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They had been alone in the galley, another late night clean up after a crazy crew dinner. It was the Marimo’s turn to do dishes, and for some reason, he hadn’t even put up a fight.
It was a calm night, Sanji was double-checking the lock on the fridge after putting away the scraps and leftovers (not that there were many with Luffy vacuuming up the table). He had been idly thinking about what they would need to stock up on at the next island - meat, obviously, eggs too, maybe some cheese. The moss needs more protein in his diet, the idiot keeps working out like he isn’t already jacked beyond any reasonable standard-
Outside of Sanji’s thoughts, though, it had been quiet, the Mosshead drying dishes and putting them away, the clink and clatter of the plates a soothing, familiar sound to Sanji.
Sanji was about to offer to finish up so Marimo could go to the crow’s nest for his watch, but as he walked over, the swordsman turned to the blond and his voice cut through the silence.
“Hey, cook, I’m in love with you.”
Sanji blinked. “W- what?”
-
Zoro had been feeling it all week; the build of pressure in his chest every time he looked at the cook. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. It was frustration and anger and yearning and something so much that he couldn’t put it into words.
And then, as he stood there, washing dishes again in the galley with the curly cook, he felt that familiar tug in his chest. A feeling he’d gotten good at ignoring. Something small and domestic, something that made him feel tamed. Like a stray who’d been pet and fed and now sleeps at his owner’s feet. It pricks at his pride, to be tamed, but something about it also makes him feel… warm.
Zoro knows he’s in love with the cook, has been at least since Thriller Bark, maybe even before then. He knows he’s so completely fucked when it comes to romance - it ain’t in his blood to buy someone roses or recite poetry or whatever the fuck people who are in love do. He knows that the cook almost certainly doesn’t return his feelings.
But in these small moments–the domestic ones, the simple ones, the tamed ones–he can’t help but hope that maybe, just maybe… the cook might not hate him. That even if his feelings aren’t returned, things could be okay between them.
He knows now, after so many of these moments with the cook, that if he tries to ignore the feeling, it’ll start to ache. That the need to say something will yank at his chest until he walks away. And most nights, he refuses to give in - he walks away. Returns to his sanctuary in the crows nest and bites down on the words that have already etched themselves in his lungs, his liver, his heart.
They fight like cats and dogs during the day, but these evenings, these simple evenings, they stand side by side and work in peace. It feels like home.
Zoro steels his resolve, readying himself like he would in the moments before a battle – three steady breaths to calm his racing heart.
-
Sanji blinks. Surely he heard the mosshead wrong, did he just say-
Hey, cook, I’m in love with you.
He coughs, spluttering. “W- What?! Why- Why are you telling me this now?!”
Marimo’s shoulders are tense, like he’s prepared for a fight, prepared to be kicked. Sanji recognizes the stance; it’s one that the swordsman only bears when about to combat an opponent he’s not sure he can beat, but that he’ll try to destroy regardless. It’s not something Sanji ever expected to see directed at himself.
What does that say, that Sanji can read his stance so well?
“Just… wanted to say it. It felt like the right time.” The mosshead shrugs, feigning indifference. Sanji can tell the casual motion is entirely forced, the tenseness of his shoulders obvious to the cook.
And what does it mean, that he recognizes those signs?
“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” Zoro continues. “You can just walk away- we can just pretend this never happened–”
“You love me?”
“Yes.”
The finality of it hits Sanji like a sea train, the absolutely certainly that drips from the word.
Am I being pranked? Sanji wonders hazily. He wants to shake the Mosshead, grab him by the shoulders and turn him upside down and shake until the words fall out. Until he can understand why, and how, and what the fuck. He wants to peel back the skin on the shitty swordsman’s chest and grab his warm, beating heart and inspect it. Because there must be something wrong with it if Zoro thinks he could possibly love Sanji. How could he love Sanji? Or maybe it was an issue with his brain - perhaps too many axe-kicks to the skull had damaged something in there. Maybe he should call Chopper.
He doesn’t do that. He just stares, his own heart thrumming in his chest.
Sanji knows their dynamic is… unique. He knows that their crewmates think they either hate each other or are best friends. He knows they swing back and forth like a pendulum. He knows their arguments and their sparring and their bouts of domesticity are inconsistent and yet so perfectly routine to the point that nobody else really blinks at it anymore.
He also knows, after his two years on Okama Island, that he is not as straight as he had previously convinced himself he was. And he knows that the way he insults and tests the other man’s patience is anything but subtle; the desperate clawing of a love-starved kitten, begging for the swordsman’s attention.
He knows their spars feel like a shadowed substitution for touch, something that helps shield his mind from the angry tendrils of his self-loathing. He knows he uses it as a punishment for himself; when things get too hard and he can’t help but hate the person he sees in the mirror, he dodges too slowly and takes hits he could’ve avoided.
He knows that the swordsman knows.
He remembers the argument they’d had. Of course he remembers – it had only been yesterday evening.
-
“Cook, will you fuckin’ stop that!” Marimo shouted, brow furrowed, something beyond anger on his face as he pushed Sanji into the galley, swords barely sheathed.
“Fuckin’ hells, stop what, asshole?” Sanji grimaced and swiped the blood from the cut on his shoulder. It stings, but that’s what he had wanted. The pain grounded him, brought him back down to Earth. He’d be out of his head all day, this was exactly what he needed.
“Stop using me as a damn knife.” Mosshead growled, pushing Sanji against the wall, the door slamming shut behind them. Sanji’s left shoulder stung from the cut, but he idly wondered if the bruise from where Zoro was pinning him on his right shoulder would last longer. He only tuned back in once the swordsman’s words hit him.
“If you wanna hurt, fuckin’ ask. If you want help, fuckin’ ask. Don’t just keep pushing thinkin’ I’ll break.”
But you always break, Sanji had wanted to say, you always help. Even when you don’t want to.
“Fuck off, Mosshead. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sanji had shoved him back and stalked off. He’d sat in the bathroom with the door locked, hand pressed against the bloody cut on his shoulder. He could hear his heart pulse in his chest. It helped wash out the sounds of the waves against the rock, the sound of metal clanking against his ears, the sound of his brothers laughing at his pain.
It worked. Just like it always did.
After that, Mosshead hadn’t spoken to him all day, turning away every time he walked by. Sanji had rolled his eyes when they ran into each other on the deck in front of the crew, trying to ignore the way it stung as the Mosshead all but pirouetted to get away from him. Then Nami had reminded them that it was the Moss’s turn to help with dishes.
-
“Look, it doesn’t have to–” change anything.
“Listen, Marimo, I–” and Sanji’s voice stops, the smoke in his lungs tangling with the sudden tears in his throat. “Just… Just shut up, and listen. You- You’re being honest with me. So, I can be honest too, right?”
Sanji takes a shaky breath. He absently realizes his hands are trembling, and that the lit cigarette dangling between his fingers is precariously close to burning his skin. He doesn’t put it down.
“Son of a motherfuckin’ bitch-” he takes a long swig of sake - the bottle he had placed on the table for the Moss to take after they finished with dishes. Something pulls in his chest as he thinks about the gentle routine they’d fallen into after Fishman Island. The dishes, the genuine conversations, the moments of peace and quiet that always ended with Marimo leaving, a bottle of sake in hand, and Sanji standing alone in the galley with his mind a mess of emotion.
“You don’t need my whole life story,” he says, eventually, the words feeling like shards of glass between his teeth. “But safe to say, I ain’t been loved right, Moss. I don’t even know if I know what love is-”
“Well that’s bullshit,” Zoro cuts him off, impulse pushing his tongue.
“Excuse me?!”
Zoro rolled his eyes. “You don’t know love, my ass. Cook, I’ve seen you love- and I don’t mean the way you treat the witch or whatever-”
“Don’t call her–”
Zoro barrels on. “I mean I’ve seen how you love this crew.”
Sanji freezes, mouth already open to interject. He wants to protest, but something in him holds him back.
“You love, cook, you love a hell of a lot. You love Luffy, don’t ya? After everything we’ve all been through together, you love this crew. The same way I love this crew.” Marimo’s eyes are sharp now, an intensity to them that reminds Sanji of a tiger.
Sanji can’t help but gulp, some deep-seated prey instinct telling him to run. “Well, yes, but-”
“But nothin’, cook. Love ain’t complicated.” Zoro shrugs. “Either ya do or ya don’t. That’s all there is to it.”
And Sanji hates when the moss is right.
But the moss is also wrong - love is complicated. At least, for Sanji it is. For him, love has been something he’s never been given without a price attached, a condition he can fail to fulfill. Judge had never loved him, just used him and then threw him away when he wasn’t good enough. His mother had loved him, he believes, but she was gone too soon and that love hadn’t protected him without her there. Reiju may have loved him, but Sanji could never be sure - she was there too infrequently, too silently, too defensive of his brothers and their damned king. Back in that damned place, love was always just out of reach, tantalizingly close yet too fucking far for him to grasp. Love was a rug that was pulled from underneath him over and over so that he would fall on his ass like the failure he was.
Zeff - his real father - had tried his best to fix Sanji, but Sanji couldn’t often hear him over the echoes of Judge and his brothers. Sanji had been too busy trying to prove himself to Zeff to see the love he was given without condition.
Sanji loves like a long-hurt child, desperate and pleading. He grasps at strings and straws, plays the perfect part, always makes himself useful. If he’s useful, he can’t be thrown away. If he’s needed, they’ll have to keep him around.
He loves like a stray cat who’s been hurt too many times. Craving kind touch, but hissing and scratching anytime someone comes close enough to pet him. Too feral to be a housecat, too tamed to be stray.
He loves like someone who's been left out in the cold for too long - desperate for warmth and willing to bathe in flame just to feel the heat. He doesn't mind the burn as long as he doesn't feel cold anymore.
He isn’t sure if he can tell the difference between the desperate want to be needed, to be useful, to be wanted, and the feeling of actual, unconditional love.
Zoro, on the other hand, loves like a sword - sharp and purposeful. He does his job and he does it well; he protects the crew, keeps them steady. He loves like an annoying younger brother to some, an indulgent older brother to a few, a straightforward friend to others. He loves like a man who bears the weight of the world easily. He’s the pillar that keeps the crew upright, that keeps them from collapsing in on themselves. He loves like an anchor. He holds them steady and keeps them from drifting out into the sea without purpose.
Sanji wonders, now, here in the silence that stretches between them, how it would feel to be loved by that sword, by that pillar, by that anchor. How it would feel to be loved with a steadiness – a certainty – that he himself cannot feel. He is very rarely steady, almost never certain.
How would it feel to be loved by an anchor?
-
Zoro sits in the stretching silence, the look on the cook’s face telling him to keep his mouth shut for a moment. Curls needs a minute to think, he reminds himself.
He’s never been good with change, has he?
Zoro thinks back to Sanji’s first night on the Merry. How he kept pacing back and forth in the kitchen, memorizing where everything was, rearranging it all, then rearranging it again. Zoro had lumbered in from night watch after seeing the light still on. They couldn’t be called anything close to friends at that point, just two strangers who had done nothing but argue from the moment they met.
Look, Zoro isn’t blind. He had thought Sanji was hot. And he isn’t stupid; he knew that the blond was clearly uninterested. But, he also knew that the cook was very easily pissed off, and Zoro thought being kicked and cursed at was almost as fun as anything else. He’s always liked a challenge and he found the prospect of clashing with the Cook exciting.
He remembers standing there in the doorway, his chest still burning with the unhealed stitches - another memory, the cook cussing him out, calling him names, but his hands were the steadiest of their barebones crew, so he was the one to stitch the wound left by Mihawk’s blade. He remembers standing there, watching the cook pace and pull out spices then put them back where they had been moments before, move plates from one shelf to another, move a knife block back and forth across the counter.
“Oi, cook, go the fuck to bed. The kitchen will still be here in the mornin’.”
Sanji had turned, startled, like he hadn’t even noticed the other man. “Oi, shut it, broccoli, I can do what I want.”
“Sure ya can, but you’re gonna be miserable in the mornin’ and I want a good breakfast, so-”
“You fuckin’ asshole- you think I can’t cook a damn good meal while sleep deprived?! I’ll have you know I-”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever, swirlybrow.” He had huffed. “I’m gonna wake up Usopp for his watch.”
And he had walked away, leaving the cook smoking his nth cigarette and fuming over Zoro being an asshole, per usual.
-
Zoro furrows his brow now, frustration clawing at his lungs in this present moment. He wants to scream at Sanji until his voice gives out, but he knows that this requires more… careful handling. He reaches out; slowly, so that Sanji can pull away if he wants to. With a gentle touch, more gentle than he can normally manage, a gentleness reserved for Wado and Wado alone, he places his hand (so much larger; calloused, scarred, and dark) on top of Sanji’s folded hands (pale, thin, with small, lightened scars from childhood clumsy knifework).
“Cook… Sanji,” Zoro says as gently as he can, the words hard to squeeze from his throat. “Look, if you wanna put this on hold, I ain’t gonna stop you. If you wanna walk away, I’ll let ya go. Nakama comes first.”
Sanji doesn’t move, just breathes shaky breaths.
Zoro takes that as permission. “I’m content to just keep as we always have. I’m happy to be your rival, your nakama. But I want… I want to try.” He struggles for the words, running a frustrated hand through his hair. “Look, I ain’t good with words, you know that, but… I don’t… I don’t usually want things.”
My swords, booze, my crew.
“But, curls, fuck, you make me want to be selfish.”
“Selfish?” Sanji’s voice comes out quiet and aching with something Zoro can’t put a name to.
He nods. “Selfish. You make me want things I’d told myself I wasn’t allowed to want.”
“... Like what?”
He closes his eyes, steeling his nerves. “Things like love. A warm meal, a safe place, a home. Things I’d thought I’d never really have.”
Sanji can’t stop the tears then; they fall before he even realized his eyes were welling up again. He knows that feeling. That feeling of never quite knowing. Of wanting and not having. Of wishing for a place that was more than a boat, more than a bed, more than a kitchen. A place he could call home. He’d found that on the Merry, then on the Sunny, but there was still something missing. Something he couldn’t put into words. He loved the crew, the family he’d built, but there was always something he hadn’t found yet. An itch he couldn’t scratch even with their help.
“I…” the words slip past his lips without his permission, the sake and the cigarettes helping ease the path. “I think I understand. But… but why me? Why not Luffy? Or Usopp? You’ve known them longer-”
Zoro can’t help but huff a laugh. “Luffy is… special to me, but I don’t love him the way I do you. He’s my captain, I’d die for him a million times over, yes, but I don’t want to hold his hands, or watch him go about his daily chores, or tease him until he combusts.” The way I want to do those things with you, goes unsaid. “And Usopp has got that girl back home, and he’s… he’s not you. He can’t take my blows, he can’t have my back the way you can.”
He sighs again, rubbing his face. “And that’s the thing, cook, is that I can trust you to have my back. Even when we fight, I know you’re there to carry the weight too.”
Sanji is silent for a moment, tears still burning his wide eyes. Then he starts to laugh, a half-hysterical laugh, “You–you don’t get to say you’re no good with words and then say all of that, shitty moss-”
Sanji laughs hard, and he feels wild, nearly doubled over now, tears still streaming down his face. “G-Gods, Mosshead, I don’t- ha, I don’t know what to say.” He tilts his head back to meet Zoro’s eyes and attempts to wipe the tear tracks from his face.
“Just tell me the truth, Curls.” Zoro replies. “If you love me back - hells, you don’t even gotta tell me if ya love me. Just be willing to try this. If you don’t, I’ll back off. But don’t go tellin’ me what I deserve or how I can’t love ya or none of that bullshit. Just… Just tell me what you want.”
Sanji’s ocean eyes are still red-rimmed but he’s smiling now - a sugar-fragile smile. “Yeah. I–I wanna try this.”
Zoro can't help it then, the smile that spreads across his face. Finally.