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He gives Zeff the ring when he’s fourteen.
Gets the idea first from a pirate passing through the Baratie , the solid silver signet around his finger, dragging slow down the menu, turning eternal past starters, sides. Tight enough that the pirate’s flesh bulges purple at its edges. Dull, really, when Sanji thinks back on it. Worn.
“It’s my crew,” the pirate tells him, leaning in so Sanji can smell the salt of him, the greedy cling of the sea that has Sanji by the guts, sometimes, has him leaning out his bedroom window over the open maw of the fish, stuck on the horizon, tilted however it tilts.
“I wear it to remember them,” the pirate says, and it’s not an answer Sanji understands, really, shitty smart mouth brat but he’s got nothing to say to that, so he hurries back to the kitchens, rushes the pirate’s order through. Fucks it up and stands there, eyes stuck on the mopped tiles, as Zeff lays into him, Patty laughing the whole time.
The Baratie isn’t a crew. Sanji’s pretty certain there. Zeff throws an empty wine bottle at him when he fucks up his cassoulet. Ten-years-old and the splinters of green grass, the implosion, has him instinctively covering his face. This isn’t a crew.
Zeff’s crew — Sanji’d seen some of them. Horizontal cuts of them. Their booted feet, the scrape of their swords along the kitchen floor, as he tucked himself small as a pear behind the shelves. Zeff doesn’t talk about them, never has, just those three rock-hard words, they’re all dead, on their new rock-hard home.
Just the two of them, then.
Dull and worn.
When they were first rescued, they’d been kept in separate infirmaries. Sanji couldn’t stand it, long drag of those months alone on the rock, just the sense of someone behind him, and now this. Couldn’t keep anything down, retching nothing in cold metal pails, burnt awake, alone in that antispectic room, alone.
By the third day, he’d broken out and half-crawled to the only other lit doorway along the corridor. Zeff’d looked at him slumped there, eyes old and unknowable, unsurprised, and sighed. Beckoned Sanji over. Put a massive hand on his head, greasy knots of hair, and said nothing.
Sanji couldn’t stand that, either.
“Course I’d heard of Red Leg Zeff,” Patty answers one night, wiping down the counters in the back, sweating and sleep-dim. “Everyone’d heard of fuckin’ Red Leg Zeff.”
The kitchen is forever low-lit. Can never really make out anyone’s face. Sanji is ten and he only reaches to Patty’s waist at this point anyway, has to hook his hands on the counter, balance on tiptoes to follow Patty’s swipe across the shining steel surface, get a glimpse of his own blurred face distorted in the soap. The image looks back at him. Expression he doesn’t get.
“What about his crew?” he asks after a moment.
“His first mate, yeah, I’d heard of him, and the navigator on that crew, that guy was crazy .” Patty cuts a look down at Sanji, suspicious. “Why you asking?”
Sanji scowls, shrugs, stares hard at his reflection, the odd thin boy there who doesn’t say a word, doesn’t offer anything. He doesn’t look at Patty.
“Ask him yourself, you little brat,” Patty says, finally, to his silence. He tosses his cloth into the sink, wet thwap , and makes to exit the room — Sanji stares after him, mouth feeling full and stuck, even when Patty throws back — “Head chef oughta thrown you out years back, runt.”
Probably. Shitty bastard.
Zeff has said as much himself.
“I’m not your fucking mother,” is what he says, or: “Stop hovering , brat,” or: “You should know how to do this without me by now,” or: “Worst fucking roulette I’ve ever tasted.”
Zeff, who snuck Sanji out of the infirmary, pitch of night, a week after rescue, bag of gold thrown over one shoulder. Jolting him awake, Sanji blind, tugged out of his bed — “can’t trust ‘em, brat” — and the whole of Zeff’s weight, old old hand cracking Sanji’s shoulder, whole heft of this oak-man Sanji can’t see the face of, silent as they fled.
Zeff, who slept only when Sanji didn’t, those first weeks, brow clenched in pain, stump sometimes seeping. Zeff, who never saw the gold coin Sanji swiped from the bag of treasure he slept guarding, cupped like a prayer between his palms as he watched the old man sleep, fear or needing, hate or guilt, just one lump of gold but enough, Sanji knew, enough to get away.
Zeff, who never really asked Sanji to join him, but never kicked him out, either. Zeff, who’d searched and who’d failed. Who’d lost some divine bet, gambled everything for the All Blue and lost it all, in the end, an entire living, smelling crew of men, nights longer than Sanji has been alive sleeping loud and restless in the same cabin. Raising foamed pints together, laying fatty strips of fish skin over each others’ open organs.
Thirty men. A ship.
The wanted poster hidden, stained, at the back of his desk.
Now, Zeff sits to the line’s side on an old stool, rubbing absently at his stump, shouting orders at Sanji’s back. The soup isn’t seasoned right. What fucking idiot picked these beetroot from the market? This isn’t on the menu. Who said you could do that? You’ve fucking embarrassed me with that plating. You’re a fucking embarrassment.
This is what Zeff has, now.
Those first weeks at the Baratie , Sanji’d slept with that gold coin tight in his fist, stared at it, the silent face on it, as though it would tell him what to do. Where to go. Who was sleeping on the other side of the wall.
The ship had been so empty. When Sanji closed his eyes, he heard the sea and Zeff, living, and nothing else. Like he never left the rock at all.
He remembers Zeff’s face when he, nine-years-old, the night after a birthday he hadn’t told Zeff about, reached out to touch a finger to the old man’s hand. The skin there had been thinner than Sanji was expecting, softer, colder, like the layer hot milk gets when he leaves it on his bedside table too long.
He remembers Zeff’s face.
He never tried it again.
Sanji is nine and he’s half-skeletal, still, bones taped in skin. His hands monstrous, claws almost, his body something inhuman and wrought, Zeff on the other side of their escape boat, filthy, silent, eaten. That gold coin is the only solid thing about him. It’s his only shot.
Sanji is eleven and they’re screaming at each other through the lunch rush. How could you fuck this up so bad? Who the fuck taught you to do this? This isn’t what they asked for.
No one asked for this.
Sanji is thirteen and hot with a fever, with the heat that rises from the kitchen below his bedroom. Stink and sweat from him, feeling too-small for his bed, half-broken wooden thing Zeff and Patty’d knocked up for him way back, feeling too-tight in his skin. Zeff stands over him, the back of his hand relief on Sanji’s forehead, but when Sanji tries to speak, a cough cuts his throat, and Zeff steps back.
“Too old for this shit,” Zeff says to the dark of the bedroom. Says something else, but Sanji can’t make it out. He needs Zeff to repeat it.
The door smacks shut.
Sanji doesn’t know what he owes Zeff. He works through the nights, works his hands to blisters, kid existing on caffeine and, later, cigarettes, appetite crushed down, works til his feet bleed, and Zeff just looks at him, dead-eyed, what must be disappointment. Looks at him, unreadable.
Fuck him. Thinks it like pure white heat.
Fuck him.
The gold coin weighs down his pocket. No other children work at the Baratie and they aren’t permitted to dine. The chefs, the barkeep, the doormen, they all swap rum and sea stories after closing. Zeff won’t let Sanji join them and Sanji watches him through the crack of the kitchen door instead, in the middle of the laughing table but looking apart, somehow, his old eyes over the other chefs’ heads sometimes, as though at someone who isn’t there.
Sanji always ends up running back to his bed. Knows the stairs that speak, that tell on him. Lies with his blanket pulled over his head and turns, turns, turns, the gold coin between his fingers. Doesn’t sleep.
Zeff doesn’t pay him anyway, tight bastard, so Sanji tucks the gold coin, the ring, away as a thought. A non-perishable thought, great shelf-life, something Sanji doesn’t have to worry about. The coin heavy in his pocket, his breast pocket, once he starts with the suits. The ring in his mind.
Then, he’s fourteen. There’s a jeweller on the island they do supply runs at. In her fifties, smile croissant-crinkled up from her counter, though he’s barely taller than her while she’s seated, just an obvious, easy pander to a leg-twitching teenager. Sanji loves her for it.
“A ring?” she says, accent Sanji can’t place, all long vowels and absent consonants, makes him think of snow-slippery streets, skies that never really lighten, castles that slide along the sea.
“Like a pirate ring.” Confidence he doesn’t feel. Doesn’t know why he’s even asked. “One for your crew.”
Look on her face that says he’s messed up, somewhere, that he’s said the wrong thing, but she just hums. When she leans over to watch him sketch Zeff’s flag out onto an old receipt — badly, fucking it up the way he never fucks up icing — she smells of cigarettes and something more acrid, deeper, something like milk.
She straightens, frowns. “You’re a bit young for that crew, my boy.”
He gives her his best boyish smile. “Not my crew.”
The woman smiles back, becomes lovely in that smile, sending Sanji’s heart flopping. Her hand on his feels kind and he thinks, stupidly, that she might touch his cheek, tuck his hair behind his ear, get a hand on him, thinks, not since —
“I don’t really have any money,” Sanji admits.
Her hand moves away.
The gold coin bumps against his breast, where it’s been all these slow years, knees to chin under his blanket, the smell of rum from below. Hot circle of metal, that’s all, really. Something to mess up the line of his suit. Nothing more.
He’s never getting out.
Couple of seasons later and the ring is thick-cut silver. Looks kinda dumb, dead-eye stare of the duck, cutlery or weaponry behind it, but that’s Zeff’s own crap design choice, inartistic bastard, nothing to be done about it. Sanji feels stupid collecting it and stupid smuggling it, teenage-shame, back into the restaurant.
It’s not what he thought it would be.
He ducks giving it a couple of times. Zeff is half a rum bottle into a poker night on his next actual birthday, hungover and snapping the next day, Sanji too heart-hot and nervous the day after. The shifts are long and the rum nights shout without him. It takes a stretch, in the end. A full change in the seasonal menu.
“What the fuck would I want with this?” is all Zeff says. “I’m a chef. I can’t wear a fucking ring.”
It’s early, before the other chefs are up, prep work that Zeff always puts him on, just the two of them, quiet slice of morning and Zeff balancing on his high stool behind him, Sanji’s hands in something’s guts. The boat tilts the way it always does, the morning sun slant into the kitchen so familiar Sanji can see it eyes shut.
Just the two of them. Just quiet.
“Get rid of it,” Zeff says, nothing much in his voice, and holds it back out to Sanji. The ring looks tiny, comically so, in Zeff’s palm. Gaudy, tacky.
A fucking embarrassment.
They’re a few feet away from each other on the opposite sides of a counter. Zeff looks lined and ancient, like the crags of a coastal reef, the familiar blues Sanji sees out of his bedroom window each morning, the same small patch of sea he’s haunted five years now.
He keeps silent.
Zeff curses, drops his gaze. Tips the ring onto the counter like it burns. Turns in one jerk and wobbles from the room, the hard clip of his peg leg, his hand grasping out for support. Finding nothing. He doesn’t look back. He doesn’t say anything else.
It occurs to Sanji, there, in that morning sun, that he’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to Zeff.
The ring only fits on his thumb, at first. Barely that — slipping near clean off in training. Takes another year to fit on a finger, too-heavy, snared there with that stupid silent face, pinprick eyes that watch up from the chopping board, the sink, from the knot of his tie. Dumb duck face that says nothing.
“Zeff’ll be pissed,” Patty says when he first spots it, gleeful. “Zeff’s gonna be fuckin’ pissed .”
Zeff is.
“Take that fucking thing off,” or: “I told you, chefs can’t wear fucking jewellery, what are you trying here?,” or: “That crew doesn’t exist anymore,” or: “You certainly weren’t fucking in it.”
Like Zeff wasn’t the one who boarded his fucking ship. Like Sanji hadn’t slept steady nights on the Orbit, like those chefs hadn’t slept there, too. Sometimes Sanji looks at Zeff and can’t remember any difference between the storm and the siege, the rock and the man. Too young and sometimes he’s not sure there ever was a storm at all.
He remembers the rock.
He keeps wearing the ring.
Wears it when he cooks, enjoys the way Zeff stares flat and silent at him. Enjoys when he catches Zeff staring at it. Wears it while the other chefs play poker after closing, alone upstairs, too old for it but blanket over his head anyway. Wears it during their silent morning prep. Likes the weight of it, the noose of it, enjoys the way it reflects back in Zeff’s stone-still face.
Sanji is seventeen and Zeff stands just behind his shoulder, not touching, as he chops. Post-dawn, silent as the ship gets. Just the two of them, just the sound of the sea and of Zeff, living. Just like the rock.
“This is better, aubergine,” Zeff says, or: “Not so much cayenne this time,” or: “Uneven, do it again, hold that knife like I taught you, boy,” or: “Not happy with this.”
“Nothing could make you happy, you sack of shit,” Sanji spits. Blood on his knife. Blood under the ring.
Voice from over his shoulder.
“What would make me happy,” Zeff says, not even hard, not even angry, like he’s explaining something clear and clean, “is for you to fucking leave.”
It’s a couple more years until Zeff gets his wish.
He stands like he always does, cross-armed, leaning heavily against Sanji’s bedroom door, watching him from behind. Watching him pack a pretty pitiful bag, really, a pretty fucking pitiful collection of his life. Of ten years working and living and not sleeping in this one room.
Zeff doesn’t say a fucking thing.
Sanji leaves the ring behind.
It’s in his bag, anyway, when he goes to unpack later that night on the Merry. Maybe he’d put it back in. Maybe Zeff had. Even if they could turn back, he doesn’t think he’d ask. He hasn’t learnt how.
Sailing away, he’d shouted things to Zeff that he’s not sure Zeff heard. Thinks he saw Zeff’s own mouth move, but they were already too far away.
What were you saying? Or: Say it again, please, you gotta say something this time, you have to, all those years, you have to. Or: I didn’t hear you. I couldn’t hear you.
On their way to Nami, in the wooden noise of the kitchen, Zoro and Usopp bickering outside, Luffy rings both his arms around Sanji, stretched spaghetti-thin, coiled like wool, and tucks his chin on Sanji’s shoulder. A hinderance to his madeleines, sure, but Luffy is solid and warm and loud pressed up against his back. Sanji doesn’t mind.
Luffy spots the ring. Grabs at it, ends up taking Sanji’s hand instead, lifting it out of his mixing bowl and peering big-eyed, child-like, turning his hand about to get a look from all sides.
Booming right next to his ear: “I like it!”
Sanji smiles, feels good, warm, good. “Thanks, captain,” he says, Luffy’s face close to his, only half visible, and smiling easy back.
“What is it?” Luffy asks.
What is it?
“Zeff’s crew.”
“Oh,” Luffy says. His head appears in full, neck elongated, to look at Sanji face-on. “So you’re part of Zeff’s crew?” And before Sanji can reply: “You’re part of my crew.”
Sanji gives him a grin, pretty helpless about it, says, “Aye aye, captain,” bubbled-up happy at the way Luffy grins right back, extra stretchy twist of arms ringing around him, squeeze that’s too tight, really, but Sanji isn’t complaining.
The next day, alone again in his kitchen. Early slice of morning. Prep work. New slant of the morning light across his counters and three sets of snoring. The sound of the sea, always. Nobody at his back.
They’ve got more than enough rations to make it to Nami. More than Sanji had himself heaved onboard, he’s sure. Three extra barrels of cured meat. Twelve jars of assorted pickled veg, shocks of colour, that don’t feature in his logs. More and more.
Sanji stands at the counter, head bowed, chopping board in front of him, flush with the food in his mind. His hands rest on either side. His sleeves are rolled up.
Morning, sound. Sanji looks at the ring and the ring looks back. He turns it round, round, round his finger. The face comes back every time, stupid duck thing staring flat metal back at him, silent reproach, maybe, maybe something else. Its mouth will never move, never shape itself into something he could never guess at, anyway, had never been able to ask about, a before like a boy tucked alone in bed, like a back turned away. A before like treacle, already set.
He starts breakfast.