” Franky waited for a minute before he let his ears free and he grumbled, “If you don’t want my apology, just say so.” But he picked up his pencil again and continued working, eyes softer, back lighter, and Sanji went back to the hand and haltingly got it to do a thumbs up. Franky laughed at that. It was so nice to see, something that had become too rare, nowadays.

Sanji made a mental note to get Brook down here so they could talk more. He wasn’t gonna get in any fucking robot, but. It didn’t have to be a robot.

A few hours later, Sanji heard the thumps of footsteps from above, the sounds of carefree voices, and he hovered up and through the deck to see how everybody was. His head barely poked through when he heard a ghastly scream and saw Brook fall over.

“Aaah! Brook, is something wrong? Is it a broken bone? A heart attack?!? But you don’t have a heart! How do I treat it?!”

“Sanji-san,” Brook cried, on the verge of tears and sounding very affronted about it, “please don’t make such a creepy entrance!”

“You stop being so goddamn scared of things that you can do!” Sanji retorted, still only a head on the deck. He pulled himself the rest of the way up when Brook screeched and covered his eyes. “Shit, calm down!”

“I suppose,” Robin said, smiling lightly, “that Sanji has scared Brook...half to death.”

It took a moment to sink in that Robin just made a Skull Joke, basically, and then Luffy threw back his head and laughed.

“It’s not funny! I was really scared!” Brook wailed, only lucky enough to have Chopper trying to console him.

“You were so scared you practically jumped out of your skin!”

“Please don’t bully me, Usopp-san! You would have been startled too!”

“Yeah,” Nami said, sternly flicking Usopp in his forehead. “He was so startled that his blood ran cold.”

“I am older than you??? Could you at least consider respecting your elders???”

Because everybody kept making fun of Brook, it took a while for them to actually load up their purchases. Nami took her new outfits into her room and came back out to help with the food. Luffy fell down the stairs delivering materials for Franky and was soon kicked out. Chopper went to organize the books that he and Robin bought. It was almost time to make dinner when Luffy looked around and said, “Where’s Zoro?”

Franky withered under the mass of focused stares. “I was downstairs the whole time, alright? I didn’t see him.”

“Sanji-san?” Brook said quietly.

“Uh. I was actually avoiding him, so no. I thought he was up with his shitty weights or something.”

It took too long, far too long for Nami to take on that exasperated tone of hers and huff out, “He got lost again.”

“Yeah, definitely, it’s what he does,” Usopp quickly answered, nodding his head like he was in an earthquake. “I guess we’ll just have to wait for him to come back! Or, uh, go out and find him?”

“Let’s wait.” Luffy’s voice was low and dark, and no amount of feigned normalcy could stand up to it. All anybody could do was exchange anxious glances and go to sleep.

Zoro didn’t show up the next morning.

Only when he didn’t show up at lunch did Luffy call for a search, and Sanji watched each crew member disappear into the town again, calling his name. All they brought back was hunger and exhaustion.

They went at it the next day, taking their meals to go, already anticipating that they’d be gone the whole day, and so this time they came back with nothing at all, and Luffy just went to his bunk and stared holes into the ceiling above until he fell asleep.

And he was gonna have to do this, huh. He was the only one who could, because of course he was, and this was probably all Zoro’s fault in some way or another so Sanji cursed him, cursed his hair, cursed his ancestors and his descendants for as many generations he could think of, and he closed his eyes and took the plunge

onto the deck of the Sunny, standing, balancing on the rocking of the ship. His clothes hadn’t changed. That is, his clothes were the ones he died in, only dry; which didn’t last long, as an angry wave tossed itself on board and left him soaking again.

Oh boy.

The rain was about as bad as he remembered, large drops that smacked rather than splashed. The lightning was almost constant. The thunder sounded like the sky was just cracking open. Sanji moved with the sway of the ship, looking around, and finally caught sight of Luffy by the railing, shouting himself hoarse at the sea, leaning out, too far, too far…

There wasn’t any danger, not here, but Sanji ran anyways, sped up when he saw Luffy start swinging a leg over, caught him by the shoulders and spun him around.

It was heartbreaking, seeing Luffy’s eyes go wide, and then his whole face just collapsed under the force of his tears. He jumped at Sanji and wrapped his arms and legs around him, squeezed him in a vice grip, and that made it slightly harder to balance, but that was nothing to talk about now, and Sanji set his arms around Luffy as well, waited until those wracking cries became intelligible words, became soft sobs, and then ragged breathing, and...silence.

Luffy pulled his head away and looked at Sanji, a smile straining against the instinct to cry more. “It’s Sanji! Like, really Sanji! Right?”

“Yeah, it’s me, it’s me,” Sanji grumbled, pushing at Luffy’s solid grip. “Get off.”

Luffy got his feet on the floor but still had his arms wrapped around his waist, and buried his face into his chest, pushing at it like he was making sure it would hold up.

Sanji waited for a moment, took a breath, and said, “You need a new cook.”

It felt like the rain just stopped in the air for a beat. Luffy jerked, but stayed as he was. “No. You’re here. You’re the cook.”

“I’m dead.”

Luffy let go and carefully stepped away, looking at Sanji’s face. “So what? So’s Brook.”

“I can’t cook.”

“You’ve got Usopp to help! And everybody else!”

“Usopp can’t keep up with my schedule. He doesn’t know anything about nutrition either, or how to tell good products from bad. Hell, is he even good at haggling? Even if I could teach him directly, that takes time. And you don’t have time to wait for one of you to become a competent cook on the Grand Line.”

This part was the toughest, emotionally speaking, and yet Luffy’s eyes were dry. It was always during fights that that he hardened up, even in fights with his friends. Crying would have probably been easier to deal with. Easier than those eyes, willful and opposing, ready to knock him flat.

“We don’t need a new cook.”

“If you want that mosshead to come back, you do.”

Luffy blinked in a way that looked like a flinch. “Zoro’s got nothing to do with – “

“Oh c’mon Luffy, you’re an idiot but you’re not stupid,” Sanji said. The rain seemed like it was coming down harder. He might have to wrap this up. “You know this isn’t a coincidence. It’s his ultimatum. He won’t come back unless you do your job as captain.”

Luffy balled his hands into fists, but didn’t swing them, not yet. Instead, he shouted, his voice booming over the sound of the storm, “I can’t choose between the two of you! Why doesn’t anybody get it! Why’re you making me do this?!”

“Listen to me,” Sanji whispered, grabbing Luffy’s face with both hands and leaning in, staring into his eyes. Those strong, hurt eyes. “You’re not choosing between me and Zoro. You’re choosing between losing Zoro or getting a new cook.”

“But if I get a new cook, then it’s just...like I’m getting rid of you...”

“You shithead, I died and I’m still here! I don’t even know how to fucking leave! I won’t go anywhere. But you have to get a new cook.”

He was backing up now, keeping his eyes steady on Luffy’s, locking them in place. The ship was still bucking, but in a distant sort of way, like the storm was only half there. “Just, think about it. Okay? And I’m sorry about this,” he finished, standing up on the railing. And once Luffy realized what was going on, Sanji dropped overboard and slammed into the ocean,

and Luffy sat up, hand reaching out for nothing at all. His mouth hung open, ready to scream out a name, but he sucked it back in. He sat in the dark and stared at his hand for a long while, getting his breathing under control.

Sanji saw everybody off in the morning. He had no company this time; for something so important as recruiting a new crewmate, it seemed necessary that everybody available should be present. So Sanji kept a watch on the ship, even if watching was pretty much the only thing he could do, tried not to spiral into depressive insanity, and waited.

“Oh my gosh, this is amazing! It’s the best kitchen I’ve ever seen!”

Franky rubbed at his nose with a grin. “Thanks, girlie. Made it myself. Fancy lock on the fridge’n everything!”

“Why would you need to lock the fridge?”

The question froze a smile on everybody’s faces as they turned towards Luffy, who was perched on a stool at the counter. He looked back, smiled more sincerely, and said, “’Cause I empty it out if you don’t!”

“Don’t say that so proudly,” Nami snapped before setting a sympathetic hand on the new cook’s shoulder. Her name was, apparently, Carrot – very fitting for someone who happened to be a rabbit. “You...really don’t know what you’re in for here. I’m so sorry.”

Carrot’s eternal smile was starting to wilt, more out of confusion than anything. “But this is such a wonderful opportunity for me, I should be thanking you for considering me the best candidate out of anybody else!”

“No. You really don’t know what you’re in for. Please. Brace yourself.”

By the wall, Brook leaned down to whisper at Sanji. “Rather cute, is she not?”

“As long as she can do the job,” he answered, shrugging. Brook fixed one of his hollow stares at him.

“In truth, I expected a more effusive reaction out of you.”

“I’m pretty sure being dead also killed my libido, Brook.”

“Who’s he talking to?” Carrot asked, pointing over to where Brook was.

Only Robin could speak up. “Ah, we haven’t mentioned it to you, but this ship happens to be haunted.”

Carrot stared, round-eyed, at Robin. Then pointed at Brook again. “Yeah, by him, right?”

“Excuse me, I do not haunt the ship, I live on it! Even though I’m dead.”

“Yeah...uh, well, it might be a little awkward, but...there’s a ghost here. And.”

“He’s Sanji!” Luffy blurted out with one of his huge smiles, and Usopp tried to wave away his interruption.

“He’s harmless. Really. So don’t be scared or anything, he’s just...around.”

Carrot looked at each visible face in turn, without a smile for the first time. She considered everybody’s expressions, and then nodded. “Okay.”

“Anyways, we gotta do a welcome party! A welcome feast!”

“Oh, for me? Gosh, who’s cooking it?”

“Uh. You. The cook.”

“I’m...making my own welcoming feast?! That’s not very welcoming!”

Nami set another sympathetic hand on Carrot’s shoulder. She was probably going to be doling those out for several days. “That’s the life of a cook here.”

“On the bright side, you can get used to this super kitchen!”

“Yeah. Okay. Okay! My first feast for you! I’ll do my best!”

“So the code is – “ Nami covered Luffy’s ears and leaned over to whisper it. Carrot’s ear twitched, receiving the message, and she started to shoo everybody out, because a feast is no fun if you watch it being made! It’s gonna be a surprise! And she closed the door and stepped into the kitchen, looked through the drawers, the pantry, everything, just taking stock.

Sometime in the middle of settling in, she froze, fur bristling. It was with a calm, strong voice that she said, “I’ll make sure they won’t go hungry.” And Sanji passed the kitchen over to her.

Zoro appeared again a little bit before the feast started, unannounced. It was almost like he’d never been gone in the first place, and everybody acted like that had been so, except for a few short seconds when Nami punched him into the ground for pulling that stunt and if he did that again, he could expect to owe her a debt long after he was dead. Then he was introduced to Carrot, unconscious. She had to be assured that this was a mostly normal thing that happened regularly.

The feast was how a feast should be. A wild celebration. Laughing. Drinking. Just spending this one night not thinking about what had come before or what had led them to this point. Just celebrating that someone else was here with them and doing their damn best to keep it a celebration. It looked like everybody was enjoying the food too, though there was entirely too much carrots for Luffy’s liking (“It’s my feast for me, and I like carrots, so that’s that! You can get what you like to eat every day after this, okay?”), and the new cook was really fitting in well. She was energetic. Nice. Kinda spunky. Almost killed Luffy when he snatched something off her plate.

Sanji stood off to the side, making sure that he wasn’t in the way. It was wonderful to watch after seeing all the shit before this. His friends having a party. His friends having fun. Just. His friends.

Brook picked his way through the plates and people until he could get to a spot to sit next to Sanji. He was holding a bowl of carrot cake. They must have run out of plates a while ago. “How are you feeling?”

He could feel his own smile fading, just a little, as he kept his eyes on the beaming faces out of his reach. Here comes the chopstick trick, like an initiation ceremony, and Carrot was trying her best to go through with it, everybody cheering her on or laughing at the way she struggled to even get the chopsticks stuck in her nose.

“I regret it,” he shuddered out, the words thick and painful. “I shouldn’t have died, Brook. I just threw all of this away, and I regret it, so much. I hate being like this. I kept lying to myself, but every time I think about my death...I lose myself. I think I could forget who I am, just wander around, wailing and shaking chains. I regret everything.”

Brook lowered his head. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Well.” With his usual ease, Sanji slipped a cigarette out of his pocket, flipped open his lighter, and blew non-existent smoke into the air. “I’m happy that I’ve got you all to ground me.”