Chapter Text
Sanji was running. He could hear cannons and gunfire in the distance. And the sounds of metal hitting metal. Where was he? Hadn’t he been with some lovely ladies a moment before? Then why was he crying?
“Stop weeping, you are a boy, aren’t you?” The voice of a little girl, a familiar voice…
He looked around. Where was the crew? He was standing before the destroyed remnants of an unfamiliar harbor, the details seemed to be blurry, but that could be because of the tears still running down his face. The little girl shook him and he focused on her. “Sanji, Go!” A petit frame that still seemed to be taller than him, pink hair, and sapphire blue eyes. Ah a dream.
It must be a dream, it had been…
He hadn’t seen Reiju in years. In his ears rang the last words his sister had shouted at him: “Don’t come back! Run and keep running until you find people that are kind to you.” He remembers her pushing his back and him running for the Orbit, the ship that took him in for two whole years before it sank to the bottom of the Ocean in a Storm. Dark clouds gathered in the sky, the cooks standing on deck waving for him to hurry up, but he wasn’t fast enough! The current was pulling his one chance for freedom away and he wasn’t going to make it! Sanji tried to run faster, the wet Sand clinging to his legs, seeming to try to grab him, hands pulling on his dirty tunic.
“Pathetic.” A long dark shadow fell over tiny Sanji. “Such a failure; you couldn’t even run away properly.” Gold was glinting in the light of thunder, for a brief moment the disgusted visage of Vinsmoke Judge was clearly visible under his Helmet. “The only reason you even made it on this ship, was because I didn’t even try to take you back. Why would I want a weak little thing like you? You would think that you at least got some sense, seeing that I gave you the same education as your siblings…”
Sanji was sinking deeper into the dark sand. “No! I am not weak!”
He was part of a Pirate Crew now and he would find all Blue! He wasn’t a child anymore, he was strong.
His dreamself shifted, grew.
“What a ridiculous dream, finding a sea that doesn’t even exist. They will leave you as soon as they find out how despicable you really are, you think you can survive the grand line with these people?” Judge sneered. Sanji grabbed the fabric of his suit leg and pulled. “They are my friends!” “And they will replace you... You think I wouldn’t have replaced you if it was necessary? But you weren’t even important enough to need …”
Something tightly grabbed his ankle and suddenly Sanji wasn’t concerned about his nightmare of a father or being replaceable, because Luffy was dragging him across the streets of whiskey peak.
Soon he’d been too busy running after his Captain, fighting one of the seven warlords of the sea, to worry much about anything but poor Vivi and her Country. But still, sometimes he wondered what had become of his Siblings and their …Creator.