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“I want to be a cook!”
Through the bars, he saw Reiju blink, and then throw her head back and laugh. That didn’t bother him so much. Reiju laughed at many things. It did nothing to dampen this burning feeling in his gut, this absolute universal certainty of his place in the world. He wanted to be a cook!
Reiju took a few deep breaths and managed to bring herself back down to a smile. “I would’ve figured that they’d have beaten that out of you by now. You’re pretty stubborn.”
“I don’t care what you think! I don’t care what any of you think anymore! None of you care about me anyways, right? So I’m just gonna leave and do what I want!”
“How?”
Reiju’s light smile didn’t even twitch, but it still looked like she was holding another laugh in while Sanji struggled for an answer. “I’ll...I’ll...” After everything, he didn’t want to cry. He already knew that crying wouldn’t help, and besides, the helmet made it impossible to wipe the snot and tears away, so they crusted on his face instead. But he could feel his eyes stinging already, not with fear or sadness but with frustration, because there was so much he wanted to do, but this weak body had no power to do anything, and what was the point of ambition for someone like him? What kind of joke was this? “I’ll, I’ll trick the guards,” he mumbled, more to hash out his own plans to himself than to have Reiju listen in. “I’ll pretend to be sick and they’ll get the doctor – “
“You think daddy’ll give you medical treatment?”
Sanji paused. It shouldn’t even be a question, and yet it was. Because on the one hand, he was fed. But on the other hand, he was...here.
He clunked his helmet on the bars and scrunched his eyes shut, letting the tears slip and overflow. When he opened them again, Reiju and her smile were right in front of him, and he yelped and fell backwards, and his helmet clunked against the floor in a different, more painful way.
“Hang on,” she said, and with a grunt, she bent the bars of the cell like they were made of clay and then backed away. The new gap was wide enough for Sanji to step through.
This was too nice, way too nice. Sanji stayed on the floor. “Why did you do that?” he asked, slowly, deliberately.
Reiju’s smile dropped to a neutral line. “I can bend them back if you want.”
“No!” Sanji scrabbled out, threaded his helmet through the bars, threw himself out the other side. Distantly, he heard Reiju laugh. Or maybe that was the ringing in his head from knocking it against the helmet again. Or both. He sat up. Pushed himself to his knees. And then to his feet. Slowly, as though moving too fast would make the world notice its mistake and put him back where he belonged. “Why did you do that?” he asked again.
Reiju clasped her hands behind her back and shrugged, beaming at him. “You’re right. We don’t care about you. I dunno why daddy keeps you here at all. So it’s probably okay if you leave.”
That didn’t answer the question, not really, but the direct confirmation of everything he knew hit him in the heart and left it bleeding on the ground. Hearing it still hurt despite everything before this moment, like someone released a monster that couldn’t be put back. He tilted his helmet down, letting it hood his eyes. “Yeah. I don’t care about you either. So I’m leaving.”
“Sure,” said Reiju. “Bye.”
Sanji turned and ran, bare feet padding against the cold stone. He looked back for one brief moment and saw Reiju waving, the smile still on her face.
“Me, marrying that little punk? Never in a billion years!”
And Sanji’s heart broke.
On some level, he could hear everything being said. The taunts. The plan. The mocking. But at the same time, the rain was roaring in his ears, his blood was pumping much too loudly, the shards of his heart were still clinking on the ground, echoing, over and over. He remembered to take a breath. Another one. He dug his fingers into the gifts and found them digging into his palms instead.
“Geez, can’t you do anything other than smile?! You’re pissing me off here!”
“Oh? Should I be doing something else?”
“Keeping up a strong face sucks the fun out of all this. I wanna see your shocked face! Show me your despair, your anger!”
He could practically hear her smile. “I can’t show what I’m not feeling. Apparently, I’m not as good an actress as you.”
“Don’t screw around with me!”
“I was just thinking how sad it is that your mother places so much faith in such an idiot.”
“Hah?!”
“After all, shooting me out of nowhere...bringing me here at the risk of being spotted...detailing every bit of your scheme unprompted...have you thought the consequences of these actions through?”
“Listen here, you fucking small-time shit. I don’t think you’ve thought through the position you’re in! You’re injured and trapped, and guess what! Consequences don’t mean shit to me, ‘cause I can – “
There was a distinct ‘clonk’ sound, and then something thumped on the floor. Sanji took a peek around the corner and saw Pudding on the floor in front of Reiju, Reiju halfway on her feet. She shook her head as if shaking off some slight dizziness and then let herself fall back onto her chair again.
“Y-you, how dare you headbutt Lady Pudding!” the goop on her arms shouted, and Reiju glanced down.
“So tell me, this numbing sensation...are you, perhaps, a poisonous slime?”
Sanji chose this moment to edge back out of view. He would be pushing the sounds of screams and slurps out of his mind for some time to come.
“Ah...disgusting. You, rug. Get over here.”
There was the sound of whimpering, and then a sudden slam of the doors as something went careening out, screaming all the way. Reiju sighed.
“I guess I have to find some other support...or endure and walk.”
The clack clack of heels, an irregular pattern. And then a soft ‘oh’ of surprise as something hit something else and then fell to the ground, and Sanji glanced back in during the scuffle to see Pudding sitting on Reiju, with a roll of film that seemed to be coming out of Reiju’s head. She had a pair of scissors in her free hand, and though Sanji couldn’t see either of their faces, he could hear the seething in Pudding’s voice as she huffed and said, “As I was saying, consequences don’t mean shit to me. Because anything I do to you, I can just make you forget!”
“You – “ Reiju started, and made a move, but Pudding was faster and snipped off the end of the film, and Reiju was silent.
“Fucking troublemaker,” Pudding muttered, and Sanji walked away.
“So that’s what happened?” Reiju asked, some time later after she had been moved to the infirmary and after Sanji took the time to calm (cry). Despite being told that she would be killed tomorrow, Reiju smiled. “How sweet of you to tell me.”
Sanji grunted, lighting a cigarette. There wasn’t any doctor here to scold him, so might as well take advantage. “I just need you to tell Judge so he can forget about the fucking wedding and stop hanging my old man’s life over my head and we can all go home. It’ll sound like a lie from me, and also, I’m not sure if I’m in the mood to tell him his shitty life’s in danger.”
“Well,” said Reiju, her smile staying the same but her eyes sliding to the right. “I wonder if I should tell him.”
“Quit fucking around. I don’t want to get killed with all of you shitheads and I don’t want all these fucking pointless threats hanging over my head. I just want to leave everything here behind, go back to my crew and fucking apologize because every shitty thing I did here was useless. I never see any of you assholes again, so.”
“I wonder,” Reiju repeated, “what it would sound like if I told him that I was taken down by a pampered princess with nothing much besides a gun. I wonder how he would react.”
Sanji almost bit his cigarette in half as his guts churned, twisted harshly, because how dare she? How dare she be afraid, when this whole time he thought of her grouped together with the rest, a tormentor under a slightly different mask? He almost jumped to his feet, but instead clamped his hands on his knees. “As if he would ever harm his perfect child.”
“You were his perfect child!” Reiju snapped, her smile now a strained line ready to collapse, and Sanji found himself leaning back. Her eyes were filled with something, something underneath the usual brightness, ravenous and dark, and had that always been there? “I was the prototype,” she continued, quieter, dull. “I simply...continued to meet his expectations.”
A muted pause. Sanji exhaled, letting out the build-up of smoke and shock. Still, he muttered, “Who was the one who got locked up for six months?”
That smile was back again. Reiju tilted her head at him. “Who was the one who continued to live with him for thirteen more years?”
But he adored you, his mind screamed, he loved you as much as he hated me, and you dare come back to me with this sob story with barely any sob, just a story and nothing more? A story about how you succeeded and succeeded, over and over again? Fuck you and fuck off.
Instead, he looked away and said, “Why did you do that? Let me out, I mean.”
Reiju’s smile dropped, and she scrunched up her face as though she had to dredge up a barely used memory. “A childish whim, I suppose.”
“Ah.” A disappointing answer to an age-old question. But how else could it be? How else, considering this family, considering her, considering him?
“Or. Maybe it was because I hated you.”
Sanji let out a single, hollow laugh. “What else is new.”
Reiju scowled an actual scowl at him. “Not because of that. I didn’t care that you were weak, it was just funny.” With a sigh, she leaned back against the headboard and gazed at the wall behind him. “I hated you because of mom.”
Sanji felt his shoulders rankle. “What about her,” he said, terse and stiff.
Reiju slid her eyes back to his face. “You should hate her too, you know. She’s the reason you’re a mistake.”
This time, Sanji snatched the cigarette out of his mouth before he could grind it into shreds. “What do you mean,” he said, managing a controlled tone even as his hands tightened to fists.
Reiju chuckled softly. “She didn’t want her boys to be altered the way they were. Our father went ahead with the procedure anyways, and she retaliated by taking a drug to...maybe kill her and you, maybe try to reverse the surgery. Either way, three came out as planned. And you,” she smiled, bright, sarcastic, “came out a failure.”
A punch to the gut. Head whirling. Sanji leaned on his knees, fingers tangled in his hair, and then he looked up from the floor. “Is...is that why she was so sick?” At Reiju’s absent-minded nod, he stared back down again. “So...it’s because of me that she’s...”
“’Because of you?’ You weren’t even born, don’t be self-centered,” Reiju snapped. “It’s because of her that she’s dead and that you’re you.”
Sanji propped his cigarette back between his lips and took several deep breaths. It hadn’t simply been a trick of fate. There was an actual, concrete reason why everything had happened the way it had. Because of his mom. He let one last stream of smoke out of his nose and straightened up again. “That doesn’t explain why you hated her.”
Reiju glanced away towards the left. “Making you a failure was her biggest success. She loved you, Sanji, but what about the rest of us? If you’re the perfectly normal child she wanted, doesn’t that make me a monster? A failure?” Her hands started clenching the sheets, pulling at the seams. “All you had to do was say ‘get better soon’ and she’d gush all over you! Why? Anybody could do that! I could do that! What’s so special about the things you did? What’s so awful about me? She gave birth to me and hated me and died. And you were the only thing left of her, and I suppose I figured, why not let you disappear? So,” she looked up, smile too wan, “that’s the story. Mystery solved.”
Sanji swallowed, trying to clear his dry throat. “I didn’t realize I wasn’t the only one who visited her.”
“Well,” said Reiju, looking away again, “you weren’t the only one who cared.”
And what could he say to that? Sanji let her stew, let himself unscramble his brain. It was a long process, and he didn’t even finish it. But there were still more pressing matters at hand.
“So,” he started, huffed a groaning sigh. “If I’m not going to tell him and you’re not going to tell him, what do we do?”
“If we leave them behind, they’ll get killed and you don’t have to worry about that old man,” Reiju said. No hesitation, no time taken to mull it over. It was frightening, almost Robin-like, and Sanji had to recoil because he didn’t ever want to associate any Vinsmoke with any of his friends.
“We’ll just sneak off without saying anything, then?”
“I won’t say anything if you won’t say anything.”
He couldn’t help but laugh. Colluding with his biological sister to destroy his biological family. He didn’t think that this was the way he’d be dealing with the Vinsmokes. “Alright. But there’s still the matter of these,” he said, raising his wrists. “You put them on; mind helping me get them off?”
“Give me a ride afterwards and let me off with no trouble.”
Only a day before, he would have compared this to making a deal with the devil. But he held out his hand and she grabbed it in hers, the two fitting together awkwardly, and they shook on it.
“Alright,” Sanji said, standing up. “Let’s find my friends.”