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Right, enough was enough.
Ever since they made it off that rock, Zeff was—rather understandably, he thought—busy with recovering from starvation and the loss of his leg. It took effort to get used to the prosthetic, what with walking now being more of an almost-insurmountable obstacle rather than something he used to do without a single thought.
Over those torturous months, he barely had enough energy to ensure the Little Eggplant didn’t perish; he had taken to trailing after Zeff like a lost duckling and, well… He’s already gone through hell to make sure the kid didn’t starve. Would be a waste of all that effort if he let him die now that they made it off the rock.
Off the rock and off the sea, at least for a while. To be frank, Zeff kept expecting the boy to disappear eventually. The kind of a kid you found working on a liner wasn’t really one to stick with someone past their use.
And yet, the kid remained loyally by his side. When they were still on land, he would wander out throughout the day, bringing back food from god knows where. Then, when Zeff prepared to recover some of his treasure— he had enough hoarded on some tiny uninhabited islands to let him settle comfortably into retirement—the kid followed after him without question, boarding boat after boat.
Zeff stopped correcting people when they assumed Little Eggplant was his son far sooner than he would have liked to admit.
Brat didn’t seem to care either way; he was quiet at first, uncomfortable, but grew enough backbone with time to start butting heads with Zeff again, just like he did when they first met.
And now, half a year since leaving that cursed rock, they’ve finally opened Zeff’s dream restaurant. Baratie’s opening night had been a massive success, and Zeff pretended he hadn’t known about Little Eggplant screaming himself hoarse advertising it in the streets well in advance, and. Well.
The type of a kid who worked on a liner wasn’t one to be literate, either.
So enough was enough.
“Patty,” Zeff called out one morning, diverting Patty on his way back from the bathroom. They didn't have many staff to begin with—just a few cooks Zeff was still trialing—but Patty, he could tell, would be one to keep. “See about teaching Little Eggplant to read and write, yeah? We could use the extra pair of hands for waiting tables.”
Patty, who was always exceedingly giddy whenever the kid got taken off the line—a regular occurrence thanks to both his and Zeff’s tempers running hot, exchanges of “I quit!” and “you’re fired!” happening every few days with no consequence the following morning—agreed with a cackle.
He wasn’t cackling when he came into Zeff’s office that following evening.
“Brat’s impossible,” he grumbled. “Tried setting him up with some simple worksheets to get him used to the letters, but he’d be back at the station whenever I took an eye off of him. He’d rather wash dishes than fill in a couple lines.”
“Hm,” Zeff grunted, putting away the paperwork he was struggling with. Running a restaurant was very different from running a pirate ship and, no lie, he might have wanted Little Eggplant to know how to read and write in part to make him do this part. “Why don’t we try using cooking, then? Kid’s rightly obsessed, let’s use that.”
Patty didn’t look convinced. Luckily for him, Zeff would oversee that personally.
He didn’t venture out into the kitchens all that often, nowadays. The leg was still rather fresh, bothering him more than it would in the future, the doctors assured. And even once it was all healed, there were still mountains of paperwork to fill in. But even if Zeff couldn’t stand at the counters from dawn till dusk, he still made sure to handle at least the dinner rush every day, and whichever other service times he felt up to.
The following day in the kitchens was very entertaining. For everyone who wasn’t Little Eggplant, at least.
“See, it’s an orange,” Patty was saying, shoving it proudly into the kid’s face. “It’s round and starts with an O sound, so when you see a circle on a piece of paper-”
“I know how to read!” The brat interrupted indignantly. His face was beet-red—the orange wasn’t the first comparison the cooks made—and he snatched the fruit from Patty’s hands, storming off to prepare the dessert he needed it for.
With every letter and the following assurances of his literacy, which grew higher in pitch each time, Zeff couldn’t help but be certain that the boy was simply too proud to admit his lack of skill.
But there was no way he’d make it to the All Blue without knowing how to read, and, well. Zeff refused to let the kid out into the world without even knowing how to write his own damn name! (....Not that Zeff actually. Knew his name. Something to worry about later, he always figured.)
So, with that in mind, when the dinner rush was finally over and clean up was nearly done-
“Kid,” Zeff called, just as the Little Eggplant was about to start helping with the dishes. “Come with me.”
The brat went without a complaint. See, the trick was: He hated doing the dishes. In his tiny mind, the math was clear: whatever Zeff wanted couldn’t be worse than the dishes. Simple logic that Zeff loved to exploit.
Zeff took them to his office, seating the kid in the visitor chair while he settled into his very comfortable armchair.
He’d already prepared the sheets of paper and writing utensils ahead of time. To be fair to the brat, Patty’s penmanship wasn’t that great, either. Zeff could see why he wouldn’t have wanted to do those exercises. Zeff’s own, however, was nothing to scoff at, even if he wouldn’t be winning any calligraphy contests or whatever other bullshit nobles did to show off.
Little Eggplant scowled the second his gaze landed on the papers, crossing his arms across the chest. “First Patty, now you,” he growled. “Why do I have to keep wasting my time on this nonsense?!”
“Because it’s important, Little Eggplant,” Zeff growled back, slamming his palm on the desk. “I get that you’d rather be cooking, I really do, but I refuse to let you walk around illiterate, you shitty brat! How can you wait tables without knowing how to write down the orders? What, you gonna draw the dishes?”
“Why would I need to wait-!” The kid started yelling before breaking off, expression turning baffled. “....You think I’m illiterate?”
Zeff sighed, moving to massage the bridge of his nose. Honestly, he was quite surprised the kid even knew what “illiterate” meant.
He only took his eyes off of the kid for one short moment. In that time, the kid hopped off the visitor chair, making his way over to Zeff’s modest bookcase, and grabbed a book at random. It just happened to be one of the older recipe books he’s got, a bargain deal he managed to find. The language was rather dated, and whatever little skills the brat was planning on showing off-
“That one might be a little beyond your skill-” Zeff started saying, but the kid ignored his warning, flipping to a random page and clearing his throat.
…He then proceeded to read the recipe with the diction of a town crier, perfectly enunciating words that would have given Zeff pause and not even hesitating on those Zeff would never have dared to attempt.
To say the kid could read would be an understatement.
The brat snapped the book shut, and Zeff took that as his cue to close his jaw. Little Eggplant pushed the book back into its place and walked back towards the desk.
“And as for writing-” he grabbed a sheet of paper, flipping it to the empty side. Instead of using one of the simple pencils that Zeff had prepared, though, the audacious little shit instead grabbed Zeff’s rather fancy fountain pen.
It was mostly something he had bought to appear more professional on the paperwork—god knows his (above average for pirates) handwriting wouldn’t be doing him any favours—and he still didn’t quite get the hang of it. Yet the kid handled it as if he’d been using ostentatious writing tools like this for years, operating on muscle memory.
The pen glided over the paper, at a speed which made Zeff doubt, just for a moment, that the brat was actually writing anything. Surely no one could write that quickly…
But when he finished and pushed the sheet at Zeff… The haste had not affected his calligraphy at all, not in any way that Zeff could notice.
He couldn’t really call it anything but calligraphy. It was too polished, all the swirls perfectly even, as if the little eggplant had been practicing them tirelessly for years.
“Now if we’re done wasting time, I have a recipe I want to test!” The brat declared, stomping out of the room.
Zeff let him leave, too focused on the paper he left behind. Now that he managed to get beyond the penmanship itself, and focused on the contents of it- Little shit wrote down a recipe.
Not one Zeff recognized, too. It was probably another of his experiments; come to think of it, it was probably the same one he just left to try.
It was interesting to see the way the boy thought; It was one thing to watch him cook or taste the finished product, but seeing the intention behind it was something else entirely. Quite frankly, Zeff was curious to see the end result.
…The brat also saved him the effort of trying to figure out his name, too. Signed his name, he did, in a big fuck-off signature at the bottom of the page. Sanji. There was a line in front of it, as if he had intended to write something else in front of it, probably by sheer reflex, before changing his mind.
Zeff wasn’t going to pry. He’d just assume a shitty family and move on. It’s not like he’d kept his own name, either. “Red-Leg Zeff” was very much a name he had earned, not been given.
A knock on the doorframe interrupted his thoughts.
“Kid ran out on you, too?” Patty said, leaning against the wall. “Saw him bust into the kitchen like there were marines on his tail.”
Zeff couldn’t bring himself to respond just yet. Patty seemed to notice the unfilled exercise sheet on the side facing him, and snorted at the sight.
“He’ll learn eventually,” he said. “We just gotta force him to understand how useful it would be, even if he ends up with the worst handwriting ever-”
“Sanji has better penmanship than all of us combined, and probably most of our customers, too,” Zeff interrupted. He held out the sheet gesturing at Patty to take it. The other did, pushing himself off the wall and crossing the room in a few short strides.
“...I’ll be damned,” he said, whistling slowly. “No wonder the brat didn’t wanna do the worksheet, it’s like asking him to go back to crawling instead of walking… by Sanji, the only decent cook at Baratie? Cheeky little bugger.”
Zeff didn’t respond, pushing past Patty and moving towards the clanking coming from the kitchen. In the end, cheeky as it was, Sanji wasn’t wrong, was he? And there was a brand new recipe of his Zeff was about to try.
