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Chapter Text

Sanji was a chef by training, not a patissier, and thus the number of desserts he could confidently make far more limited than his usual repertoire of recipes. Sweet snacks or after-dinner treats were simple things like pound cakes and a few rotating varieties of cookies; or, when he thought Nami deserved something extra fancy, handmade ice cream, usually served up as a parfait. 

But now that there was an honest-to-goodness princess on board the Going Merry with them, Sanji had become determined to elevate the crew’s usual dining experience into something more befitting royalty. And as far as low effort, high-reward desserts went, absolutely nothing beat a good chocolate mousse.

“For you, my dear princess,” Sanji crooned as he set a martini glass full of mousse down in front of Vivi, carefully topped with a piped swirl of whipped cream, a sprinkle of chocolate shavings, and a single mint leaf for a pop of color. “Mousse au chocolat à la Sanji.”

Vivi clapped her hands together delightedly. “Oh! Thank you, Sanji-kun, this looks delicious!” she said, beaming at him in a way that made Sanji feel positively faint with sheer, unfettered joy. “But you didn’t have to go to all this trouble just for me!”

“Well, it wasn’t just for you,” Sanji assured her with a wink and a smile as he set a similar glass down in front of Nami, this one topped with a bit of mikan zest and a delicate curl made from the fruit’s rind. “It was also for my darling ~Nami-swan~”

Nami rolled her eyes. “Don’t lie, Sanji-kun,” she chided, though the corners of her mouth were twitching upwards with a poorly concealed smile. “I know you only made this because you wanted to impress Vivi.”

“I can want to impress you both!” Sanji protested, clasping his hands together in a pleading gesture as he fluttered between the two beautiful angels gracing his presence. “There’s room enough in my heart for two!”

Vivi giggled. Nami shook her head with a fond sigh. Across the table, Zoro snorted into his mug of beer and grumbled something about embarrassing shitty love-cooks, while Luffy and Usopp had both taken to staring at Sanji with two very bad attempts at puppy dog eyes.

“Saaaaaaaaaaanji,” Luffy said, his bottom lip wobbling in a way more reminiscent of a dying fish than a cute baby animal, “don’t we get any dessert?”

“In a minute,” Sanji snapped, blowing an irritated huff of smoke out around the cigarette currently held at one corner of his mouth. “Let me make sure the ~ladies~ are squared away.”

Luffy groaned, his forehead hitting the table with a loud, forlorn thunk. “Wish I was a lady,” he grumbled into the wood grain. “Then I could get dessert first.”

At that, Sanji couldn’t help but chuckle. “Captain, I’m sorry to say, but even if you were a woman, there’s no way in hell you’d ever be a lady,” he said, reaching over the table to give Luffy’s head a consoling pat. “You like punching things too much. Ladies have to be more dainty than that.”

Luffy’s head shot back up with a loud thwang. “Shishishi! That’s true!” he laughed, face splitting open into a wide grin. “I’d way rather clobber things than be dainty. Hey, Zoro, is that why you’re a boy instead of a girl? Cause you’re not dainty?”

“Nah, Zoro’s a boy because he hates showering and stinks like a swamp,” Nami answered before the swordsman could respond, batting her eyelashes at him when he glowered at her over the rim of his beer mug.

“And he sweats like a pig,” Usopp piped up, nudging Zoro good naturedly with his elbow.

“And he only owns one full set of clothes,” Sanji added as he came back from the kitchen with the second round of mousses, these ones served up in Luffy-proof plastic bowls rather than delicate martini glasses. “Which he doesn’t wash nearly as often as he should.”

Zoro snorted. “Thanks. You’re all far too kind,” he drawled with a sharp-toothed, sardonic grin as he raised his mug in mock salute, which led to laughter from all around the table—himself included. Then, when Sanji set a bowl of mousse down in front of him, he added, “Luffy can have mine, cook. I don’t like sweet things.”

Sanji frowned as he quickly snatched Zoro’s bowl away from Luffy’s greedy fingers, the captain having already finished his own helping of dessert in the three seconds since Sanji had given it to him.

“I know that, moss-for-brains,” he huffed while keeping a whining Luffy at bay with one foot planted solidly against his chest, annoyed by the implication that he wasn’t aware of Zoro’s taste preferences—that was his job, after all. “But I made this with dark chocolate, so it shouldn’t be too sweet, even for you.”

Zoro raised an eyebrow, eyeing Sanji in a way that clearly said he thought the cook was being stupid. “Chocolate is chocolate, idiot cook,” he scoffed. “Doesn’t matter what fucking color it is, it’s all too sweet for me.”

Sanji glared furiously at him, about to open his mouth and snap out an explanation of how dark referred not to the color but to the cocoa-to-sugar ratio of the chocolate, didn’t you know that, idiot marimo—

And then paused.

“… Okay,” Sanji said after a moment, setting the bowl of mousse back down on the table; it was empty before he could so much as blink, Luffy licking his chops as he let out a loud, satisfied belch. “Well, I’ve got some leftover whipped cream still—do you want a fruit parfait instead?”

“I’d prefer booze,” Zoro replied flatly.

“Booze isn’t dessert,” Sanji shot back evenly. “And I think you’ve had plenty already this evening.”

“Fuck off, you’re not the boss of me,” Zoro scowled. “You can’t tell me when I’ve had enough booze!” 

“No,” Sanji snapped, “but I am the boss of our pantry and you don’t get anymore booze without my say-so.”

“Oh yeah, shit cook? Why don’t you say-so to my swords then!”

“Bring it on you useless swordsman, I’ll flatten you into a fucking pancake—”

“Boys, if you’re going to fight, please take it outside,” Nami sighed tiredly around a mouthful of mousse as Zoro leapt up from the table with swords drawn to meet Sanji’s incoming kick. “Some of us would like to enjoy our dessert in peace for once.”

“Of course, Nami-swan—“ Sanji started to say, only to have the wind knocked out of him by a sword hilt to the gut. His retaliation was a swift and brutal roundhouse kick to Zoro’s ribs, and the only reason Sanji didn’t go on to kick the swordsman’s stupid ass was because Luffy decided to join the fray and got all three of them tangled up in a rubber-limbed mess that took nearly an hour to sort out.

So. The mosshead didn’t know the difference between milk and dark chocolate.

Honestly, it wasn’t that surprising. This was Zoro, after all; he didn’t keep anything inside his head that wasn’t directly related to swords, his ridiculous workout routines, or, weirdly enough, a decent amount of math. He probably wouldn’t even be able to tell what dark chocolate was just by looking at it, something that Sanji was certain could be weaponized against the idiot swordsman—he just wasn’t sure how.

And then, a few days later, as Sanji was looking through all the chocolate he had in the pantry to find one suitable for making brownies, he caught sight of a line on a package of bittersweet chocolate discs declaring them to be made with 80% pure cacao, and inspiration struck.

“Oi, marimo,” Sanji called to Zoro when the swordsman entered the Merry’s galley that same afternoon, no doubt on the prowl for some post-nap booze. “Come here, I want you to try something.”

Zoro paused, eyes narrowing suspiciously as he turned to face Sanji. “Why me?”

“Because it’s for you, dipshit.” Sanji huffed, rolling his eyes as he pulled out a cigarette. “And stop giving me that look. I’m not going to poison you, jeez.”

Zoro continued squinting at him as he approached the kitchen counter, obviously unconvinced of Sanji’s true intentions. Sanji bit back the urge to say anything, reminding himself that he needed Zoro to be complacent if this little scheme of his was going to work. So instead of spitting out a few choice insults like he very much wanted to, Sanji instead slid a small bowl of the dark chocolate discs he’d found towards Zoro. 

“Here,” he said as he lit up. “Try this.”

As predicted, Zoro scowled deeply—first at the chocolate, and then at Sanji. “Why the hell are you trying to feed me this shit, cook?” he demanded. “I already told you—chocolate is too damn sweet for me.”

“It’s not chocolate,” Sanji lied smoothly. “It’s cacao.”

Zoro blinked.

”Hah?” he said, head tilting in confusion.

“Cacao,” Sanji repeated, blowing out the smoke from his first drag. “It’s the seeds—also known as cacao beans—of the Theobroma Cacao tree which have been fermented, dried, roasted, ground into a paste, and then made into these discs for easy consumption.”

He gestured at the chocolate in the bowl, which Zoro looked down at with a more thoughtful expression than before. “Beans from a tree that get dried and roasted?” he asked. “Isn’t that how you said coffee is made?”

“Uh, yeah,” Sanji replied, surprised that Zoro had remembered him explaining that; he wouldn’t have thought that the coffee production process would fall under the umbrella of information Zoro actually deemed worthy of retaining. “That’s why I thought you might enjoy this, actually. You like black coffee, and cacao has a very similar flavor profile—bitter, but complex. And the notes change depending on where the beans come from and how it’s processed, just like coffee.”

“Huh.” Zoro picked up one of the discs, squinting at it curiously. “So do you just… eat it?”

“Yup,” Sanji said brightly. “It’s good for you too, in small quantities. Lots of vitamins and antioxidants.”

Zoro’s nose wrinkled. “The hell are antioxidants?” he asked.

Sanji took another drag off his cigarette and let the smoke out as he waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t worry your mossy little head about it,” he said, unable to help the jab. It was Zoro, after all; if Sanji was too nice he’d get suspicious. “Just think of them as another kind of nutrient.”

Zoro glared at him for the insult, but didn’t set down the disc, turning it over a few times between his fingers as though attempting to gauge it for traps or poison. Then, apparently satisfied that he wasn’t about to consume anything nefarious, he shrugged and said, “Yeah alright. I’ll give it a shot.”

Sanji had to press his lips together to keep from smiling too broadly as Zoro popped the disc into his mouth, growing ever more pleased with himself as the swordman’s expression began to shift, his curious frown melting away into the barest hint of a smile, and the normal furrow between his brows disappearing in favor of an ever so slight rising. On most people, it would have been a disappointing reaction; on Zoro, it was the expressional equivalent of childlike wonder. 

“So?” Sanji prompted, barely able to contain his delight as Zoro swallowed the piece of chocolate.

Zoro shrugged again. “Not bad,” he admitted, and Sanji bit down hard on his cigarette’s filter to stop himself from laughing in the mosshead’s stupid green face. On a sliding scale of Zoro-ism’s, ‘not bad’ was tantamount to a normal person’s ’holy shit, that’s delicious’.

“See?” Sanji said, smiling crookedly around his cigarette. “Told you it wasn’t poison.”

Zoro rolled his eyes. “Whatever,” he muttered, gaze dropping down to the remaining chocolate in the bowl. “So… Can I take these or what?”

At that, Sanji actually had to turn away so that Zoro wouldn’t see the triumphant grin he couldn’t hold back anymore. He was sorely tempted to reveal the entire deception now just so he could bask in the idiot swordman’s no doubt furious reaction, but Sanji held himself in check. It would be better to wait, to give Zoro more time to become addicted to the ‘cacao’ before he gave away the game; that way, Sanji could ensure the maximum possible potential for Zoro’s eventual humiliation at his hands.

“Sure, marimo,” he said, hoping that Zoro couldn’t hear the barely contained cackle of glee in his voice. “They’re all yours.”

Chapter Text

There was but one flaw in Sanji’s brilliant plan to get Zoro hooked on chocolate, though unfortunately for him, it was a rather big one—and that was that Zoro wouldn’t actually admit to liking ‘cacao’.

In retrospect Sanji realized that he probably should have foreseen this particular dilemma sooner, because Zoro didn’t freely admit to liking pretty much anything except booze. He wouldn’t even acknowledge that he liked onigiri, which the swordsman could inhale at a speed that rivaled Luffy’s. Everything Sanji knew about Zoro’s taste preferences he had figured out himself by watching and noting what Zoro seemed to enjoy; Zoro’s part was merely to grunt in affirmation whenever Sanji happened to share his observations. So despite his clear enjoyment of the cacao, Zoro didn’t ask for it again—much to Sanji’s great annoyance, because if Sanji was the one who kept having to force chocolate on the mosshead instead of Zoro asking for it himself, it would defeat the entire purpose of his (truly excellent) prank. 

Stupid, no good, inconsiderate bastard, delaying Sanji’s hard-earned fun. He’d have to make sure and laugh all the harder at Zoro’s inevitable humiliation when the time finally came.

Then, as the crew was sailing away with all due haste from Drum Island towards Alabasta, the most dreaded time of the month unfortunately descended upon them: period week. 

Sanji was, of course, nothing if not sympathetic to the plight of all those on board who had to experience the monthly expulsion of an intrauterine lining (even the idiot swordsman, not that he’d ever tell Zoro that). But the fact of the matter was that both Zoro and Nami were absolute hell to deal with during their periods, and because living in such close quarters had caused their cycles to line up, it meant the other three crew members had to deal with a ‘double category five PMS storm’ (as Usopp had so eloquently put it) every four weeks or so. And this time, Vivi’s period had apparently decided to join in and make it a triple hazard event.

“Witch!” Sanji heard Zoro yelling from the kitchen, where he was currently in the process of making a series of snacks for the ladies that required his utmost concentration, and definitely not because he was hiding from his darling Nami-swan’s hormone-induced wrath. “What the hell did you do with my haramaki?!”

“I washed it, you goddamn caveman,” came Nami’s bellowed reply. “It was absolutely disgusting—”

“The hell it was, it got washed by the stupid cook like two weeks ago!”

“Well then you must have been wiping your ass with it, because that’s what it smelled like!”

“You smell like ass! Goddamnit, now the texture is all messed up again—Ow! What the hell was that for?”

“Guys please!” came Vivi’s voice, in a wobbly wail more befitting of a grieving widow than a young princess. “I can’t stand watching my friends fight like this, stop, just stop—”

There was an ear-splitting shriek of anger as Nami screamed, “Zoro, you absolute fuckwad, you just made Vivi cry—” at the same time that Zoro yelled, “Nami, stop scaring the fucking princess—”, followed by a series of heavy thuds, and then a long stretch of extremely vehement and utterly incoherent shouting. 

Sanji’s legs twitched with the instinctive urge to swoop in and protect his darling Nami-swan and Vivi-chan from their mossheaded brute of a swordsman, but that kind of attempted chivalric intervention was what had gotten him beaten within an inch of a concussion twice already this morning. As Nami (awash with anger like some kind of vengeful goddess of old) had so eloquently put it earlier, Sanji’s job today was to get back in the fucking kitchen and make me some goddamn snacks! 

Besides, judging by the extremely loud crash that had just shaken the entire ship, Sanji was pretty sure their captain had the situation covered. Not well covered, if the three voices that began screaming in unison for Luffy to get off of them! were anything to go by, but covered nonetheless. Definitely no need for Sanji to get involved and risk a permanent brain injury thanks to Nami’s magnificent and shockingly powerful fists.

He was just popping a tray of spinach puffs into the oven when the galley door opened, and Sanji looked up to see the newest member of their crew walking in, scribbling on a small notepad held between his hooves and muttering something under his breath that Sanji couldn’t quite make out.

“Hey Chopper,” Sanji greeted. “What’cha got there?”

The little reindeer looked up from his notepad. “Oh, hi Sanji!” he said brightly. “Well, as you know, three of our crew are either currently menstruating or about to start—”

“Oh, really?” Sanji remarked dryly. “I hadn’t noticed.”

Chopper paused, blinking up at Sanji in confusion. “You didn’t notice they’ve been experiencing classic symptoms of premenstrual syndrome for the past few days?” he said, sounding surprised.

Sanji bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. “That was a joke, Chopper. Of course I’ve noticed; it’d be impossible not to.”

“Oh! Right, I see. A joke.” Chopper hid a giggle behind his tiny hooves, which made for such a disgustingly cute image that Sanji felt cavities forming in his mouth just from looking at him. “Anyway, I learned about premenstrual syndrome from Doctorine of course, but since she was post-menopausal I’ve never actually seen it occurring in person. So I was just taking some notes for myself; it’s fascinating to see what kind of changes a small hormonal shift can bring about in a person.”

Sanji coughed. “Riiiiiight,” he said slowly. “Do, uh. Do the three menstruating persons on our crew know that you’re taking notes about them?”

“Not yet!” Chopper replied. “Although, I was thinking about sharing my observations at dinner—”

“No!” Sanji shouted in panic. At Chopper’s startled look, he quickly tacked on, “Er, because—that would be disrespecting their privacy…?”

Chopper blinked at him a few times, and then laughed. “Oh, of course! You’re right, Sanji—doctor-patient confidentiality is a very serious matter. I should just keep these notes with their charts.” He reached up to rub the back of his head, looking rather bashful. “Sorry. I guess I’m just so excited to start practicing medicine for real that I got ahead of myself.” There was a brief pause, and then he added, “Actually, since I’m here—do you think you could help me with something?”

Sanji smiled at him warmly, silently relieved to have headed off what would almost certainly have been a disaster of positively ship-wrecking proportions. “Of course. What is it?”

“Well, I gave Nami and Vivi something to help with their menstrual cramps earlier this morning, but when I tried offering some to Zoro, he refused to take it.”

Sanji rolled his eyes; of course the idiot mosshead wouldn’t let Chopper give him any painkillers. “Let me guess,” he said with a rueful smile. “He gave you his whole spiel on how pain is just a question of mind over matter?”

Chopper nodded, his expression twisting into a deep, concerned frown. “I tried explaining to him that actually, pain is the body’s way of letting us know something is wrong and he should really listen to it, but all he said was, ‘My body doesn’t know shit about what it can and can’t handle,’ and then he stormed off.”

Sanji hummed knowingly. “Sorry Chopper, but if you want my help getting him to take medicine, it’s a lost cause. He can’t be talked into it, and even Luffy isn’t strong enough to pry Zoro’s jaw open and force it down his throat. Trust me, we’ve tried.”

“Oh no, I don’t want to do anything like that!” Chopper said, waving his hooves frantically. “I was just wondering if you had any dark chocolate that I could give him to eat instead.”

At that, Sanji blinked.

“Dark chocolate?” the cook repeated.

“Yes.” Chopper’s face scrunched up in clear distaste. “It’s a much more bitter version of regular chocolate due to the low sugar content. I know it’s probably a long shot, but since you know so much about cooking and have so many unusual ingredients around, I was hoping you might have some…?”

Sanji blinked again, and then let out a soft laugh. “Chopper, I know what dark chocolate is,” he said with a small smile. “And I have plenty of it. I’m just a little confused as to why you want it for Zoro.”

“Oh, you do! That’s great!” Chopper beamed at him, giving Sanji the sudden urge to shower him with a frankly irresponsible amount of candy. “You guys didn’t have a doctor before me so I wasn’t sure whether you might have any on hand for medicinal purposes or not.”

Sanji raised an eyebrow. “Chocolate has medicinal purposes?”

“Cacao does, especially for menstruation,” Chopper answered. “And dark chocolate works better than milk chocolate as a supplement because of the higher cacao content.”

“Really?” Sanji tilted his head thoughtfully. “I thought that was just something people made up so they’d have an excuse to eat more of it. What does it do?”

“Dark chocolate is high in magnesium which helps relax muscles, thus lessening the pain of menstrual cramps, plus polyphenols which can reduce inflammation, and iron to mitigate possible anemia, which many people who have periods get as a result of chronic blood loss over time,” Chopper explained. “And it increases dopamine production in the brain to help with mood. It’s really kind of a wonder food. It’s just too bad that it tastes so terrible compared to regular chocolate, otherwise it’d be so much easier to get people to take it prophylactically. But I was hoping, well…” He paused, suddenly looking quite sheepish. 

“You were hoping… what?” Sanji prompted.

Chopper’s gaze dropped to the side as he said, “I was hoping that maybe you could… make something to help me trick Zoro into eating it?”

Sanji stared at him.

“Trick?” he repeated, the corners of his mouth beginning to curl.

Chopper nodded guiltily. “Yeah. You know, like when you help a little kid get down cough medicine by making it taste like cherry syrup? Of course, I’d rather he take it of his own free will, but dark chocolate is just so bitter that I can’t imagine he’d want to eat it outright—Sanji, why are you laughing? This is serious, he’s miserable right now and I really think some dark chocolate would help!”

“I’m—I’m sorry, Chopper! It’s—I’m not—of course it’s serious! Very serious, I just—God, fuck, give me a minute,” Sanji wheezed out in between fits of laughter as he doubled over, trying and failing to get a hold of himself several times before finally managing to calm down. When he lifted his head, it was to find Chopper gazing at him with what could only be described as reproachful disappointment, which very nearly set him off again.

“You know, Chopper,” Sanji said around a wide, breathless grin, barely able to contain his glee, “I think I just might be able to help you.”

Despite being completely flabbergasted that Zoro would not only willingly ingest dark chocolate, but actually even enjoy it (“But it’s so bitter! Not sweet at all!”—“Well, Chopper, some people don’t like sweet things.”—“What?”) Chopper was all for Sanji’s plan to feed Zoro some more ‘cacao’. So, after making sure Nami and Vivi were squared away with an assortment of sweet, salty, and iron-rich snacks, Sanji moved onto Zoro—who had commandeered the crow’s nest earlier in the afternoon and, according to a thoroughly terrified Usopp, summarily threatened to gut and/or behead anyone who disturbed him. But, being absolutely sure that the mosshead could do no such thing to him, Sanji went on up anyway.

What he found up there, however, was not exactly what he was expecting.

Sanji was of course familiar with the somewhat stereotypical image of women on their periods—cranky to the nth degree, wrapped up in blankets with hot water bottles to help ease their cramps, possibly trying to eat their way through a pint of ice cream or a jar of pickles depending on what kind of cravings had hit. But despite having been on board the Going Merry with Zoro for a few of his menstrual cycles already, Sanji had never seen the swordsman in such a state. Zoro got moody and snappish (more snappish than usual, at any rate) while on his period, but by and large he was either doing one of his ridiculous training routines as a means of proving his whole ‘mind over pain’ bullshit, or napping. And because of that, Sanji had always assumed his periods must not be all that bad.

But the Zoro that Sanji was currently looking at—curled up at the far side of the crow’s nest, with a blanket covering his lower half and his hands resting over a suspicious hot wattle bottle shaped bulge underneath his haramaki—looked absolutely miserable.

“Uh,” Sanji said, very intelligently. “Marimo?”

Zoro glanced up; his entire face was twisted into an expression that made it look like he was about two seconds away from killing everything within a fifty foot radius, or bursting into tears. Which on Zoro was a fucking weird look, and Sanji was suddenly prepared to do whatever it took to never have to see it again.

“What,” the swordsman said flatly.

“I… I brought you some snacks,” Sanji said, finding that he didn’t even have it in him to send an accompanying jab Zoro’s way with how terrible he looked already; it would have been like rubbing salt into an open wound.

Zoro’s gaze shifted to the plate of onigiri Sanji was holding, and then he sighed.

“M’not hungry,” he mumbled, leaning back against the side of the crow’s nest, eyes slipping shut as a pained grimace rippled across his face. “Just feed them to Luffy.”

Sanji stared at him, cigarette nearly slipping from between his teeth as his jaw went slack. Zoro had never turned down onigiri before. Just how bad was he feeling right now?

“You should really eat something, mosshead,” Sanji said after a moment, feeling extremely unmoored by the lack of vitriol in their current conversation. “You know, to uh, keep your energy up. From the blood loss…?”

A muscle twitched in Zoro’s jaw as his eyes snapped back open, fixing Sanji with a furious glare. “It isn’t even that much blood,” he spit out with a vehemence that caught Sanji off guard, though for once it didn’t sound like it was aimed at him. “I shouldn’t feel this shitty over it—”

The tips of Zoro’s ears suddenly went pink, and he cast his gaze off to the side, like he was embarrassed to be admitting how crappy he felt. Sanji felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for him, as well as a large swell of annoyance. It couldn’t be easy, he supposed, having to deal with a period when it was seen as such an intrinsic part of female biology; but on the other hand, Zoro was a stubborn fucking idiot, and he really needed to get over this dumb idea of his that pain could simply be ignored.

Speaking of which—

“Well, maybe you’ll feel better if you eat some of this,” Sanji said, climbing into the crow’s nest properly and setting the plate of onigiri down next to Zoro, as well as a small bowl filled with pieces of a broken up 85% intense dark chocolate bar, which was the highest cacao percentage that Sanji had been able to find in the pantry.

Zoro glanced at the bowl, raising an eyebrow. “Is that cacao?” he asked.

“Yeah. Chopper asked me to give you some, since you’re a fucking idiot that won’t take any goddamn painkillers, even when our doctor asks you to,” Sanji said with a sharp exhale of smoke, rolling his eyes to show exactly what he thought about this. 

Zoro scowled deeply at him in response, which left Sanji feeling oddly reassured. Miserable Zoro was foreign territory, but annoyed Zoro was as familiar as his kitchen knives by now. “And how exactly is this supposed to help?” Zoro asked, picking up one of the pieces and squinting at it suspiciously.

“Magnesium to ease your cramps, polyphenols to fight inflammation, and iron to combat anemia,” Sanji explained, trying to remember everything Chopper had said to him earlier as he took a drag off his cigarette. “Oh, and it’ll increase your dopamine production so you won’t be so fucking moody. Hopefully.”

Zoro tilted his head, face scrunching into a deep, confused frown. Sanji could practically see the algae-encrusted gears inside his head trying to turn, so he sighed irritably and said, “Look, in simple moss-brain terms, it’ll work like medicine, but unlike medicine, it actually tastes good. What more do you want?”

He used his foot to nudge the bowl closer, but Zoro only glared at him. “Medicine?” he repeated, eyes narrowing. “Fuck off, I told Chopper I didn’t want—”

“No, you fuck off, jackass!” Sanji snapped, cutting Zoro off with a furious scowl of his own. “Look, I don’t know why you’re so fucking obsessed with this idea that pain is something you can just will away, but one, it’s fucking not; two, Chopper was worried enough about you that he put in a special request for me to make you something that would help; and three, you are clearly absolutely fucking miserable right now. So how about instead of fighting me for once, you just shut up and eat the goddamn cacao?”

Zoro kept glaring at him, one of his hands twitching towards the swords lying by his side. Sanji glared right back, lifting one foot off the ground in warning; period or not, Sanji would fight the idiot if that’s what it came down to.

But after a couple of long, tense moments, Zoro dropped his hand with a heavy sigh. “Alright, fine,” he bit out, like the admission physically pained him. “But just so we’re clear, I’m only doing this for Chopper’s sake. Not yours.”

Sanji snorted. “Like I care,” he shot back as he finished his cigarette, crushing out the butt against the bottom of his shoe. “Just eat the damn cacao.”

Zoro put the piece he was still holding into his mouth, tongue darting out to lick the melty bits off the tips of his fingers in a way that made Sanji feel weirdly warm and flushed. Probably because it was so gross. Marimo tongue? Ick.

“Finish the whole bowl,” Sanji instructed as he turned to climb back down to the deck. “Doctor’s orders.”

“You’re not the fucking boss of me,” he heard Zoro grumble in response; but when Sanji caught a glimpse of him before his descent, he saw Zoro popping several pieces into his mouth at once, and he had to bite his lip to keep from laughing out loud.

Chopper was waiting for Sanji back in the kitchen, anxiously licking at a bowl of (milk) chocolate ice cream. “Well?” he asked when Sanji finally returned. “How did it go?”

Sanji shot him a triumphant grin. “Mission successful, doctor,” he said, giving the little reindeer a two-fingered salute.

“What mission?” came an irritated voice from the kitchen, and Sanji started as he saw Nami standing at the stove, glaring down at a tea kettle as though she could make it boil faster through sheer willpower.

“Nami-swan!” Sanji exclaimed, twirling over to her. “Did you need some more tea? You should have told me, I can—”

“We’re getting Zoro to eat dark chocolate to help with his period symptoms by calling it cacao so that he doesn’t realize he’s eating chocolate!” Chopped declared with a giggle, cutting Sanji off.

Nami blinked. “Wait, really?” she asked, the frown melting off her first time all day to be replaced with a wide, amused grin. “And that worked?”

“So far, yes,” Sanji answered. “We just have to hope he doesn’t realize that he’s actually eating chocolate so he’ll keep doing it.”

For the first time today, Nami let out a small laugh; Sanji very nearly swooned in response to its resonant sound. “It’s Zoro,” she said, mouth curling into a delightful little smirk. “So long as everyone keeps their mouths shut, I’m sure there’s no way he’ll ever figure it out.”

“So you’ll help us keep the secret, Nami?” Chopped asked hopefully. “I would hate for him to stop eating it just because he finds out that it’s actually chocolate!”

“Oh, of course, Chopper!” Nami called to him, tone dripping with innocence. “Anything to help a fellow crew mate!”

Chopper beamed at her and went back to eating his ice cream. Nami shot Sanji a glance from the corner of her eye and then muttered under her breath so only he could hear, “At least until we can embarrass the hell out of him by telling him exactly what he’s been eating this whole time—right, Sanji-kun?”

“Oh, Nami-swan,” Sanji sighed, heart positively aflutter. “Have I ever told you how much I love you?”

Chapter Text

Of course, the main problem surrounding Sanji’s plans for a big, humiliating reveal didn’t change just because Zoro started regularly consuming dark chocolate while on his period. In fact if anything it actually got worse—because now that Chopper saw ‘cacao’ as essentially a kind of medicine, he’d put in the requests for it on Zoro’s behalf, meaning the mosshead himself didn’t really need to ask for any. And Sanji couldn’t very well inform Chopper that the whole thing was supposed to be a prank; the disappointment he could imagine welling up in those big, soulful brown eyes was too much to even think about.

Stupid, no good, moss-for-brains bastard, not playing along properly with Sanji’s game. Who did he think he was, anyway, being able to resist the siren call of chocolate?

“Well, maybe you need to do more to entice him into wanting it,” Nami said as Sanji shared his dilemma with her one afternoon while he was making dinner, and she was working on her latest chart at the galley table. “I mean, it’s chocolate. There’s gotta be a ton of other ways to feed it to him, right?”

“They’re all desserts, though,” Sanji sighed as he ran a fluted cutting wheel across filled sheets of fresh pasta to make ravioli. “He’s not going to eat anything that’s sweet. Besides, most of what I know how to make has a lot of dairy in it, and I’m not turning him into a marimo gas bomb just so he’ll eat more chocolate.”

(The revelation of Zoro’s dairy intolerance had only come about recently, thanks to some careful observations by Chopper. Sanji would have said he couldn’t believe that in nineteen years of living Zoro had somehow never managed to clock the direct correlation between his consumption of dairy products and the subsequent onset of stomach problems—except that of course he could, because it was Zoro.)

Nami made a face. “Ugh. Good point.” She hummed thoughtfully, tapping the end of her pen against the table. “There must be desserts out there that don’t use a lot of dairy though.”

“It’s not just the dairy,” Sanji replied. “It also can’t look like a dessert or he’s bound to start getting suspicious. That shitty swordsman might be an idiot, but even he isn’t going to buy it if I put a chocolate cookie in front of him and try to tell him it’s made with ‘cacao’.”

Nami grinned at him. “Why Sanji-kun,” she said, lifting a hand to her mouth in mock surprise, “was that a compliment about Zoro that I just heard come out of your mouth?”

“No!” Sanji snapped immediately, and when Nami raised an eyebrow at him, he added, “It wasn’t! All I said was that he’s not a complete moron.”

Nami clucked her tongue softly. “A compliment is a compliment,” she trilled lightly. “Keep it up and you might have me thinking that you actually like our big dumb musclehead of a swordsman.”

Sanji felt his whole face go red from what was presumably pure, unfettered anger that he was keeping well in check for Nami’s sake. “Me? Like the mosshead?” he scoffed incredulously. “No way. That grassy green ogre can get fucked for all I care.”

Nami smiled at him in a way which conveyed loud and clear that she didn’t believe a word of what Sanji had just said. Which, in fairness to Nami, wasn’t… entirely untrue.

Sanji would have been hard pressed to say that he actually liked Zoro, but he couldn’t deny that there was something unique about their relationship—a push and pull which straddled a rather fine line between camaraderie and rivalry. One minute they’d be at each other’s throats, and the next they’d be side by side, both on the battlefield and off. Zoro was just as likely to fight Sanji for access to the liquor cabinet as he was to help with the dishes and tidy up the kitchen after a meal. Recently Zoro had even been helping Sanji with some of the easier food prep things that needed to get done like chopping vegetables, and he honestly wasn’t half bad at it; granted that may have been because Sanji had insinuated he would be and Zoro was now determined to prove him completely and utterly wrong, but still. 

Just because Sanji sometimes got along with Zoro, though, didn’t mean he wasn’t fully invested in the mosshead’s eventual chocolate-loving humiliation. And that was never going to happen if Sanji didn’t get Zoro to start asking for ‘cacao’ of his own volition. Nami was right; Sanji needed a more enticing form of cacao than just the plain old discs and broken up bars he’d been using thus far. He needed something bold. Something delicious. Something so good that it would have Zoro positively begging for more.

He just wasn’t entirely sure what that form was yet.

As sad as the crew was to leave Vivi behind when they departed from Alabasta, it was also hard not to be excited by the addition of their newest crew member, the mysterious and alluring Ms. All-Sunday—or, as she was now known to them, Robin. Unless your name was Zoro, in which case you were (in Sanji’s opinion, anyway) a moss-headed asshole who, even if you had grudgingly accepted your captain’s declaration that Robin was one of the Straw Hats now, continued to make your suspicions about the former Baroque Works agent well known.

Robin, however, wasn’t especially put out by Zoro’s clear distrust of her; if anything, she actually seemed to find it rather amusing. Walking out onto the deck with snacks in hand only to find Zoro silently fuming in a corner while Robin watched him with one of her signature enigmatic smiles was now a source of endless entertainment for Sanji, who decided to show his gratitude for this newfound daily delight by getting Robin some good quality coffee for making espresso (which she had recently confessed to him was a one of the few things about working for Crocodile that she quite missed).

This was, however, a task easier said than done. Port towns usually only carried the kind of coffee largely favored by the Marines, which for all intents and purposes was just finely ground dirt that brewed up into hot, steaming cups of mud. This was fine for those on the crew that only wanted coffee for the caffeine hit (Zoro, Nami, and himself—Usopp preferred tea, and Luffy had been summarily barred from ever consuming coffee again on penalty of being tossed overboard), but for someone as refined and elegant as the lovely Nico Robin, it simply wouldn’t do.

So Sanji became a man on a mission—scouring every port they stopped at for a coffee that would brew up into something better than engine oil. And, after weeks of fruitless searching (to the point that Sanji was convinced the Grand Line didn’t actually have any good coffee readily available and that Crocodile must have been getting his through some kind of black market trade), he finally found some.

Sanji could smell it the moment he set foot on the docks: a beautifully intoxicating aroma of freshly roasted and ground beans, deep and pungent like only truly good coffee could be. There was no shortage of shops around the town’s main plaza, but experience had taught Sanji that the best offerings were always off the beaten path, and he wanted to find something truly special for his darling Robin-chan. So he wandered a little further, scoping out both side streets and alleyways until eventually coming upon a small cafe buzzing with what looked like local activity. The smell wafting out of the open windows was positively scrumptious, and when Sanji stepped inside, he immediately realized why—it was a coffee and a chocolate shop.

“Good afternoon, sir!” an older woman with a cheerfully sagging face greeted as Sanji made his way up to the front counter. “What can I help you with today?

“And a lovely afternoon to you, my dear lady,” Sanji said with a warm, flattering smile. “I’ve been searching high and low along the Grand Line for some good quality coffee, and I fear your shop may very well be my last hope. Please, won’t you help me?”

The woman (Sanji noted that the name tag pinned to her apron read ‘Hana’) let out a loud, boisterous laugh. “Well, I can certainly try. Are you looking for anything in particular?”

“I am open to any and all suggestions you see fit to give me,” Sanji replied. “However, I will confess my favorite has always been coffee from the Conomi Islands in the East Blue, if you’re at all familiar…?” 

“Hmm. I’m afraid not.” Hana frowned thoughtfully. “But if you can describe the flavor profile I might be able to suggest something similar.”

“It was usually a light roast,” Sanji said, remembering the coffee from home rather wistfully. The East Blue grew plenty of it thanks to the warm, humid environments found on most islands there. “Very bright, almost fruity.”

“Delicate or full-bodied?”

“Somewhere in between.”

“And the acidity?”

Sanji considered. “Low, I think. I remember being able to drink it easily on an empty stomach.”

“Mmm. Probably a natural process, then.” Hana turned around, surveying the array of coffees behind her with a soft humming noise. “I’ve got a few here I think could work for what you want. Do you have a minute to stick around? I’ll make you some pourover samples and then you can decide for yourself which you’d like.”

“For you my dear lady, I have all the time in the world,” Sanji declared, and she laughed again, her belly shaking with the strength of it.

“Have a seat at the bar, then. Or you can look around the shop if you like. Kai Lin over there is sampling some coconut milk truffles made with our shop’s signature 72% bittersweet blend. An excellent treat if you enjoy chocolate, and who doesn’t?”

She nodded towards the far end of the counter, where Sanji saw a younger worker with a heavy canvas apron covered in patches of what appeared to be cocoa powder chatting excitedly with a few people gathered around a large dessert case. Sitting on the counter in front of them was a platter of chocolate truffles, half of which were already gone.

“Coconut milk truffles?” Sanji repeated, his curiosity piqued; he knew regular truffles were essentially just balls of ganache rolled in cocoa powder, but he’d never heard of them being made with coconut milk before. 

“Oh, you have to try one!” Hana encouraged him with a warm smile. “They’re something of a local specialty around here. We don’t have a lot of grazing land for livestock so dairy’s rather hard to come by, but we’ve got plenty of cocoa and coconut trees. And there’s no easier way to combine the two than making a nice truffle.”

There was a brief pause as Sanji’s brain absorbed and then parsed this new information. “Wait,” he said, turning back to her. “So they don’t have any dairy in them at all? Just coconut milk?”

“Hmm? Oh yes; coconut milk makes an excellent substitute for heavy cream,” Hana explained as she began measuring out coffee beans for the pourovers. “Similar fat contents, you see. Actually, almost all of the desserts we serve are made with coconut milk instead of dairy, and you’d probably never know the difference if I hadn’t just told you.”

The grin that Sanji felt curling at the corners of his mouth was nothing short of ecstatic.

“Oh Miss Hana, my darling angel,” Sanji crooned, leaning over to rest his elbows on the counter and giving her the most flattering look he could possibly muster. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to share a few of your recipes…?”

After an exceptionally aggressive charm offensive and a rather larger purchase of both coffee and chocolate than Sanji had originally intended to make, he left Hana’s shop armed with a handful of new recipes, all of which were completely dairy-free and thus entirely marimo-friendly. The easiest of these by far was the coconut milk truffles, which only required him to melt chocolate into coconut milk to make a ganache, and then let that set so it could be rolled into little balls of chocolatey, coconutty goodness. As far as a low effort, high reward dessert went, they were even better than a chocolate mousse; Sanji felt a brief pang of regret that he’d never thought to make truffles as a snack for the ladies, because he was sure that they’d adore them.

But then again, if he’d done that, Sanji probably wouldn’t have been able to whip up a batch of coconut milk truffles and feed them to an unsuspecting Zoro.

“Oi, marimo!” Sanji barked as he strode up out of the galley and onto the deck with a plate of freshly made truffles in hand. “Get over here, there’s something I want you to traaaaaaah…”

Sanji trailed off as his brain registered the scene in front of him, which was not Zoro alone, as he’d expected, or Zoro glowering at Robin from a corner while she was stretched out on a lawn chair reading, as would have made sense—but rather Zoro and Robin leaning against the ship’s railing side by side, him holding a sheathed Yubashiri while staring at it in rapt fascination, and her talking animatedly as she used one long, elegant finger to point out details on the saya.

Of course Robin had finally managed to get through to Zoro by talking to him about his stupid swords. It was all the idiot mosshead cared about. Besides booze. And napping.

But Robin didn’t know about Sanji’s little prank, and with Zoro standing right there, there was no way for Sanji to warn her. Zoro however, enraptured as he was by whatever Robin was telling him about Yubashiri, didn’t seem to have noticed Sanji was there yet, so all he needed to do was slip away before—

“Oh, Mr. Cook!” Robin called, waving at him with a smile. 

Sanji froze, heart pounding a furious indent into his ribcage as Zoro also turned to look at him, brow pinched in something that wasn’t quite a frown and on anybody but a moss-headed ogre would probably have looked kind of cute.

“Is that cacao?” he said, nodding his head at the plate of truffles Sanji was holding. “Why’s it look so funny?”

Sanji’s heart plummeted straight through the bottom of his stomach and into the sea as Robin blinked curiously and then arched one elegant eyebrow and said, “Cacao?”

“Er,” said Sanji intelligently. “It’s…”

“It’s this special kind of bean that gets fermented, dried, roasted, then processed into a paste which gets solidified for eating,” Zoro explained, turning back towards Robin. “Chopper makes me eat it when I’m on my period because it helps with the cramps and shit. Tastes pretty good though, considering it’s basically a kind of medicine. Kind of like coffee if you ate it instead of drinking it.”

“You—you might like it too, Robin-chan!” Sanji added hastily, before she could respond. He was caught somewhere between panic that she would accidentally give away his scheme and disbelief that Zoro had remembered enough of his spiel on ‘cacao’ to parrot that much of it back to someone else. “You like coffee and uh, cacao has a very similar flavor profile. Perhaps you’d like to give one of these a taste…?”

Sanji shot Robin a desperate, pleading look, hoping that it would come off to Zoro as his usual eagerness to please the ladies of the crew. 

Luckily for Sanji, Robin was even more intelligent than she was beautiful, and one look was all she needed to catch on, her wide blue eyes positively sparkling with mirth as she replied smoothly, “Oh, I know what cacao is. And as a matter of fact, I do quite enjoy it. I’m just a little surprised, that’s all. I wouldn’t have expected you to be a fan of such, ah—a refined flavor, Mr. Swordsman.”

Sanji could have kissed her.

“Refined?” Zoro replied, head tilting in confusion. “What, you mean like fancy? Cacao’s not fancy. Is it?”

“Certainly more fancy than coffee,” Robin said. “Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Cook?”

Sanji coughed to hide his laugh. “It’s certainly, er, rarer than coffee,” he said, aiming a bright, impish smile towards his now favorite woman in the entire world. “I suppose fancy is one way to describe it, though I think I prefer ‘elevated’.”

“Elevated,” Robin repeated with a small nod. “Yes, I think that’s an excellent term for it.”

Sanji beamed at her, while Zoro’s brow furrowed into a deep frown. “If cacao is fancy,” he said, “then why are you feeding it to me?”

At that, Sanji blinked.

“What do you mean?” he asked, genuinely puzzled by Zoro’s question. “Why wouldn’t I feed it to you?”

“I mean if it’s fancy, wouldn’t you rather save it for the girls?” Zoro responded. “That’s what you like to do, right? Give them all your nicest, fanciest treats? You don’t waste that kind of food on me.”

The tips of his ears had started to turn pink as he spoke, a telltale sign that Zoro was—for whatever reason—embarrassed. It was such an unexpected reaction from the normally unflappable swordsman that for a few moments, all Sanji could do was stare at him.

“Zoro, I don’t ‘waste’ food on anybody,” he finally said after a stilted pause. “I feed people things they like because it makes them happy. You like cacao, so I feed it to you; it doesn’t matter how ‘fancy’ it’s supposed to be.”

Now it was Zoro’s turn to blink. “… Oh,” was all he said, and it sounded rather stunned.

The unfamiliar tone in Zoro’s voice knocked Sanji wildly off kilter, like the world had spun around all topsy-turvey and he’d suddenly become dangerously unmoored within its waters. He opened his mouth to say something that could put things right side up again, but nothing came out; all Sanji could do was stand there and gape like a goldfish until Robin—beautiful, intelligent, perceptive Robin—intervened.

“I must admit, though, I’ve never seen cacao served like that before, Mr. Cook,” she said, nodding at the plate of truffles. “Did you do something special to it?”

“Oh, um—yes! Yes, I did!” Sanji stuttered, snapping back to himself with a jolt. His cheeks felt oddly warm, almost like he’d been blushing. “We had some extra lying around so I thought I’d do a little experimenting in the kitchen and came up with these! I call them cacao balls.”

At that, Zoro snorted. “Balls?”

“Oh, grow up, moss-for-brains!” Sanji snapped, though he was secretly incredibly relieved to be back on such familiar footing as he lashed out with a kick aimed for Zoro’s stupid green head—while keeping the plate of truffles perfectly balanced in one hand, of course.

“Don’t blame me!” Zoro said with a sharp-toothed grin as he parried Sanji’s blow with a partially unsheathed Yubashiri. “You’re the one that decided to call them balls!”

“Because I’m an adult that understands a ‘ball’ is a shape, not a five-year-old laughing at potty humor!” Sanji shot back, glowering furiously at him. “God, I can’t believe I actually tried to do something nice for you when this is the fucking thanks that I get.”

Zoro frowned at him as he fully unsheathed Yubashiri to block Sanji’s incoming roundhouse kick. “What the hell are you talking about, shit cook?”

“I believe he means that he made the cacao balls for you, Mr. Swordsman,” Robin said, her voice rather wobbly around the edges, like she was trying very hard not to laugh.

“Hah?” Zoro glanced at her, and Sanji saw his opening. “What do you mean, for—”

The rest of his sentence was promptly cut off by Sanji drop kicking him into the water.

“Serves you right, you ungrateful asshole!” Sanji bellowed over the side of the railing as Zoro came back up, sputtering and furious. The swordsman let out an answering string of vehement curses and promises of severe bodily harm, but Sanji ignored him in favor of twirling around to face a highly amused Robin.

“I’m so sorry you had to witness that awful display of brutality, Robin-chan,” he sighed, holding out the plate of truffles to her with a flourish. “Would you like to try one?”

Robin chuckled as she picked a truffle up between two long, elegant fingers. “I assume there’s a reason for your peculiar choice in terminology?” she asked.

“The mosshead won’t eat chocolate because he thinks it’s all the same and that it’s ‘too sweet’,” Sanji answered, rolling his eyes. “But as far as he knows, cacao is something else entirely.”

“Mmm.” Robin gave him a conspiratorial smile. “And I assume that at some point you plan to reveal he’s been eating chocolate this entire time? Possibly when it could invoke the maximum possible humiliation on his part?”

Sanji grinned. “Your extraordinary mind is matched only by your blinding beauty, my dear ~Robin-chwan~”

Robin chuckled again before taking a bite out of her truffle. “Wonderful,” she declared, and Sanji very nearly fainted with delight until she added, “I’m sure the swordsman will love them once he’s had a taste.”

At that, Sanji couldn’t help but snort. “Zoro doesn’t love anything,” he said, pulling out a cigarette and jamming it into his mouth. “I can’t even get him to admit that he likes ‘cacao’. It’s incredibly aggravating. That’s why I had to make these.” Sanji gestured at the plate of truffles with his free hand before moving to grab his lighter. “Hopefully they’ll be tasty enough that the marimo won’t be able to resist asking for them again.”

Robin gave him a rather inscrutable look as Sanji lit the cigarette. “So you made him a version of ‘cacao’ that you hoped he would like enough to ask for on his own? That’s very thoughtful of you, Mr. Cook. He’s lucky you care so much.”

Sanji paused mid-inhale, staring at her for a moment while his jaw slack enough that smoke spilled from his mouth in a hazy cloud, and his cigarette dropped to the deck. 

Care? Sanji thought dumbly as he crushed the lit end underfoot on instinct. That wasn’t—Sanji didn’t care about Zoro. Or well, of course he cared, because Zoro was a member of the crew and Sanji cared about all of them, but it wasn’t like—he hadn’t done this because—

“It’s for the prank,” he stressed, feeling strangely warm under the collar. “I just—I think it’ll be funnier when the time finally comes if he’s been asking for ‘cacao’ on his own. Because, you know—that means he has to admit that he actually likes it. It’s—it’s for the prank.”

For a long moment, all Robin did was look at him. Her expression was largely unreadable, but it gave Sanji the distinct impression of an awful lot of cogs turning within the magnificent machinery of her brilliant mind, something he suddenly found he didn’t like one bit.

“Well then,” she finally said, with the same kind of enigmatically amused smile she’d been aiming at Zoro whenever he glowered at her suspiciously from across the deck. “Good luck with your prank, Mr. Cook.”

Sanji felt very certain that he’d just missed something, though for the life of him he couldn’t begin to guess what.

By the time Zoro managed to swim back to the Merry and haul himself out of the ocean, Sanji had already returned to the kitchen to begin preparing dinner. Given that he’d just kicked the shithead overboard, he wasn’t really expecting Zoro to come help with the prep work like he’d been doing recently—and so was rather surprised when the swordsman entered the galley and stomped over to the kitchen, looking thoroughly annoyed as he began washing his hands in the sink. He had on new dry clothes but his hair was still wet, and Sanji couldn’t help asking—

“Have a nice swim?”

Zoro scowled deeply. “Fuck off, dartbrow,” he snapped, drying his hands on a dish towel before stepping over to the pile of vegetable Sanji had laid out next to his cutting board. “You got lucky. Won’t happen again.” He grabbed a cucumber and a knife, and then added, “How do you want these sliced?”

“Julienned. For cold noodle bowls,” Sanji said after a moment of stunned silence. He couldn’t believe that Zoro was still up for helping him after Sanji had knocked him into the ocean like that; he would have thought the mosshead would be fuming for days at being so caught off guard.

But if Zoro was angry about their little scuffle earlier, he didn’t show it; instead cutting cucumbers and carrots into perfectly julienned matchsticks (honestly it was kind of amazing how fast he’d picked up on the basics of knife skills; or maybe not surprising at all, given that a knife was only one step removed from a sword) before moving on to thinly slicing cabbage for one of the side dishes. He was quiet, which wasn’t unusual; but Sanji could hear frequent pauses in his work, and whenever he glanced over to see why, he found Zoro staring at the plate of truffles now sitting on the counter next to him, with a frown that Sanji couldn’t quite parse.

“Hey, cook,” Zoro finally said after several minutes of working side by side in silence.

“Yeah?” Sanji replied.

“You didn’t… actually make those cacao balls for me, did you?”

Sanji paused in the middle of whisking up the sesame dressing for the noodles to stare at him. “Do you know anyone else on this ship that eats cacao?” he asked flatly.

“Well, no, but…” 

Zoro trailed off; the tips of his ears had started going pink again for reasons that Sanji couldn’t begin to fathom. “Why?” the swordsman finally asked, after a long moment of stilted silence.

“What do you mean, why?” Sanji snapped, more aggressively than he meant to; watching the blush start to crawl from Zoro’s ears down the back of his neck was making Sanji’s stomach twist in a very strange way that he didn’t like it one bit. “Why do I make anything for anyone on this ship? Because it’s my job to feed you fucking ingrates. And the ladies.”

“No, I mean…” The furrow of Zoro’s brow deepened so much that it made his nose wrinkle. “Why go to all that extra trouble?”

Sanji was extremely glad Zoro was staring at the plate of truffles, because it meant that he couldn’t see when Sanji balked and nearly dropped his bowl of dressing. 

“I—I thought you might have been getting—I don’t know, bored with it?” Sanji stuttered, scrambling to come up with a halfway decent lie since he didn’t have one readily available; it wasn’t something he’d ever thought Zoro would bother asking. “And that, uh… That this would be a good way to… switch things up?”

Zoro tilted his head in confusion as his gaze moved from the plate of truffles over to Sanji. “Why would I be bored with it?” he asked, sounding genuinely confused.

“Well, it’s just… you never ask for it,” Sanji replied. “I mean… Even when you’re on your period, Chopper is the one that gives it to you. So I thought maybe you’d… lost interest.”

It sounded like a lame excuse, even to Sanji’s own ears. He cringed, bracing himself for what was sure to be a series of suspicious follow up questions from Zoro; but then, to Sanji’s utter shock, Zoro went bright red from his ears all the down past the collar of his shirt, and he dropped his gaze rather firmly down onto the floor as he muttered—

“I didn’t know that I could.”

Sanji blinked. Stared. Opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again and said, “What?”

“I—I thought it was something you’d only give me while I was on my period,” Zoro clarified, face and neck now the approximate color of a tomato. “Except for that first time you had me try it, you never have any around, so I just… assumed.”

Sanji blinked a few more times as a funny feeling stirred to life in the pit of his stomach, half dismay and half something else that he couldn’t quite describe. He wanted to protest that that was ridiculous, that of course Sanji had ‘cacao’ around outside the times Zoro was on his period, except…

Zoro was right. Sanji didn’t keep any ‘cacao’ out for snacking, because doing so could have potentially given the whole game away if someone else identified it as chocolate. 

Was that really why Zoro never asked for any ‘cacao’? Because he hadn’t known he could? The idea seemed nearly unthinkable to Sanji, who thought he’d always been very clear that the crew could ask for just about anything they wanted; Sanji might not always give it to them, depending on their current stock or someone’s state of health or if a certain captain was attempting to eat his third meal of the day before noon, but asking was always allowed. 

The fact that Zoro hadn’t known that—that somewhere in the process of this whole elaborate prank Sanji might have lost sight of his foremost duty at the crew’s cook—made him feel like he’d failed in some fundamental way to make sure that above all else, the swordsman was well fed. And that stung. Deeply. 

“Okay, well, for future reference, you can,” Sanji said slowly, trying to keep the overwhelming disappointment he currently felt in himself out of his voice. “Anytime you want.”

Zoro turned his head, frowning thoughtfully as he fixed Sanji with his full attention. Being pinned beneath that hazel-grey gaze was not unlike having the blade of one of Zoro’s swords held to his throat, and Sanji struggled not to squirm under the scrutiny, feeling as though one wrong move here could end up flaying him alive.

Then Zoro gave a short nod and turned back to his cabbage, resuming his slicing as he said, “Okay.”

For a moment Sanji just stood there, head spinning and stomach twisting and heart pounding from an overload of sudden emotions, none of which he wanted to examine too closely for fear of what he might find there. “Marimo, I mean it,” he said once he felt like his thoughts had settled into at least some semblance of cohesion. “Cacao isn’t like booze, I’m not going to stop you from eating it.”

It was a greater relief than Sanji would ever admit out loud when Zoro snorted and rolled his eyes, drawing them back once again into familiar territory. “I said okay, didn’t I?”

“Well I just wanted to be sure you understood!” Sanji said hotly as he resumed whisking his dressing.

“I do!”

“Okay!”

“Okay!”

“Fine!”

“Fine!”

Sanji scowled, setting his bowl of dressing aside in favor of pulling out a much needed cigarette, grumbling to himself under his breath about shitty swordsmen and idiot marimos. Zoro should have been able to hear him, so Sanji was surprised when he didn’t respond—until he glanced over and saw that there were now several truffles missing from the plate on the counter, and that Zoro’s cheeks had a rather puffed and dimpled appearance to them that looked an awful lot like he was smiling with his mouth full.

Sanji turned away to hide his own crooked grin. The mission to entice Zoro with a new form of ‘cacao’ may have ended up being a bit more roundabout than he’d intended, but a success was a success. Now all Sanji had to do was wait for the truffles to sink their delicious claws into Zoro’s tastebuds, and soon the marimo would be asking for cacao morning, noon, and night.

He was certain of it.

Chapter Text

Zoro, because he was Zoro and therefore a stupid, no-good, fun-ruining bastard, didn’t ask for more cacao.

“You don’t think he suspects, do you?” Sanji asked Usopp as he frowned down at the large tray of hard-boiled egg whites he was currently piping filling into for deviled eggs.

“I don’t think who suspects what?” Usopp replied, not looking up from whatever project he currently had scattered across the galley table.

“That Zoro suspects cacao is chocolate.”

This time Usopp did look up, fixing Sanji with a reproachful glare. After the near miss with Robin, Sanji had decided to fill the sniper in on his little prank too, so as to ensure that there was no chance of anyone on the crew inadvertently revealing the truth about cacao to Zoro. This was a decision which Usopp himself had vehemently protested, adamant that when Zoro inevitably blew his lid upon finding out, Usopp wasn’t strong enough to defend himself from the ensuing murder spree. Only after extracting a promise from Sanji that the cook would act as his human shield when such horrific events transpired did Usopp finally relent on his threats to spill the beans to Zoro right then and there—and he continued to make it clear that he still wasn’t very happy about being in the know.

(Luffy had been left out of the loop on the basis that Sanji was fairly certain their intrepid captain also didn’t know there was a difference in varieties of chocolate, and given his already limited brain space, Sanji didn’t think it very pertinent to add anything in there that Luffy didn’t expressly need.)

“I think,” Usopp said, slowly and emphatically, “that you are playing a very dangerous game, and that you should think about the potential consequences to any innocent bystanders who want nothing to do with this scheme of yours.”

“So you don’t think he knows already,” Sanji said, and Usopp sighed heavily.

“No, but Sanji—I know Zoro doesn’t seem like the sharpest tool in the shed, but he’s smarter than you’re giving him credit for. Even if he doesn’t suspect anything now, he’s gonna figure it out eventually. So if you want to pull off your ‘grand reveal’ or whatever it is, you need to do it soon. Preferably when I’m somewhere well out of sword range.” Usopp paused and then added, “Also, isn’t this a lot of extra trouble for you? You have to hide the chocolate now whenever you make desserts for the rest of us so that Zoro doesn’t see how similar it is to ‘cacao’, and anything you make with ‘cacao’ for Zoro, you can’t make with chocolate for anyone else for the same reason.”

Sanji scoffed. “It’s not that much extra work,” he insisted. Just because he’d had to write out a physical list of all the things he could only make with chocolate and those he could only make with ‘cacao’, and could no longer use dark chocolate at all for anything that he wasn’t expressly making for Zoro, and had begun scouring every port stop they hit for a dark chocolate that on its own was so delicious it would finally get Zoro to crack and start asking for it—it didn’t mean Sanji was going to that much trouble.

Usopp raised an eyebrow, and said nothing.

“Okay fine, so maybe it’s a little extra work,” Sanji admitted after a few moments of pointed silence as he resumed his piping with newfound vigor. “But that’s okay; it will all be worth it when I can finally reveal to that idiot mosshead that he fucking likes the stupid chocolate.”

There was a pause, and then Usopp said—

“Does he like it, though?”

Sanji squeezed the end of the piping bag too hard and exploded deviled egg filling all over the tray.

“What?” he demanded, head snapping up to stare at Usopp. “Why the fuck would you say that? Of course he likes it! He eats it, doesn’t he?”

Usopp held his hands up placatingly. “But only when you give it to him, right? Isn’t that what you’ve been complaining about?”

“Well, yeah, but—” Sanji cut himself off with a frustrated growl, stomping over to the cupboards and pulling out a large bowl. “Look, I know what the marimo looks like when he enjoys something, okay? And he fucking enjoys chocolate, you can see it on his stupid, ugly face.”

He dumped the now ruined tray of deviled eggs into the bowl and then grabbed a fork, beginning to mash up the whites with more force than was strictly necessary. Zoro did like chocolate. Sanji knew he liked chocolate. He’d seen the look on Zoro’s face whenever he ate it, that wasn’t something you could just fake—

“I’m just saying—” Usopp began, and then stopped.

Sanji stopped his vehement mashing of what was now a nice deviled egg salad, giving Usopp a sharp look. “You’re just saying… what?” he prompted.

“Nothing,” Usopp answered quickly. “I’m not saying anything, I don’t know why I even—”

“Usopp,” Sanji growled, and the sniper let out an audible squeak.

“I… I am just saying—and mind you this is under duress so you can’t get mad at me if you don’t like it—that… sometimes… Zoro…” He trailed off, throat bobbing with an audible swallow. 

“Usopp, just fucking tell me,” Sanji demanded. At Usopp’s continued silence, he sighed heavily and added, “I promise that if I get mad I’ll take it out on Zoro and not you, how about that?”

Usopp did not look particularly reassured by this, but nonetheless he went on, “Sometimes Zoro doesn’t like things you make for him, he just… doesn’t think it’s worth saying anything about it.”

It took a few seconds for Sanji’s brain to actually process the words coming out of Usopp’s mouth, but when it did—

“What?!”

“You said you wouldn’t get mad!” Usopp reminded him when Sanji flung his fork into the sink so hard it bounced out and fell onto the floor with a dull clatter.

“No, I said that if I got mad I’d take it out on Zoro instead of you,” Sanji practically snarled, anger rising up hot and heavy from somewhere deep within his chest and bringing his blood to a rolling boil. “What the fuck do you mean, sometimes he doesn’t like the things I make but doesn’t say anything about it? Does that fucking moss-infested ogre not like my cooking?!”

“No!” Usopp said, waving his arms frantically. “No, no, that’s not it at all—”

“Then what the hell is it, Usopp!” Sanji yelled. “What the fuck could that algae-brained fuckwad not like about—”

“I don’t know!” Usopp cried, throwing his hands up in front of him like a physical ward against Sanji’s anger. “I swear I don’t Sanji, I just—all I know is that I once found him practically choking on an onigiri and when I asked him what was wrong with it, he told me that he doesn’t like the tuna mayo kind because he can’t stand mayonnaise! But then when I said he should tell you that so you didn’t make them for him in the future, he said he didn’t think it was worth bothering you about.”

There was a solid fifteen seconds of silence before Sanji finally managed to find his voice again, and when he did, all he could get out was—

“Zoro said he doesn’t like mayonnaise?”

Usopp nodded.

“You—you’re sure about that,” Sanji continued, each word like it was being wrenched from the nauseating pit of dread that had suddenly appeared in his stomach. “He said the words, ‘I don’t like mayonnaise’?”

Usopp grimaced. “I mean technically what he said was ‘It’s like trying to eat a gob of whale cum,’ but I think the sentiment is the same.”

“… Whale cum?” Sanji repeated.

“His words, not mine!” Usopp insisted. “I love mayo, it’s my favorite condiment! Why, when I was a boy, they used to call me the ‘Mayo King’ back home—”

Usopp kept rambling, but Sanji had stopped listening. He was too busy trying to play back every single instance he could recall of ever having fed Zoro mayonnaise—which was a lot, because mayo actually was Sanji’s favorite condiment. 

He made it by hand, and that was no easy task; you had to be constantly whisking the egg yolks while a slow, steady stream of oil was added so as not to break the emulsion between the two, and a single batch could sometimes take as long as fifteen minutes to come together. But Sanji loved that about mayo. He loved how easy it was to see the labor of it transforming from a bowl of oil and egg yolks into a beautiful, creamy condiment, proof positive of a job perfectly executed. And because he loved it so much, Sanji put mayo in as many things as he could; onigiri fillings, salad dressings, dips, spreads, egg salad, chicken salad, deviled eggs—the list went on and on.

And Zoro—apparently—thought it was tantamount to eating fucking whale cum.

How the hell had Sanji missed that?

“Uh, Sanji?”

Sanji snapped out of his mayo-induced reverie, which wasn’t terribly easy when the world felt like it was crumbling to pieces around him and all he could do was stare on in horror. “Huh?” he said, blinking several times at Usopp, who looked back at him with no small amount of concern.

“You okay?” the sniper asked hesitantly. “You look… kind of ill.”

Sanji blinked one final time and then shook his head vigorously. “I’m fine,” he lied. “I’m just… You’re sure he said it was like trying to eat a gob of whale cum?”

Usopp raised an eyebrow. “You really think I’d be mistaken about a description that vivid?” he asked, and Sanji sighed deeply.

“Well,” Sanji said, frowning down at the giant bowl of egg salad he’d been planning to turn into sandwiches for the crew’s afternoon snack, Zoro included. “Guess I’m just going to have to feed his portion of this to Luffy.”

So. The mosshead didn’t like mayonnaise.

In theory, this shouldn’t have bothered Sanji. While he did his best to accommodate the crew’s preferences when it came to food, at the end of the day, Sanji wasn’t a mind reader. If Zoro didn’t like something, he needed to put on his big boy pants and let Sanji know about it like a fucking adult. And since he’d clearly opted not to, Sanji should have been able to wash his hands of the whole thing and continue feeding Zoro as many fucking mayo laden foods as he wanted.

In reality, Sanji was losing his goddamn mind.

For days after Usopp’s little revelation, Sanji watched Zoro like a hawk whenever he ate, trying to reassure himself that he did, in fact, know what the swordsman liked when it came to food. Everyone had something like a tell when it came to eating things they truly enjoyed; a certain expression, a specific noise, a physical tic. Sometimes big, sometimes small, but always—at least in Sanji’s experience—somewhere to be found, if only you paid close enough attention. 

Luffy, for instance; he’d eat anything Sanji put in front of him, but there was a sort of full body wiggle he made when biting into a juicy piece of meat, and it became particularly evident when he was eating something that had been cooked over hot coals or an open flame. Nami always made a tiny little hum in the back of her throat whenever she ate a mikan, and Sanji had used that same noise to figure out her preference for bright acidic flavors and anything made with a plethora of fresh fruits. Usopp had a tendency to sigh and smack his lips after eating any kind of freshly caught fish, especially if they were chargrilled; and Chopper, never having been taught anything close to proper table manners by either Hiriluk or Dr. Kureha, simply declared his opinions about food openly and often (something that Sanji honestly appreciated, because it made things a lot easier for him). Sanji was still trying to figure out Robin’s particular tell, but already he had begun to notice that unlike the others, she very rarely went back for seconds on a plate—almost as though she was afraid of being too greedy.

Sanji thought he had figured out what Zoro’s tell was a while ago: those stupid hamster cheeks he got whenever he stuffed his mouth too full, like he was afraid the food would disappear if he didn’t try to eat it all at once. He’d first noticed it after feeding Zoro onigiri for the first time, and as they had continued to elicit the same reaction upon each subsequent serving, Sanji had clocked it as an indication of pleasure and then stopped paying as much attention to any further reactions Zoro might have had to being fed. Which, as it turned out, had been a terrible miscalculation. 

Because Zoro got those stupid hamster cheeks with everything that he ate. 

Sanji observed him over the course of an entire week, and it didn’t matter what the hell he gave Zoro; the hamster cheeks were there. Potato and sausage hash for breakfast, stir fried noodles for lunch, soy glazed sea beast donburi for dinner—hamster cheeks. Hard boiled egg and vegetable platter for a mid-morning snack, salmon onigiri for an afternoon one—hamster cheeks. Fresh fruit with a little bit of whipped coconut cream for dessert (since at the very least Zoro did give him a stink eye when Sanji attempted to feed him a bowl of ice cream)—fucking hamster cheeks.

It was infuriating. Only Roronoa Zoro would be enough of a bastard to somehow not have a particular tell when it came to eating foods he truly enjoyed. It was like Heaven had crafted him with the express purpose of driving Sanji out of his fucking mind. 

Sanji was sorely tempted to retaliate against this blatant attack on his sanity by simply dousing everything he fed to Zoro in as much mayo as physically possible, just to see what would get those stupid fucking hamster cheeks to disappear; but unfortunately for Sanji, his sworn duty as a cook prevented him from taking such a drastic step. Because that would mean feeding Zoro with the express intent of not nourishing him, and for as much as Sanji wanted to drop kick the stupid green asshole overboard for how much anguish Zoro was causing him, giving Zoro food that Sanji knew he wouldn’t like just wasn’t something he could force himself to do. The closest he got was giving Zoro a plate of freshly made onigiri for a snack one day that included one with tuna mayo flavor, and even that left Sanji feeling like a piece of shit—leading him to indulge in a chain-smoking break on the upper deck of the Merry, which he did solely because the breeze was better up there, and definitely not so that he could covertly watch Zoro eating down on the lower deck.

Zoro had just finished eating the tuna mayo onigiri, hamster cheeks and all, when Sanji suddenly found himself choking on a lungful of smoke as Luffy appeared out of nowhere and launched himself onto Sanji’s back.

“Saaaaaaaaaanji,” Luffy whined in his ear as Sanji spit out a string of vehement curses threatening all sorts of bodily harm upon Luffy’s person that had no effect whatsoever. “I’m hungry! Can you make me a snack?”

“Luffy, get off!” Sanji snapped, trying and failing to dislodge his barnacle of a captain. “And no! You just had a snack thirty fucking minutes ago!”

“Yeah, exactly!” Luffy said brightly. “So now it’s time for another! Shishishi!”

“Luffy, I am busy—” Sanji started to say, and then abruptly cut himself off. Because chain-smoking didn’t count as being busy, and there was no way in hell Sanji was going to admit to watching Zoro eat. He’d never live it down.

“Hmm?” Luffy craned his head at an unnatural angle over Sanji’s shoulder and peered out onto the lower deck. “Oh, sorry—were you watching Zoro again?”

Sanji, who had just been considering whether or not it was worth it to jam the lit end of his cigarette against Luffy’s arm in an effort to break his hold, froze.

“Again?” he repeated, with a rather strangled laugh. “I’m not—I mean, I’m not watching the stupid mosshead! And—and even if I was, I definitely wouldn’t be doing it again.”

“Oh,” Luffy said. “Well, then what have you been doing? Because we’ve all noticed it—even Zoro.”

Sanji choked.

“He has?” he said faintly, pitching forward to grab the upper deck’s railing for support as his knees very nearly gave out. “I mean—you all have?”

“Oh yeah.” Luffy nodded vigorously as he untangled himself from Sanji’s back, opting instead to hoist himself up onto the railing next to where Sanji was currently trying his best not to die on the spot from embarrassment. “Nami bet him two thousand berries that it’s about staining your favorite yellow shirt with curry sauce, but he thinks it’s because you finally noticed that he keeps stealing sips from that bottle of nice Drum Island gin in the back of the pantry. Either way, they think you’re trying to come up with ways for his eventual murder to look like an accident.” He paused, and then added, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t actually kill him, though—our crew just won’t be the same without a good swordsman.”

Sanji groaned, dragging one hand down his face. “That’s not the nice Drum Island gin, it’s a decoy bottle filled with cheap vodka,” he sighed before pulling out another cigarette. “And technically speaking I was the one who stained my shirt with curry sauce.”

“Oh.” Luffy tilted his head in question. “Then what is it? Is there a problem between you two?”

Sanji snorted. “When isn’t there a problem between us?” he grumbled as he lit up. His hands were jittery from having too many cigarettes already, but Sanji didn’t know how else to deal with his irritation towards Zoro without picking a fight, and that just… didn’t seem like the right thing to do at the present moment. After all, even if Zoro hadn’t told Sanji he didn’t like mayonnaise, it was ultimately still Sanji who had failed to notice it. Failed in his basic duty as the ship’s cook to notice what foods his friend (and they were friends, even though Sanji was pretty sure neither of them would admit that for anything less than pain of death) didn’t fucking like.

“Huh?” Luffy’s head continued tilting until it reached the very disconcerting angle of a full ninety degree bend. “What are you talking about? You guys don’t have problems—not real ones anyway.”

At that, Sanji couldn’t help raising an eyebrow. “Come on, captain,” he said, giving Luffy a rather humorless smile, “Even you’re not that dense. You know Zoro and I butt heads all the fucking time. We did it this morning when he got bacon grease all over my newspaper.”

Luffy rolled his eyes. “That’s not the same and you know it,” he insisted, nudging Sanji’s ribs gently with one flip-flopped foot. “You guys butt heads ‘cause it’s fun and you like doing it. If there was actually a problem, you guys would like, stop talking and not interact at all. Which I guess is kind of what you are doing by just watching Zoro without saying anything, so… Is there a problem?”

Sanji blinked, turning his head to peer at Luffy, who was giving him a sort of wide-eyed, innocent stare that felt as though it could see right through every careful layer Sanji had ever built up around himself. He swallowed nervously, realizing with a growing sense of dismay that there was no way in hell he could avoid answering Luffy honestly—not with the captain looking at him like that.

Fuck. Goddamnit. Fuck. This was all Zoro’s fault. That stupid sentient mold spore was going to be the luckiest man alive if Sanji didn’t end up murdering him over this.

“Zoro… doesn’t like mayonnaise,” Sanji finally said after a long, stilted silence, feeling as though every word had to be ripped from the same nauseating pit of dread in his stomach that hadn’t left since he’d spoken to Usopp nearly a week ago.

“Oh.” Luffy blinked a few times, and then laughed. “Is that all? Silly Sanji, then just don’t make things with mayo for him!”

“No, Luffy, it’s—” Sanji sighed, bringing the hand not holding his cigarette up so he could run his fingers irritably through his bangs. “Let me try that again: Zoro doesn’t like mayonnaise, and he didn’t tell me about it.”

“Ooooh, I see,” Luffy said, nodding sagely for a moment before he paused. “Wait, no I don’t. Why is that a problem?”

“Because I’m the fucking cook!” Sanji snapped, shoving himself away from the railing so that he could glare properly at his captain in an effort to make him understand the gravity of the situation. “And my crew mates—even stupid, no good, moss-for-brains bastards like Zoro—should be okay with telling me when they don’t fucking like something so that they’re not having to—to fucking choke it down every time I make it! And if that shit fucking swordsman can’t even be assed to tell me he doesn’t fucking like mayo when I use it as often as I do then—”

Sanji stopped, cutting himself off with a strangled noise before ashing the remainder of his cigarette in one long pull and then jamming the butt out against the bottom of his shoe

“He should have told me,” Sanji spat, the feeling of being caught somewhere between anger and dismay for the past several days finally coming to a head, bubbling over inside him like an unattended pot. “I thought—I thought I’d made it clear to everyone on the crew that you can be honest about all the things you do and don’t like. I may not always listen—” He quickly clarified as Luffy opened his mouth to no doubt launch into a vehement protest about being made to eat his daily quota of fruits and vegetables “—but I do take those things into account. And I can’t… I can’t figure out why Zoro won’t tell me that he—apparently—thinks mayo is tantamount to fucking whale cum.”

Sanji slumped against the railing again with a heavy sigh. His fingers itched for another cigarette, but as the rest of Sanji’s body seemed fairly adamant that it had reached its maximum possible level of nicotine saturation, he settled for fiddling with his lighter instead while staring miserably out at the lower deck. He could see that Zoro had finished his snack and was now doing some kind of ridiculous weight training exercise that seemed to involve him hopping around the deck like a frog. Sanji wanted to strangle him just for existing.

“Sanji?” Luffy said after several moments of awkward silence, and Sanji sighed again.

“Yeah?”

“Have you asked Zoro why he didn’t tell you that he doesn’t like mayo?”

Luffy said this like it was the easiest solution in the whole wide world, and Sanji couldn’t help barking out another humorless laugh because of it. “Captain, don’t be stupid,” he said with a chagrined smile. “Of course I haven’t.”

“Why not?” Luffy asked simply, and Sanji blinked.

“Well, because… I mean, he’s not going to… He’s not just going to tell me if I ask,” Sanji answered, frowning at Luffy as he did so. “Right?”

Luffy tilted his head in question. “Are you sure?”

Sanji blinked again.

“Yes…?” he said, hating how uncertain he suddenly sounded, because Sanji was sure that Zoro wouldn’t just tell him why he didn’t like mayonnaise. After all, if he’d never bothered informing Sanji of it on his own, what reason would he have to be honest if Sanji were to ask?

Luffy continued staring at him, his brown eyes wide with the same innocent gaze as before—giving Sanji the rather horrid feeling of being flayed open so that his entire soul could be bared for the world to see. It was a struggle not to squirm under the intensity of Luffy’s scrutiny, and Sanji was not a man particularly prone to squirming.

Then Luffy shrugged. “Well, as long as you’re sure,” he said, reaching over to pat Sanji on the head. “Can I have my snack now?”

Sanji got the distinct impression that he’d just missed something rather important.

Chapter Text

By now the Straw Hats were no strangers to victory celebrations thrown in their honor, but even so, the party put on in the wake of Enel’s defeat was truly something magnificent. Perhaps it was elation at the crushing defeat of a previously invincible kami, or maybe it was because for the first time in four hundred years, Skypiea was truly at peace. Possibly it was just that all of the Sky Islanders were happy to be alive after they’d come so close to total destruction. Whatever the reason, it was a raucous time, and Sanji was only too happy to be a part of it.

He was just taking a quick smoke break in between helping Pagaya whip up big batches of fresh sky fish ceviche when Sanji saw Robin and one of the older Shandians—the chief of their village, if Sanji recalled correctly—approaching from the corner of his eye. “Mr. Cook,” Robin said with a smile once she’d reached his proximity. “I was wondering if we might make use of your culinary expertise for a minute?”

”But of course, Robin-chwan!” Sanji exclaimed, falling to his knees in joy—because how could he not, when Robin wanted to use his knowledge of cooking! “Anything you want! Your wish is my command!”

Robin let out a small chuckle. “Actually, it’s not really what I want. It’s the Shandians.” She nodded at the chief standing next to her, who gave Sanji a warm if slightly bemused smile.

Sanji blinked. “Oh,” he said, feeling vaguely crestfallen but determined to rally himself. He stood up and turned to the chief with a smile of his own. “Of course, I’d be happy to help. What is it?”

The chief cleared his throat. “We—that is to say, us Shandians—would like to prepare a special ceremonial drink for your crew as thanks for all that you’ve done for us,” he said, in a voice filled with the kind of gravitas that only came from age and experience. “But the process is rather labor intensive, and seeing as all the strongest people in our village were in the Upper Yard when the Survival Game happened, they’re too injured to help out like they normally would. However, Ms. Robin here seems to think you and your fellows might still be up to the task…”

The chief trailed off, eyeing the myriad of bandages covering Sanji’s torso rather dubiously, which only made the cook laugh. 

“Well if not me, then I’m sure Luffy could lend a hand—assuming we can pry him away from whatever meat it is that they’re spit-roasting over the bonfires.” He grinned at the chief reassuringly, happy to see an answering smile break over his wizened face. “What is it that you need done?”

The chief glanced briefly at Robin, who gave him an encouraging nod. “We call the drink xocolatl,” he said, returning his gaze to Sanji. “And we make it from the sacred food of the old gods, cacao.”

Sanji blinked.

“Cacao?” he repeated.

The chief nodded. “It comes from trees which grow in the Upper Yard that must once have been part of the land you call Jaya,” he said. “They produce a large fruit pod whose seeds we ferment, then dry, roast, and grind into a paste. This we mix with achiote, tlilxochitl, neuctli, and chilli to make the xocolatl.” 

For a moment, Sanji could only stare at the chief as he tried to think of the most polite way to tell him that the only one of those ingredients Sanji recognized was maybe chili; but thankfully, Robin intervened on his behalf before he could make an idiot of himself. 

“Achiote is annatto seeds, neuctli is honey, and of course you’re already quite familiar with cacao,” she explained with a small though extremely amused smile. “Although the tlilxochitl—Am I saying that right, chief?”

“Tlil-xo-chitl,” the chief enunciated. “You need to roll your tongue around the L sounds more.”

“Tlilxochitl,” Robin repeated. “Anyway, I believe it might be something that’s only capable of growing on Sky Islands on implanted varse. The chief says they’ve found it on excursions into the Upper Yard and the Skypieans here have adopted it into their cuisine as well, but there’s no similar plant mentioned in the old oral histories of Shandora, nor in any of Noland’s journals. And since he was a botanist I can’t imagine he would have missed it—oh, but anyway. That’s neither here nor there. I’m sure the thing you’re more interested in is the cacao.” 

A very light sheen of pink had bloomed across Robin’s cheeks as she spoke, marking the closest that Sanji had ever seen her get to anything like being embarrassed. Part of him wanted to swoon and sing her praises until the sun rose, for surely Heaven had smiled upon him, being able to witness such a rare moment of Robin’s truly stunning beauty.

But the other part really, really needed to know what the deal with the cacao was.

“I mean, it’s chocolate, right?” Sanji asked her. “That fermenting-drying-roasting-grinding process is the same one that we use for turning cacao into chocolate down on the Blue Sea—except that we also add sugar and other stabilizers to it.”

“As far as I can tell, yes,” Robin said. “But as I’m sure you’re aware Mr. Cook, grinding down cacao beans into a paste is a long process—and the Shandians obviously can’t do it via machine the way we do.”

“How do you do it?” Sanji asked the chief. “Grinding by hand? That must take ages.”

“Xocolatl would not be restricted to ceremony if it were easy to make,” the chief replied with a wry smile.

“I know you mentioned Luffy,” Robin said, bright blue eyes suddenly glinting in the dim evening light as she gave Sanji a rather devilish smile, “but I think our dear swordsman might be a better fit for aiding with this particular task. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Sanji beamed.

“Oh Robin-chan,” he sighed dreamily. “Have I ever told you how much I love you?”

Sanji found Zoro drinking on the far side of the bonfires, alongside a number of Shandian warriors who were apparently not quite so injured that they needed to remain sober. “Oi, marimo,” Sanji called to the swordsman as he approached. “Come here, I need someone whose biceps are bigger than his brain.”

“I’m drinking, shit cook,” Zoro said, rolling his eyes at Sanji over the rim of his mug. “Go ask someone else.”

“The Shandians want to make us a cacao drink, but they need help grinding the cacao beans into a paste,” Sanji said, neatly skirting past the protest. “I figure a meathead like you should have no problem with that.”

Zoro blinked. Once. Twice.

“Cacao?” he repeated, lowering his drink and staring at Sanji with a dumbfounded expression.

Sanji nodded, jerking his thumb in the direction of the Upper Yard. “Cacao grows on Jaya,” he explained, “and when part of Jaya got blasted up here on the jet stream, some cacao trees came with it. The Shandian chief says they sneak into the Upper Yard and collect whatever pods they can so that they can make a special drink with it.”

“Ooh, is the chief going to make xocolatl?” one of the warriors said, swaying slightly as he spoke. “That’s—hic—a huge honor, man! We only make xocolatl for the—hic—most special occasions!”

He thumped Zoro heavily on the back with a vague noise that seemed to indicate congratulations were in order, but Zoro didn’t react to the blow at all. He was still staring at Sanji like the cook had just grown a second head.

“The Shandians have… cacao,” Zoro said slowly, in a tone that suggested he was having quite a bit of trouble wrapping his head around this concept. Sanji was tempted to laugh at him, but he doubted that would go over well, and right now he needed Zoro to be as complacent as possible. Maybe the stupid swordsman really didn’t like chocolate as much as Sanji thought he had, but he’d still fallen for Sanji’s deception about it; and no way in hell was Sanji going to waste such a perfect opportunity to set Zoro up for such a perfectly humiliating reveal. 

“Yup,” Sanji said, tapping his foot impatiently. “And they need help making it into xocolatl. So hop to it, shit swordsman.”

For a long moment, Zoro simply continued to stare at him with an expression of total bewilderment, as though he really couldn’t parse what Sanji had just said. Sanji frowned, wondering if there were perhaps some lingering effects from Enel’s lightning that had hit Zoro’s nervous system. He himself was still seeing spots at the edges of his vision, and his nerves hadn’t entirely recovered either, fingers still twitching from the occasional errant jolt.

“Hello?” he said, leaning in close enough that his cigarette smoke wafted into Zoro’s face. “Earth to mosshead? Are you in there or do I need to go get Chopper?”

The smoke (or possibly the threat of Chopper) seemed to snap Zoro out of his daze, and he gave himself a violent shake before standing. “I’m fine,” he said, fixing Sanji with an inscrutable look. “Let’s go help with the… cacao.”

Sanji led Zoro through the still raucous party over to the designated cooking area, where Robin and the chief and a few other Shandians had set up with the huge stone slabs that they called metates, as well as all of the ingredients needed to make the xocolatl, including a large woven basket full of shelled cacao beans. Robin was already in the process of grinding some of them down, and she gave Zoro and Sanji one of her small, enigmatic smiles as they approached.

“Ah, I see our cook managed to find you, Mr. Swordsman!” Robin said. “And just in time—I fear my arms may simply not be up to the laborious task of grinding these cacao beans down into a paste like the chief wants. Do you think you could help?”

Robin brought the back of one hand up to wipe away some clearly imaginary sweat on her brow, giving a little huff of exertion as she did so; Sanji bit straight through the filter on his cigarette in an attempt to keep himself from bursting into laughter.

“Uh,” Zoro said, staring at the setup the Shandians had made. He looked more perplexed than Sanji had ever seen him before—which was saying something, because he’d been there the first time Chopper had tried explaining to Zoro that no, most people do not recover from life-threatening injuries in just a single day. His hazel-grey eyes were somehow wide with confusion despite the deep furrow of his brow, and one of his cheeks had gotten the same puffy look that it did when he took a too big bite of onigiri. Sanji was almost tempted to reach over and pinch it.

“Don’t worry moss, I’ll explain it so your cactus brain doesn’t have to work quite so hard,” Sanji said with a grin as he lit a fresh cigarette before kneeling down by one of the metates and grabbing a few handfuls of cacao beans from the nearby basket, dropping them into a depression in the center of the large stone slab.

“So cacao beans actually have a high fat content, which is what allows them to be ground down enough to start becoming something like a paste instead of a just a powder,” Sanji explained as he began to run a heavy stone pestle back and forth across the bean in slow steady motions, the shells cracking pleasantly as they broke open under the weight. “But the process requires a constant motion since the heat created from the friction of grinding is what helps soften the fats enough for them to be properly released. You see the way Robin’s beans have been ground down enough that they’ve begun to take on a kind of shine? That’s from the fats. The goal is to grind down the beans enough that they reach a spreadable paste form—almost like soft butter. Got all that, idiot swordsman?”

Sanji leveled him with an expectant look. Zoro just stared back at him blankly.

“And that’s… how you make cacao?” he asked, gaze darting back and forth between Robin and Sanji like it wasn’t quite sure where to settle. Looking at him with his still incredibly perplexed expression was making Sanji’s heart do a mildly uncomfortable sort of pitter-patter inside his chest; probably more aftereffects from Enel’s lightning strikes.

“Well, you have to add a couple other things to get it to the solid state that we usually eat it in—stabilizers and such,” Sanji answered. “But yes. This is cacao in its purest form.”

For a few moments, Zoro continued staring at Sanji like he had no earthly idea what was going on, and Sanji couldn’t help but feel a brief flash of concern. For as much as Zoro was clearly an idiot, he wasn’t usually this out of it, especially not when having something explained to him; Sanji had once managed to get him to understand the concept of chateau cut potatoes with only a single demonstration, and the same could not be said of any of the line cooks currently working back at the Baratie. Sanji opened his mouth, about to ask if Zoro really was experiencing some nasty side effects of being hit by Enel’s lightning—but then the swordsman’s gaze sharpened, his expression schooling itself into the kind of hard-eyed determination he got whenever he was training.

“Okay,” he said. “How much do I need to do?”

“The Shandians only intended to make enough for the crew, but I think Luffy would rather everyone be able to partake,” Robin said with a smile. “So the more of the cacao paste we can make, the better.”

Zoro nodded. “Right. I can do that,” he said. There was a brief pause and then he added, “Definitely better than the cook can, at any rate.”

Sanji, who had just been congratulating himself on perfectly executing this part of his little scheme, blinked.

“Excuse me?” he said, glaring up at Zoro. “What the hell do you mean by that, shit swordsman?”

Zoro smirked. “Just that you’ve got no upper body strength, shit cook,” he replied smugly, gesturing at Sanji’s torso. “No way those skinny chicken arms could work hard enough to grind cacao beans down into a paste.”

He crossed his arms in a clear attempt to accentuate the prominence of his own biceps, and Sanji felt himself go hot all over. From rage, of course.

“Oh, fuck off, shithead!” Sanji snapped. “You think I lug around hundred pound cuts of meat all day just for show? I could grind twice as much cacao as your sorry ass without even breaking a sweat!”

“Oh yeah?” Zoro grinned, sharp-toothed and a little feral, hazel-grey eyes glinting dangerously. “Fucking prove it then, curly-brow. Whoever loses has to do the other’s chores for a week.”

Sanji’s nostrils flared.

“Bring it, motherfucker.”

It wasn’t until the two of them were nearly done grinding down the (awed and somewhat terrified) Shandians’ entire supply of cacao beans that it occurred to Sanji Zoro had clearly been baiting him. Because while Sanji’s upper body strength certainly wasn’t anything to sneeze at, Zoro had him beat simply by virtue of being a swordsman that trained upwards of six hours every goddamn day. And while Sanji liked to think he’d at least given the stupid, no-good, conniving bastard a decent challenge, by the end of the grinding process Zoro’s large heaping bowlful of cacao paste was ultimately (though barely, at least in Sanji’s opinion) bigger than his.

“I’m going to fucking humiliate him,” Sanji seethed to Robin while Zoro gloated by sauntering back towards the main party with an entire giant gourd’s worth of some kind of Shandian alcohol. “I don’t care if he never eats chocolate again. I am going to make him feel like the absolute stupidest person alive for this.”

Robin merely raised an eyebrow at him, which Sanji chose to believe was a silent but tacit approval of his plan to make Zoro fucking die of embarrassment when Sanji revealed to him that cacao was, in fact, fucking chocolate.

Once the cacao paste had been made, the rest of the xocolatl came together quite easily. Freshly chopped red chilis were steeped in a large pot of simmering water just long enough to leech the heat from their seeds before being strained out; then the honey was added, along with the tlilxochitl, which were long, black pods that had been split open lengthwise, allowing their pinpoint tiny seeds to infuse into the water. They smelled absolutely divine going in, unlike anything Sanji had ever encountered in his life before, and he made a mental note to ask the chief later if they’d be willing to give him some to take back down to the Blue Sea.

Next came the achiote paste, which the chief informed Sanji was really more for color than anything; it gave the whole concoction a sort of a reddish hue that reminded Sanji of rich, mineral-filled earth or the sun as it set over the Alabastian desert. And then finally, the cacao paste. Upon being added, it turned the whole concoction into what looked like a giant vat of the richest, darkest hot chocolate Sanji had ever seen—which he supposed for all intents and purposes, was exactly what it was.

“It smells wonderful,” Sanji told the chief truthfully as he helped to stir the mixture, ensuring that all the cacao paste was properly dissolved. “We have a similar drink down on the Blue Sea, but it’s made with warmed milk and sugar. I’ve never considered adding chili to it since it’s meant to be quite sweet. Plus we of course don’t have tlilxochitl.”

“That’s such a shame—we’ll have to send some along with you when you leave,” the chief said, much to Sanji’s delight. He dipped a small bowl into the vat, filling it with the xocolatl before taking a small sip, humming thoughtfully as he did so. “Mmm, very good. Another minute and I think it should be ready to serve.”

Sanji grinned, unable to help bouncing on the balls of his feet a little with sheer excitement. Determination to ruin Zoro’s life aside, this was still an amazing opportunity to try a drink that couldn’t be found anywhere else in the world, and Sanji was going to savor every single second of it—before and after Zoro’s earth-shattering humiliation at his hands.

Robin had gone to gather up the rest of the crew and she was just returning now; with Luffy at the front, practically vibrating with joy as he ran up to Sanji and jumped onto his back. “Sanji, Sanji!” he crowed with delight. “Robin says you and Zoro helped the Shandians make a special treat just for us! Is this it? Is it meat? No wait, it’s liquid—is it a meat soup?”

“It’s a drink, captain,” Sanji said with a laugh as he wrapped his arms around the backs of Luffy’s knees to better stabilize him. “They call it xocolatl.”

“Hmm. Xo-col-a-tl,” Luffy repeated, drawing the word out syllable by syllable. “Shishishi! That sounds kinda like chocolate! Is it like hot chocolate? Ooh, can we add marshmallows? Pleeeeeeeease?”

Sanji froze, panic rising up fast and sharp inside his chest as he cast his gaze around frantically for Zoro—but he was thankfully still a little ways away, chatting with Robin as they brought up the rear of the group, behind Nami, Chopper, and a slightly inebriated Usopp. Robin was wearing a rather amused smile, and Zoro looked strangely smug about something. Probably the stupid bet over the cacao paste. Sanji couldn’t wait to see the expression on his dumb mossy face once he made his grand reveal.

First things first, however—

“It definitely isn’t like hot chocolate, and we are not adding any marshmallows,” Sanji said firmly as he let go of Luffy’s legs, letting him drop to the ground with a heavy thud. “In fact, the Shandians would be, uh… very insulted if you were to compare this drink to hot chocolate, so how about we just don’t say anything more about it, eh captain?”

Sanji turned to give Luffy as severe a look as he could muster, hoping that would help drive the point home so Luffy would keep his mouth shut. Luffy tilted his head, blinking up at him in confusion for a second before his face split open into a wide and oddly knowing grin.

“Oooh, I see!” he said, jumping back onto his feet. “No mentioning chocolate! I got it. Shishishi! Hey look, everyone’s here—let’s drink!”

Luffy then proceeded to launch himself at a thoroughly unsuspecting Zoro, causing them both to crash to the ground in a tangled pile of limbs, with Zoro spitting curses at his captain while Luffy cackled gleefully. Sanji blinked after him with no small amount of bemusement, wondering what the hell that had been about. It almost sounded as though Luffy knew about the cacao deception, even though Sanji had never told him. 

Maybe he hadn’t been giving Luffy enough credit when Sanji had decided not to let him in on the secret. Or maybe Luffy was just being weird. Both seemed like equally likely options.

Whatever the case, Sanji didn’t have time to dwell on it. The chief had begun explaining the importance of the xocolatl to the gathered group as he presented large cups made from hollowed out gourds to each of them. A special tool called a molinillo as well as a small amount of dried and ground maize had been used to create a foaming effect across the top of each cup, making each one look like it was positively bubbling over with xocolatl, and Sanji couldn’t help a thrill of pride that shot through him as he heard the chief say, “—and I really must thank Miss Robin and Sanji for all their help. I don’t know if we could have done this without them.”

Sanji grinned crookedly. “Well, not just us,” he said. “The marimo was happy to help too. After all, he really likes cacao.”

He glanced at Zoro, who now had a still giggling Luffy plastered to his back and a look of fond exasperation on his face as he allowed the captain to clamber all over him. Upon catching Sanji’s gaze however, the expression shifted to one of Zoro’s signature sharp-toothed grins.

“More like I had to step in because your weak ass arms weren’t up to the task of grinding all those beans,” he said smugly, and Sanji had to bite back a growl. 

Patience, he told himself. The time was almost here. And then Sanji could bask in the sweetness of Zoro’s humiliation all he wanted.

So instead of kicking the asshole’s skull in like Sanji wanted, he simply grinned meanly back at him. “Help is help, mosshead,” he said. “So let’s drink to the fruits of our labors, yeah?”

“And to kicking some god butt!” Luffy declared loudly, thrusting his cup into the air with vigor.

“And bonfire parties!” added a flushed and beaming Usopp.

“To not dying a horrible death by lightning,” Nami chimed in with a wry smile.

“To discovering the fate of the lost city of Shandora,” Robin said with a nod towards the chief, who smiled widely back.

“To friends! And adventures! Even when they’re really scary!” Chopper piped up, and there was an answering chorus of enthusiastic agreement from everyone present before they all put their lips to their cups and drank deeply.

Sanji let his eyes slip closed for a brief moment as the drink finally hit his tongue. It was a symphony of flavors like nothing he’d ever experienced, foreign and familiar all at once; not unlike a cup of hot chocolate, but so much more unique in its complexity. The richness of the freshly ground cacao paste, the hint of heat from the chilis and the barely there sweetness from the honey—and bringing it all together, a flavor Sanji could find no earthly comparison for that he had to assume was the tlilxochitl. He felt certain that it would have been wonderful under any circumstances, but as a drink shared between his crew—his friends—in the wake of their victory against Enel and indeed this whole sky island adventure, it was nothing short of magnificent.

Sanji was almost sad that he was going to have to cut his enjoyment of this moment a little short in order to hit Zoro with the truth about cacao, but consoled himself with the promise that laughing in Zoro’s stupid, mossheaded face would be well worth the small sacrifice.

“Oi, marimo,” Sanji said, opening his eyes and turning to grin crookedly at the swordsman—only to stop short as he caught sight of Zoro’s expression.

He was staring down at his cup and blinking slowly, hazel-grey eyes widening in surprise, or possibly even bewilderment, but with something else lying just beneath the surface. It felt significant, but Sanji couldn’t tell whether it was good or bad—a confusion which was made significantly worse when Zoro let out a small, “Huh.”

Huh? Sanji thought. What the hell did huh mean? What kind of a fucking reaction was huh? 

“Something wrong, Zoro?” Nami asked, smiling at him with a picture perfect look of innocence while next to her, Chopper made an awful grimace and immediately turned to ask Robin in a very loud whisper whether or not he was allowed to add any sugar to the drink.

“No,” Zoro said, mouth twisting into a thoughtful frown. “Just…”

He paused to take a second sip, jaw working almost like he was swishing it around his mouth in the way one did with wine. There was a small furrow between his brow now, giving his whole face a rather pensive but severe look.

There was a sudden, awful clenching in Sanji’s gut as his brain decided that right now was an excellent time to recall that in all the chaos surrounding their Skypiean adventure, he’d never had a chance to figure out the ongoing issue of apparently not being able to tell what Zoro’s food preferences were for shit, and oh god, was that what was happening? Was this what Zoro looked like when he hated something so much that he couldn’t even muster up his stupid hamster cheeks? Had Sanji made an awful miscalculation in his eagerness for Zoro’s utter humiliation and just fed Zoro something he despised?

Fuck, Sanji thought frantically. Fuck fuck fuck, that was it, wasn’t it, he’d completely missed the mark on this and now Zoro was—

“I… like that.”

Sanji’s rapidly spiraling thoughts ground to a screeching halt.

“What?” he said, though in his current state of panicked confusion, it sounded more like a South Bird’s squawk than an actual word.

“Yeah.” One corner of Zoro’s mouth twitched. “That’s… really good.”

He took a long drink, and Sanji saw those stupid fucking hamster cheeks forming as his mouth filled with too much xocolatl—but he also saw something else.

Zoro’s cheeks were puffed out like usual, but there was also a small indent on each side that looked like the little dimples Zoro got whenever he grinned. It was the same look he’d had the first time he’d tried the cacao balls, and the one he got whenever he was eating onigiri or drinking sake—but not, Sanji realized with a jolt, the one he got when eating most other foods. And more specifically, definitely not the one he got when eating tuna mayo onigiri.

The dimples, Sanji thought dimly as he continued staring at Zoro’s stupid face with its stupid hamster cheeks and its stupid fucking dimples. The dimples were his tell. It made it look like he was trying to smile with his mouth full.

Fuck.

There was a loud, pointed cough, and Sanji snapped out of his dimple-induced reverie to find Nami looking at him with an expectantly raised eyebrow, Robin giving him one of her small, amused smiles, and Usopp not so subtly backing away from the general vicinity while trying to drag Chopper with him.

Right. The reveal. Sanji was going to do the reveal. Sanji needed to do the reveal. Now, while the time was ripe. He was never going to get a more perfect chance than this.

“Oi, marimo…” he said again, turning to look back at Zoro. Luffy had detached himself from the swordsman’s back and was now in the process of trying to haul Chopper and Usopp back towards the group, much to the little doctor’s confusion and the sniper’s evident distress. Zoro himself was in the process of finishing his xocolatl, and when he lowered his cup, Sanji saw that the stupid fucking dimpled hamster cheeks were still there.

Zoro quirked an eyebrow at Sanji and made an inquisitive humming sound, mouth apparently too full for a verbal response.

Okay. This was it. The moment Sanji had been working towards for ages. Zoro was going to find out that cacao was chocolate and he was going to die of humiliation and Sanji was going to dance on his grave. All his hard work was about to pay off.

Sanji took a deep breath.

“What do you have against mayonnaise?” he blurted out.

Nami, who had been in the middle of sipping her own drink, promptly choked.

Zoro blinked at him, swallowing his remaining xocolatl with visible effort before saying, “What?”

“Mayonnaise!” Sanji fumed, acutely aware that this was absolutely not what he’d meant to say and yet unable to stop himself as several days worth of confusion, frustration, and dismay finally bubbled over inside of him. “Usopp says you don’t like mayonnaise but you’ve never bothered telling me because you’re an algae-brained dipshit that can’t be bothered to inform the cook when you don’t like something that I make!”

For a moment, all Zoro did was stare at him. Then his head whipped around so that he could glare furiously at their sniper as he yelled, “Usopp! You told him about the mayonnaise thing?”

“It’s not my fault!” Usopp cried, scrambling to put himself behind Luffy even while being tangled up in his rubber-limbed embrace. “I was under duress! I had no choice!”

“I’ll fucking show you duress,” Zoro growled, taking a step forward—but then Sanji was in front of him, one leg raised in a clear challenge.

“Don’t blame Usopp for this, shit swordsman,” he said angrily. “You’re the one who couldn’t be assed to tell me that you don’t fucking like it. Even though—and I can’t believe I’m about to repeat this in front of the ladies—you think it’s like eating a gob of fucking whale cum.”

Zoro, much to Sanji’s surprise, went bright red from the tips of his ears all the way down his neck. “What does it matter whether or not I like it?” he protested hotly. “I fucking eat it, don’t I?”

“Yeah, and that’s insane!” Sanji shot back, leaning in close to glower at him. “You realize that, right? Tell me you realize that it’s fucking crazy of you to eat something that you hate just because you didn’t think it was worth telling me about!”

“How is that crazy?” Zoro demanded. “People eat stuff they hate all the fucking time! You make Luffy eat vegetables every goddamn day!”

“Yeah!” Luffy yelled. “No more vegetables, Sanji! Only meat!”

“Luffy, shut up,” Sanji snapped before returning his attention to Zoro. “Vegetables are an essential food group because they have nutrients that the body needs in order to function correctly. Mayo—which by the way is fucking delicious you uncultured mold growth—is a condiment. There’s nothing in it that you can’t get from another source, which means you don’t have to eat it! So why do you when you clearly fucking hate it?!”

“Because you hate wasting food, you fucking idiot!”

Sanji was honestly kind of surprised that his head didn’t explode on the spot, because that’s sure what it felt like what had just happened inside his brain upon hearing Zoro’s response.

“What?” he squawked, but either Zoro didn’t hear him or was choosing to ignore him, because he barreled on—

“I can’t fucking believe that you’re angry at me about this!” he fumed. “You talk all the fucking time about how much you hate wasting food and here I was, just trying to do you a fucking favor by shutting up and eating whatever you gave me, even though mayo is disgusting and it is like trying to eat fucking whale cum—”

“Can we please stop saying the words ‘whale cum’!” Nami yelled from somewhere off to the side. “For God’s sake, Chopper is right here!”

“Oh, that’s okay, Nami! I’m familiar with the slang words for semen—Doctorine thought it prudent knowledge when she taught me about reproductive health in case I ever needed to educate people about safe sex—”

A great deal of shouting ensued as both Nami and Usopp attempted to cut Chopper off, Robin tried egging him on, and Luffy began cackling loud enough to drown them all out. But Sanji wasn’t really paying attention to any of it. He was still too busy trying to wrap his head around Zoro’s reasoning for not telling him about his hatred of mayonnaise—because in all of Sanji’s many, many guesses as to why the hell Zoro had kept this from him, this was quite possibly the last thing that he had ever expected.

“You eat mayo because I hate wasting food?” Sanji repeated, still stunned.

Zoro scowled deeply at him as he crossed his arms, face still curiously red. “Isn’t that obvious?”

“… No,” Sanji answered after a moment. “No, that’s not—Zoro, how the ever loving fuck does you eating something that you hate factor into my not wanting to waste food?”

Zoro rolled his eyes. “Because if I said I didn’t like it, you’d have to make something else for me to eat, right?”

“Yeah?” Sanji said, feeling totally lost. “So?”

“So isn’t that wasting food?”

Sanji stared at him.

“How the fuck is that wasting food?” he asked, and Zoro blinked.

“Well, because… You have to use more food than you would otherwise, right?” he said, scowl morphing into a slightly softer frown. “Just to make something extra?”

“Yes…?” Sanji replied, not at all sure where the hell Zoro was going with this.

“So… isn’t that… waste?”

It took a few moments for Sanji’s brain to be able to process that particular statement, but when it did, Sanji considered it a minor miracle that he didn’t strangle Zoro right then and there for being the dumbest fucking person on the face on the planet.

”Zoro,” Sanji said slowly, needing to make sure that Zoro understood what he was about to ask. “Would you eat the extra food that I made you?”

Zoro raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, of course.”

“Then for fuck’s sake, that’s not wasting anything!” Sanji yelled, throwing his hands into the air in exasperation. “When I talk about wasting food I mean things like—like chefs only using the best cuts of meat because they don’t want to bother with the bits that are harder to work with, or people throwing out produce because it looks a little too brown, or someone not being willing to try something new just because they think it’s weird! I’m not—I don’t want you to have to force something down that you hate! That’s more wasteful than me having to make an extra dish or two!”

Zoro’s frown deepened, head tilting in confusion as he said, “How so?”

“Because food is more than just fuel, you fucking algae-brained moron!” Sanji shouted, feeling like he was losing his mind a little bit having to explain this. “You should enjoy what you eat! You should want to eat it! Why the fuck do you think I work so goddamn hard to cook for this crew the way that I do? Any shithead with a knife could feed you guys, but I am trying to nourish you!”

Zoro blinked again. Several times.

“… Oh,” was all he said, and the redness from his face and neck seeped all the way across his shoulders and down beneath the collar of his tank top, giving the impression that the swordsman was blushing with his entire goddamn torso. Sanji had never seen him get so red before. It was making his lungs and stomach and especially his heart do all sorts of weird, fluttery things that Sanji had to assume was due to how disconcerting he found this whole situation, and especially Zoro’s evident embarrassment. Never in his wildest dreams did Sanji think it would be anything like this.

“You’re such a dumbass,” Sanji grumbled, pulling out a cigarette that he suddenly felt like he desperately needed (more desperately than usual, anyway) and lighting up. “Holy shit, I can’t believe you’ve been choking down mayo this whole goddamn time because you thought I wouldn’t want to ‘waste’ food on making you something else. That’s…”

He trailed off, trying to decide on what word would most accurately describe how Sanji felt. It was stupid. It was moronic. It was complete fucking bullshit. It was…

Weirdly thoughtful, in an idiotic, very Zoro-ish sort of way. Almost kind of… sweet.

Sanji choked on a lungful of smoke and doubled over wheezing.

Sweet? he thought frantically. Where the fuck had that come from? Zoro wasn’t sweet. He was gross and—and mean and combative and—and protective and kind and—

“Hey, Chopper?” Sanji called, voice faint and rather strangled as it came out. “Do you think you could take another look at me? Those lightning strikes must have hit harder than I thought.”

Chapter Text

“You know you’re in too deep, right?” Usopp said. “If you try and tell Zoro that cacao is chocolate now you’re just going to look like an asshole.”

Sanji, whose forehead was currently pressed against the galley table as he tried to become one with the wood grain and escape this hellish mortal coil, gave a muffled groan.

“What happened?” Nami asked, poking him gently in the side. “You had the perfect pitch all lined up and then you blew it on that whole mayo tirade.”

Sanji groaned again. “I don’t know,” he lied, because the fact that he’d been utterly blindsided by Zoro’s stupid dimpled hamster cheeks was a secret Sanji planned on taking to his grave. “I think I had been building the moment up for so long in my head that when it finally came I just… choked.”

Nami sighed. “Oh, Sanji-kun,” she chided with a soft tutting sound. “Brought down by your own hubris, I guess.”

Sanji groaned for a third time, lifted his head up, and then let it fall back against the table with a loud and somewhat painful thunk, which unfortunately did nothing to alleviate the maelstrom of thoughts and emotions that had been plaguing his every waking moment since seeing Zoro drink the xocolatl on Skypiea. Currently he was caught somewhere between elation at knowing for certain how much Zoro enjoyed ‘cacao’, dismay at the fact that he had completely fucked up his chance to reveal the prank, and also a whole bunch of other things that Sanji was trying very hard not to think about because quite frankly, he didn’t have the mental fortitude to deal with them right now.

Stupid, no good, cacao-enjoying bastard. Only Roronoa fucking Zoro could turn something as commonplace as liking chocolate into an event so earth-shattering that Sanji was still roiling with the aftershocks. 

“So what now?” Usopp asked. “Do we all just keep pretending that cacao is chocolate?”

“I think we have to,” Sanji replied, voice still muffled by the table. “I don’t see what other choice there is.”

“Maybe we should just bite the bullet and all tell him together,” Nami suggested. “He’ll still be mad but—”

“No!” Sanji exclaimed, wincing as his head shot up so fast he swore he heard his neck crack.

Both Usopp and Nami blinked at him.

“No?” Nami repeated.

“No,” Sanji said firmly, even as his pulse roared inside his ears, heart beating a frantic, panicked rhythm against his ribs as he thought about the potential consequences of telling Zoro about the prank now. “Nobody is going to tell the stupid mosshead anything. I can—I can still fix this.”

“You can?” Usopp asked dubiously.

“Yes!” Sanji insisted. “I mean not—obviously we can’t tell him it was a prank or he’ll lose his shit but I can—I can fix this. I know I can.”

Nami and Usopp exchanged a skeptical glance. 

“Sanji-kun—” Nami started to say, but in a rare moment of distressed weakness that he would later grovel at her feet for in apology, Sanji cut Nami off.

“Leave everything to me,” he said, smiling with as heavy a dose of false confidence as he could possibly muster. “I’ll figure out a way to tell him so he won’t go completely bananas. Until then, we all just need to keep pretending that dark chocolate is cacao, and everything will be perfectly fine.”

Of course, everything was very much not going to be fine, because at this point there was simply no way Sanji was going to be able to tell Zoro the truth about ‘cacao’ without looking like a complete and total jackass. But then again, that wasn’t really the issue. 

In fact, if there was anyone on earth that Sanji felt confident he could be a complete and total jackass to and not have to worry about any lasting damage to the relationship, it was Roronoa Zoro. The upside of constantly straddling such a fine line between camaraderie and rivalry was that Zoro had already seen Sanji at his meanest, and far from being put off by it, simply ebbed and flowed to meet Sanji in kind. Teeth met with teeth, blow met with blow, trust met with trust. The Davy Back Fight that occurred some weeks after their descent from Skypiea had been neither of their proudest moments, and yet it had also proven to Sanji that no matter how ugly things got between him and Zoro, it would never be so bad that they couldn’t find a way to bounce back.

The only other things Sanji had ever felt with that kind of bone-deep certainty were his mother’s love, Judge’s hatred, and that someday, Luffy would become the King of Pirates. That Zoro of all people had somehow managed to earn the same distinction as these other constants in his life simply for putting up with all the shit Sanji threw at him was…

Honestly, Sanji wasn’t sure what it was. Only that the comfort of it calmed the usually turbulent waters of his mind, and steadied the often panicked heartbeat inside his chest. 

So no, Sanji didn’t really care that he would end up looking like a jackass if he revealed to Zoro that cacao was actually dark chocolate. Realistically, it was only a matter of time before he found out anyway. Even though Sanji had roped everyone else into continuing to play along (Luffy now included—he’d actually been rather enthusiastic about it, and made a big show of saying how gross and bitter cacao was every time Zoro ate some around him), at some point the swordsman was bound to run into chocolate out in the wild and realize that it and cacao were one and the same. The main concern Sanji had now was that once Zoro found out, he might end up losing his taste for dark chocolate entirely in the resulting humiliation. And Sanji really, really didn’t want that to happen, because it had become clear to him since seeing Zoro’s reaction to xocolatl how much Zoro genuinely loved ‘cacao’.

He still hadn’t asked for it of his own volition, but Zoro was now openly happy to accept anything Sanji made that had cacao in it—everything from cacao nib granola to cacao protein smoothies to fucking cacao silken tofu pudding, which Sanji had somehow managed to convince Zoro didn’t actually count as a dessert since cacao ‘wasn’t sweet’. And now that Sanji knew what to look for, it was pretty obvious just how much Zoro liked all of these new treats; no matter what he was eating, if it had cacao in it, then the corners of Zoro’s mouth would turn up and create those telltale dimples, like he was trying to smile with his mouth full.

“How do you keep coming up with this stuff?” Zoro asked Sanji one evening when he came up to the crow’s next to drop off some cacao laden snacks for Zoro’s turn on the night watch, including a brand new creation of ‘cacao clusters’ (which was just nuts, dried fruit, and coconut chips held together with melted chocolate).

“What are you talking about, marimo?” Sanji replied as he blew out a lazy lungful of smoke. The night was pleasantly balmy, and he’d decided to stick around for a moment to enjoy his last cigarette of the day since Zoro’s company became moderately more bearable when he was snacking on something (mostly because it kept his mouth occupied).

“All these cacao recipes. I’d never even heard of it before you gave me some and now it seems like you’ve got a new idea for something to make every week.” Zoro grinned at him, sharp-toothed like always but for once looking decidedly more impish than feral. “I was just wondering how you do it.”

Sanji, caught off guard by the question and utterly panicked by it (which had definitely been the only reason for his rapid increase in heart rate and not Zoro’s unexpectedly adorable smile), stuttered out something about the similarity of cacao to things like coffee and nuts, and how once you knew that, it was pretty easy to make up new recipes or adjust existing ones. Zoro looked oddly perplexed for a moment before shrugging and suggesting that Sanji leave the dried cranberries out of the clusters next time, because Zoro didn’t like the way they stuck to his teeth.

That was another new thing—Zoro enjoying cacao so much that he felt comfortable giving Sanji his input on new recipes and experiments. On one memorable occasion he’d even helped Sanji make a batch of cacao balls, becoming unusually quiet and focused as Sanji explained the importance of chopping the cacao into uniform pieces so that it all melted at the roughly the same rate, and why the indirect heat of a double boiler helped to keep the cacao and coconut milk mixture from burning.

“I wouldn’t have expected you to be interested in this,” Sanji admitted to him as they sat at the galley table forming the cooled ganache into small balls and then rolling them in a variety of coatings, including cocoa powder, chopped nuts, and Zoro’s favorite, toasted flaked coconut. “The cooking process, I mean.”

Zoro popped the cacao ball he’d just finished making into his mouth, humming happily. “Me neither,” he admitted around his stupid dimpled hamster cheeks, the sight of which now got Sanji so vexed that his whole face would start flushing in irritation. “But cacao’s pretty interesting when you think about it. I mean, who was the first person to look at one of those big ass pods and think, ‘I wanna see if I can eat what’s inside there?’ Can’t be a whole lot of other foods out there like that.”

He gave Sanji a rather inscrutable look as he said this last part, which Sanji ignored in favor of steering Zoro’s attention firmly away from any foods potentially similar to cacao by throwing out some vague insult that he couldn’t even recall now, but which had resulted in nearly the entire batch of cacao balls being thrown to the floor in the ensuing altercation. And yet Zoro had still eaten every single one, an act which made Sanji almost nauseous if he thought about it for too long because of how much it twisted up his insides. The much appreciated display of not wasting food aside, it was irrefutable evidence of just how much Zoro liked ‘cacao’, and the thought that Sanji might end up inadvertently ruining one of the swordsman’s favorite foods over a stupid prank, just because he’d been too up his own ass to realize before now how much Zoro truly enjoyed it…

It felt like a betrayal of everything Sanji was supposed to stand for as a cook, and he kind of hated himself for it.

Sanji was, of course, nothing if not confident in Luffy’s ability to handpick the best possible people to join the Straw Hat crew given his excellent track record in doing so thus far (stupid, no good, moss-for-brains swordsmen included)—but even he had to question Luffy’s decision to bring Franky on as their new shipwright when they finally set sail from Water 7. 

Okay sure, Franky had built the new and extremely impressive Thousand Sunny for them, but he’d done so with materials bought by the two million berries the Franky Family had stolen in the first place. And yes, Franky had irrevocably thrown his lot in with the Straw Hats when he’d burned his blueprints for Pluton and helped Robin escape from Spandam, but he’d also been a mob boss, for God’s sake. A real, true criminal. And yeah, now all of the Straw Hats were wanted by the World Government, but that was a very recent development; it wasn’t like anyone else on the crew had been a criminal before they joined.

“Actually, two of them were,” Zoro said, leveling Sanji with a thoroughly unimpressed look from his seat at the breakfast bar while he waited for Sanji to finish making his now standard post-workout cacao smoothie. “Both of who you wait on hand and fucking foot like the lovesick idiot that you are, and one of who when I tried to voice objections about her having a criminal past, got told that I was being ‘unreasonable’ and ‘a big fat jerk’. So I really don’t think you’ve got a leg to stand on here, cook.”

“That’s different,” Sanji insisted, very magnanimously choosing to ignore the comment about being a lovesick idiot as he poured a cup of soy milk into the blender and then dumped a block of silken tofu on top of it. “Nami-san and Robin-chan were both under extenuating circumstances. It’s not like they wanted to be criminals.”

“Yeah, and Franky only became a mob boss because he wanted to stick around Water 7 and keep an eye on Iceburg,” Zoro countered, rolling his eyes. “Just admit it, cook—you’re jealous that your precious Robin-chan is fascinated by the new weirdo who doesn’t wear pants.”

He grinned, sharp and a little mean, and Sanji scoffed. 

“First of all, I am not jealous,” he stressed, adding some frozen banana pieces, a hefty scoop of cocoa powder, and just a little bit of honey to the other smoothie ingredients. “Robin-chan is her own woman and she is allowed to be fascinated by whomever she wishes. And second, even if Franky did only become a criminal to keep an eye on Iceburg, that still doesn’t change the fact that the Franky Family beat the shit out of Usopp for those two million berries in the first place. You really wanna tell me you’re okay with that?”

He raised an eyebrow at Zoro, who grimaced.

“Yeah alright, that was fucked up,” the swordsman agreed with a sigh. There was a brief pause before he continued on, “But in Franky’s defense, Usopp doesn’t really seem to care. In fact, I think he might be the most excited out of any of us to have him onboard. Did you see his face the other day when Franky could actually keep up with his rambling about the dial technology? He looked just like Luffy does whenever you do yakiniku night.”

Sanji frowned as he turned on the blender. Usopp had been spending a lot of time with Franky ever since they set sail from Water 7, and he did seem pretty excited to have a crewmate that could tell the difference between a socket wrench and a torque wrench on the first try—but that didn’t necessarily mean he liked Franky. Just that they had some similar interests and knew what the hell terms like ‘radial load bearing’ meant.

“I just think—” Sanji began to say once the blender was off, but he was interrupted by the cyborg and sniper in question entering the galley together, chattering excitedly about the potential use of dials in the Sunny’s defenses.

“I mean they’d obviously be way lighter than cannons, and weight is always something to consider on a ship,” Franky was saying. “But you’d lose the advantage of having a long range weapon—plus you said the impact dials need to build up a store of kinetic energy before they can be deployed, right? So it’s not like you could reload them right away after use.”

“True, but unlike a cannon, an impact dial has theoretically unlimited use,” Usopp countered, eyes wide and sparkling with excitement as he gestured emphatically to illustrate his points. “I mean, I assume they must break under stress at some point, but whether that’s due to use or an upper limit to the amount of kinetic energy that can be stored I haven’t figured out yet—”

Zoro quirked an eyebrow and shot Sanji a look as if to say ‘see?’. Sanji slid Zoro’s finished smoothie across the breakfast bar towards him and then flipped him off.

“Hey, Cook-bro!” Franky raised a hand in greeting as he approached. “Can you hit me with a—oh hey wait, is that a chocolate milkshake, Haramaki-bro? That actually sounds suuuuuuper good right now!”

Sanji, who had just been about to laugh in Zoro’s face about being called ‘Haramaki-bro’, froze.

Oh god. In all the chaos surrounding Robin’s rescue from Enies Lobby and then his skepticism about Franky’s presence on the crew, Sanji had completely forgotten to inform him about the cacao charade.

Fuck, Sanji thought frantically, while behind Franky, Usopp let out a panicked squeak and dove beneath the galley table. Fuck fuck fuck fuck—

“This isn’t chocolate,” Zoro said as he grabbed the smoothie off the counter, tone positively dripping with disdain on the last word. “Chocolate is a gross candy for kids. This is cacao.”

Franky blinked.

“Uh,” he said, looking confused. “Isn’t cacao just—”

“Cacao is this special kind of bean that gets fermented, dried, roasted, and then ground into a paste,” Zoro continued, cutting him off. “And from there you can do all sorts of things with it because it’s got this bitter, complex flavor that pairs well with tons of stuff—like in this smoothie.” 

Sanji had literally never been more thankful for Zoro being a mossheaded idiot than he was in that moment, and that was saying something.

“I could make you one if you want Franky,” Sanji offered, happily latching onto Zoro’s explanation. “Though cacao isn’t sweet so you might not like it—I know Usopp doesn’t. Right, Usopp?”

Usopp hesitantly poked his head out from underneath the table. “Uh,” he said, gaze darting nervously back and forth between Zoro, who was eagerly slurping up his smoothie (dimpled hamster cheeks and all), and Sanji, who was staring at him with an extremely pointed and rather menacing look. “Right…?”

“Chopper doesn’t either,” Zoro added, mouth still half full of smoothie. “Robin does though. If you don’t like yours you could bring it to her instead.”

Franky continued looking at them with a rather perplexed expression, but to Sanji’s great relief, he eventually said, “Uh… sure. Why don’t you make me a smoothie, Cook-bro? I’m always up for trying something new.”

“Can you make me a smoothie too, Sanji?” Usopp asked as he stood up from his hiding spot, apparently satisfied that any threat of imminent danger had passed. “Not a cacao one of course, since I, uh, don’t like it—but maybe strawberry-banana? Ooh, and mango?”

Sanji sighed. “Yeah yeah,” he grumbled, even as his mouth curled into a smile over Usopp’s responding squeal of excitement at the prospect of his favorite smoothie flavor. “Everyone take a seat.” 

Usopp and Franky resumed their previous chatter about the dials while Sanji got to work on the new smoothies, while Zoro sat and watched them silently while working on his own snack. At one point Franky paused in his conversation with Usopp and said something to Zoro that made him laugh, but as it happened when the blender was going, Sanji couldn’t hear what it was. Probably a fart joke, since that seemed to be Franky’s style of humor. Of course moss-for-brains Zoro would find that amusing. Idiot.

“What do you think?” Sanji asked Franky once he’d served up the new smoothies to him and Usopp, who immediately started slurping up his strawberry-banana-mango concoction with all the enthusiasm of a mosquito on an unsuspecting victim.

Franky hummed consideringly as he took his first sip. “It’s good,” he said after a moment, though Sanji couldn’t help noticing that there was a slight pinch in his brow. 

“But…?” he prompted. He might not have liked Franky all that much, but he was still one of the crews, and Sanji didn’t want him to walk away from his kitchen unsatisfied

“But… I don’t know. I feel like it’s missing something.”

That had Sanji raising an eyebrow; Zoro and the cacao creations aside, he didn’t often get feedback from the other crew members about potential improvements to his cooking, and he couldn’t help being a little curious. “Like what?”

Franky frowned thoughtfully down at his smoothie. “Something like… Ooh, I know!” He snapped his fingers. “Peanut butter! Peanut butter would go great with this.”

He grinned at Sanji, who, much to his own annoyance, could only stare blankly back, because he had no idea what the hell Franky was talking about. 

Thankfully, he was spared the humiliation of having to admit his ignorance by Zoro, who cocked his head thoughtfully and asked, “What’s peanut butter?”

Franky blinked at him. “You don’t know what peanut butter is, Haramaki-bro?”

“Nope. Is it like compound butter made with peanuts?” Zoro’s face scrunched up in distaste. “That’s kind of a weird thing to put in a smoothie.”

“Uh, no.” Franky huffed out a little laugh. “It’s sort of like a paste made from ground up peanuts. I think they call it peanut butter ‘cause it kinda spreads like butter.”

“A paste? You mean like tahini?” Sanji asked, suddenly intrigued. He used tahini fairly often in his cooking, but he’d never considered the possibility of grinding up other seeds in a similar fashion. Or nuts. Or legumes, as peanuts technically were.

“No idea what that is, Cook-bro,” Franky answered cheerfully. “But oh man, if you guys have never had peanut butter, you gotta try it! It’s so good! And it goes suuuuuuper great with ch—uh, I mean… cacao? Probably?”

He shot a rather confused look at Sanji, who cast a panicked glance at Zoro to see if he had noticed Franky’s near slip—but Zoro was busy slurping down the last remnants of his smoothie in a very loud and annoying fashion, utterly oblivious to anything else around him. Sanji let out a tiny sigh of relief; thank god for small miracles in the form of mossheaded morons.

“How do you make it?” Sanji asked, turning back to Franky, who grinned widely.

“Just throw some roasted peanuts in a food processor and hit go until they turn into peanut butter, Cook-bro.”

And that really was all it took (plus adding a pinch of salt); the hardest part was simply waiting for the food processor to cool down every few minutes so it didn’t overheat and blow the motor while trying to get the peanuts to their desired consistency. And once they had…

“Holy shit,” Usopp exclaimed, except it came out more like ‘o-ee ith’ because the peanut butter had stuck his tongue to the roof of his mouth. “That’s…”

“Told you!” Franky laughed around his own spoonful of peanut butter. “Peanut butter’s the best, bros.”

“How the ever loving fuck did roasted peanuts turn into that?” Zoro asked Sanji with perfect enunciation, despite the fact that his cheeks were 1) fully hamstered and 2) fucking dimpled. Over ground up peanut paste. Which admittedly was extremely tasty, and Sanji’s brain may have already started running through about a hundred different ways he could begin incorporating it into his existing recipes, but still.

Sanji smacked his lips a few times trying to get any lingering peanut butter out of his mouth so that he could actually talk. “Well, the grinding process definitely helps release the fats normally trapped inside the plant, which is why we were able to get it into a paste form instead of the peanuts just turning into a dry powder,” he said. “My guess is that those fats are helping to enhance the natural richness and nuttiness of the peanuts—making the overall flavor much more potent than it normally is.”

“So kind of like when you grind cacao beans and the fats get released?” Zoro asked, and Sanji blinked.

“Um, yeah. Kind of… exactly like that, actually.” He was surprised and a little chagrined that Zoro had managed to make that connection before he had. Maybe all that time they’d been spending together in the kitchen was starting to rub off on the big green ogre, a thought which made Sanji feel decidedly strange in a way he couldn’t quite articulate.

“So it probably would go well with cacao,” Zoro said as his tongue darted out to lick a stray bit of peanut butter away from the corner of his mouth. Sanji felt his cheeks flushing at the sight—because it was embarrassing to watch Zoro eating with all the finesse of a toddler. Or something.

“It totally would!” Franky declared enthusiastically, before seeming to remember himself and quickly adding, “Because, um… You said cacao is a bean, right? And peanuts are kinda like beans, so that makes sense, uh… Flavor profile-wise…?”

Sanji shot the cyborg a warning glare, feeling like they were already skirting dangerously close to Zoro figuring out the truth about cacao without Franky adding in his clearly uninformed opinions about flavor profiles—but Zoro just stuck another spoonful of peanut butter in his mouth and said, “Well, cook? C’mon, I wanna know what this shit tastes like with cacao.”

So Sanji made another cacao smoothie, this time adding in a generous scoop of peanut butter. And as it turned out, peanut butter didn’t just go well with ‘cacao’. 

It was, in essence, the absolute perfect complement to it. 

Rich and nutty versus earthy and floral, with the peanut butter’s salty, savory undertones superbly balanced against the bitter complexity and depth of the cocoa powder. Both were already standout flavors on their own, but combined they made something that was, quite possibly, one of the most delicious things Sanji had ever tasted in his entire life.

And fucking Franky had been the one to introduce him to it. 

Chapter Text

So. Here was the problem with peanut butter.

Objectively speaking, it was one of the most incredible foods Sanji had ever encountered in his entire life. It was delicious, it was versatile, it was a nutritional powerhouse, and perhaps most importantly, every single person on the crew liked it. Zoro in his post workout peanut butter and cacao smoothies, Robin and Usopp in peanut butter sandwiches (those being a hallmark of South Blue cuisine, at least according to Franky), Nami and Chopper in the peanut butter cookies Sanji had added to his ever expanding dessert repertoire—Sanji had even gotten Luffy to voluntarily consume a vegetable by slathering peanut butter over celery and then putting a few raisins on top so Luffy could pretend he was eating ‘bugs on a log’. It was practically a goddamn miracle food.

And yet despite the fact that peanut butter was, by all possible metrics, something that Sanji should have absolutely adored, every time he went to use it he got a vaguely queasy feeling in his stomach like he’d just eaten something rotten. Because all Sanji could think about was the fact that fucking Franky the goddamn cyborg had been the one to introduce it to him. 

Which was simply not fair to peanut butter, and also not really fair to Franky either. Clearly there was some other issue at hand here between himself and the shipwright, although what that issue might actually be was a conundrum that Sanji had yet to figure out, and it was honestly driving him kind of bonkers.

His initial assumption was that he was still upset over what the Franky Family (and by extension Franky himself) had done to Usopp back on Water 7, because despite the many other ways in which Franky had proven himself afterwards at Enies Lobby, Sanji maintained that beating their sniper to a pulp simply for trying to get back the money they’d stolen in the first place had been an incredibly shitty thing to do. The only problem with this conclusion was that if true, it was honestly rather petty, because Usopp himself clearly wasn’t holding any grudges about the whole thing. 

“I mean, I’m not gonna pretend it didn’t suck,” Usopp said when Sanji finally asked him about it one day while they were out fishing together on the Mini-Merry. “But it just doesn’t seem worth staying mad about, y’know?”

“You think?” Sanji asked while he watched the end of his lure for any signs of activity.

Usopp shrugged and popped one of the peanut butter crackers they’d brought along into his mouth. When he was done chewing he said, “Nah. I’d just be making myself miserable by not letting it go. And it’s not like Franky hasn’t tried to make up for it. I mean, just look at the Sunny!” 

He gestured to the ship, which they could see in the distance bobbing gently along with the waves; the red paint on her sides gleamed brightly from a fresh cleaning, and with the full force of the afternoon sun shining cheerfully upon her proud lion’s figurehead, it almost looked as though she was winking at them from afar.

“She is a very good ship,” Sanji admitted, and meant it. Franky had spared nothing in her construction, and the amount of thoughtfulness he’d put into making sure each person on the crew could carve out their own little space onboard was truly wonderful. Sanji could find nothing to complain about in his new state-of-the-art kitchen, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t tried.

“She’s a great ship,” Usopp corrected, nudging Sanji playfully with one elbow. “I mean, obviously no ship could ever truly replace the Merry, but honestly? I’m glad that Franky’s the one who built her successor. I don’t think anyone else would have understood what Merry meant to us like Franky does.”

Usopp smiled as he patted the side of the Mini-Merry, wistful and a little sad. There was a gentleness to the gesture that made Sanji’s heart constrict almost painfully inside his chest, and suddenly he felt terrible about how unfair he was being to Franky, because Usopp was right—no other shipwright would have been able to pay their respects to the Merry the way that Franky had.

Unfortunately, that sense of shame only lasted about as long as it took him and Usopp to finish up their fishing trip and return to the Sunny, where Franky and Zoro were sprawled out on the lawn drinking beer together. Zoro said something to Franky that made him let out an obnoxiously loud laugh, and suddenly Sanji was right back to feeling irritated for no apparent reason and being extremely annoyed at himself about it, which led to him picking a nonsensical fight with Zoro, since duking it out with the crew’s resident idiot moss always improved Sanji’s mood.

The next logical conclusion Sanji had concerning his lingering animosity towards Franky was simply that he was angry about Franky deciding to pursue the affections of his beloved Robin-chan—an effort that had become well known amongst the rest of the crew, mostly because Franky himself was making no efforts to hide his intentions towards the archeologist. 

“I mean, I totally get it if this is one of those ‘no relationships allowed’ crews, ‘cause it can get real dicey if things go south,” Franky said during the post-dinner cleanup one night, sweeping and mopping while Zoro did dishes next to Sanji and Luffy scrubbed pots as punishment for having tried to steal one of the hams that had been roasting earlier. “But if you guys are okay with it, I’d like to try. She’s just a real super lady, you know?”

Luffy, who’d been pouting down at the pile of pots laid out in front of him nonstop for the last half hour, suddenly looked up and said, “Nah, we’ve never made any rules against people starting relationships. It’s more just that no one’s bothered trying yet.”

He cast a rather intense stare over at the sink as he said this, which Sanji could only assume was a surprisingly subtle commentary on his own tendency to fawn over Nami and Robin without any follow through—though strangely enough, Zoro was the one who began to visibly prickle at their captain’s scrutiny, shoulder hunching slightly and the tips of his ears going pink. 

“You’re probably gonna have to fight the cook for it if you want to romance her, Franky,” Zoro said, voice slightly too loud for the confined space that encompassed the galley and making Sanji wince as it echoed harshly around them.

“Aw man, is that true, Cook-bro?” Franky said, face splitting into a wide and rather amused smile. “Are we gonna have to fight to see who wins the fair lady’s affections?”

Sanji rolled his eyes. “Please. As if I would ever stoop to anything so crass,” he scoffed. “I shall simply continue to be the doting gentleman that I always have, and Robin-chan can decide for herself whether or not that’s worthy of receiving her ‘affections’.”

“Fair enough,” Franky replied with a warm laugh that actually had Sanji wanting to smile back at him—until Franky asked Zoro if he wanted to crack open a few cold ones up in the aquarium bar when they were done cleaning up, at which point Sanji’s mood instantly soured again for reasons he couldn’t quite articulate. 

But watching Robin respond to Franky’s romantic overtures instead of his own wasn’t quite the harrowing experience Sanji had expected it to be. In fact, given how loud the cyborg had made his intentions at the outset, his actual perusal of Robin was fairly quiet and subtle—long chats inside the library, accompanying her on the errands she ran at port stops, an earnest effort to learn about her tastes and preferences from the rest of the crew (including at one point asking Sanji what her favorite flowers were, information that he was surprised to find he didn’t mind sharing). And what was more, it was clearly working; Robin could often be found these days alongside Franky, smiling with a bashful sort of amusement that tinged her cheeks a soft pink and stretched her mouth wider than Sanji had ever seen before her rescue from Enies Lobby. And far from being jealous that Franky was the one responsible for these treasured expressions of true happiness, Sanji found that he was simply delighted to see them at all, regardless of the source; it was no less than Robin deserved, especially after all that she had been through.

So it wasn’t about Usopp, and it wasn’t about Robin. Except…

Except that it had to be about Usopp or Robin. Because if it wasn’t Usopp or Robin, that left only one other possibility—which was that Sanji was jealous of the increasing amount of time Franky had started spending with Roronoa fucking Zoro.

And that was… insane. That was an absolutely insane idea to have. Sanji being jealous of Franky spending time with the fucking mosshead of all people? It was so insane that Sanji almost couldn’t believe the thought had even crossed his mind in the first place. Sure, Sanji may have been a little surprised when Zoro had started spending more and more of his free time around Franky, but that was just because he hadn’t thought Zoro and Franky had anything in common besides unusual hair colors. It wasn’t like Sanji actually cared, even if it made no fucking sense and he couldn’t figure out a single good reason for why it kept happening. 

But it did; Zoro chatted with Franky at meal times, occasionally drank beers with him out on the Sunny’s lawn or at the aquarium bar, and a few times even came down from the crow’s nest with him after what had clearly been a shared weightlifting session (Franky also being very keen on Zoro’s now standard post-workout cacao and peanut butter smoothie). Once Sanji had even had to track Zoro down because he’d apparently been so caught up in whatever conversation he was having with Franky that the stupid swordsman had fucking forgotten he was supposed to be helping Sanji with dinner prep that evening. Not that Sanji really needed his help of course, but it was the fucking principle, and also the fact that Sanji could not, for the life of him, understand what the hell Franky had to offer that Zoro found so goddamn compelling.

But that wasn’t jealousy, it was just… confusion. That for some reason kept turning into irritation. But Sanji was pretty much always irritated with Zoro for one thing or another, so maybe all of this actually made perfect sense and Sanji’s issue wasn’t with Franky at all but with Zoro, because Zoro was a stupid, no good, utterly infuriating bastard that made Sanji feel all sorts of things that he’d never felt before—not least of which was what had become an almost existential dread that once Zoro found out what ‘cacao’ actually was he was going to stop eating it forever, which is why Sanji had to work extra hard now to keep him from finding out the truth.

Jealousy, though? That was just ridiculous.

There was an unspoken but well-acknowledged agreement between Zoro and Sanji that whenever Sanji needed to do a large supply run, Zoro put all those stupid muscles of his to good use by coming along to be Sanji’s pack mule. The expected payment for this service was Sanji buying exactly two drinks for Zoro at the end of the day, which meant that more often than not, they’d spend at least part of the first evening at any new port stop drinking at a bar together—Sanji with a nice glass of wine or brandy, and Zoro happily pounding away whatever cheap swill happened to be on offer once he’d blown through the more expensive stuff covered by Sanji’s tab. 

They usually wound up arguing about something completely irrelevant or nonsensical and then fighting in a back alley about it, or occasionally beating the shit out of the Marines and bounty hunters who tried to get the jump on them before hauling ass back to the ship so that bar owners couldn’t start talking about things like ‘property damage’. If pressed about it, Sanji could (grudgingly) admit that, for as much as Zoro might annoy the shit out of him sometimes, these evenings spent together were not actually altogether terrible. On occasion, he might even go so far to describe them as fun. But that was usually the exception, not the rule—and of course Sanji would have much preferred passing that time in the company of his dear Robin-chan or darling Nami-swan.

Or at least, that’s what he’d always assumed.

“Alright marimo, let’s go,” Sanji called to Zoro late one morning after returning to the Sunny’s deck, following a brief foray onto the docks to learn more about their latest stop. It was apparently one of several smaller sister islands to a much bigger one nearby and served mainly as a tourist destination known for its many excellent beer breweries. It made Sanji curious as to whether the promise of one or two more free drinks after their grocery shopping would allow him the liberty of trying to teach Zoro the difference between a pale ale and a maibock. 

Zoro, who was already leaning against the railing by the side of the gangplank (Sanji presumed waiting for him), frowned at the cook as he approached. “Go where?” he asked, and Sanji raised an eyebrow.

“To the market you idiot, where else?” he replied. When all Zoro did was continue to frown blankly at him, Sanji huffed and added, “Our supplies aren’t going to haul themselves back to ship, dumbass. I need you to play pack mule for me.”

Zoro’s frown twisted in a look of sheer confusion for a moment before suddenly he grimaced. “Ah shit. I forgot to tell you,” he said, reaching up to rub at the back of his neck sheepishly. “I can’t help with the supply run today.”

Sanji blinked. “What?” he said, unable to hide the surprise in his tone. “Why?”

Zoro opened his mouth to respond, but before he could say anything further, Franky jumped down from the upper deck and landed next to them with a very loud and rather jarring thud that Sanji refused to admit might have knocked him off balance just a teensy bit.

“Sorry Cook-bro, that’s my fault,” Franky interjected cheerfully. “I need materials to do some repairs to the Sunny, and I asked Zoro-bro if he could help me haul everything back to the ship since most of it’s pretty heavy stuff.”

He gave Sanji a broad grin, which Sanji did not return. In fact, for a moment all Sanji could do was stare at him, unable to answer as a white hot bolt of rage surged up his spine—because of the fact that Zoro had apparently graduated from Haramaki-bro to Zoro-bro, and Sanji was still stuck as Cook-bro. Obviously.

“You can’t haul it back yourself?” Sanji finally snapped, more irritably than he knew was warranted. “I thought you were a cyborg—aren’t you supposed to be, I don’t know, ten times stronger than the average man?”

“Well yeah,” Franky replied. “But Zoro’s like, twenty times stronger than the average dude, so it’ll be even easier if I bring him along.” 

He gave Zoro a friendly shoulder punch as he said this, and the tips of Zoro’s ears went pink. Sanji felt the inexplicable and yet incredibly strong urge to break something. Possibly Franky’s neck. For stealing his pack mule. Because that was an extremely rude and inconsiderate thing to do. And Sanji was about to open his mouth so he could convey the severity of this grievance to Franky (preferably with quite a few choice swear words and threats of bodily harm) when another voice suddenly cut in—

“Cook-san, if you need an extra set of hands to help you bring things back to the ship, I’m happy to volunteer.”

Sanji’s head whipped around to where Robin had just walked out of the galley and was now making her way towards them. “I have some shopping of my own that I wanted to do anyway,” she continued. “And I’d appreciate the company. If you don’t mind, of course.”

Robin gave Sanji a warm smile as she came to a stop next to him. It gave her an aura of such show-stopping beauty that it should have set his heart positively ablaze with love and passion for the talented, incredible, magnificent woman in front of him, whose mere presence Sanji was blessed to be in. 

Instead, all he could do was blink at her dumbly and say, “Oh.”

Robin tilted her head curiously. “Is that alright?” she asked.

Was it—was it alright? Of course it was alright! In fact, it was better than just ‘alright’—it was the best thing that had happened to Sanji in ages, possibly in his whole entire life! Robin-chan wanted to go to the market! With him, Sanji! Just the two of them, all alone for hours on end! It was practically a dream come true!

So why the fuck did Sanji’s stomach still feel like he’d swallowed a mouthful of acid?

“Oi, cook,” Zoro said, snapping his fingers in front of Sanji’s face. “Did you finally melt your brain with all that flame of love shit you’re always going on about?”

Sanji snapped out of his reverie with a jolt. “Like you’d know anything about the fiery passions of love, moss-for-brains,” he shot back at Zoro heatedly. “Robin-chan, I would be absolutely honored if you’d accompany me to the markets. Far more than this shit swordsman, at any rate.”

He bared his teeth at Zoro in a rather mean smile, fully expecting it to be returned in kind—but instead, something very strange happened.

Zoro stared at him for a moment before his gaze dropped to the ground. “Alright, geez,” he mumbled, arms crossing tightly over his torso. “Didn’t realize you fucking hated my company that much.”

Sanji blinked.

What?

“What?”

“Let’s go, Franky,” Zoro said as he turned away, not even bothering to shoulder-check Sanji like he normally would as he walked past him. “No sense in wasting the cook’s time if he doesn’t want us around.”

Sanji opened his mouth to say something, but he was so stunned by Zoro’s behavior that no words actually came out, trapped as they were behind the lump that had suddenly appeared in his throat. What was happening? Why wasn’t Zoro responding to their back-and-forth like he usually did? 

“Marimo—” he finally managed to say, but Zoro was already gone, stomping his way down the gang plank with even more gracelessness than usual.

For a long moment, the three remaining crew members on deck simply stared after him. “What the fuck,” Sanji finally muttered before turning back to Franky and Robin. “What’s his problem?”

Franky glanced at Robin with one eyebrow slightly raised, and she looked back at him with an eerily similar expression. “Uh, you know Cook-bro,” Franky said after a brief pause, “if you really need Zoro to help you with your grocery shopping today, I can just hold off on getting my stuff until tomorrow. We’re gonna be here for a few days while the log pose resets anyway, so it’s no sweat off my back to wait.”

For a moment, Sanji actually considered this. It wasn’t like he didn’t think Robin would be helpful, of course. It was just that he and Zoro had a sort of system already for how they went about the shopping, and Zoro was stronger than Robin so of course he could haul more stuff, and then there was the ritual of getting drinks afterward and dear god, was he really considering forgoing time with Robin for the fucking marimo?

Sanji gave himself a rather violent shake before scoffing, “I don’t need the marimo’s help for anything.” He shot a glare down the gangplank and onto the docks where Zoro was now wandering, no doubt having somehow gotten lost in the five steps he’d taken away from the ship. “Besides, if he’s gonna be a cranky bastard about it, why would I want to hang out with him all day instead of my beautiful Robin-chan?”

He made a gesture at the darling lady in question, though Sanji found he wasn’t able to inject quite as much enthusiasm into the flirtatious flourish as usual. Robin, for her part, simply arched her eyebrow a little higher, while next to her Franky left a very loud, very emphatic snort. 

“Good lord,” he said, dragging a hand down his face. “You guys really are stupid stupid about this, huh?”

“What?” Sanji squawked, rounding on Franky with a furious scowl. “What the hell is that supposed to mean, you two-bit robot?”

Franky just sighed and shook his head. “Don’t worry about it, Cook-bro,” he said. “You’ll figure it out eventually.” He paused, and then added, “Probably.”

Sanji was so taken aback by whatever the hell that was supposed to mean that he couldn’t even find it in himself to protest when Franky moved past him to follow Zoro down the gangplank, bellowing obnoxiously as he went, “Hey, Zoro-bro, you need to go left! No, no, your other left—no, your other other left—”

Franky’s booming voice faded quickly behind them as he made his way over to wherever the hell Zoro had managed to get himself already lost, leaving Sanji and Robin standing alone on deck—her with a thoughtful though otherwise indecipherable expression on her beautiful face, and him stunned into what Sanji could only think to describe as a desperate sort of confusion.

“Figure what out eventually?” he finally asked, turning to look at her helplessly.

“I’m terribly sorry, Cook-san,” Robin said with a small shrug. “I’m sure I have no idea what Franky is talking about.”

Under ordinary circumstances, having Robin accompany him on a trip to the market would have been an absolute dream come true for Sanji, and he’d have spent every moment turning it into a delightfully unforgettable experience for her, for surely such a splendid lady as Robin deserved nothing less. 

But, seeing as Sanji’s mind currently felt like someone had put all his thoughts into a blender at high speed, lit the contents on fire, and then poured it directly back into his empty brain cavity so the resulting toxic mass could burn him alive from the inside out, he was understandably having a bit of trouble mustering the proper appreciation for the situation at hand.

“I apologize, Robin-chan,” he sighed heavily when Robin had to call him to attention after Sanji zoned out while a vendor was talking for what must have been the fifth time that day, his normal attentiveness being unceremoniously overridden by Sanji trying to figure out what the hell had been the problem with Zoro earlier and also what the ever loving fuck Franky had been talking about (stupid stupid about what? What did that even mean?). “I fear you’ve caught me rather out-of-sorts today.”

Robin gave him a small, sympathetic smile. “I quite understand, Cook-san. And it’s perfectly alright; everyone has off days now and again.”

“I suppose,” Sanji replied morosely, not feeling any better about it. Here he was, wasting his energy thinking about a stupid, no good, moss-for-brains bastard when he should have been pouring his all into entertaining Robin, and yet every time Sanji tried to put any thoughts of idiotic, algae-encrusted swordsmen aside, his brain simply refused to cooperate.

“Do we have everything we need?” Robin asked, drawing his attention back to the errand at hand. Sanji pulled his grocery list out and scanned it briefly; it did indeed look they’d managed to procure everything he’d wanted, except—

“I need more chocolate for the shitty swordsman,” Sanji sighed. “Although I don’t know why I even bother keeping up this stupid charade for him if he’s just gonna be a asshole for no good reason.”

Robin gave a small, polite cough. “There was that rather large confectionary shop we passed on our way to the market,” she said. “Why don’t we go back and take a look at what they have?”

But sadly, there was no decent chocolate to be found at the bewildering large candy store near the market’s entrance—just rows of cheap looking truffles covered in spots of chocolate bloom, bags of unappealing brown blobs that they dared to call pecan turtles, and blocks of terrible looking fudge with enough highly processed sugars in them to make even Chopper’s teeth ache. Certainly nothing Sanji could use to placate Zoro.

Which was fine, because he didn’t need to placate Zoro. So what if Zoro had clearly been upset earlier, red-faced and mumbling like he’d been… Angry? Embarrassed? Hurt? Why would Zoro have been hurt? It had just been a stupid joke for fuck’s sake, of course Sanji didn’t hate his company—but even if he did, surely Zoro didn’t care that much? They were friends, but it was admittedly a rather strange friendship built in no small part on being dickheads to each other because of the implicit understanding that being a dickhead was okay. Had that changed when Sanji hadn’t noticed? Was Franky behind this somehow? Was that what he had meant by ‘stupid stupid’? Sanji was this close to hunting Franky down and melting his sorry cyborg ass down into scrap metal with his diable jambe and oh God, he was doing it again.

“I’m sorry my dearest Robin-chan, could you repeat that?” Sanji said as he turned towards her, cheeks so hot from embarrassment that he probably could have fried an egg on his own face. “I’m afraid my thoughts were… elsewhere.”

“I was just saying that perhaps we should go find something to eat?” Robin suggested gently. “It’s been a while since breakfast—and you always tell me whenever I’m feeling off that a snack should be my first order of business.”

She gave him a rather meaningful look, and Sanji realized with a start that he was, in fact, rather hungry, and probably would feel a lot better once he had something to eat. “I think that’s a fantastic idea,” he said gratefully. “What would you like to eat?”

“Oh, I’m not picky,” Robin replied rather airily. “And besides, you’re the expert here, not me. What don’t you choose?”

Which was how they wound up at one of the port town’s many local pubs, drinking steins of excellent witbier and eating what should have been a wonderful meal of bratwürste with sauerkraut and potato salad. Except that Sanji could barely taste any of it, because all he could think about was the fact that he was supposed to be doing this with Zoro, and then getting mad at himself for not appreciating the fact that it was happening with Robin instead of Zoro, especially since she was far better company than that stupid brainless marimo would ever be—even if she did keep giving Sanji looks over the top of her beer stein which left him with the distinctly uncomfortable feeling that Robin was wordlessly peeling apart his entire psyche layer by careful layer.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Robin asked him suddenly, and Sanji blinked at her.

“Talk about what?”

“Whatever it is that’s been bothering you as of late.”

Sanji frowned. “Isn’t it obvious?” he said. “You saw how weird Franky and the mosshead were both acting this morning—what’s up with that? And what the hell did Franky mean when he said ‘you guys really are stupid stupid about this?’”

Robin hummed thoughtfully. “Actually, I meant more in the broad scheme of things,” she explained. “If I may be so bold, it’s not just today that you’ve been acting out of sorts, Cook-san. In fact, I’d go so far as to say you haven’t quite been yourself since shortly after we left Water 7.”

She quirked one elegant eyebrow at him, and Sanji nearly choked.

“Wh—what?” he stammered, hands falling to his lap so he could twist his cloth napkin nervously around his fingers without her seeing. “I’m not—that’s crazy, Robin-chan! I’m fine! Perfectly fine! Nothing’s been bothering me outside of this morning!” 

Sanji laughed, though it came out far more panicked than amused, which did absolutely nothing to help his case and in fact only made Robin tilt her head, calm expression shifting to include a touch of concern. “I swear, everything is fine!” he insisted. “Franky’s fine! Great, even! I mean, just look at the kitchen he built for me! It’s incredible! What would I even have to be out of sorts about?”

He smiled at her, as wide and bright and beaming as he could make it, in the hopes that if he appeared emphatic enough, Sanji could better convince Robin that she was somehow mistaken, and they could move on to talking about literally anything else.

Instead, Robin smiled one of her small, enigmatic smiles and replied smoothly, “I don’t recall saying anything about Franky.”

Sanji froze.

Fuck.

“Uh,” he said intelligently, and Robin let out a small laugh.

“It’s alright, you know,” she said, not unkindly. “A new crew member means a shifting dynamic, and everyone is bound to react differently. Do you remember how suspicious Zoro was of me when I first joined the crew?”

The mention of the idiot swordsman snapped Sanji out of his panicked reverie. “I do,” he replied, scowling. “I also remember that he was fucking wrong.”

Robin hummed. “Actually, he wasn’t,” she corrected, her smile twisting into something slightly more rueful. “I only planned to sail with the crew for a few islands to get away from Alabasta before I set out on my own again. And I wouldn’t have been above taking your valuables and supplies for myself if it came to that. In fact, the main reason I didn’t try to take off sooner was because Zoro was watching me so closely. And then by the time he’d relaxed, I was rather more inclined to stay than I had been before.”

She gave a little shrug, taking a slow sip from her beer stein as Sanji processed this newly shared information. “Oh,” he said, blinking owlishly at her. “I… I never realized you had intended to leave.”

For a moment Sanji felt almost ashamed, wondering if his initial affections for Robin and the joy of having another lovely lady on the crew had really made him so blind to her true intentions—but then Robin said, “Of course you didn’t, because I didn’t want you to. And not to put too fine a point on it, but I’ve had many more years of practice manipulating people than you’ve had learning to see through someone’s lies. But now that I’m here to stay, I think it’s probably time that I start being a little more honest, don’t you?”

Sanji—who himself was usually on shaky ground with the concept of honesty even on the best of days and thus felt that he wasn’t quite the best person to be asking that particular question—tried nonetheless to reassure her. “Well I’m glad you're comfortable enough with us now to want to try, at least.”

At that, Robin smiled, a delightfully wide and warm thing that Sanji couldn’t help but try and return in kind, even with how inexplicably miserable he felt. “Your turn now,” Robin said. “What’s bothering you about Franky?”

Sanji blinked at her several times and then sighed so heavily he all but melted onto the table as he realized that he couldn’t very well not be honest with Robin now. Years of practice manipulating people indeed. 

Still, it took another moment or five or possibly even ten before Sanji was able to lift his head, settling his chin onto one hand while the other began to tap its fingers in a nervous drumbeat against the soft cotton of the tablecloth, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to meet Robin’s eyes as he muttered, “It’s just… He’s been spending an awful lot of time with Zoro.”

He winced even as he said, knowing how stupid and idiotic and utterly insane that must have sounded to another person, because why did it fucking matter if Franky and Zoro were spending time together? But to Sanji’s surprise, Robin merely gave a little hum of acknowledgement and said, “Yes, I had noticed that as well.”

Sanji’s gaze snapped to her. “You have?” he asked, and when Robin nodded, couldn’t help tacking on, “Okay, and that’s—it’s weird, right? I mean, not that I care really, that shitty swordsman can do whatever he fucking wants, it’s just that I don’t—what do they even have in common that would warrant them spending that much time together?”

He gave her a rather helpless look, feeling lost and confused and still completely crazy that this was even bothering him in the first place; but it was, and Robin had asked. And Sanji supposed that if anyone could help him to sort out this rather impossible conundrum, he could certainly do worse than someone as brilliant as the lovely lady sitting across from him.

“Well now that is an interesting question,” Robin said, mouth curling into one of her small, enigmatic smiles. “You can’t think of anything at all that they might have in common?”

“No!” Sanji insisted, slumping back into his seat and scowling down at the mostly empty plate he honestly could barely even remember eating. “I mean… It’s not like Franky’s a swordsman. And Zoro doesn’t really seem that into the whole robot thing. Or cyborg, I guess.”

“Perhaps not. But what is a cyborg, really?” Robin asked, with the curious and encouraging tone of someone posing a deep philosophical thought experiment. 

Sanji made a noise somewhere between a hum and a deep, unsatisfied grumble. “Someone who’s part human and part machine?” he answered.

“Mmm. And how did Franky become part machine?”

Sanji blinked, his scowl smoothing out into a more thoughtful frown. “He… did it to himself, right?” he said, trying to recall what he could about Franky’s self-inflicted transformation. “From scrapped ship parts?”

“Indeed.” Robin’s smile grew incrementally, though something in the depths of her clear blue eyes suggested a much deeper amusement, which Sanji had to admit he found rather unnerving. “A self-made man, one could say.”

“I… guess?” His frown deepened as he considered this. “But what does that have to do with Zo—”

And then it hit him—hard and fast like one of Zoro’s sword hilts to his gut, knocking all the air out of Sanji’s lungs as he realized with a decidedly painful clarity that he might—just might—be an absolute fucking moron.

“… Oh,” Sanji finally managed to get out after several moments of stunned silence. 

“‘Oh’ indeed,” Robin said, which was about the nicest response she could have given at that moment, and definitely more than Sanji felt he deserved. Truly Robin must have been some kind of benevolent goddess given human form, because good fucking god, how much an idiot could he be?

“Oh my god,” Sanji groaned, burying his face in his hands as he wondered whether or not it was physically possible to die from mortification, and then whether or not he deserved that kind of cowardly exit instead of the extremely thorough chewing out he definitely deserved from Zoro for being such a dipshit—and Franky too, for that matter. “Oh my god, I’m so fucking stupid.”

“No,” Robin said (which was factually incorrect, though Sanji appreciated the vote of confidence). “Just… not as observant as you usually are. Perhaps there was something about the matter that was clouding your judgement?”

Sanji let out a noise slightly too hysterical to be considered a laugh. “Yeah—the fact that I’ve apparently got fucking baba ganoush for brains,” he said, borrowing a favorite admonishment of Zeff’s. God, no wonder they’d been spending so much time together; Zoro was probably thrilled to have someone who could actually relate to him that way on the crew. 

Several more moments of stilted silence passed between them before Sanji finally let his hands fall away from his face so that he could start smoking a cigarette or five. “So… Franky’s trans?” he asked as he pulled a pack and his lighter.

“Honestly? I’m not sure,” Robin replied, and then at Sanji’s confused look continued on, “I can confirm that simply from the feel of them his genitals aren’t the originals—” (what little redness had drained away from Sanji’s face promptly returned in full force, and he was honestly surprised that his entire head didn’t spontaneously combust) “—but given that they’re on the front half of his body, that could just be because he replaced them along with everything else. Either way though, he can probably relate more than anyone else on this ship to Zoro’s unique life experiences.”

Sanji lit the cigarette now clamped between his teeth and then took such a heavy drag it immediately turned almost half of it to ash. “Fuck,” he groaned on the exhale, turning his head away so that the smoke wouldn’t all end up in Robin’s face. “I never even considered that.”

“But it puts things in a bit more perspective, yes?” Robin asked, and Sanji sighed.

“… Yeah.”

They lapsed into another awkward silence as Sanji quickly finished his first cigarette and then immediately lit another, puffing on it vehemently as he willed the nicotine to absorb into his system faster and hopefully ease the awful pit of queasiness that had opened up in the pit of his stomach, as large and violent as the whirlpool that had nearly taken down the Merry right before their Skypiea adventure. The commonality between Zoro and Franky seemed so fucking obvious in hindsight that Sanji honestly couldn’t believe he’d ever missed it, and the fact that he had made him feel… Rude, almost. Inconsiderate. Careless. 

And maybe that would have been understandable if it had just been about Franky, who was new enough to still be settling into his role on the crew, but Zoro? Zoro was his friend. Sanji felt like he should have known better, should have realized sooner, and it was killing him a little (a lot) that he hadn’t. He knew that they’d never really talked about Zoro being trans much beyond the obvious scars on his chest and the fact that he still got periods, but that was mostly because Sanji had always gotten the impression that Zoro hadn’t really wanted to talk about it. Maybe that had been an oversight on Sanji’s part. Or maybe Zoro just didn’t want to talk about those things with him, which was… fair. Of course it was fair. It wasn’t like Sanji could relate to that particular experience. He probably wouldn’t have had much to offer Zoro even if he did want to talk about it.

So why did Sanji feel so sick to his stomach thinking about it?

“You don’t need to beat yourself up about it, you know,” Robin said, snapping Sanji out of his spiraling thoughts with a start. “It was an honest oversight.”

Sanji sighed, stubbing out his finished cigarette on the table’s ashtray and then flicking his lighter on and off in lieu of lighting another, mostly to spare Robin’s lungs from the smoke. He appreciated her attempts at reassurance, but they did nothing to ease the terrible knot that had formed inside the cavity of his chest, and suddenly Sanji heard himself say—

“I forget, sometimes. That he wasn’t born a man.”

Robin blinked curiously at him, causing Sanji’s face to do its best impression of an on-fire tomato; but now that the words had started, he found he couldn’t stop the rest of the confession from spilling out. “I mean, I know he still gets his period, and Chopper gives him those shots every month now, and it’s not like he’s shy about his chest scars, but in my head those are all just… Zoro things, I guess. He’s a guy and he gets periods and he used to have breasts but now he doesn’t. Is that…” He swallowed thickly around the lump that had appeared in his throat. “Is that bad?”

Maybe it was. Maybe that was why Zoro didn’t talk to him about this kind of stuff. Maybe Sanji had been treating him horribly all this time because he’d just assumed that was what Zoro wanted, instead of pulling his head out of his ass for the two seconds it would have taken to just ask.

A disembodied hand wrapped around Sanji’s wrist, preventing him from playing with his lighter; when he looked up, it was to see Robin smiling at him, soft and wide and filled with such gentle fondness that Sanji very nearly forgot to breathe.

“I think that’s rather what he hopes for, actually,” she said, and the relief Sanji felt flooding through his chest was so palpable he actually slumped onto the table and knocked over the remainder of his witbier.

They finished the rest of the meal in a companionable if awkward silence, and it was only when their waiter was setting their check on the table that Robin asked, “Did you want to try looking for chocolate again before we head back?”

Sanji sighed, chewing on his bottom lip for a brief moment as he considered; he supposed he probably owed both Zoro and Franky something for being such a dumbass recently, but given the quality of what had been at that one candy shop—

“Are you folks looking for a good place to get some chocolate?” the waiter said, cutting into Sanji’s thoughts. “There’s a local shop nearby that does all kinds of great stuff—I get my wife a box of chocolates from there every year for her birthday and she just adores them.”

“It’s not that monstrosity of a shop near the wholesale market is it?” Sanji asked before he could stop himself, and then realizing what he’d just said, hastily tried to add, “I mean, not that there was anything wrong with their selection, it’s just—I’m looking to make my own things, and they didn’t have any plain chocolate for sale—”

“Oh no, not Sugarland,” the waiter replied, saying the store’s name with such disdain that Sanji found himself perking up hopefully. “That place is just a tourist trap for people who come here on day trips from the mainland with their kids. If you’re looking for real chocolate, I can tell you exactly where to get it.”

The shop where the waiter directed them was a good thirty minute walk away from the main market (which meant it would be an hour long trip all the way back to the Sunny), but as soon as it came into view, Sanji knew the detour had been worth it. It stood out on the corner with a charming facade of pastel pink and mint green and windows full of boxes displaying beautifully decorated bonbons; and out in front, someone had put up a chalkboard sign that declared—

Try our new 64% semisweet baking bars—a complex chocolate with peaks of tart fruit and cherry top notes with floral aromatics and a fudgy finish. Perfect for desserts or candy making!

“Now this seems much more promising,” Robin said, smiling at him with a sidelong glance. “I’m sure you’ll find something in here to smooth things over with our dear swordsman.”

God did Sanji hope so.