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Zoro woke up. This wouldn’t be anything particularly worth writing home about, except for the fact that he hadn’t been expecting to.
The Sunny’s doctor’s quarters were bathed in a soft, blue-soaked half-light. Zoro wasn’t sure whether it was just before sunrise or just after sunset. Actually, he wasn’t sure what day it was, either.
It took him a long minute to cobble his thoughts together into something that resembled memory. The last thing he truly recalled was pain – the searing kind, the everywhere kind, the kind that felt like the flesh was melting off your bones. In his lungs, in his limbs, in the spaces between his muscle and his sinew and his skin. It had been omnipresent, everything, all-encompassing. And then it had been gone, and there was nothing at all.
He sort of remembered, vaguely and distantly, the sound of Sanji’s voice. The harsh press of fingertips against the soft inside of his elbow, the warmth of a body along the length of his side. The clean, citrusy tang of dish soap that clung permanently to Sanji’s clothes, the spicy-sweet smell of cigarette smoke. A dream, maybe, already half-forgotten.
Zoro hissed in a breath through his teeth as he shifted a little in the bed, muscles screaming in shocked and horrified protest. He was hooked up to an IV drip and a heart monitor, a thick strip of bandages wound tight around his bare chest and middle. He’d dropped his swords during his conversation with Kuma, before – everything. Where were they?
Ignoring the static jolt of pain that issued down his neck and raced along his spine, he turned his head to peer around the room. He really must’ve been out of it, because it wasn’t until that moment that he realized he wasn’t actually alone.
Sanji was sitting on the floor in the center of a patch of pale light, the glow turning his skin and hair to alabaster. His long legs were folded neatly and his back was pressed against the wall. In his hands, lying across his lap, was Wado Ichimonji.
Something in Zoro twisted. He couldn’t even begin to explain what he was feeling. He just knew that seeing someone else’s hands on Wado felt like watching them open up his chest cavity and extract his heart. It wasn’t right.
Except…
Sanji’s head was bowed, the full force of his rapt attention fixed on Wado’s bare blade and the soft, flannel cloth in his hands. Above the reek of antiseptic, Zoro could smell the familiar spice-warm scent of cloves: choji oil, definitely, although the bottle at Sanji’s side looked like a different size and shape than the one Zoro kept for his own use. There was something… not relaxed, but habitual, about the way Sanji was moving. His quick, clever hands held Wado with something close to reverence, steady and confident but careful.
The tension slowly bled out from Zoro’s shoulders. He shifted his eyes away from Wado and up at Sanji, who looked—
Even in the violet maybe-dawn light, Sanji looked exhausted. There were bruise-blue bags under his eyes. His hair was messy and curling a little at the very ends, like he hadn’t even bothered with that funny-shaped brush of his after getting out of the bath. Instead of his usual suit, or even his fancy, neat pajama set, he was wearing an oversized blue sweatshirt and a pair of old, gray sweatpants that pooled around his ankles. Zoro didn’t think he’d ever seen Sanji in sweats before. There was something nearly disturbing about it. Like looking at one of those bald cats, without any fur.
Zoro opened his mouth. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say. Get your hands off my sword, maybe, or, What the hell do you think you’re doing? If his injuries had really gotten to him, he might’ve even said, You look terrible, or, Are you okay? or, I’m so fucking glad you’re alive.
Before any of that could come spilling out of his mouth, though, Sanji said something.
Actually, no. He wasn’t speaking – he was singing. Quiet, nearly inaudible, just the suggestion of rough consonants and the rasp of his oddly sweet smoker’s tenor. The tune was lilting and simple, with the cadence of a nursery rhyme.
“Alouette, gentille alouette, alouette, je te plumerai.”
This is a dream, Zoro thought, without any real confidence. Nothing that was happening was making even the remotest bit of sense, but Zoro didn’t think his sleeping mind was creative enough to conjure this: the inflection of a language he didn’t know, the graceful movement of long fingers on sharp-edged steel, the quicksilver-shine of blond hair.
Minutes passed like that. Zoro dozed in and out of sleep, the world blurring pleasantly around him. He was finally jarred out of it when Sanji stopped singing and, suddenly, spoke.
“Hey, um. Thank you,” he whispered. His voice was oddly subdued, not a trace of his usual prickly bravado. Thinking that he’d been caught watching, Zoro’s heartbeat stalled inside his chest. But Sanji was still looking down at Wado, wearing the gentlest smile Zoro had ever seen on his face. He continued, “I’ve never had the chance to say it, but thank you for taking care of us. Of him.” He ran the flannel cloth over the blade once more before sliding Wado back into her scabbard in one smooth, graceful motion. “There, now,” he added. “All clean. As befitting of the future world’s greatest swordsman, eh?”
Zoro allowed himself to watch with rapt attention as Sanji gently set Wado aside and moved Kitetsu to his lap. “Be nice, okay? No cutting me, I’ve gotta at least get the blood off you, or you’ll rust,” he whispered to the sword, before going back to humming the same song he’d been singing before.
Despite himself, Zoro’s eyes began to slide shut again. The timbre of Sanji’s voice held a strange harmony with the familiar hum of the blade under his hands, just barely within the range of Zoro’s hearing.
Inside Zoro’s head, Sanji’s eyes blew wide and blood stained his teeth and his hand flew up to clutch, ineffectually, at Zoro’s bicep.
Inside this strange dream, Zoro drifted into oblivion, accompanied by the quiet sound of Sanji’s voice.
When Zoro woke again, the doctor’s quarters were bathed in sunlight. He blinked up at the ceiling until the rich, dark stain of the wooden boards swam into focus. Then he unceremoniously yanked the IV tube out of the crook of his arm and went to sit up.
“Stop that!” Chopper’s voice shouted, from much nearer to his bedside than Zoro had been expecting. “Zoro, you idiot, you’re going to rip out all your stitches!”
“I’m fine,” Zoro rasped, mostly out of sheer muscle memory – like a leg twitching after the kneecap was tapped.
Chopper stopped fussing with the discarded IV tube and looked up at him with dark, starry eyes brimming with tears. “You are not fine! I’ve never seen you look so horrible! We were so worried about you,” he wailed.
“Good thing I’ve got the best doctor on the Grand Line,” Zoro said, smiling wanly when Chopper ducked his head in embarrassment. “Chopper, is everyone okay? Luffy?”
Chopper sniffled and rubbed tears out of his eyes. “Luffy’s fine. Everyone else is okay, too. Apart from Sanji, you were somehow the only one of us who got seriously hurt.”
Zoro’s stomach did something extremely unpleasant. He jerked upward, managing to prop an elbow under himself before the burn in his muscles and the monumental pull of gravity became too much. He collapsed back down onto his back with an oof.
Chopper raised his hooves in a soothing gesture and quickly added, “Calm down! He’s okay, now. But his leg was pretty badly broken during the fight against Kuma, and so were a few of his ribs, somehow. It’ll take a little while before he’s completely healed, but he’s in much better shape than you are.”
Zoro physically winced at the word ribs. Chopper gave him a sharp look but let it pass without comment.
“You’re going to be out of it for a while longer,” Chopper continued, in the professional tone he reserved for when his patients were being particularly bull-headed. “Your body is still healing, and you’ve been asleep for nearly seventy-two hours straight. Above all things, you need rest right now. Are you going to stay here and go back to sleep, or are you going to make me knock you out? I bought anesthetic made for giants on Water 7 and I’m not afraid to use it.”
“The crew’s safe? We got away?” Zoro asked, just to be completely certain.
“Yes,” Chopper assured him. “I promise. We’re all perfectly safe right now.”
“Okay,” Zoro said, slumping back into the comfortable divot his head had left on the pillow. “Then I’ll sleep.”
“Promise?” Chopper asked, sternly.
“Promise,” Zoro said. “Thanks for taking care of me, Doctor.”
“Calling me that doesn’t make me happy at all, you jerk,” Chopper mumbled, covering his face with his hooves.
It was becoming quickly apparent that Chopper hadn’t needed to extract a promise from him. Zoro could already feel sleep tugging at the edges of his vision. His body felt leaden, welded to the bed. “Chopper,” he said, his voice slurring a little, going slippery on the last syllable. “Tell the cook ’m sorry.”
“Huh? Sorry for what?”
“’S ribs. Didn’t mean t’break ’em.”
In his last few moments of awareness, Zoro felt Chopper gently touch the back of his hand. “You tell him yourself when you get better. He’ll want to hear it from you. Okay?” he heard him say, as if from a very great distance.
“’Kay,” Zoro managed, thinking, despite himself, about the look of horror on Sanji’s face as Wado’s hilt impacted his ribcage. Then sleep rolled over him like the tide of Aqua Laguna, and he stopped thinking about anything at all.
The next time he woke up, it was to the grinning face of his captain, looming a couple inches above the tip of Zoro’s nose.
“Zoro’s awake!” Luffy crowed, to nobody in particular.
“Hi, Luffy,” Zoro muttered, reaching up with an unpleasantly unsteady hand to shove Luffy’s face away.
Luffy went willingly, clambering off Zoro and dropping heavily into a chair that had been dragged right up against the bedside. He leaned back on the chair until it was tipping onto its two rear legs and announced, “You look terrible.”
“Yeah, well, I feel like shit,” Zoro said, his voice grating in his throat. “Water?”
“Here!” Luffy passed him a full glass that had been sitting on the bedside table. He sat with uncharacteristic patience as Zoro drank, kicking his legs and staring very intently at Zoro’s face. “Chopper says you almost died. You scared the crew pretty bad.”
“Not you, though?”
“Silly. Zoro isn’t going to die until he becomes the world’s greatest swordsman. I knew you’d be okay.”
Zoro wasn’t sure what to say to that, so he took another gulp of water to hide his smile and didn’t say anything at all.
“You wanna tell me what happened?” Luffy asked. “Sanji won’t say. He won’t let anybody else say anything, either, even though some of Lola’s guys said they saw everything. Stingy Sanji.”
“I don’t,” Zoro said, honestly. It had been his intention from the beginning to keep what had happened with Kuma to himself, but he was a little surprised Sanji had kept quiet, too – and, more than that, that Sanji had wrangled other people into silence as well. It wasn’t like Zoro had time to ask him for his secrecy, before battering him into unconsciousness.
A twist of nausea tugged at Zoro’s stomach. They’d never fought like that, before. They’d left bruises, of course, but Zoro had never hit Sanji with the intent to harm him, and he knew in his gut that Sanji hadn’t, either.
Zoro didn’t know what his face was doing, but whatever it was, it made Luffy’s oddly intent expression sharpen.
“Okay,” Luffy said. “That’s fine. But if you ever decide you wanna talk about it, I’ll listen. Okay, Zoro?”
“Okay,” Zoro said. “Thank you, Captain. Is everything else all right?”
“Yeah, we’re good. We had a big party, and Brook played songs and joined the crew, and Lola proposed to Nami and Nami looked really sad when she had to say no. Hey, do you wanna see everyone? They’ve been waiting and waiting for ages, but Chopper said only one of us was allowed in here at a time while you were still sleeping.”
Zoro took a second to process all that. “Yeah, okay. Let ’em in.”
Luffy launched up and out of the chair with an energy that made something frayed and anxious inside Zoro’s chest unclench. He hadn’t realized how badly the confrontation with Kuma had unsettled him until the last of the fear finally fell away. It was like he’d been lying pinned under one of his heaviest dumbbells, trying to breathe like normal.
Luffy sprinted to the door and yanked it open, shouting, “You guys! Come see Zoro!” so loudly it made Zoro wince.
Like they’d been waiting out in the hallway, the Straw Hats poured into the doctor’s quarters immediately. Usopp and Franky were first, sobbing and clutching each other as they performed some kind of ungainly, uncoordinated, celebratory dance. Nami followed after them and gently knocked her knuckles against the crown of Zoro’s head. Robin passed him a cup of tea, unsweetened except for the tang of fresh lemon. Brook, who apparently really was here to stay for the long haul now that his shadow was reattached to what remained of his body, offered to play him a lullaby to soothe him back to sleep; Zoro grimaced and declined.
Zoro waited, half his attention focused on Usopp’s dramatic reenactment of how he’d singlehandedly subdued an entire faction of Moria’s zombie army, half his attention focused on the door. It didn’t reopen, though. Even when exhaustion caught up to him and he slipped back into a doze, the door stayed firmly shut.
Where is he? he wanted to ask, but that felt uncomfortably akin to stripping himself naked in front of a crowd. Instead, Zoro let the familiar, beloved chaos of his crew wash over him, and said nothing.
Zoro woke up in the hour just past midnight, absolutely and unshakably certain that he wasn’t alone in the room anymore. At first, he assumed it was Chopper, coming in to check on him. When he blinked his eyes open and squinted through the strange, bleary haze left behind by the pain medication he’d been forcibly given a few hours before, he realized his mistake. It wasn’t Chopper in the room.
It was Sanji.
Zoro watched in silence as Sanji gathered up his swords and returned to sink down into that same spot on the floor, his back pressed up against the wall. He was carrying the same rag and bottle of choji oil, as well as a thin sheet of sandpaper.
Once again, Zoro felt a stab of alarm. What the hell did a cook know about caring for a world-class katana? An improper sharpening job could ruin the hamon or even destroy the blade. Stop him, his instincts screamed. Stop him, stop him, stop him.
Instead, Zoro waited and watched, as Sanji unsheathed the Black Blade, Shusui, and began to sharpen it with the easy confidence of someone who had been handling swords for a lifetime.
Zoro felt approximately as though he’d been whacked over the head with a frying pan. The dojo had spent years drilling the proper care for a katana into Zoro’s head. This wasn’t how kitchen knives were handled. How did Sanji know how to do this?
Another dream, Zoro’s brain suggested. A side effect of the drugs.
Sanji sighed and curled his fingers around Shusui’s hilt, and for a moment, in the moonlight, he looked like a statue animated by an unknown god, wrought from living marble. Zoro remembered – the frantic sound of his voice, the gunfire-rapid thump of his heartbeat, the wild, animal terror in his eyes.
Let him go, he’d told Kuma, trembling with the pain of standing on a shattered leg. Take me instead.
Hell of a side effect, Zoro thought, before passing out.
The next night, when Sanji entered the doctor’s quarters, Zoro was already awake.
He watched with half-lidded eyes as Sanji crept across the room to grab his swords. He was holding his breath, eyes flicking periodically toward Zoro, like he was a child sneaking into the kitchen to steal cookies and frightened of being caught.
Zoro waited until Sanji’s hand had closed around Wado’s scabbard before he opened his eyes fully and said, “You’ve been taking care of my swords.”
Sanji froze, Wado half-lifted into the air, knuckles white around her hilt. His visible eye shot over to stare sidelong down at Zoro.
“Oh,” he said, with the energy of someone who dreamed, longingly, of being anywhere in the world apart from here. “You’re awake.”
Zoro lifted his chin toward Wado and commented, “Hell of a hobby to take up.”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” Sanji said, stiffly. “I was just—”
“Cook,” Zoro said, unimpressed.
Sanji pressed his lips into a thin, pale line and set Wado back down. He turned away from Zoro, his shoulders hunching up toward his ears. Sanji and Zoro were nearly the same height, but when he held himself like this, it made him look much smaller. Like a turtle curling into its shell.
In a voice coiled tight with tension, Sanji said, “Well, it’s not like anyone else was doing it. And I know you don’t like people touching them, but after… well. I’m sorry, but it needed doing. That’s all.”
“Chill out, curls. I’m not pissed off about it or anything. If anything, I’m grateful someone did it when I couldn’t. I just don’t understand why you would.”
If anything, Sanji seemed to shrink even further into himself at this statement. “What’s there to understand? They were disgusting and soaked in a metric ton of your stupid gorilla blood and zombie guts and they needed to be taken care of. I know how to care for blades, so I was the obvious choice. Because of my kitchen knives, I mean.”
Zoro hummed skeptically. “So… what? Someone picked you to do it? Who? Luffy?”
Sanji waved a hand, still abjectly refusing to meet Zoro’s eyes. “Well, whatever. Maybe I volunteered. I don’t know. What does it matter?”
“They’re my swords,” Zoro said. “It matters.”
“You’re overthinking it,” Sanji said, stubbornly.
“I’m not, and you know it,” Zoro snapped. “Weren’t you the one throwing yourself in front of Kuma like a suicidal maniac for the sake of my dream? Clearly it fucking matters, cook.”
Abruptly, like he’d set his hand down on a hot stove, Sanji’s spine snapped straight. He spun around and met Zoro’s eyes again, and Zoro suddenly got the unsettling sense that he’d missed a step in this conversation. Sanji didn’t look annoyed or bored or frustrated. He looked furious, eyes wild, cheeks a hectic and enraged scarlet.
“Sorry,” he said, his voice icier than the biting Drum Island winds. “Which one of us is the suicidal maniac, again?”
Zoro blinked at him uncomprehendingly for a moment before he finally understood what Sanji was getting at. “What I did… It’s not the same thing. It’s my job to protect this crew.”
“Oh, yeah?” Sanji said, acidly. “That’s your job? To throw yourself bodily between us and our enemies, even at the cost of your life? And what’s my job, then? To stand aside and watch you die?”
“You’re so damn dramatic. I’m not dead, and you didn’t watch me do jack shit,” Zoro reminded him, rolling his eyes.
Sanji physically recoiled, as though Zoro had struck him clean across the jaw. He spat, “Fuck you,” the words punched out of him like a mouthful of blood.
“Oi,” Zoro said, startled.
“No,” Sanji said. “No. Fuck you, Zoro. You don’t get to make jokes about – you absolute fucking – how dare you?”
“Sanji,” Zoro managed, so utterly taken aback by the vehemence of this reaction that he forgot to come up with an unpleasant nickname entirely.
“Since you’re clearly feeling better, you can take care of your swords yourself,” Sanji told him, expression shuttered, voice perfectly flat. “I’m too busy to waste my time on this anymore. You know, since some of us have a job apart from ‘warlord’s personal punching bag.’”
“Hey, what the hell is wrong with you?” Zoro said, with genuine concern.
Sanji pivoted sharply to head for the door. “Get well soon. Or don’t, I guess. Since it’s all the same to you.”
The door slammed shut behind him.
In the stillness of the doctor’s quarters, Zoro said, out loud, “What the hell just happened?”
It bothered Zoro through that night, and it kept bothering him into the next day.
In the middle of that afternoon, Chopper pronounced Zoro well enough to return to his normal bunk in the men’s sleeping quarters, and even to begin training again, albeit at nowhere near the intensity that he’d been working at before Thriller Bark. Zoro was stiff-muscled but mobile, relieved beyond words to be allowed out of the infirmary. In the days that followed, he began to rejoin the pattern of the Straw Hats’ everyday lives, settling back in with his longtime crewmates, learning the quirks and oddities of the new one.
Except for one of them.
Sanji was avoiding him.
The only time Zoro saw him anymore was at mealtimes, and even then, he completely refused to meet Zoro’s eyes. He responded to Zoro in one-word sentences, his face blank and his tone flat. When Zoro offered to help him dry the dishes, he jolted like he’d sliced his palm open on a bread knife and openly fled from the table, snapping something Zoro couldn’t understand.
Even beyond his obvious lingering anger about their – fight? Zoro still wasn’t quite sure what had happened during that conversation – there was something undeniably off about Sanji. He’d swapped that oversized sweatshirt out for his typical tailored suits, his hair brushed neatly back into place. He was effusive with his compliments towards Nami and Robin and just as sharp-tongued when he spoke to the rest of the crew. By all accounts, he looked normal enough. But there was something about him that just… wasn’t right. The bruise-dark bags under his eyes weren’t going away. His face was too pale.
It wasn’t like Zoro and Sanji had never fought before. They fought all the time. If Nami’s loud complaints were to be believed, it was the only way they knew how to communicate. This time felt different, though. Something had gone very seriously wrong, and Zoro had no fucking idea what it was.
Most people would probably have described Sanji and Zoro as being constantly and inescapably at odds. That wasn’t right, though. After all, at odds suggested that they were on different pages, that they couldn’t understand each other. Sometimes, Zoro felt like he understood Sanji better than he understood anyone else on the crew. Even when they were at each other’s throats, it was like they were moving to music nobody else could hear, matching each other beat-for-beat. When Sanji was pissed off, so was Zoro; when it was time to get serious, to work together, then they did. This time, though, it was like Zoro had tried to take a step, only to have his foot meet with empty air.
He realized how just how unbelievably out of hand the situation had gotten when he stepped out onto the grass deck, about a week after they departed Thriller Bark, only to watch Sanji physically vault over the railing and jump down to the lower deck to avoid him.
Staring at the space that Sanji’s back had just been occupying a second ago, Zoro’s already-limited patience withered and died. He spun on his heel and stormed over to Nami’s mapmaking office, letting himself into the room without bothering to stop and knock. If he knocked, she’d just tell him to go away. No point, since he wasn’t planning on listening either way.
She was sitting at the desk, bent over a half-finished sketch of the route they’d taken between Water 7 and the Florian Triangle. There was a smudge of ink on one of her cheeks, probably from when Luffy set off one of Usopp’s experimental explosives below deck, about forty-five minutes prior.
“Oi,” Zoro said, to get her attention.
Nami looked up from her parchment and raised an eyebrow. “What? I’m very clearly busy. Bothering me without a good reason is going to add onto your debt.”
Without waiting for permission, Zoro dropped heavily down into the seat on the other side of the drafting table. “The cook tells you stuff, right?”
Nami set her pen down, attention clearly caught.
“Sometimes,” she said, slowly. “He’s a pretty private person. If you’re asking if he tells me how he’s feeling, the answer is usually no. What’s this about?”
“We fought the other night,” Zoro muttered, picking at the chipping wood on the corner of the table. “He’s been weird ever since and I can’t figure out why.”
“Have you considered apologizing for whatever stupid shit you said?” Nami asked, making an aggrieved face at whatever his expression involuntarily did in response to that question. “Of course not. Look, the past week has been hard on him. He’s exhausted and stressed. If you said something nasty, just go be a big boy and tell him you didn’t mean it.”
“I didn’t say anything nasty,” Zoro protests. “I didn’t even insult him or anything. He started going off about me being suicidal, or some shit, and when I pointed out that he wasn’t even there and I’m not actually dead, he acted like I’d kicked a puppy or something.”
Nami’s expression went very pointy indeed. “I see,” she said, and Zoro realized with a cold chill up his spine that he’d managed to wade right back into dangerous waters without realizing it.
“You know what his problem is, then?” he asked, bravely ignoring the sub-zero aura she was now exuding.
She drummed her fingertips on the table. Her nails made very menacing, very sharp clacking sounds on the hard wood. “I do,” she said.
“Fucking tell me, then,” he said, before adding, a bit lamely, “please.”
“No,” she told him. “I don’t think I will.”
Zoro groaned loudly.
She lifted a hand to silence him. “Look, it’s not like I’m trying to torture you, but I’m also absolutely not going to speak on Sanji-kun’s behalf. Especially not about something as important as this. Just go talk to him properly, dummy.”
“He’s been running away from me for a week. He doesn’t want to talk to me,” Zoro pointed out.
“Corner him while he’s cooking,” she suggested, waving a hand. “As if you’ve ever had a hard time bothering him when he wants to be left alone before.”
“It’s different this time,” he said, frustrated.
Nami’s expression shifted a little, at this. Some of the chill eased, replaced with something careful and almost knowing. “Oh, yeah? And why might that be?”
“I just,” Zoro said, and stopped.
He didn’t know how to put it into words – he just felt, with something approaching complete conviction, that whatever he and Sanji had was in imminent danger of collapsing beneath their feet. If he pushed too hard, Sanji might never look at him, ever again. He might avoid Zoro’s eyes across the Sunny’s dinner table forever, might never fall into place at Zoro’s back during a fight again, might never pass Zoro another wet dish with a quiet mutter of his name.
“I want to fix this,” Zoro finally managed to articulate. “I need to fix this. Not fuck it up even more.”
The ice on Nami’s face melted entirely. She smiled at him, something like relief and maybe even pride on her face. “You know, that’s not that bad of a starting point. You could try telling him that.”
“He’ll laugh me into the ocean.”
“He won’t,” Nami said, turning back to her map. “Give it a go. If it doesn’t work, we’ll think of something else.”
He got to his feet and turned to leave the office. His hand was on the doorknob when she added, “He carried you back to us, you know. Showed up covered in your blood, screaming for Chopper to come and help. I’ve never seen him like that before.”
“Bloody?” Zoro asked, confused.
Nami sighed. “No, Zoro.”
She didn’t offer anything else to clarify. Baffled and developing quite a substantial headache in his temples, Zoro rolled his eyes and barreled out of her office.
Zoro had been intending on following Nami’s advice. Truly, he had. He’d approach during dinner prep, appropriately contrite, and tell Sanji, Whatever I did, I want to fix it.
Unfortunately, the instant he walked into the galley, Sanji fixed him with a thunderous glare and all his best intentions went flying directly out the window.
Typical.
“If you’re not here for anything important, then get the hell out of my kitchen. I’m busy,” Sanji snapped, slamming the knife he’d been using to dice an onion down onto the countertop, beside his cutting board.
“Would you just,” Zoro half-shouted, before swallowing hard and forcing his voice to lower to something resembling a conversational volume. Go talk to him properly, Nami had said. “Would you just tell me what the fuck your issue with me is?” he demanded, from between gritted teeth. Well, it wasn’t quite what he had been aiming for when he walked into the galley, but at least he wasn’t yelling.
“Besides the obvious?” Sanji said, snidely.
“Yes! I know I drive you insane, but this isn’t normal. What is your problem?”
“My problem,” Sanji echoed, incredulous. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You are so fucking ridiculous—”
“I’m not the one who’s been ducking around corners to avoid me. I’m not the one who blew up over nothing the other day—”
“Over nothing!” Sanji echoed, a note of hysterical laughter in his voice. “Yeah. Because nothing happened, right, Zoro?”
“Can you not talk in riddles right now? Ever since I woke up, you’ve been practically sprinting away from me like I’ve got some kind of disease—”
“Yeah, it’s called terminal stupidity, and I’m worried it’s contagious.”
Zoro slammed a fist down on the countertop and ignored the way it sent a ripple of residual soreness buzzing through his sinews, all the way up to his elbow. “Cook, cut the shit. What the fuck are you running away from?”
Sanji’s nostrils flared. He whipped around to face Zoro fully for the first time in what felt like years. Something in Zoro lurched back to life under the weight of his gaze. Sanji’s visible eye blazing, he yelled, “You! Damn it! Fuck! Shit. Esti de câlice de tabarnak.”
“Me? What the hell? You’ve never run away from a fight before.”
“It’s not about fighting, you stupid, idiotic, moronic, photosynthetic sasquatch.”
Zoro threw his hands in the air. “What the hell is it about, then?”
“You died!” Sanji screamed, and Zoro realized with a horrible jolt that his visible eye had filled with tears. “You fucking died in my arms, Zoro! Your heart stopped! You weren’t breathing! I carried you back and Chopper looked like he’d never been so afraid in his life and I was soaked through to the skin with your stupid blood and I thought – I thought you were gone, and that my weakness had killed you.”
It dawned on Zoro, suddenly, that it was extremely possible that he had not understood any part of this situation, even remotely. It was like he’d strode confidently out on a path, only to find himself stepping off a pier into the middle of the sea.
Some of the annoyance, itching in his limbs for the past several days, bled out of him.
“You thought I died and that… pissed you off?” he said, slowly, as his brain attempted to make the variables in this equation add up.
Sanji abruptly deflated. The rage in his face and the tense line of his shoulders drained away. He looked pallid and exhausted and so much older than nineteen.
“I have some issues,” he said, tonelessly.
“Obviously,” Zoro agreed, without rancor.
“Sometimes,” Sanji continued, through a clenched jaw, “I find it difficult to properly express my emotions.”
To a casual acquaintance, witness to Sanji’s mood as it shifted from doting to apoplectic with the speed and unpredictability of the Grand Line’s tide, this statement would probably seem like the height of absurdity. Zoro, who had watched Sanji struggle under the weight of his own feelings for months and was frankly a little flabbergasted that he would even be willing to admit it out loud, simply nodded.
“I wasn’t pissed off,” Sanji informed him. “I was scared. When you knocked me out… when I woke up and you were gone… I felt so small and so useless and, fuck, Zoro, I’ve never been that scared in my entire life.” He covered his face with a trembling hand and added, very quietly, “I think, if we keep having this conversation, I’m going to say something that could ruin everything.”
That was an out – Sanji was offering him an exit to this conversation, neat and tidy. He couldn’t take it, though. There was something in the back of Zoro’s head that knew without a shadow of a doubt that, if he let this conversation go now, it would break something between them permanently.
“Don’t run away from me,” he said, urgently. “If you’ve got something to say, then say it. Whatever it is, I want to hear.”
Sanji made a skeptical noise. “And if it fucks up the whole crew? If it destroys everything Luffy’s built?”
“Won’t that be up to us? It’ll only fuck things up if we let it.”
“You’re like a dog gnawing at a bone sometimes, mosshead,” Sanji muttered, his voice oddly, intentionally neutral.
As he looked at the slump of Sanji’s shoulders and the hollow sharpness of his cheeks, Zoro bravely battled back the instinct to reach out and grab his shoulder, touch his face. They had always been tactile, but not like that, and, right now, Sanji would only take a gentle touch as an insult.
Zoro stood still and said nothing and waited.
Finally, Sanji said, “You’re important, you know. To this crew. Vital, even, if I’m being completely honest.”
Zoro shrugged in acknowledgement. He knew he was important to the Straw Hats, in the same way as all the members Luffy had chosen. If any of them were gone, it wouldn’t feel right. The crew would lose their essential, basic shape. It was why losing Robin and Usopp back in Water 7 had felt so much like the severing of a limb. It would be the same if they’d lost Chopper, or Nami, or even Franky and Brook, new as they still were to the team. The absence of any of them would be like a human being trying to live without blood or a heart or a set of lungs.
(Given literally everything about Franky and Brook, maybe that comparison wasn’t the best Zoro could’ve come up with, but still.)
All that was why, when Sanji had said, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to find a new cook, Zoro had suddenly felt like the earth had fallen out from beneath his feet. The idea of the Straw Hats without Sanji – the idea of walking into the galley and finding it empty, or worse, finding someone else there – was unfathomable. A day dawning without the rising of the sun.
Sanji wasn’t done speaking, though. He took a deep breath and continued, with something akin to misery in his voice, “Well, you’re also important to me. Personally. So you can understand why what happened might’ve been a little upsetting.”
Zoro’s brain ground to a violent, screeching halt. Like the sea train, crashing directly into the front gate of Enies Lobby.
“I’m what?”
Sanji didn’t look particularly surprised by this reaction. He echoed, “Important. To me. Extremely. Keep up, mosshead.”
“Because… we’re crewmates,” Zoro suggested, fumbling desperately for anything that would make that statement make sense.
Sanji groaned. “Fuck, Zoro, don’t be dense.” He paused, and then added, much more quietly, “I did warn you it could ruin everything.”
“You,” Zoro said, and then: “Me. What?”
“Maybe someday soon you’ll graduate to two syllables, caveman,” Sanji said, but there was something fond and almost wistful in his voice, and he looked at Zoro with eyes the crystal-clear color of the sky, and Zoro fucking – realized.
“You – what? You like me? For real?”
“I like Cabernet Sauvignon and a well-fitted suit and the trashy romance novel book club I have with Robin. I love all of our crewmates, even the damn talking skeleton Luffy picked up like a stray cat,” Sanji said dismissively, but his face was flushing a startling pink, down to the pressed white collar of his shirt. “The way I feel about them is not the same as the way I feel about you.”
Zoro’s head was spinning. He shook it, aggressively, hoping that would clear the fog that was settling in around him.
It didn’t.
“But you hate me,” he pointed out, seizing on the first and most obvious problem with this explanation.
“You do make me want to bang my head against the wall until I pass out,” said Sanji. Somehow, this did not sound like an agreement.
“You’ve hated me since day one,” Zoro continued, much less confidently.
“Hate isn’t exactly what I was feeling while you were getting hacked open and traumatizing all our customers,” Sanji told him, color rising further in his cheeks.
“I’m a man,” Zoro added, with even less composure than he’d been working with before.
“Yes,” Sanji said, dryly. “I have actually noticed that.”
“That… doesn’t strike you as an issue?”
“An issue? Are you about to tell me that you’re both gay and homophobic?”
“I don’t mean an issue on my end, moron,” Zoro bit out. “Are you telling me you’re not straight? You?”
Sanji went, if possible, even redder. “I’m bisexual. Don’t make it a big deal,” he grumbled. “Like I said, I have some issues with self-expression. Gender roles were… enthusiastically… imposed on me. Early in life.”
“I know Zeff was a little old-fashioned about women, but he was a pirate, there’s no way he didn’t have bi men on his crew—”
“Not just by Zeff,” Sanji interrupted. “I… I don’t think I’m ready to talk about that part, yet, though. Maybe someday, but not yet.”
“Okay,” Zoro said. “Okay. Fine. Then… my swords…”
Sanji sighed. “I was going out of my mind, waiting for you to wake up. I’d already meal-prepped for the next month and a half and deep-cleaned the whole damn ship. Twice. I needed to do something, even if there wasn’t anything I could do to keep you here, if we were going to lose you after all.” He lifted his shoulder, looking away from Zoro, gaze fixed on the countertop. “You love your swords, and I love you. So. It seemed logical at the time.”
Zoro said, “I see,” and only sounded a little bit like he was choking to death on his own tongue.
“Anyway, none of that really matters,” Sanji continued, waving a hand nonchalantly, as though he hadn’t just revealed information that had flipped Zoro’s entire worldview on its head. “I won’t be weird about it, and it’s not like I was ever planning to tell you, anyway. But since you insisted on hearing it – that’s why I was avoiding you. Every time I looked at you, I felt your blood on my skin. I kept feeling your heartbeat stop under my hands. The fear – I don’t know. I couldn’t put it down. Even once I knew you were safe. I just kept carrying it around. It was making me insane, so I started avoiding you. Sorry, I guess.”
“I was scared, too,” Zoro blurted out.
Sanji blinked. “What, seriously? Could’ve fooled me. When I found you, you looked so… I don’t know. Stoic, I guess. You didn’t look scared at all.”
“I don’t mean for myself,” Zoro said, shaking his head. “I’m not afraid to die for the sake of my captain and this crew. But you… you tried to take my place. You tried to throw your life away for my sake. When you stepped in front of me – fuck. I was scared, too, curls.”
“Oh,” Sanji said, eyes wide.
“You know, for all that you call me a suicidal maniac, it was a sacrifice you were willing to make, too,” Zoro pointed out.
Sanji waved that off. “It’s not the same thing at all. This crew needs you, Zoro.”
“We need you, too. Are you fucking kidding me? We wouldn’t have survived a week on the Grand Line without you.”
Sanji’s cheeks flushed dark at that, but he plowed forward, the line of his jaw stubbornly set. “Well, what about your dream, huh? You think I don’t know you carry that katana for someone else’s sake? You’re willing to die before that dream is fulfilled?”
“I’m willing to die perusing it. I always have been.”
Sanji looked vaguely sick for a moment, his eyes sliding down Zoro’s chest to fix on the spot where Mihawk had bisected his torso.
“Yeah,” he said, flatly. “I noticed that, too.”
His duel with Mihawk wasn’t something Zoro allowed himself to think about too frequently. He’d been soundly and humiliatingly defeated; it had strengthened his resolve, and taught him how far he still had left to climb, and that was all. Nothing else about it served him – he’d set it down a long time ago.
There was something distant inside of him that remembered, though. A blond boy in an incongruously neat suit among a ship full of pirate cooks, his pretty face pale, his blue eyes brilliant as summertime and wet with unshed tears.
Isn’t it easy? Abandon your stupid dream!
A stupid dream that Sanji was apparently willing to die for, now.
Oh, Zoro thought, and everything suddenly made sense.
Even back at Arlong Park, before they really knew each other, they’d settled into step immediately, falling in back-to-back as they faced down an enemy with the routine simplicity of a muscle contracting. Sanji pivoted to match Zoro’s fighting style with a speed that even the paired bounty hunters who’d worked together for years would’ve envied; he didn’t even need to look in Zoro’s direction before offering him a boost or protecting his back. When Zoro got serious, Sanji seemed to understand him intuitively.
His quick agreement with Zoro’s complicated decoy plan in Alabasta. His easy acquiescence when Zoro asked him for a ten second truce on the Groggy Ring field. The way he backed Zoro up in Water 7 when Luffy had wanted to chase Usopp down and ask him to come back, even though Zoro knew Sanji missed Usopp too, maybe more than anybody else on the crew.
The sharp edges of Sanji’s temper, the hectic flush of red in his cheeks, the way everything about him made Zoro want to swing a fist or break a glass or press bared teeth to the perfect line of his throat. The way they’d sometimes wake up in a pile on the Merry’s well-worn floor, Sanji’s head on Zoro’s arm or his ankle hooked around Zoro’s leg or his palm flat and open on Zoro’s chest.
Sanji, dropping a plate of food into his lap and settling next to him as the bonfire turned his hair to spun gold in the strange, cloudless Skypiea evening. Sanji, passing plates for him to dry – the bump of their shoulders together as they crowded the sink, the shape of his mouth around Zoro’s name. Sanji, bending down with his hand outstretched, the bare hint of a laugh in his voice as he said, You’ll catch a cold. The focused burn of his eye when they sparred. His clever fingers, gentle as he cleaned Wado’s bare blade – the only object Zoro had ever held dear.
Sanji loved him. He’d been showing him this whole time. It was Zoro’s own dumb fault he hadn’t been listening.
Zoro allowed himself a moment to think about what it would’ve felt like, if the roles had been reversed. If he’d stepped up to Sanji’s side and offered his own life in exchange for Sanji’s, only to be struck from behind and knocked out cold. If it had been him, shaking and helpless, desperately trying to find what he could only assume would be Sanji’s dead body. If it had been him carrying Sanji back to the ship, heartbeat silenced, breath stopped. Sanji’s blood on his hands. The image sent a hot roil of nausea twisting through his stomach.
Sanji had held him up. Sanji had saved his life. Sanji had offered to die in Zoro’s place so that Zoro could chase his dream.
“What about your dream, huh?” he asked, and his voice came out unsteady and strained. “Who’s gonna find the fucking All Blue if you die, huh? Me?”
“Please. You couldn’t find your way out of a wet paper bag, mosshead,” Sanji said, but he looked startled.
Zoro stepped forward, into Sanji’s space, setting a hand on the counter and leaning his head toward Sanji’s shoulder. Close enough that he could feel the heat off Sanji’s skin. “I don’t regret what I did,” he said, quietly.
“Of course you don’t,” Sanji said, the look of open surprise in his expression closing off, just a little.
Zoro reached out and caught Sanji’s chin between his forefinger and thumb, holding him in place before he could turn away. “I wanted to protect the crew. I wanted to protect Luffy. I also wanted to protect you. I can’t regret that, and I would do it again a thousand times. But I am sorry that I made you feel helpless, and I’m sorry I left you to pick up the pieces.”
“You didn’t make me feel anything,” Sanji said, mulishly. “I was too weak to help you and I was too weak to protect the crew. I failed.”
“That’s not what fucking happened,” Zoro snapped.
“How the fuck is it not?”
“Don’t you get it? Aren’t you the one who told Usopp that we can only do what we can do? This was something I could do. Carrying me back to Chopper – holding this crew together – protecting them when I couldn’t. Those are things that you could do. I couldn’t have laid my life on the line like that without knowing you were there to take care of everyone else.”
Sanji’s face did something very complicated at that. “You… you don’t think I’m weak. Or a failure,” he said, his tone somewhere between dubious and utterly incredulous.
“The hell? No, I fucking don’t. You’re a serious pain in the ass sometimes, but you’re definitely not weak.”
A tear spilled over in Sanji’s visible eye and sped down his cheek.
“What? What did I say?” Zoro asked, alarmed.
“Shut up, mosshead,” Sanji said, hotly. He smudged the tear off his cheek with the back of his hand and turned away, hiding his face.
“Cut that shit out,” Zoro said, reaching out to catch Sanji’s face between his palms. “Look at me, cook.”
Sanji hissed at him like a pissed-off cat, but met Zoro’s eyes.
“I can’t promise that nothing like this will happen again,” Zoro began.
Sanji clicked his tongue. “That’s obvious. Self-sacrificial idiot.”
“And I’m no good at this kind of thing,” Zoro continued, gamely letting that comment pass unchallenged. “Thought you wanted – I dunno. A beautiful princess. An epic romance. Flowers and chocolate and stuff. Not sure why the hell you’d be interested in me.”
“If you’re saying my taste in men is terrible, trust me, I already know,” Sanji said, a note of wry humor creeping into his voice. “I did want that stuff, I guess. And then I met you. Now none of it seems like it matters all that much, somehow.”
“Be sure,” Zoro warned him.
Sanji’s brow furrowed. “Be – what? Zoro, what are you—?”
Zoro softened his grip on Sanji’s face, his hands sliding down to cradle the line of his jaw. “Kick me in the shin if you hate this,” he said, and then he ducked forward and kissed him on the mouth.
Zoro’s lips landed a little off-center of where he was aiming, crushing against the corner of Sanji’s mouth. It was a little too much pressure, nearly bruising, and Sanji wasn’t responding, so he released his grip on Sanji’s face and reared back.
Sanji stumbled a half-step backward, eyes wide and frantic, like Zoro had driven his knuckles into his stomach rather than kissing him on the lips.
“What the hell?” he whispered, reaching up to touch his mouth. “Are you messing with me?”
Zoro levied him with an extremely unimpressed look.
“Right,” Sanji said, sounding dazed. “Right. Then… You too? For real?”
“Yeah,” Zoro said. “Me, too. For real.”
“Since when?” Sanji demanded.
Zoro shrugged. “Not sure. I noticed it for the first time in Little Garden, but it might’ve started sooner.”
“You’re kidding me. All this time?” Sanji said. The corner of his mouth twitched, and then he was beaming, that rare, bright smile that forgot to be suave or handsome or cool. His All Blue smile. “Wow. So the Demon Swordsman of the East Blue had a crush on me? That’s so embarrassing for you.”
“Oi, asshole, you literally just told me you were in love with me,” Zoro complained, but Sanji was stepping into his space, sliding his hand up Zoro’s shoulder to curl around the back of his neck.
“You be sure, too,” Sanji said, quietly. “I don’t want you to be with me out of pity.”
Zoro scoffed. “Like I’d be with somebody I pitied.”
“The things you say, mosshead,” Sanji said, but he was smiling and there was something sweet and joyful and nearly adoring in his gaze as he reeled Zoro in to kiss him again.
The angle was better this time. Sanji’s mouth slid against Zoro’s, hot and wet and open, fingers curling into the overgrown hair at the nape of his neck, other palm pressing flat against Zoro’s chest, directly above his heart. Zoro folded his arms around Sanji, hands splayed across his back, chasing the mingled taste of cigarette smoke and red wine on Sanji’s tongue.
“I’m not gonna be good at this,” Zoro warned him, tracing the tip of his nose up Sanji’s jawline, pressing an open-mouthed kiss to the spot directly below his ear.
“I’d say you’re doing pretty all right,” Sanji said faintly.
Zoro huffed a laugh, muffled by the curve of Sanji’s throat. “I meant… this. The – I don’t know. Relationship, thing. I’m not gonna magically get good at it overnight.”
“I didn’t fall in love with you thinking you were secretly Prince Charming,” Sanji said, dismissively. “And it’s not like I know what I’m doing, either. Shut your mouth, mosshead, you can rib me about my inexperience when I’m feeling a little less emotionally vulnerable.”
Zoro obediently held his tongue.
“I’m not gonna be good at this, either,” Sanji added, turning his face away from Zoro’s, as though that would make the scarlet heat in his cheeks less obvious. “I’m a mess, Zoro. My issues have issues. I just… I think I’m probably hard to love.”
“No, you’re not,” Zoro said.
Sanji blinked. “I – what?”
Zoro reached up and touched Sanji’s forehead, just above his eyebrow. He drew his fingertips to the side, taking the curtain of Sanji’s bangs with them. “It’s been easy enough for me,” he said, with a shrug.
Sanji’s eyes, horribly, filled with tears again.
Zoro blanched, rearing back. “What the hell did I say wrong this time?”
“Nothing,” Sanji said, wetly. “Dammit. You said everything completely right. Come here, Zoro.”
Sanji leaned forward and fervently kissed him again. This time, the flavors of smoke and wine mingled with salt. Zoro leaned back and smudged the tears off Sanji’s cheeks with the back of his knuckles.
“You’re such a crybaby,” Zoro said, fondly.
“We can’t all be impenetrable stoic walls,” Sanji sniffled. “Now go back to your sickbed, invalid. Chopper’s going to kill us if you pull a stitch, plus I’m already disastrously behind schedule on dinner and Luffy’s going to start tormenting me in about fifteen minutes.”
“I don’t need any more damn bed rest,” Zoro snapped, but he let Sanji plant his hands on his shoulders and steer him out of the kitchen.
“I’ll come and get you when everything’s ready,” Sanji told him. “If you’re good, I’ll even sneak you some sake after dinner, without telling Chopper.”
“Cook,” Zoro said, and Sanji halted. “Thank you.”
“For what?” Sanji asked, looking baffled. “The sake?”
For carrying me back to the Sunny. For taking care of this crew. For kissing me like that. For telling me you love me, even as I am. For being the kind of man I could lean on, over and over again, and for being the kind of man who’d act like bearing that weight took nothing at all.
“For taking care of my swords,” Zoro said, which was as close to saying all of that as he could imagine himself coming.
Sanji’s face split into an enormous grin. “Sure, mosshead,” he said. “Anytime.”
He woke that night to a blond figure standing uncertainly by the side of his bunk. Zoro wordlessly opened his eyes and reached out a hand. Sanji, his blush visible even in the dim light of the men’s sleeping quarters, hauled himself up and into Zoro’s bed. He slid under the covers and let Zoro tug him into his side.
“Surprised you’re not pitching a fit about this,” Zoro whispered.
“It’s easier than waking up in a pile on the floor,” Sanji hissed back, tucking his face into the space between Zoro’s shoulder and his throat. “You’re like a fucking space heater.”
“Yeah, well, your feet are fucking freezing,” Zoro answered, hauling Sanji closer and curling an arm around his waist.
“I’m really glad you’re alive, you stupid swordsman,” Sanji muttered, his legs threading between Zoro’s. Zoro could feel his breath against his pulse point, the rhythmic thud of his heart against his own ribcage.
Zoro buried his face in Sanji’s hair and whispered, “Yeah, cook. Me, too.”