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Maybe there’s another island, you think.
You’re woken up not by their voices but their proximity. You’re not sure if you’ve been sleeping at all. Luffy comes flying out of the kitchen and the cook comes stomping after him, slam of galley door, slam of sandals on the deck.
You crack an eye open. Luffy has a towel looped over his shoulders, knotted at the front like a cape, blowing mad behind him as he leaps away from the cook’s grasp, momentarily vanishing in the high sun. The cook is straight after him in a whirl and Luffy ducks too-quick under his arm, cackling, using the momentum to clamber onto the cook’s back, sending them both down in a tumble, the whole deck stuffed with the cook’s indignant squawks, Luffy’s maniacal laughter, the whole deck awash with morning, the two of them there poured out of gold.
They haven’t noticed you.
It’s a scene that should be familiar. Luffy fleeing, cheeks stuffed with bounties, mid-haircut. It’s a scene you’ve watched play out across the deck in between each island, the cook manhandling Luffy into submission like a child, clucking and brushing cut hair from his shoulders, trying to pin their wriggling captain down, steady stream of grouching in breaths of smoke, interrupting your nap. Your que to stomp over, to shout, to get in-between them.
The patch of shadow you’re sitting in is as dark as a thing can get. You’re sailing into colder waters but both of them seem young and warm and clean to you, there in a heap of the deck, nearly blared out by the sun, the sunlight this great battering thing, leaving you half-blind, hollowed, you should go over there, but —
Familiar, but —
The cook is cutting Luffy’s hair. It’s ten minutes ago. He tilts Luffy’s head this way and that with his fingers light on Luffy’s chin. He inspects Luffy, quiet and serious, smoke twisting through the space between them, Luffy watching and pliable, relaxed, as the cook glides scissors over his eyes.
The cook is cutting Luffy’s hair. He’s standing on a broken spine and Luffy’s fingers are still wrapped up, nails not yet grown back. Black tufts float like feathers down to the galley floor and the cook doesn’t grumble, not once, as Luffy jostles for the mound of snacks he’s prepared. All his favourites, for penance.
The cook is cutting Luffy’s hair. It’s after Alabasta and every time Luffy shakes his head, dog-like, eyes scrunched up and grinning, sand comes flying off him. You remember finding orange grains in the galley for weeks after. You remember the cook sweeping it up at night, muttering to himself, as you pass by silently for your watch.
The cook is cutting Luffy’s hair, but you remember how he looked up when you pushed the galley door open, distracted from his task, Luffy still happily chattering on at him but the cook not listening anymore, still bandaged under his blue hoodie, staring at you near-wobbling in the doorway with something unfathomable in his eyes.
You remember that time most of all.
On Law’s submarine, you pick at your own hair and frown and wonder. It sticks up in every direction, no real crown, short and spiky between your fingers. No matter how long passes, it never seems to grow.
Soon enough, Luffy stops wriggling away, lets the cook drag him, giggling, into submission. There’s food smeared around his mouth and the cook rubs at it, cursing, with the end of the towel-cape, and your captain’s eyes don’t leave his face for a second, grinning wild up at him in the shot of lemon sun, whole body leaning in — one stretch of instant yes and it’s familiar, it’s a scene you know, but —
The thing is — you always thought you would have time.
The thing is — this stone’s been in your belly since Wano. In the bright-lit galley, they’re not quiet but you can’t hear them. On a rooftop after the battle, the cook is relaxed like you’ve never seen him before, leaning into Luffy just so, lighting a cigarette with steady hands. Luffy keeps looking for the cook during the feast, fists full of food, cheeks bulging, a meerkat pop above the crowd, not chewing.
You know them both. Know them better than anyone else, better than the rest of the crew, this trio they’ve assigned you as. Sometimes you think you know the cook better than he even knows himself, quick swift vanishing boy who does not speak his mind and does not touch, who sleeps restlessly in the hammock next to yours and haunts the kitchen, half-asleep, before the sun has even risen.
In the Wano baths, Luffy sits between the cook’s legs as he washes his hair. Water and soap on his nose, his cheeks, and he grins at you through the suds and waves happily. The cook mutters things you can't hear and his hands are gentle in Luffy's hair and you wonder when this happened, how this happened, why nobody told you, how the doors closed behind you.
Zoro, he asks. Oi, Zoro, d’ya have a moment?
You don’t answer.
You take out your swords and turn away.
Another night and you can see his shadow on the boys’ room wall. He’s standing over your hammock or someone else’s — if he moves just a bit closer, you think you’ll know, you’ll be able to figure it all out at last. Caught in the odd triangle-shaped light of the open doorway and not moving. You don't say anything. You wait. You have to know.
Morning and his hand is on the kitchen table next to yours, thin wrist, bone prominent right there under white skin, the softness of its underside. But the cook doesn’t touch and so neither do you. Later, you will carry him drunk back from a bar and ignore all the things he is saying. Later, you will wake in choked fits in the dark infirmary, sailing from Thriller Bark, and he will be asleep next to your bed every time.
Hating him would be the easiest thing you’ve ever done.
On the deck, Luffy is pointing out across the sea, forward to where their ship moves, twisting around, motor-mouthing up at the cook, blur of motion. The cook has his hands in Luffy’s towel-cape and he’s smiling all soft at him, and each time he follows Luffy’s gesture he looks back more bright, more astonished, but you can’t make out what it is they’re both seeing out there on the horizon. The sun is too high.
Here’s something that never happened:
He keeps drinking as he switches the scissors and comb to the other hand. Deep concentration on his face, bite to the lip, crease to the brow. You’re sat on the rim of the bath, midnight gone, four bottles down, and he kicks your feet apart and steps between your legs.
There’s not enough light to see by, just the cold moonlight sneaking in through the windows. Snick of scissors, the low clink of his wine glass on the sink. You’re eye-level with his chest, the thin material of his half-buttoned shirt. Collarbones. Flat belly. He sticks the scissors and comb between his teeth, gets a hand on either side of your head. The inside of your knees presses against his leg.
You’re cold everywhere except for where you are touching him. You have rules and you have priorities but, here, you could have something more. It’s the easiest thing in the world to pull him down and kiss him. He comes to you like he’s been waiting for it. You don’t know why you ever thought he wasn’t.
But that never happened. You never let it.
What you don’t yet understand is this: Luffy knows he wants the cook as soon as he sees him.
Maybe it’s different from you, for you, but this is the important bit — you take longer.
There’s no one point. You wake him up for his watch one night and it’s so quiet, so dark, he’s shivering as you shake him by the shoulder. Blinking awake, rubbing his eyes. There’s something about him in the half-light, when you can’t really see each other, that has you by the throat. You don’t ever want to see more of him than this, you think.
Or you’re across the kitchen table from him, drinking by candlelight. You make sure your hands don’t touch as you share the bottle. You don’t say much as he talks and, when he passes out, you leave before sunrise. You never remind him of all the things that he’s forgotten he’s told you.
You’ve always thought that was what he needed.
Sailing into a bright winter sky, Luffy and the cook are blotted out by the sun, but you’re thinking of the cook up in the black of night and the cook in the quiet of his kitchen, long after all the others have gone to bed, post-fight heady, crooked grin on a face of dust and blood, and you’re thinking about all the things you’ve ever wanted. The things you've always been sure you will get.
The ship takes you forward, but you’re on the ship together, so it doesn’t matter. This is what you tell yourself: you have time. You still have time.
Then the cook leaves. And then Luffy brings him back.
He brings something else back with him, too.
(I can’t be Pirate King without you, Luffy said.
But you’ll never know that. You weren’t there.)
By the time you see him again, the cook's hair is long enough to curl. When he's bent over chopping boards, it twists golden at the nape of his neck. Luffy sits on the kitchen counter next to him, kicking his feet happily, and plays with it, twirls it around his finger while he steals from the cook's chopping board with his other hand, dodges the cook's performative elbow jab.
Luffy says something and the cook says something back, low and sweet tones you don't catch. He turns from his task and reaches out and pushes Luffy's fringe off his face, kind of tuts, kind of laughs, smoke puffing out of his quirked mouth. He doesn't touch and there he is, you think, keeping his hand pressed to Luffy's head like he's staunching a bleed, Luffy grinning stupid back at him, sunlight streaming in buttery through every window.
You remember him looking up, magnet snap of the head, every time you walked into a room. That hasn't happened in weeks. You go and stay in the crow's nest until it's dark and you stay there until it's light again, not really sure why.
The thing is — Luffy knows he wants the cook from the first moment and Luffy is the one who brings him back. Simple as that, simple as Luffy always is, want and take, all of it right now, reaching out with arms that never need to stop. You had other things to do. When you met him, your focus was on Mihawk, you were bleeding out in his home, and that never really changed.
The others don't tell you what happened on Whole Cake and you never ask.
When morning comes, the light of it is devastating.
Maybe there’s another island, you think. You’ve seen stranger things. An island where you sheath your swords and don't turn away, tug the cook by his hand, his collar. Flush high on his cheeks, lips open with surprise. Crowd him against a beach that could be any beach. Let his fingers get in your hair and let him kick your feet apart. Let him warm you with his touch.
Right now, right now. On another island, a version of you who went after the cook pins his wrists down in hot sands. There’s nothing to wait for. On that island, at this very moment, you’re sure it’s happening.
Luffy is yapping on happily — my cook, my cook is the best cook — still clutched onto his front, easy claims, easy domesticity, all mine. His arms are wrapped once, twice around the cook now, the cook leaning easy against the railing, leaning into it. Sticky hands, full-bodied and decadent greed, and eyes that never move away.
In your shadowed corner of the deck, you are still and deliberate, shivery with something like violence.
Familiar, but the cook doesn’t push him away.
You remember the cook asleep next to you on the floor of the boy’s room. Waking up and his slack face and staying there like that, pretending to be asleep when the cook began to stir. Still pretending when he slowly roused and, even slower, moved away.
Non-linear, the cook sliding a bottle across the table to you, wicked grin, wicked boy, you carrying him passed out over your shoulder back to Merry down black streets, him pyjama’d and rumpled as you’re waking him up for his watch, rubbing at bleary eyes with the back of his hand, blinking blinking up at you in the dim-dark of the night.
You remember waking up yourself, choked in bandages, and the cook slumped over your infirmary bed, remember how soft his hoodie had been, how you’d pulled your hand back before he could wake up, how you never spoke to him about any of it, turned away when he tried, avoided the galley for weeks, the cook cutting Luffy’s hair and stopping and staring at you and then, finally, silently, going back to his task.
You remember it all.
You just always thought you would have more time.
(On the other island, maybe. Maybe there is time. Ships are still on still seas, the tide tempered to a stop. It is always bright daytime and the cook has his shirt sleeves pushed to the elbows, sunburn that never heals on his nose, freckles that don’t come. Everyone waits, Luffy waits, Mihawk waits, and the two of you pick fruits that don't regrow and wade through motionless rivers together, the only moving things in a hushed-up world, the only chance you’ll ever have.
You’re touching his fingers on a cold bottle of sake. You’re carrying him back to Merry and waiting for him to wake up. You’re taking watch with him, clambering in close and cold, joint breath misting in shrinking space. You’re fisting a hand into his blue hoodie and tugging him weakly out of sleep and onto your infirmary bed.
Somewhere, you realise with clarity or fear, somewhere it’s all happening, all at once.)
Here, tomorrow, Luffy’s hands are around the cook's wrists. The cook is fussing with Luffy’s hair, the tear on his red shirt, the crumbs still around his mouth, Luffy’s face tipped up to him, always, smiling clear and wide. They look more like photographs of themselves than real life — chill winter sunlight on their boyish faces, big grins and clear eyes and completely in control, the way that they will be remembered, the way they’ve always been and the new way they are now — touching, there in the sunlight, scissors still in the cook's back pocket.
And suddenly you know, you know exactly what happened in those days when Luffy went after the cook and you didn't, the nights you said nothing and the days Luffy always did, and you know it's over, any moment now, it's the end of something you never even started.
And then they’re leaving.
You want to say something. You want the cook to turn around and see you. See something on your face, across your forehead and between your teeth, words caught and things you could once have said but can’t anymore. This is the last chance you’ll ever have — you know it with wild, illogical certainty — this is the last moment in time.
You were mine, you want to say. Were, will be, were always meant to be. And then he’ll turn back and see you and reach out and say, you never told me that, that never happened — but it did, it did, of course it did. In your head, it happened all the time.
You don’t say anything. Luffy drags the cook forward, into the warmth and heat of the galley — and you are still in your shrinking slip of shadow.
The deck is empty again. Hardly any time at all, but you know that you’re in a different time altogether now, that you have sidestepped the place you were meant to be. There’s nothing for it. There’s nowhere else but here, no island, no nighttime coming for you. You are stranded in the sledge of the sun and you could wait for hours, for days, and they would not come back.
You close your eyes and try to fall back asleep.