Chapter Text
Sanji uses what little strength he has left to pull at the pirate’s jacket. “How did you survive until today? Where’s your food?!” And then he sees it: the rope tightly tied just under the knee, the hollow pant leg, the traces of blood on the desolate, unforgiving rock. He can’t help but fall backwards; his shock draining the energy to stay standing.
“Your leg… What happened to your leg? In order to save me, you gave it up…?” Sanji says, his eyes getting damp even though he should be beyond dehydrated.
Zeff’s voice is gruff. The few words he speaks sound pained. “That’s right.”
“What about the food? Did you give me all the food you had?”
“That’s right.”
He can’t stand it at this point. Sanji stands up, becoming more distressed by the second. “I didn’t ask for your help!” He’s angry, because there’s no way his life is worth any of this. “I can’t think of any reason for you to be kind to me!” He was a weakling, someone who ran away from home because he wasn’t strong enough. The old man should hate him. Why would a prideful man risk his life for someone who is prideless? “Why….?” He can’t stop the tears now, neither can he think about how his body is already screaming from dehydration and that crying this much would only put him a foot in the grave. “Why did you?!”
“Because you…” Zeff takes a breath and gathers the energy he needs in order to speak. “You have the same dream as me.”
And Sanji’s whole world stops. “The All Blue. But they say it doesn’t exist…” He’s reminded of the cooks back on the Orbit who made fun of his dream daily, who told him that there’s no way the All Blue is real.
“Of course it does!” It looks like Zeff uses all the energy he has left to raise his voice. “Head to the Grand Line! The All Blue surely exists there.”
Zeff’s liveliness leaves as quickly as it came. He slouches a bit more. Neither of them are watching the horizon anymore. Suddenly, Zeff flops down onto his back. Sanji startles and leans over him, checking to make sure he was still breathing.
“Don’t do such unnecessary things!” Sanji can’t help but say.
The old man’s eyes have a sheen to them. It’s scary to watch, but Sanji doesn’t leave his side. “I had a different dream too. I wanted to build a restaurant on the sea… so I could feed anyone who was hungry...”
“A restaurant…?” Sanji asked. He put a hand on his stomach, pain resting deep in his stomach.
“Yes, I wanted to live a useful life after building that....”
Sanji thought hard about that. “Okay! I’ll help you…” He can’t help but catch onto the past tense. The rope tied around the old man’s leg catches his eye. “So don’t die!”
Zeff ignores the second part of Sanji’s declaration and lightly chuckles. “It’s impossible for a poor, stupid boy like you.”
“Then I’ll become strong.” The tears come back. Sanji knows what the old man is doing; for many, it is easier to let go of someone who was mean to you before death than someone who was nice, but Sanji was already indebted to Zeff, there was no changing the fact that he cared about the pirate’s life.
Silence stayed for a while before Zeff took one last deep breath in. “You are a cook too though, I might bring you along. I’ll name it the Baratie, how does that sound, little eggplant?”
“The Baratie sounds like a shitty name for a restaurant, old geezer.”
Sanji sits down again and listens as the old man mumbles something about the Baratie and something else about how to make well balanced seafood fried rice. He listens and listens until the voice goes out, but he doesn’t leave.
When he finally looks up, there's a ship. He looks at the old man, who fell unconscious a while ago, and stands up on shaky legs. His voice sounds loud to his own ears, but he yells and waves his arms at the ship, who notices. They’re being rescued. They’re free.
By an insane stroke of luck, the ship that picked them up had a good number of medical staff and was very well stocked. They transferred Sanji and Zeff to the medical ward and onto beds separated by thick white sheets. Doctors start taking tests and Sanji couldn’t fight against his eyes closing to rest for the first time in months. While he sleeps, the medical staff work on taking tests and setting up IVs and bandaging his injured ribs.
What he doesn’t see is a pair of doctors standing over Zeff’s body, speaking in quiet voices before gently draping a white sheet over the body.
Sanji wakes up hours later to the sound of voices. He sits up the best he can and examines his surroundings. There are curtains surrounding his bed, but his eyes catch the sight of shadows behind them. His arm hurts a bit and he looks down to find an IV sticking out of it. On both the metal tray on a rolling stand as well as a small wooden nightstand next to the bed, groups of pill bottles, needles, and stacks of papers lay. The lights are turned off, but a couple lanterns scattered around the room provide enough light to see.
He decides to focus on the voices. They’re quiet, but he can just barely make out what they’re saying.
“So you think they were there for months? God, how did they survive?”
“They must’ve had some food but it didn’t last.”
“Listen… I overheard the Head Doctor say that he suspects the man was a pirate. Do you really think that’s true?”
“That big bag of gold is suspicious but have you ever heard about a pirate traveling with his own kid? That little boy hasn’t even hit his teenage years. There’s no way a pirate would be sailing with a kid that young. They were probably just sailing for vacation and got caught up in a storm.”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re right. Gosh, I really don’t think I can be there when we tell that little boy his father’s dead.”
Sanji stops listening then because his mind can’t wrap around the last word. That old geezer… was dead? No, that couldn’t be right.
“I know. No one really knows what to do with him. We’re going to have to make preparations at the closest island.”
“It might be dangerous, this group of islands is pretty close to the Grand Line.”
“We have no other choice though. I know the Head Doctor is going to want that dead body out of his infirmary soon and no one on this ship wants to take care of a little kid.”
Sanji tunes out the rest of the conversation. Luckily, the two nurses left the room and shut the door behind them. With strength that should've been impossible to have, Sanji ripped the IV out of his arm and shakily got out of bed. Walking was hard, so he hung onto the sheets separating his bed from Zeff’s. Once he pulled it to the side, he was met with the sight of a body covered with a white sheet. Next to the bed, Zeff’s bag of gold lay. Sanji’s vision blurred. The old man had lied to him about the food, instead eating his own leg so that the both of them could survive and that didn’t even work.
He took another step closer to Zeff’s body.
It radiated cold.
(Like iron masks and jail cells and shoulders turned away from him.)
That’s okay, he thought. He could handle the cold. He came from the North Blue, right? Cold was supposed to be like home to him.
The tears running down his face were warm.
He numbly limped his way back to his bed and laid down on it. He closed his eyes and his mind led him into dreams about the past. Head to the Grand Line! The All Blue surely exists there.
Over the next few days, Sanji started his process of recovery. Alone. The doctors took tests and mumbled something about BMI and refeeding syndrome and some weird words he didn’t understand. They gave him water that they had mixed with something at scheduled moments until he was able to handle juice.
It took a while, but the first time Sanji had a bite of food since he was rescued, he cried. He could hear a voice in the back of his mind calling him a crybaby, but he didn’t care. He was eating real food. And the only ones who were congratulating him on his recovery were faces he didn’t know instead of a warm smile taking the first bite along with him. He cried harder and the nurses took it at his relief of being alive instead of his regret of surviving.
A small woman wearing a white coat stayed after all of the other medical staff left. She clasped her hands together in front of her. “Sanji, now that you are better, is it okay if i ask you a few questions?”
Sanji sat up straighter and nodded. He recognized the doctor from when he was first rescued; she had asked his name.
She smiled. “We have an estimate, but do you know how long you were stranded?”
“85 days.” Sanji croaked. His voice hadn’t been the same after everything that had happened. (He didn’t want to talk to these strange people, he wanted to talk to Zeff.)
“And how did you both get there? Was there anyone else involved?”
After thinking for a moment, he answered. “We were on a cruise ship. There was a storm I think. I don’t know if anyone else fell off.”
“Do you remember the name of the ship?”
Sanji shook his head. It was better to leave his time on the Orbit behind, he didn’t want anyone tracing it back and finding out the truth.
“That’s okay, you’re doing great. This one is the most important, do you have any other family we can contact? They must miss you dearly.”
“I don’t.” Sanji quickly replied. He had no family left. The Vinsmokes disowned him, Zeff died, no one wanted him.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” She shifted her weight, looking nervous. “Well, once you recover we will drop you off at your choice of the nearest islands. Some of them have good homes for orphans.”
They still thought that Zeff was Sanji’s son and he didn’t bother correcting them. He hadn’t known Zeff for very long, but he had acted more like a father than anyone else. He supported his dream of finding the All Blue, sacrificed himself so that Sanji could live, and taught him important lessons. Sanji had it all engraved on his brain; he would never forget anything Zeff had said.
“The gold your father brought along is all yours and we can convert it into beri for you. We promise we won’t take advantage of any of it.”
Sanji tried to resist looking to his left and seeing the bag of gold, the vacant white bed, and failed. He stared at it curiously. It was Zeff’s gold that he got on his adventures as a pirate. His interest grew.
“Can I see it first?”
“Yes, yes, of course.” She, like all the other doctors, treated him as if he was made of glass, as if he was fragile and would break at any moment, so much so that they even feared to hold him. It took some effort, but the doctor was able to get the bag onto his bed. The tear he made had been stitched up. “I’ll leave you to make your decision. Ring the bell once you are ready.”
Sanji nodded and waited until she left the room until he opened the bag. As expected, there was a large collection of gold objects from cups to sculptures to coins, but on top there was a small, worn leather book. Sanji picked it up and opened it to the first page. His eyes widened.
The old man hadn’t just saved a bunch of gold, he had also saved his log book from his adventures during and after the Grand Line. To Sanji, this was treasure far more valuable than any gold. He flipped through it like he was a starving man and the words were his food. It was all there in Zeff’s handwriting, although some places were smudged from water damage: the people he met, some of the dishes he cooked, notes from his interactions with other cultures’ cooking, even some lines about the Baratie. At the very end of the journal, which was full from cover to cover, the words All Blue caught Sanji’s eye.
I was unable to find the All Blue neither in Paradise, nor in the New World. But, we found evidence of its existence. To find it would take another journey through the Grand Line, and the crew cannot live all their lives here. We leave the New World and return home to the East Blue. Maybe after I build the Baratie, we will sail once again.
The old man had found evidence of the All Blue and Sanji could barely contain his emotions. It was really out there! It wasn’t a myth! Sanji closed the journal and held it against his chest. He would find the All Blue and he would cook the fish from there and it would be the best meal in the entire world.
He tucked the log book under his pillow so that the medical staff wouldn’t read it out of curiosity and find out the truth about Zeff’s identity. Sanji turned back to the bag of gold. He looked through the objects, unsure how much beri he would get. Near the bottom of the sack, there was a dagger with gold and jewels inlaid on a balck hilt and scabbard. The cross-guard was also golden. Sanji picked it up, confused as to why someone like Zeff, who fought via kicking, would want a blade. He unsheathed and examined it. The blade was sharp and true, he figured with a bit of cleaning it would be as good as new. He tucked the dagger under his pillow as well.
On a whim, he grabbed a simple necklace with a golden circular pendant and a black cord. A small part of him was desperate to keep as much of it as he could; Zeff chose this gold and it was his last belongings and thus it was Sanji’s only belongings. But, he stopped himself from taking more and tied up the bag. Sanji lightly pushed it away from him and rang the bell by his bed.
The same doctor from before rushed in. Sanji looked at her and motioned towards the bag. “Can you convert it to beri for me, please?”
“Yes of course. We’ll do that on the next island, which is most likely where we will leave you. Would you like me to get a bag for you?”
Sanji nodded. The doctor took the bag off his bed and left it on the floor, leaving afterwards. Sanji weakly grabbed his glass of water and took a sip. He set it down and looked at the empty, white bed. “I promise, old geezer, I’ll make it to the All Blue and I’ll build the Baratie. I promise.”
He laid his head down on his pillow, slipping a hand underneath and brushing his fingertips across the cover of the journal. Sleep never came easily for him, but with a plan in mind, Sanji closed his eyes and finally fell into a deep slumber.