Chapter Text
Zoro has to hurry. He snuck away from the grove today, ducking behind the other children as Koshiro lead them through their kata, quietly slinking through the bamboo until it was safe enough to run. If he doesn’t hurry he’ll be found out again, and Koshiro will sigh and scold him, a disappointment in his eyes that always makes Zoro’s stomach turn queasy, or worse: Koshiro’s wife really will just ban him from their house this time.
She’s off visiting the Hanadas across the village today, apparently. Tomo saw her leave just after breakfast. That means she’ll have left the house alone for a good three or four hours, and more importantly, that she’ll have left Kuina alone.
His best friend’s been locked inside for months now, ever since her accident. One slip down the stairs and her life shattered around her, along with her leg. It’s still in a cast, now, but it’s better. Her head is as well. The thick swathes of weeping red bandages are gone, only an angry scar left in its place. Her stitches have already come out. Even her hair is growing back in. Koshiro won’t let her practice with the rest of them yet, but she still tries, moving slowly together through their kata with Zoro when he visits. It’s the reason her parents don’t like him visiting her anymore. He’s encouraging bad habits, apparently, as though it wasn’t Kuina’s idea in the first place. Whatever. This is why he’s sneaking in.
Zoro climbs up the stone steps leading to the front door, sliding it open and running across the house to Kuina’s room. She used to be up on the second floor, but they moved her down ever since the accident.
He grins to himself, excitement rushing through him as he reaches for the bedroom door, only to slam face-first into something.
“Oh dear,” a soft voice says, and Zoro stumbles back.
He looks up at the woman, rubbing his forehead where it caught the hilt of her sword, holstered at her hip. She’s tall. Taller than even Koshiro, and slender as the branch of a tree, despite how strong her hands are when she sets them on his shoulders. Her eyes are very dark where they peek through her hair, the inky, silk-straight strands falling around the both of them when she bends over him in concern. It’s a black curtain around them. She thumbs at his forehead and whispers, an amused quirk to her bare lips, “I’m sorry, Zoro, I didn’t see you there. Are you okay?”
The words ‘ how do you know my name?’ get caught in his throat. Tongue thick in his mouth, face warm, he just nods.
“You’re sure?” she asks, and he nods again. “That’s good. You’ve gotten so big now! But oh, you must be here to see Kuina, right? I’ll see you later, then.”
She straightens up and waves at him, and he waves back. Her smile widens, pale cheeks flushing pink, and she sets a hand on his head and musses his hair up, giggling, “Oh, you’re just so adorable,” before finally leaving, her long hair swaying like a shining banner as she walks. Zoro watches her go, both hands raised over his head protectively.
Kuina’s door is still open. She’s sitting on her futon, watching the woman leave too, having watched the whole interaction, probably.
“Who was that?” Zoro asks, coming over to sit beside her.
“Natsuo,” Kuina whispers, starstruck.
Natsuo was one of the older boys at the dojo, helping instruct the younger children when more hands were needed. He— she, apparently, left Shimotsuki almost a year after Zoro joined the dojo. Went off to be a body guard for some rich merchant the island over. It’s been years since Zoro saw her. He didn’t think he ever would again. Most of the boys who leave home don’t come back.
She did, though, and returned so different from before. Not just because she’s a woman, but because she teaches, now. She came to the dojo to pay her respects, but she ends up settling into a small house in town and holding calligraphy classes for the children. Sometimes a few of the kids from the dojo will go to her and she’ll teach them for free, as a thank you to Koshiro for raising her. Zoro goes a few times. He doesn’t like calligraphy, is pretty awful at it too, but he likes her. She’s nice and she pinches his cheeks sometimes when he visits, says he’s so cute that she just wants to eat him right up, and even though Zoro’s old enough by now to find that annoying from any other adult that tries to treat him like a kid, he doesn’t mind it much from her.
Kuina goes to the classes, too. Her mother used to take her, but now that her leg’s all better she goes on her own. It’s one of the few things she’s allowed to do now, since Koshiro won’t let her pick up a sword again, despite how much she’s recovered. So it’s calligraphy classes by day, and then practicing with Zoro deep in the forest where no one else can find them after.
A little over a year after Kuina’s accident, she tells Zoro, sat down upon leaf litter with a bokken in her lap, “I’m going to be a boy when I grow up.”
Zoro, in the middle of whacking a tree with his own wooden swords, one in his left hand and two trying to balance in his right, doesn’t really get it. “Okay,” he says. Then he goes back to his whacking.
A few months later, Kuina comes back from calligraphy class with a new name. “It’s written like this,” he says, holding up a piece of thin paper inked with thick strokes, two characters spelling it out. “Akito.” His calligraphy is always so much neater than Zoro’s. It’s probably the best out of all of them. Yet another thing for Akito to lord over him.
“Mine is spelled like this,” Zoro says, showing off his own paper.
Akito reads it and laughs. “That’s sword, idiot, not Zoro.”
“It’s cool,” Zoro tells him. Because it is.
Akito laughs again.
Another year goes by, more of the same. Akito’s bedroom is still on the first floor, never to be moved upstairs again. He still isn’t allowed to come back to training. He goes to calligraphy once a week now instead of twice, and his mother enrolls him in a sewing course one of the grandmothers across town has started hosting. He goes there most days, comes back early to spar with Zoro in the woods, and does not stir up a fuss when his parents still call him a girl, because he hasn’t told them yet.
One day Zoro slips up and calls him a ‘he’ in front of Koshiro— he’s allowed to visit again, now that Akito and he don’t practice their kata together in the house— and Koshiro laughs. He gives Zoro a funny look, like he’s too old to be making silly grammar mistakes like that. A few days later, Akito comes back from calligraphy and tells him to use ‘they’ instead.
When Zoro is 15 and Akito is 16, they decide to leave.
Zoro has never held any ill-will for Shimotsuki, but Akito has been stewing in their own resentment for their home for years, now. Even the name of their village sounds sour on their tongue. They need to get out, finally. They need to be anywhere but there. And Zoro is the one who made them swear one of the two would be the world’s greatest swordsman, so of course he has to leave with them.
Bounty hunting isn’t a terrible way to make a living. They’re strong individually and even stronger together, so picking off small-time pirates in exchange for berry gets them by while they wander around. Dracule Mihawk is the one who holds the title of world’s greatest, apparently, so they train and practice and try to figure out how the hell they’re supposed to find him. The next few years pass like that. It’s peaceful. Then when he’s 19 Zoro picks a fight with Axe-Hand Morgan’s son and gets strung up, and Akito comes to save him along with a rubbery kid by the name of Luffy.
Luffy’s a fine guy, in Zoro’s book. He has big dreams too: wants to be King of the Pirates. Knows he’ll be King of the Pirates. They get along like a house on fire. Akito, because they’ve been attached at the hip for the past four years, follows Zoro as Zoro follows Luffy, and they all start collecting crew like a crow collects treasure.
The Baratie is their most eventful stop by far.
There’s the mouthy blonde cook, firstly, this guy with mile-long legs and funny eyebrows who makes something spark and burn in Zoro when they argue. He’s one of those people who mistakes Akito for a girl at first, but unlike a lot of those other assholes, he manages to correct himself before Zoro even has to threaten to take his head off— which is almost a shame, considering he wants to pick a fight.
Then, there's Mihawk.
“You are going to die,” Akito tells him, more serious than they’ve ever been before. “Zoro. Don’t fight him.”
“If I die then I wasn’t worthy of being the greatest swordsman in the first place,” Zoro snaps. He ties his bandana around his head, adjusting it low over his eyes.
Akito yanks him back, nails digging hard into his shoulder. Zoro watches them in silence, daring them to say more. To insinuate anything further.
Zoro shoves them off and whips around, fisting his hand into the collar of Akito’s shirt, dragging them closer. “You’re not giving up on our dream, are you?” he asks. “Because that’s what it sounds like.” Betrayal is what it sounds like.
Akito glares back at him even more ferociously. “No,” they say. “I’m just smart enough to see where we are compared to him, and not enough of an idiot to let my best friend die before he’s 20!”
They try to shove Zoro away, but Zoro only grabs on tighter, and then Nami pries her way in between them like she has any right at all to interrupt this fight, pulling them apart.
“Stay out of this,” Zoro snarls at her, and Nami shoots him a positively venomous look over her shoulder.
“Die on your own if you want to,” she tells him, “but don't drag Akito into it too.”
Zoro looses. Zoro also, pointedly, does not die.
“You’re still an idiot,” Akito tells him, as though he hadn’t gotten Dracule fucking Mihawk to acknowledge him this way.
Zoro rolls his eyes. Whatever.
“You think you have a right to act like that when I’ve got my hands in your guts?” they ask. They pull tighter at the sutures they’re currently stitching into his skin, and Zoro grits his teeth against the flash of pain that causes. The rocking of the boat as they chase after Nami doesn’t help either. It’s a good thing he didn’t eat before the duel this morning.
“You’ll kill me before Mihawk ever could,” Zoro hisses, and Akito only yanks harder.
“I’m saving your life, you ungrateful piece of shit. I swear to— if you could promise Luffy you’re not going to lose again, then you can promise me you’re not going to die before me.”
“I’m not—”
“Zoro,” Akito says, stern. “I will never stitch you up again, for as long as I live, okay?”
So, what: they won’t be here to clean up after his mistakes? They’ll wash their hands of him completely? That makes him even sicker to think about than the wounds and waves do.
“Fine,” Zoro mutters. “I promise. Whatever gets you off my back.”
“Good.”
Then they sit there and keep stitching him up again, anger slightly abated, gentler than before.
Akito’s anger starts to cool off by the time they hit the Grand Line, but Zoro’s still not over it. It would be one thing to see the strongest person he knows, someone who’s beaten Zoro in every match they’ve had since they were children, lose to the Dracule Mihawk. It’s another thing entirely to see that person not even try.
Akito is not supposed to be scared of anything— if they are, then where does that leave Zoro?
Zoro wakes up late one morning after nightwatch, stretching out in his hammock and yawning in what’s supposed to be an empty room. Instead, when he looks, Akito is sitting cross-legged on the floor of the boy’s bedroom, head bent over their lap, shoulders shaking.
Zoro is out of the hammock in a second, kneeling before them. “What is it?” he asks, hands hovering over them, trying to spot any injuries. But there is no blood nor tears. Akito just looks up to glare at him, fingers white-knuckling a syringe.
“You’re messing me up,” they snap, trying to shove him away. Zoro falls back, staring at the long needle.
“You’re sick?” he chokes out.
“No. It’s my T shot, Zoro.” Akito rolls their eyes. Zoro remembers Chopper mentioning something about that, at the same time he scolded Akito for the particular way they bound their chest. That was back when they first picked the reindeer up from Drum, but he must have figured something out since then. Picked up testosterone at the latest island, maybe, or figured out how to make it himself.
“Chopper’s not helping you?” Zoro asks, watching the way Akito’s fingers tremble.
They shrug. “It’s my transition. I should— I want to do it.”
So they say, but they still sit there glaring at their thigh like it’s offended them, jaw tense as they try to work up the courage to inject themself. The tip of the needle wavers. It switches hands as they wipe their palm on their shorts, drying the nervous sweat off, and they haven’t told him to leave yet. Zoro leans forward and holds his hand out.
“I’m not Chopper,” he says, and doesn’t say exactly what he is, maybe because he doesn’t quite know. A friend. Family. The only person in the world who was there every step of the way, to watch Akito as they became Akito.
“Guess you’re not,” they respond, and place the syringe in his hand.
Zoro lines up the needle and pushes it in, steady and easy, and sees Akito’s fingers digging into the floor in his periphery. Pained, yes, but no longer trembling in fear.
Akito, for as long as Zoro has known them, has been the strongest and most fearless person in their little world. But that’s not right anymore, out on the high seas, beyond the bubble of childhood. Luffy is here, and Dracule Mihawk is even further away, and even with Crocodile behind them, the Grand Line looms menacingly overhead. Akito is afraid of dying to Mihawk, and is afraid of needles, and is afraid of other people looking at them and seeing a woman… but they’re brave enough to let Zoro do this for them.
“I’m not dying before you,” Zoro tells them quietly, slipping the needle out cleanly once he’s finished the injection. “I promise.”
There’s little Zoro has to say about fighting a false god, about almost losing Robin, and even about almost dying himself. The real strangeness is what comes after.
Sanji is weird around him— jittery, flustered, panicked. Like he won’t leave him alone for one second. Zoro reaches for water and it’s already in his hand, he starts to feel hungry and lunch is already at his bedside, and the worst part of all this hovering is that Sanji isn’t even there to see it through. He comes and goes, flitting through the infirmary like a ghost, never staying long enough to pick a fight with. It’s irritating beyond belief. Even when Zoro is discharged and Chopper finally lets him go, Sanji still treats him like he’s breakable.
Shouldn’t Kuma have been a wake up call that he isn’t? That Zoro can get through whatever’s needed without breaking at all?
Akito pulls him aside and tells Zoro to get his shit together, with a meaningful look directed at Sanji. “He’s losing it,” they tell Zoro. As though he couldn’t already tell.
“What’s that got to do with me?”
“Use your brain,” Akito says, affect flat. Then they think better of it. They point to Zoro’s chest, right above his stained bandages. “Use your heart. This is getting painful to watch.”
Whatever that means.
Zoro climbs up to the crow’s nest for nightwatch that same night, muscles aching and barely-stitched wounds twinging. Chopper gave him another checkup before dinner, offering more painkillers, but he denied them in favor of allowing himself some sake again, for the first time in ages. He pulls himself through the hatch, keeping his breathing carefully even to mitigate the sharp sting spreading through his body, from the cuts along his ribs and the bruises along his thigh, and finds Sanji where Zoro’s supposed to be. Sitting on the cushioned bench, he stares out the window and keeps watch even though it isn’t even his turn. A cigarette smokes from between his lips. An ashtray is full to the brim on the windowsill.
“You shouldn’t be up,” Sanji mutters, twisting the cigarette out of his mouth, between his fingers. His face is shadowed dark in the moonlight. His shoulders are stiff and tight.
“Fuck off, I can do whatever I want,” Zoro says. And then still stands there for a moment to gather himself, feeling the pain leech out of him as his muscles decompress. He loiters, shifting his weight from foot to foot, eyeing the seat beside Sanji’s with longing. But he refuses to sit on principle. “It’s my turn to keep watch. Get lost already.”
Sanji scoffs. “And let you pass out all alone up here? A sea king could show up and you’d probably fall down the ladder and die before you warned anyone.”
“As if. You wanna go? I’ll kick your ass right now, just say the word.” Zoro finds his swords at his side, Shusui’s grip unfamiliar but bitingly powerful under his fingers.
Sanji glares at him, unmoving from his spot, cigarette held so tightly between his fingers that it bends. “Newsflash, fucking idiot. Some of us don’t want to watch you die right before our very eyes! Maybe I’ll fight you again when you’re not about to collapse from a well-placed sneeze, Mosshead.”
“A little spar wouldn’t kill me! Piss off, Cook, you callin’ me weak after all that?”
Sanji stands abruptly, grinding his cigarette out into the ashtray, snowdrifts of gray spilling over the windowsill into the room. He marches up to Zoro and makes as if to grab him, or lay his hands on him somehow, but he doesn’t. Zoro knows even if he did it would never be to hurt him, because Sanji has all these rules about fighting and using his hands— but if not that, then what? What does he intend to do when he reaches out with both his hands and then stops, pulling back with a frustrated sound low in his throat.
“You are the most frustrating person I know,” Sanji whispers viciously. “You almost died in my arms a few days ago, asshole, of course I’m worried about you.”
“Well— stop,” Zoro stammers, hand tight around his swords. Not out of intent to fight anymore, but just for comfort, maybe.
“Stop? Stop? You think I can just stop this?” Sanji sounds a bit hysterical. His hands find his own hair, running through it, tugging the ends, like no matter what he can’t get it to sit right.
“What’s wrong with you?” Zoro asks, mouth moving before he can determine that it probably isn’t the best thing to say right at this moment. He steps back, fingers still so tight around Shusui’s hilt, hunched and defensive and wide-eyed. Because really, there is something wrong with Sanji, isn’t there? This is unprecedented. Weird, even.
Sanji lets out a hollow little laugh. “What's wrong is that I’m in love with you, dumbass. So sorry I can’t stop worrying about you dying.”
Zoro cannot find the words quick enough. Each moment that goes by, nothing around them but the riotous waves outside and Sanji’s slowly wilting form as Zoro stares at him silently, only makes it harder to speak. To think, even. Because this is uncalled for. Sanji doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Surely he didn’t mean it. Surely Zoro heard wrong.
“You— no you don’t,” Zoro finally settles on. Because he doesn’t.
“I think I would know what I feel,” Sanji mutters. Bitter, and a little condescending. Zoro can’t help but bristle.
“You don’t! You like girls.”
“So a guy can’t be bi anymore? Fuck this shitty world we live in.” Sanji heads back to the window, grabbing a pack of cigarettes from the sill. He dumps it all out, two pitiful sticks rolling out into his palm. He lets out a miserable sigh and places one between his lips and stuffs the other back into the box, finding his lighter in his pocket. “Whatever. Just get lost, okay? Scram.”
Then, because this is the easiest part to respond to, Zoro spits out a “like I’m a cat? Get lost yourself, shit— fucking asshole. Whatever.” And then still scrams anyway, climbing back down the rope ladder, grumbling to himself, the burning pain in his limbs all drowned out by the chorus of I’m in love with you echoing around his head.
So. New problem Zoro never expected to have. His crewmate is in love with him.
Sanji specifically, which is weird. Like. Okay. Members of the crew Sanji is supposedly in love with: Nami, Robin, and now Zoro. Three out of nine is a crazy ratio, isn’t it? 33%? Is he aiming to hit 40% by the end of the fiscal year?
Shit-talking aside, it’s just downright odd. Zoro doesn’t believe him at first, obviously. He knows what a Sanji in love looks like. It looks like kneeling at Nami’s feet to buckle up the thin straps of her heels for her. It looks like spending hours perfecting a new recipe to Robin’s particular tastes and then serving it to her with a bunch of garish, violet and lavender garnishes. It doesn’t look like days spent worrying over Zoro’s every move, stressing himself out to the point of dark undereyes and nails bitten to the quick. Only now, it apparently does.
What is he supposed to do with this information? Nothing, apparently. Sanji goes on about his day like he hasn’t confessed anything life-altering at all. He expects Zoro to as well, clearly, but that’s a hard thing to do when he can’t help but be aware of Sanji now in a way he never was before.
He’s always thought their cook was attractive, sure, but there’s a difference between seeing the way light catches the blonde edges of his hair at sunset to set it aflame, quietly appreciating that to himself, and watching him while he cooks. Strong arms, strong hands, the cut of his knife quick and precise. Easy and quiet as a fish through water. His head bent over the cutting board as he pares away flesh from the delicate bones of a butterfish, falling over his dark eyes such that only flashes of the deep blue peak through the curtain.
Zoro leaves the galley with his water forgotten on the kitchen table, head stuffed full of the scent of brine and ink and memories of coming home from calligraphy class with flushed, pinched cheeks and something new blooming in his gut.
There is a difference between seeing Sanji handle a knife and thinking, oh, that’s pretty neat, and watching him sharpen the blade on a whetstone nowadays and thinking he loves me.
There is a difference, Zoro knows, between seeing and watching.
There is also a difference between the way the boys and girls Akito and he met up with while bounty hunting would call out to him with sly looks and charming smirks, running their hands up his biceps and shoulders because they wanted him to press them into the bricks of a back alley and bruise kisses into their mouths, and the way Sanji loves him.
—Draping his jacket over Nami’s shoulders when she comes back from a day out sunbathing in nothing but her bikini, picking white flowers to arrange into a careful bouquet because he knows Robin likes them the best, and making onigiri and ochazuke day after day for Zoro even while the rest of the crew gets pasta or sandwiches.
Popping into the infirmary or bunk room or aquarium lounge every once in a while just to see if he can find Zoro. Just to see him with his own two eyes for even a second before going back to whatever it is he was doing.
Blushing red whenever he finds Zoro working out shirtless when he should be resting— but instead of watching him all flushed, wanting, eyes dragging over his form, Sanji just yells at him to rest and not overwork himself, something pleading and miserable in the wild of his visible eye.
Worry looks good on Sanji, he notices. Worry for Zoro specifically.
It’s in the curl of his lips around his fourth-too-many cigarette, and the way he folds himself into the seat directly next to him at dinner, long limbs slick and graceful. It’s the intensity of his gaze. In the way he gains this fragility— this desperation. This gentility. It’s nothing as simple as familiar desire.
Zoro watches the way Sanji loves him and wonders why he wants to taste it. Why saliva pools on his tongue when he slips and has to catch himself on the bathroom doorframe and Sanji holds him up, reflexively, cool hands wrapped tight around his bicep, eyes tracking not Zoro’s naked body, modesty shielded by nothing more than a slipping towel, but lit with frustration and boring straight into his eyes.
“Thanks,” Zoro tells him, breathless.
“Sure,” Sanji mutters, bitter, resentful. “Whatever.” And then he holds onto him tight even after Zoro rights himself, like if he digs his fingers in hard enough he can bypass the muscle entirely and make his way into the bone.
Love is a strange thing.
Zoro has not been loved by anyone in this world other than his dead parents and Akito, probably. Koshiro is a hard maybe. His wife was a definite no. Zoro was one among many in a sea of orphans at the dojo, all of them vying for scraps of affection and ambition like baby birds screeching and leaping out of their nests, begging for hacked-up food. Some of them formed lifelong friendships with each other, forging their own little families of siblings to brave the waves. Zoro, who had always been a loner until Akito, and who remained even more lonely after them, never cared for the others. His family was the proprietor's son and no one else. The only other person who might have come close to loving him was the swordswoman who taught him calligraphy once a week.
He has his friends now, sure. Luffy loves him, Usopp and Nami love him, Robin should, and Franky and Brook… might, one day. It might be too soon to say for sure. Becoming crewmates sort of fasttracks anyone to that position. Strangers one second, family the next.
But none of those are romantic love. Zoro has rarely been loved before now, and never in the way that Sanji means. That’s what really throws him off.
“Why?” he demands one day, and Sanji looks close to throwing the cast-iron skillet in his hands right at Zoro’s head.
“Just because,” Sanji snaps, ears flushing tantalizingly red. “I just do, jackass!”
“You have to have a reason,” Zoro insists. How could you just fall in love with someone for no reason? Just like that? Liking is one thing, attraction is another, ‘ I want to spend the rest of my life with you’ love is something else entirely. It’s driving him crazy, trying to figure it out. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure, Mosshead, I know what being in love feels like!”
“You won’t back out?”
“I— what?”
“You won’t fall out of love with me?”
Sanji stares at him. Slack-jawed in shock for a moment, then slowly hardening into resolve, fingers tight around the skillet. He turns the stove off and for the first time ever leaves lunch forgotten behind him as he turns to Zoro and tells him, firm, angry, “Of course not. I don’t half-ass things, especially not this.”
“Good,” Zoro says, like it’s a challenge. “Then, okay. We can— do this.”
“This?”
Zoro gestures between them. As though there’s something tangible between them in the air, a line connecting them together.
“You don’t love me back,” Sanji says, and for the first time since he confessed, he doesn’t sound angry about his love. There’s nothing frustrated or furious in the tone of his voice. Just vulnerable. That, too, is its own brand of curious temptation. It makes something slither its way up Zoro’s spine, shivering against his bones, electrifying his heart.
“I could,” Zoro tells him instead of answering. It’s a bargain, maybe. He didn’t think he’d have to persuade him. Sanji loves the girls freely, without expectation of reciprocation, and clearly planned the same for Zoro but— surely, he’d like something in return, right?
Sanji just watches him for one long moment. The vulnerability starts to look a little something like hope. “You won’t back out?”
“I don’t half-ass things either, Cook— Sanji.” The name is new, fresh, tastes like adventure on his tongue. Like some new fish they caught or fruit they discovered on some uninhabited Grand Line island and Sanji cooked up. “Sanji,” Zoro says again, just to say it, and Sanji warms, stumbling back into the counter, catching himself on it, thin wrists bent and long fingers trembling, cheeks bitably pink.
“Yeah,” Sanji says. “Okay.”
Dating Sanji is even stranger. Not that they get much of a chance to really dig into it, before things go to shit. In the next week they’ll be split up at Sabaody. In the next few days Zoro will fall in love with Sanji too.
It goes like this:
By night—
Zoro, fumbling with his bandages fresh out of the shower, stitches pulling, biting at his skin, Chopper asleep for the night already.
Sanji, up late as always, walking in on him in the bunk room. Silently taking those bandages, kicking Zoro’s shin softly until he scoots over, then sitting on the bed right beside him, thigh to thigh, knee to knee, deft hands already wrapping around his bicep. Cool against his damp, hot skin. Holding the bandages close. Biting tape off with his teeth. Looking up at Zoro while he secures it.
Zoro, handing more gauze over. Wanting to feel those hands on the rest of him too.
By day—
Sanji, setting a simple plate of grilled fish and rice in front of him, smiling at Zoro’s own smile, dragging his fingers firm up through his hair. The back of Zoro’s head. The nape of his neck.
Zoro, shuddering. Grabbing his hand. Pulling it in. Stopping, unsure, with that hand warm on his collarbone, Sanji pressed up behind him, crew all around them already digging into lunch.
Sanji, taking pity on him, maybe. Mouth pressed into the crown of his head. Warm tingling up his spine.
Zoro is going crazy with affection. He finds Sanji some days just because he craves it, sitting at the kitchen table just to watch him cook, hoping he deigns to dole out some kindness. Waiting patiently until his boyfriend— boyfriend, what an idea— finally sets something in the oven to cook and pulls up a chair beside him, resting his cheek on Zoro’s back. Holding his hand under the table. Hooking their ankles together.
“Hey,” he says, the day before they dock at Sabaody, coming up to join Sanji on nightwatch. Because he can’t sleep. Because he wants to touch and be touched.
He sits on the bench beside Sanji, following him when he shuffles over to make room, pressing them both together until not a breath of air remains between them. He sets his head on Sanji’s shoulder because he knows he can. Turns his face into Sanji’s neck because it smells like cologne, and presses his mouth into it because Sanji will let him.
“Get off,” Sanji grumbles, but makes no effort to push him away. “You’re heavy, you sack of shit. Goddamnit.”
“You love me,” Zoro reminds him. As though it means he’s obligated to indulge Zoro’s every whim.
“Fuck you.”
“Hey,” Zoro asks, quiet into the space between them, this cloud of giddy warmth expanding beneath his ribs. “Why haven’t you kissed me yet?”
“You— don’t—”
“I do.”
“Don’t read my mind, jackass. Grassy bastard,” Sanji mutters, running his fingers through Zoro’s hair, rubbing at his scalp. “Mossy.”
“So, you going to? Or do I have to?”
Zoro pulls away, watching the way Sanji licks his lips. The pink tip of his tongue just barely visible. That ever-present embarrassed blush bloomed across his face yet again.
He leans in. Sanji doesn’t stop him. And it’s not quite what he expected, when their mouths meet, slow and awkward, nervous and ill-practiced, gentility a stranger to one of them and persistent desire to the other.
“This is so stupid,” Sanji whispers against his mouth, already curling in on himself, but Zoro gives chase.
“You taste like shit,” Zoro whispers back. “Those fuckin’ cigs of yours—” Then goes in for more.
Sanji laughs, then, so hard it hurts, warm against Zoro’s mouth, lips bumping into each other, his arm trying to push Zoro away again by the shoulder. But the sound— the sweetness of it. Of Sanji giggling against his lips and pulling away, then pushing back in, pressing a sweet kiss once, twice into his mouth, then away again.
“Come back here,” Zoro whines— whines! actually whines!— coming in closer, heart tripping over itself in his chest. And it’s then that he figures it out.
“I do,” he tells Sanji, crawling up into him, like he can fit their bodies together forever. Glued tight, stitched shut.
“Wha—”
“Not I ‘could’ love you,” he says between kisses. “I do.”
“Oh.”
“Mmh—”
“Oh!”
Sanji pushes him away, hands tight on his biceps, like he’s digging into the bones, hair a curtain over his dark eyes, face warm and gaze intense, and with all the force he said it the first time, tells him again— “I love you too.”