Work Text:
Sanji has never liked the cold. The way it creeps into his bones and settles, unwelcome, into his blood. It stiffens his limbs, the ice, wraps its frozen fingers around the length of his leg, entrapping, and ties a shackle to his ankle, stuttering its dance. Sanji’s body is his weapon, after all, a honed arrangement of grace and force. But the cold blunts him, makes him crude, slow. Helpless. Once more. There’s no battle, not now, not yet. But if there was… The chill mocks him as it freezes the spaces between his cells, takes away action and potential, ends circuits of possibility before they can even begin.
It ruins him—the cold—steals, always, into the locked rooms of his mind. Locks can’t keep out the cold, after all. That much, Sanji knows.
Zoro’s eyes are on him.
Of course, the idiot is dressed in nothing but a thin shirt with sleeves that barely reach his elbow. Of course, he’s holding the sweater that Usopp had parceled out to him, when it became clear the shift in temperatures was no fluke, instead of wearing it. They hadn’t, it turns out, been ready for the weather to change so suddenly. Stupid, honestly, to be so unprepared. Stupid of Sanji not to imagine that frost could come trembling back to settle against his cheeks. Even if this change hadn’t been marked on any of Nami’s maps. Even if it seems like something more is at play that none of them could have predicted. Sanji should have… He’s the only one of them who knows cold.
Starvation. That nightmare he accounts for carefully every day. But the ice. He’d thought maybe he could put the ice aside. That it had melted somewhere far away, in a dungeon that lives only in his dreams. In a mask of stinging, burning iron that remains only as a phantom. He’d thought that. Dreamed that. That it was gone.
And now they’re all freezing.
The vision of hunger painting them, coming over his crew with its vicious pangs and slow, aching deterioration, that had spurred him to readiness. But seeing the faint tinge of blue along their lips, their huffs of rattling breaths, it threatens the overwhelming dismay that lives inside of him just as much.
Zoro’s arms are bare. And the sweater is slung along his elbow.
It makes a shudder run through Sanji’s spine, the sight of him, careless, cold, frustration and fear battle to see which can churn his stomach harder. It makes him pull the too-thin layers draped across his shoulders closer to his body. But it’s not enough, not nearly.
“You should wear that.” The words have come sharp from his lips before he can stop them. A little more brittle than he’d like them to have formed. If his mouth had consulted his mind, he might have aimed for nonchalance. Might have grumbled it in the same kind of frustrated laughter he levels at the other when he’s being particularly irritating and purposefully, or perhaps just primally, dense. But instead, it comes out pinched in unflatteringly vulnerable ways, and curved with the edge of a hiss he doesn’t really mean to aim at Zoro.
But the other only blinks back. Unmoved by the snap of speech.
Zoro tips his head to the side, and for a breath, dark eyes appraise him, narrowed and searching for something in a way that throws Sanji’s defenses up in reflex, have him hastily shoving his thoughts all the way down. Then their gazes lock instead, and mock consideration paints the other’s features. “Hrmm.” He drawls, lifting the scrap of fabric into the air in front of him and giving it a shake. “I’m not sure it’s my color.”
Zoro has a knack. An uncanny, preternatural ability to work his way under Sanji’s skin under the best of circumstances. And here, today, with barely healed wounds too close to the surface, it doesn’t take much. Sanji’s back stiffens, nails digging into his palms as his fingers curl into themselves, fists forming on both sides. The annoyance, at least, is familiar, boils his blood in a way that steams.
“Oh, of course.” This drawl is less brittle, its bleak sarcasm preferable to the raw edges that crept through the last. “Is frozen solid more your shade, then? I don’t think marimos can survive in the ice.”
“Nah.” Zoro’s smirk unearths from the depths, and the sight of it, despite the twists of irritation and the flickers of anger, despite the sudden snowdrifts and icicles, despite the sharp edges of the past too close to Sanji’s throat, despite all of that, the sight of Zoro’s smirk flutters something in his heart. “Moss can survive anything. But this seemed more waiter-colored to me.” The edge of the other’s lips curl, and Sanji’s eyes follow them, helpless. But not helpless like in the memories the cold dredges up. Helpless in some other way altogether. “So I couldn’t be caught dead in it. What if someone got confused?”
And then the sweater hits Sanji square in the face.
He snatches it down, glowering, mouth open to protest, but Zoro cuts him off before he can growl out that there’s no sweater on the four seas that won’t clash with moss, so he’d better get the fuck over himself and put it on. The words form serious, now; the other’s arms are crossed.
“Why are you on deck?”
The rest dies on Sanji’s lips.
At once, the cold is back. And Sanji had failed to be ready for it. Failed to prepare for this nightmare that he knows so intimately. So he has to keep watch. He has to understand why its come and what it brings. Even if it has anchored his feet to the ground. Even if he’s useless in the face of it.
The air is frozen against his cheeks, and there’s metal, and there isn’t, it’s gone, but it’s all around him. And the cold is there, crept in, crept everywhere. He looks away.
“Come inside.” No softness twines through the syllables Zoro makes. But his fingers, against all odds, are warm when they curl around Sanji’s wrist. There’s no softness in his tone, but his touch, though stubbornly unyielding, is gentle. It trembles something fragile through Sanji, sends tendrils winding from its contact point and up, twines around the blossoming bruises beneath his skin, meanders through his sluggish blood vessels, constricted and slow, wraps around his heart. Brings it warmth. Makes its beats come faster.
Sanji knows his eyes have gone terrible, as he brings them back to Zoro, wear that haunted, hunted look he’s practiced erasing in the mirror time and time again. A little twinkle, a sliver of charm, some wild irreverence, a swirl of invitation, and the ache recedes, blends into the rest—camaflouges into nothing more than a touch of mystery.
But the cold has stripped him of his masks.
Sanji has never liked the cold. Not in the barely remembered before. Not in the frozen, lonely then and not now.
He knows Zoro sees, but the other doesn’t flinch. Only tightens his grasp. Pulls a little. Sanji doesn’t protest as he’s led away, even though he should. Should dig his heels in and insist. Should wrench his arm back and stay. But it’s welcome, Zoro’s touch on his skin. and Sanji can’t quite make himself give it up. Annoyance fades down to exhaustion in the face of the firm insistence. He’s cold, and he’s tired, and an unbearable sensation of tears, prickling and angry, threatens around his eyes.
No locks can keep the cold out. That much Sanji knows. He’d been locked, and the cold came still. Crept beneath the door, crept into him. But Zoro’s hands are warm as silent, he pulls Sanji as many layers deep into the Merry as they can go. As far from the air and the ominous white skies that stretch empty, on and on, as is possible. Away from the icy froth of the waves.
They sit, their backs against a wooden wall. And Sanji lets Zoro pull the sweater onto him. It’s a hushed kind of intimacy, to be dressed. Sanji has been undressed before, many times. But here, his limbs trembling from cold, the memories steeping into his skin, and Zoro’s fingers shifting warmth onto his form, he’s never felt more bare.
The sweater is a soft gold. It would have been a nice color on a moss, but instead, it rests on the lines of his own body, a gift.
In the dimness, Zoro’s face is inscrutable. At first, the seeming emptiness there much of the time had pressed in a too-familiar way against Sanji’s awareness. But Zoro isn’t empty. He’s not emotionless. Even unreadable, there’s a miasma churning beneath the surface. It’s just well kept, hidden behind the other’s own carefully accumulated walls. And for the glimpses he gets of what’s below, Sanji is grateful. For the fact of Zoro’s beating heart, Sanji is grateful.
He’s grateful for the sweater, too, so fucking much it steals his words away, makes him breathless.
Before. Then. He had been alone.
Now.
The other doesn’t stop him as Sanji reaches out, brings his fingers into Zoro’s, and threads them together. They bend and curl into each other, fit just right. And Zoro doesn’t stop him as he scoots closer, pressing the edges of their bodies together too. He only half grunts in acknowledgment, as is his way, and then spreads a blanket procured from somewhere around them. His head leans back against Sanji’s, though, when Sanji presses it careful against his shoulder. Inhales into the solid familiarity of it.
Zoro is warm. And his heart beats.
“You’re a menace,” He murmurs into the fabric beneath his cheek. Too thin, so that Sanji would have one more layer with which to fight the memories. I love you, he lets himself think, just for a fleeting brush of a moment. And then out loud, he says instead, a little wry. “I hate the cold.”
“Me too,” Zoro murmurs, but his lips curve against Sanji’s hair, form a small smile.
Zoro is warm. And his heart beats.
And maybe the ice thaws, just a little.
Sanji is helpless, but the good kind.