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The shitty Vice Admiral tosses him roughly into the cell. Sanji hit the ground hard shoulder first and turns to glare up at the shithead.
“Let’s see your so-called friends find you in there,” he sneers as he locks the door, leaving him in complete darkness.
He groans as he sits up and leans against a wall. He’d been given something during his enhanced interrogation that made his entire body pulse with pain in time with his heart beat, so he figures it’s best to just wait it out.
When he closes his eyes, he can just hear the ocean on the other side of the cold stone wall. His two least favorite places in the world are dungeons and godforsaken rocks in the middle of the ocean, and this shitty fortress happens to be both.
Still, he shouldn’t be here too long. The nearest island is only three days away, so factoring in time to realize he’s missing, gather information about the Marines around these parts, and any freak weather phenomena that may delay his friends, they should be here within a week.
No problem.
The only light in the cell comes from a flap by the base of the door that opens when they slide food for him.
He can’t count days so he counts meals.
By meal four the silence is getting to him, so he sits by the flap when it opens and tries to talk to the guard. The guard doesn’t respond. He insults his mother and makes a crude comment about his dick to try and get a response, but no dice.
The food is drugged. It gives him some kind of stabbing pain from his knees down that makes it difficult to stand and impossible to kick, but he eats it anyway. Drugged food is better than no food, and he’s certain his friends will be here soon.
The dungeon on Germa, he thinks sometimes between meal ten and eleven, was bigger. It was nicer too, for a dungeon, fully furnished and everything. At least light would come through and give him some sense of life outside his cell. The worst part of his time in the Germa dungeons wasn’t the dungeon itself, it was the mask that robbed him of his face and identity and standing and served as a reminded of his failures. That he wasn’t good enough.
There’s no mask here, but the feeling still clings to him.
On meal twenty a dripping starts in the far corner of the cell. He finds it and determines that it’s just the ocean, reclaiming this miserable rock through the slow process of erosion. It would take about a hundred years to flood the cell at the rate it was going, but the sound echoes off walls and in his ears until it becomes a part of him.
He can't tell if it's better or worse than the quiet.
He misses people. He’s never really considered himself a social person, but he’s always had people. On Germa there was his family and the soldiers and servants, and they were all shitty but they were there. On the cruise ship there was the guests and his coworkers. At the Baratie there were the customers and the chefs. On the Merry and the Sunny there was his crew.
He misses Luffy helping himself to the still raw ingredients while he’s in the middle of cooking, ruining the meal he’d been preparing.
He misses Zoro throwing an insult at him then trying to slice his head off. He misses Nami sighing at him in that exasperated way of hers then charging him five hundred berries for staring too long.
He misses Usopp’s crying and flailing and his asinine requests that he’s perfectly capable of doing himself, but he asks him to do anyway, because he knows he will.
He misses Chopper eating way too much candy and still asking him for more because he knows he can’t say no.
He misses Robin and her dark sense of humor and how, despite everything, he’ll never know quite what she’s thinking.
He misses Franky and the loud banging that always seems to be coming from his workshop no matter the hour.
He misses Brook and his horrendous table manners and his inappropriate questions to the fine ladies of this world.
He misses Jinbei and his holier-than-thou attitude and how he always seems to know exactly what he’s thinking.
He misses his friends.
By meal twenty four, he’s wondering what’s taking his crew so long to get here.
Meal thirty six is when he first thinks that they’re not coming for him. That they finally realized what he’s known all along but tried to deny, that he’s a useless shitty failure and that they can do better. That they finally abandoned him.
He talks himself out of it. It’s not the last time he thinks it.
Maybe he’s always been here, in this cell, in this darkness. The sun and the ocean and the Straw Hats and a world outside the cold and the dank and the dark are just things he made up to keep himself occupied. Maybe it was only every this.
The flap opens, and he’s given his fifty third meal.
On the rock, after the ship wreck, when he spent his days slowly wasting away, the sun was his constant enemy. It burned every part of him it could reach, drying him out even faster as beat relentlessly down on him. He remembers at one point glaring up at the traitorous bastard, wishing it would go away and leave him alone forever.
Is that why he’s here now, left in the dark, abandoned by the sun? He tries to will it back, but it’s not listening.
Maybe death is the only way out, he thinks after meal sixty four is delivered. If he just sits here and doesn’t eat it, eventually he’ll die and he won’t be here anymore. He won’t be anywhere. He’ll finally be free.
Eventually his stomach starts growling, and he remembers Zeff’s bloody stump of a leg and maybe death is the only escape, but not like this. Not again, not ever.
He eats the food.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he shouts to the darkness sometime after meal seventy. “I give up. You win.”
He waits for the darkness to claim him. It does not.
There is no meal after meal eighty two.
He doesn’t even realize he hasn’t eaten until his stomach starts growling. He wanders over to the flap, but there’s nothing there.
He tries shouting at the door. He tries banging on it. Nothing happens, nothing changes.
Maybe they’re preparing him for some new torture. Maybe they decided to let him die after all. Maybe they forgot about him too.
He waits until his legs stop hurting, then he starts kicking.
He kicks the walls. He kicks the door. He kicks everything he can find. He’s out of practice, so he tires easily and doesn’t do much damage.
He sits down and rests. When he can feel his legs again, he gets up and continues kicking.
The door’s hinges break before the lock does. He pries the damned thing open and is blinded by the cheap lighting in the hallway. After so long alone in the dark it’s overwhelming, but he grits his teeth and waits for his eyes to adjust.
The first thing he sees after so long is blood, painting the walls in drips and streaks. The second is the bodies of two Marines that were sliced open.
He keeps moving.
He follows the path of carnage out of the dungeon until he finds himself outside in the sunlight for the first time in what feels like forever. The sun is even more blinding than the artificial lights inside, but he takes it all in, breathing deeply as he soaks it up.
When he can pry his eyes open, he scans the ocean and spots it, there, anchored just off to the side, the Thousand Sunny.
He gets there as fast as his weakened legs will carry him, and jumps down on the deck. He calls out, but no one answers. No one is there, the ship is empty. He doesn’t know where they’ve gone.
He collapses on the deck. The grass on the deck is soft, the sun is warm, and the ocean cradles the ship like it’s welcoming him back.
He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, smelling the salty sea air and finally feeling home.
He can wait.