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Pipi pipi pipi pipipipipipipi –
The explosion rang in his ears long after it had happened, and only after the lingering echoes died out in his skull did he hear the screaming. His. His screaming. He was the one screaming.
His knees clattered to the floor as he forced his screams down to whimpers and trailed his eyes down his arms, and they were still there, the cuffs, looking untouched, clinging to his wrists, and he reached for them again, he had to, he needed to, just get them off before he could threaten to use them (even though there was no danger anymore just because the danger had already been done), but the odd weight at the end of his arm, the tug of flesh as it flopped freely, his hands, his hands his hands his hands, and then he heard, “Don’t do unnecessary things!” before a boot connected with his side and he rolled once, twice, choked on his own spit as his wrists hit the floor once, twice, and he was aware of more screaming but it wasn’t his, someone else’s, a mad and feral scream that ended in a boom and a crash and a lot of broken wall.
Chopper ran up to him now, all snot and tears but still bellowing out something medicinal back at Nami, who lagged behind but was trying urgently to put one unsteady foot in front of the other, and Sanji said, “Don’t shout at her,” or he might’ve said so (he didn’t really say so), but he didn’t protest when Chopper turned him on his back and cupped his arms carefully until they were both resting on top of his chest.
“I need you to take even breaths, Sanji! Can you do that? Can you keep still?”
He couldn’t do anything except cry and grind his feet against the floor, he wanted to grab something and wring it out, tear it apart, do anything to, to, he wasn’t even sure what, but that wasn’t an option anymore and he shut his eyes and tried to get his throat under control, but he only managed two short, clipped babbles before he went back to crying again. Because, because.
There was a burnt smell, like fat popping in the pan; one of his arms ended in dead skin, exposed bone, a little spidery thing with its legs all backwards. The other was much of the same, only the wrist was more like a string of flesh and muscle keeping something useless connected to him and every time that arm moved, that hand swung, and it hurt hurt hurt and Chopper tried to hold that one gently, tried to carry that hand so it didn’t move so much while he examined it but it was no use, gravity, entropy, inertia, whatever, all the forces of nature were conspiring against that one bit of wrist to make it snap, just finish it, no point in holding the suspense, get it over with.
“I need anesthesia! Nami!”
“Oh god oh god oh god,” Nami said in between her gags and gasps, but she was able to pull her hands away from her mouth and dug around in Chopper’s bag for anything he needed.
Chopper flicked his hoof against the needle and took hold of Sanji’s arm. “I know it hurts, I know, but you need to relax your arm, Sanji. I’m sorry, just for this quick shot, and then it’ll stop hurting, so please relax your arm, just try as much as you can and I’ll handle the rest.”
Focus. Focus, focus, on Chopper, focus on what he’s saying, flood your mind so it pushes everything else out and just stop, and he felt something slide into his skin and he held out as long as he could before dissolving again, into pain and tears and screams and his arms, his hands, but it was starting to fade now, he was starting to fade, he breathed, his throat aching from the friction, and he watched Nami and Chopper watching him.
“I didn’t,” he started, because it seemed important to say, to let them understand, just so they could make an informed decision, “I couldn’t, let him; use me again, I couldn’t, not against you, not against you.”
He couldn’t tell if they heard. He couldn’t tell if he had even spoke. But he repeated it because it was important, so important to say before everything simply faded.
Luffy greeted him with blood on his hands and a serene sort of look that always came after bloodlust. The world didn’t quite feel all there yet and how much of his blood was made up of painkillers?
His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and the only sound he made was a croak, but Luffy said, very quietly, “You won’t see him ever again.”
Something lifted, an invisible thing that he had never let anybody notice. Never again. Really, truly never again? Once and for all, never again? But Luffy was never one who could lie and he was the sort who made reality match his words (not like Sanji, the complete opposite really) and Sanji exhaled and felt his lips pull into a smile, felt his smile pull at some bandages, and he raised a hand to feel out his face only to find that he hadn’t at all.
He had imagined this happening before. He always imagined the worst case scenarios, so of course he did. But the stump surprised him anyways; so blunt, so rounded, so alien, it looked more like an eraser or a handle or something, not at all like an appendage attached to his own body. He could control its movements but its movements were not his. He lowered it out of sight before shock could overcome the painkillers.
Luffy was moving towards the door now and Sanji whined, but he was calling Chopper in and he heard way more feet than just two rushing the door and oh, how did he ever deserve this.
“No, I have to check up on him! You shouldn’t hover – “
“Stay,” he croaked, or at least a facsimile of the word, and when Chopper asked him if he was sure, he whispered out a pleading sigh that Chopper couldn’t ignore.
Luffy, sitting on the table. Brook, standing politely at the back. Nami, oh Nami, that lovely beacon up front, Chopper right at his side, pulling him slowly upright, the faces of his friends, none of them ugly clones of his own, and Carrot and Pedro were here as well?
Upright was a challenge, gravity same as always but his body not putting up enough of a fight, and though Chopper only scooted him up enough to barely call him sitting up, he wheezed and closed his eyes for a moment.
“...Others…?”
“Fine!” Nami replied, though there was a bit of a lilt at the end that doubted that word. “We, had to split up. Before coming here.”
“The situation had become quite...complicated, and we had to split our attentions for a while,” Brook added.
“...Sorry.”
“No, no don’t!” Carrot’s voice was significantly wetter than the others. It was hard to tell, but she was jogging a leg – silently, for politeness’ sake.
“The blast ruptured your eardrums but they’ll heal. Your lungs held out a little better, though you’ll be short of breath for a while – no smoking, by the way – and there was no shrapnel damage since the...cuffs, didn’t blow apart or anything...so most of the injuries ended up being internal. There’s only the burns and...well...I saved one, but...”
He glanced down the length of his other arm and found a heavily bandaged but perfectly recognizable hand. It was one more than he had expected. He couldn’t quite move it, that is, he couldn’t move it at all, but the fact that it was there was good news and he wasn’t about to waste his breath complaining.
He took in everybody’s faces once more. “Others...”
Nobody looked eager to answer, and maybe that had been too obtuse, and he wondered if he could work his tongue for more than two syllables at a time when Luffy finally answered. “We’re catching up to them at the samurai place. That Kaido guy’s doing stuff and I’m gonna beat him up and then we’ll steal a rock.”
“Road Poneglyph,” Nami muttered.
His eyes were getting heavy. It felt like they would roll to either side, like a shitty chameleon or something, and he had to shut them for now. “...Gonna...fight...”
“Please don’t tell me he’s trying to say what I think he’s trying to say...”
“You’ve done enough, Sanji, just rest, okay? Just, don’t worry about anything else.”
“...Please.”
He flung out the word, burdening it with every bit of his being; this is exactly where I want to be, you are exactly the ones I didn’t know I loved, please take me with you, please let me make it up to you, please don’t leave me, not here, not where I can’t see you. His breath was starting to speed a little with the effort it was taking to keep conscious, he was sweating even though he felt so cold, but this was important, he needed a promise, he needed Luffy to promise, he needed his recovery to become a truth.
“Okay,” said Luffy, “but you gotta get better first.”
Brook hummed and Nami sighed and Chopper looked to the heavens as though praying for a divine entity to descend and change Luffy’s words (though Luffy wouldn’t even let a god boss him around) but he said, “I won’t do a rush job, but if you recover enough, then...”
Whatever else went on in the infirmary, he didn’t know because he huffed a laugh and let everything in him drop, into the mattress, into the floor, into the sea. There would probably be a time in the future when he would mourn – or rejoice, or maybe reflect – but for the moment, he would sink.
Waking up without the shield of anesthesia was. It was;
His left hand was completely gone. When he glanced away and back, it was still gone. His arm tensed in the particular way that would have moved fingers, but there were no fingers to move and his arm ended, it came up short, a swath of bandages all over a fine, chiseled point, like someone had pinched his wrist and simply twisted it off and he had nothing but the remains, and his hand was completely gone.
Chopper had been by his bedside and hopped over as soon as he heard Sanji’s breath hitch. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Can you tell me how you’re feeling? Does anything hurt? Are you in pain?”
My hand is gone, he didn’t scream. And he didn’t thrash against Chopper’s hooves, and he didn’t curl up and turn towards the wall, he didn’t throw up, absolutely didn’t. Instead he dug a hole from his brain to his guts, buried everything there to rot, and sweated out, “It’s fine, I’m fine.”
Chopper gave him the sort of look he usually reserved for Zoro, and Sanji added, “Okay, actually. I’m not fine.”
“Medically speaking, I can confirm that.” Despite his tone, his hold was tentative as he shifted Sanji into a sitting position and moved his IV out of the way. Perching himself on his chair, Chopper rolled towards Sanji’s side and carried over a tray with soup that smelled distinctly sterile, somehow. Sanji could see there wasn’t much in it but herbs and he tried not to grimace. But then again, there was a lot to grimace about.
“Okay, this is important. How does your head feel?” Chopper started, preparing a spoonful.
It was hard to sit up without leaning back, draping over the headboard and letting himself just melt. Sanji just succumbed to fate and a future of aching necks. “Mmrrgh...fuzzy and gross...”
“No migraines though? That’s good...I was worried about any brain damage you might’ve had...”
“No more than usual.” Sanji tried to chuckle, but the angle of his throat made it sound like a wheeze instead. Chopper raised his head and aimed the spoon at Sanji’s lips. The soup tasted medicinal. That might have been a compliment from a doctor, but from a chef, not so much. But it also tasted like the first thing he’s had for days, and it slid down his throat with a pleasant sort of painful, like it was melting off the crusty, dead walls of his throat and leaving it smooth.
Chopper continued interrogating him in between scoops of soup, and after that, started listing off the various ways his organs went to shit, and then after that, a list of restrictions and regulations on his diet and his movements and his habits and it must have been a millenniumbeforethe post-procedural lecture was through. Sanji focused on the soup.
“Right. So, now that you’re awake...I’m gonna take your bandages off, okay?”
Sanji nodded absently, for about half a second. And then, “Oh.”
“I left them on to, just so you didn’t have to, see everything. Right off the bat. I’ll start with your chest…?”
Sanji had to raise his arms for this, but could at least rest them on the railings. The bandages came off smoothly, painlessly. The sight under that was less so. Dark red splatters on his skin, blisters that had been peeled and now simply flaked at the edges, a significant patch of stitches that made him glad he didn’t know what it looked like before. Right. Tugging on the cuffs, he had curled around them instead of extending them out. This was just natural. Looking like he’d had his stomach scooped out and then put in backwards. He tried to control his breathing, then closed his eyes.
Chopper, beautiful soul that he was, set his hooves on his arm. “Sanji...you don’t have to look, but your injuries have to breathe. I can’t keep these bandaged. Sorry...”
“Do it.”
It took a moment for Chopper to start, but he reached over for Sanji’s right arm and peeled the gauze off. Sanji tried to follow suit and peeled an eye open, and there it was, or there was part of it, getting revealed wrap by wrap, and he could see his normal lily-white skin like everything was okay, like it was all a joke, but then Chopper got closer to his hand and there was that ugly red look again, and the harsh silver of stitches again, but this time looking all the larger against the narrow space of his wrist. And there was his thumb, his palm…
There were stitches on the tips of his fingers, and he didn’t want to think about what that meant but his mind supplied the image, his hand hanging on at an angle, his fingers bent backwards, the tips of them shredded, or even blown off entirely, and how could he ever move this hand again when it would clearly fall apart?
Chopper was saying something. About nerves, about growth, about sensory information. And, “I’m gonna do the other one.”
He stopped breathing and he hated it. He couldn’t do this, he didn’t have the time, not for this shit, and he said “Okay.”
The nub where his hand used to be looked like skin stretched over bone, stitched together at the end, like leather. But there was nothing there – and yes, that was the problem, but there was nothing there, no ugly burns, no uneven skin, and between the two, he couldn’t help but feel better about this one. Looking at his right, there was something that belonged to a monster. But here on the left, it was more like. His hand had gone on vacation. And it was fine, looked perfectly normal, it just wasn’t here, and all he had to do was wait for it to come back.
Chopper was looking at him looking at his lack of hand, and so Sanji just leaned his head back and sighed. “Alright. How do we start?”
It would take maybe ten days to get to Wano, and Chopper was kind enough to allow him outside after one. Sanji stretched and flexed and kicked out on the soft grass of the deck, jabbing at the air – swift one-twos, roundhouse, smoothly from one foot to the other, jump, flip, land, spin – until he felt something ache or Chopper ordered him to stop; then he’d sit and stare out at the sea, trying to curl his fingers one by one, grinding an unlit cigarette between his teeth, and it was back to kicking and thinking about nothing else.
Nami would stand by him once in a while and glare for a bit, tap her fingers against the railing like she was trying to hammer her nails in. A few days in, she said, “You could sit this one out.”
“It’s an important fight, Nami-san. I have to do my part.”
“You don’t have to do anything. You’ve been through a lot of shit, you really could take a break.”
Sanji clasped his hands together and found his fingers clasping smooth skin instead. He tried not to flinch. “It’s one of the goddamn Four Emperors, I can’t just sit here doing nothing. And I have to make up for – “
“We don’t keep you around because you’re useful, y’know.”
Nami was crossing her arms, her eyes still harsh, but not like she was angry at him specifically. Just, angry. Her sister’s bracelet glinted a bit when he looked up at her words, and when she caught his eye she continued, “You’re here because you’re you. Not just because you cook or kick or anything like that. We value you because you have worth, Sanji-kun.”
And sitting down the way he was, her standing the way she was, it’s like being a kid again but in an alternate world, hearing something so foreign that it would have been an entirely different language to him if he was still eight, and who knew what would have been if he had grown up speaking that dialect. But then those words would have never been special, and he pushed himself to his feet, stood as straight as he could, and smiled back. “Isn’t that all the more reason to fight?”
Nami rubbed at her forehead as he went back to his kicks.
Wano was a mountainous country, with neat slopes and chiseled peaks that lent an unreal air to the whole island. It looked like a nice, meditative sort of place, if it weren’t for the fleet of ships, all with grotesque animalistic figureheads, surrounding the whole thing.
Chopper had admitted that he hadn’t needed medical supervision for a while now, though Sanji was still watched, and Sanji was confident in his capabilities (enough to ruin a sea king’s day on the way here) and yet, Luffy said, “No.”
Sanji looked down at him, smoking without the help of a cigarette. “What the fuck do you mean ‘no,’” he asked, but his pure belligerence pushed him on without an answer. “You said I could fight!”
“If you got better,” Luffy added, arms akimbo like he was a shitty parent or something, some mature goddamn adult, and that was just all the more insulting for multiple reasons that Sanji could barely parse at the moment.
“Yes. And if you haven’t noticed, I’m the picture of perfect fucking health! Signed off by the doc and everything!” Seeing Chopper flinch and edge behind Pedro’s legs was enough to give him pause, but only that, and he strode up to Luffy, practically stepping on his toes, making full use of his six centimeter advantage. “There’s no reason to leave me behind!”
“You haven’t gone in the kitchen yet,” Luffy said, and it felt like everything Sanji had buried was about to come up again. He opened his mouth, closed it. Felt everybody’s stares crawling up his back.
“I was busy,” he said, clutching his arm, and it was amazing how six centimeters could disappear so fast.
“But you never even went through it to go to the infirmary,” Chopper piped up, nose still firmly behind Pedro’s leg. “You always went through the other door.”
“And you don’t even go to get food, we had to keep sending meals to wherever you were,” Nami added, her mouth a thin line, juxtaposed with her heavy voice.
“Ever since...that incident, you have not spoke about...” Brook gestured vaguely towards Sanji’s direction, pointing with his whole hand, as though the word itself would have been too offensive, and somehow that just made it worse.
Sanji whirled towards Brook and spat, “Because it doesn’t matter!” and the way everybody faltered gave him a slimy sort of pleasure.
Nami stepped forward with a fist raised, but she managed to untangle it instead and shout back, “It doesn’t matter? You fucking blowing up your own hand doesn’t fucking matter?! Are you even hearing yourself?!”
“Not when we’re fighting fucking Kaidou!” Sanji snapped back, throwing his arms out wide. “I don’t have time to get distracted,” but the swelling feeling in his gut was already reaching critical mass, he could feel it, clawing up his throat to pour out of his mouth, his own traitorous brain didn’t even believe what it should, everything that he had wrapped up tight was getting unraveled and he clutched at his own head only to recoil when the stub of his wrist knocked into his left temple instead and he made a gurgled sort of yelp and just collapsed.
It’s gone, it’s just gone, abandoned in the dust and rubble of his childhood prison, as though he could never fully escape the place of his birth, and if it had to happen, why there? Why did the one place he hated the most have to claim a piece of him, after he had spent most of his life escaping it, and why did it have to be, out of anything it could have been, why, why, why couldn’t he just forget and focus on the actual important thing, why couldn’t he just be dependable for once, and suddenly there was something on his head and Sanji turned around and Luffy was still there, sans hat, and he brought a hand up and felt the brim.
“Oh fuck no,” he breathed out, “you’re not doing the fucking hat thing with me. You’re not.” He tore the goddamn hat off but couldn’t bring himself to throw it against the ground and just clutched it as hard as he could without damaging the straw. Luffy just patted him on the shoulder.
“We’ll be back, so just take care of Sunny and my hat for me, ‘kay?”
The hat was still in his hand but he was having a hard time seeing it clearly at this point because he was fucking crying, his nose burning with disgusting mucus, and he still wasn’t letting it go or giving it back, he was fucking putting it on to pull over his eyes and he said, “You little shit.”