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The day Zeff collapsed on the barren earth, his belly concave, his face sun burnt and wind-blistered, it was all Sanji could do not to collapse next to him.
Now, the walk from Zeff to the rock and back was the hardest distance Sanji ever had to walk, but the rock was the only rock big enough with a dip in it for collecting rainwater and he was too weak to move Zeff on his own. He made the trip over and over, stumbling on bare feet, each trip longer and more exhausting than the last. The water kept slipping through the cracks between his fingers, and it was never enough once he made it back to Zeff, on the other side of the island.
“You don’t have to do this,” Zeff told him, his voice hoarse and low. His eyes were closed against the high sun.
“Shut up, old man.” His own voice sounds broken and thin. “Just drink.”
He tilted his hands towards Zeff’s parched lips, and Zeff drank, a miserable swallow.
He pushed himself up, and made the trip again, and again, and again.
The next day, he tore a strip of cloth from his shirt and the effort of it left him gasping. He looked at the scrap in his hands, ragged and sad, and, in a moment of terrible lucidity, he felt the hopelessness deep in his gut. It knocked the breath from him. In that moment, he knew, really knew, the very real possibility of an end, and he closed his eyes and trembled.
After a long, long time, he finally bent, soaked the cloth in the water and brought it back to Zeff, who drank. He said nothing.
The next day, when Sanji returned for the fifth time, Zeff said, “You’re going to kill yourself this way.”
“Shut up,” he snapped. “I can do it. Drink.”
Zeff drank.
The next day, Zeff said again, “You don’t have to do this.”
He pressed his lips into a thin line and glared hard. “Who else is going to keep you alive, old man?”
“That’s not your responsibility. Your responsibility is to live. Or else all this would have been a waste.”
“Who asked you!” he cried, shaking so violently that he wrung the cloth in his hands and the water trickled onto the dry ground. “Shit!” He sat down hard, devastated and heartbroken, trying so, so hard not to think. He balled his hands into fists and pressed them against his eyes. “Shit! Look what you made me do, old man!” he screamed, voice breaking traitorously.
"I’m sorry,” said Zeff, very quietly.
Labored breaths, inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale. It hurt all over, real pain and a heavy, unshakeable weight on his limbs.
“It hurts,” he whimpered. “It hurts everywhere. I’m so hungry.”
“I’m sorry,” Zeff said again. Then, after a long moment’s deliberation, he rasped, “I’m counting on you.”
“I know,” he hiccupped, held his head up. Made himself stand, wearily. “I know. I’ll be back.”
The day after next, he realized how much harder it was to focus, how much harder it was to walk in a straight line, and his vision kept blurring and doubling.
He fell on his sixth trip back, scraped his knees and elbows and chin, felt everything rattle dangerously inside him, organs and teeth and faith.
He made himself get up again. Be defiant, he told himself. Walk.
How many days later, how many impossible days, he could not tell you, only that he could not move anymore, sitting next to Zeff, who was no longer speaking.
He watched for ships instead. He hardly realized when his eyelids drooped closed and he was staring at the after-image of an empty horizon.
The next day, it rained.
He opened his mouth wide as he could and laughed and laughed until he felt like he was drowning, lightheaded and hopelessly happy. He woke Zeff up so that he could do the same.
The next day and the day after that, he made the trips again, slow and steady as he could manage, one side of the island to the other, and back, and back.
Cupped palms, each drop that escaped a meager libation to whatever gods he knew and forgot to pray to.
Too many days later. Too many days, and he was hallucinating. Today there was a woman, ethereal and bright, and when she turned to him, she looked like a half-remembered memory. She took his hands, dipped them in the water and held them there.
He was on his knees.
“He needs to live,” he told her. His head felt like it was stuffed full of gauze. “Please,” he pleaded, but he refused to cry.
She said nothing, only sent him on his way, stumbling over his own feet, water dripping from his little hands.
Today he sat next to Zeff on the hard, unyielding earth, at the edge of the precipice, at the end of the world, and he held his hand.
The horizon was empty, and he understood death. He was not too young. The woman he saw had not returned, and he understood despair, too.
“It’s okay,” he told Zeff, who was not listening anymore. “It’s okay, old man.”
Be defiant, he told himself.
Your name is Sanji and you’re going to find All Blue. They said you wouldn’t but you will. If a sky this blue exists, then anything can. You believe that. You’ll believe in anything.
Zeff’s heartbeat a slow, solemn drum in his chest.
Today, he told himself. If not today, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then the next day, and if not the next day, then the day after next, and the day after that, and the day after that.
And maybe today it will rain.