Archive of Our Own ^beta

“This has got to be some kind of curse,” Usopp says as Sanji contemplates ripping their latest delivery flyer’s letter of resignation into tiny little pieces and eating them in a fit of rageful protest. 

He does not. Mostly because Nami is standing right there, and he’s already embarrassed himself in front of her enough to last him a lifetime. 

“No, no, listen to me,” Usopp is still going, “That’s four flyers in six months, and three of them left to join the city guard. Three! Three out of four. What are the chances of that, huh?”

“Who would curse us?” Luffy voices the question from atop the washing machine, “We haven’t done anything to anyone.”

“Maybe it was that lady you sold a dead rat in a pickle jar?” Nami offers from her throne: the dryer, which has a solid three inches of height on the washing machine. A lady such as Nami only deserves the most regal of perches in Sanji’s opinion.

“That was a rare preserved adolescent mink!” Usopp protests, “They keep away bad energy!”

“Why did it look like a rat then?”

“Because it was an adolescent mink, it wasn’t fully grown!”

Sanji crumples the letter in his fist as Usopp and Nami devolve into arguing. Beside him, Luffy hums lightly. 

“Is Sanji worried?”

“No,” Sanji says, and he’s not really, only they have orders that need to go out, and someone needs to deliver the refills to their monthly tonic subscribers, and someone needs to pick up the newly printed catalogues from the press shop, and–

“A little,” he amends, tugging lightly at his bangs, “We just have a lot of stuff that needs to be done, and we don’t have time to find and train a new hire.”

“Usopp can do deliveries,” Luffy offers, “And Koby said he was willing to help out on breaks from the Academy.”

Koby had been a good kid. A little squirrely and with the thickest flying goggles Sanji had seen on anyone, but polite and timely. Sanji has no idea what possessed him to want to become a city guard. The Academy was going to eat that kid alive. 

“Usopp’s swamped, he mans the front of the shop and does the restorations on whatever tchotchkies you dig up,” Sanji notes. He’d found Usopp asleep at his workbench last week, head on his spellbook, screwdriver still in hand.

“I can help,” Luffy jabs a thumb at his own chest, “I used to do ‘em anyways, at the start.”

“I know, Captain,” Sanji sighs, “It’s not a long-term solution, though. We need another pair of hands around here. Or another pair of broomsticks, whatever.”

“A pair of broomsticks,” Luffy drums his fingers against the side of the washer, “I dunno about a pair, but I can get you three.”

“Three?” Sanji echoes as Luffy hops off the washer, “Three what?”

“Don't worry, Sanji,” Luffy waves his hand in a manner that means that Sanji should up and ready himself to start worrying profusely, “I know a guy.”

=

Luffy’s ‘guy’, as it turns out, is Roronoa fucking Zoro.

“No!” Sanji drops the ladle back into his cauldron; it sinks to the bottom, and he’s going to have to fish it out later, but that doesn’t matter at the moment. “Absolutely not!” 

“Nice to see you too, Curly,” Zoro, the absolute bastard, smirks. 

“No,” Sanji repeats, jabbing a finger at his stupid, smug face, “I’ll get Usopp to do deliveries. I don’t care if a customer brings in a dozen cursed toilet plungers that keep trying to ram themselves up people’s asses. They can find someplace else to take their problems. Usopp’s the delivery boy now.”

“Has that actually happened?” Zoro glances around like a stray toilet plunger might be lurking between the shelves for the perfect moment to lodge itself between his admittedly symmetrical asscheeks. 

“Yes, it kept appearing on whatever surface someone was about to sit down on– wait, why am I telling you this?” Snaji whips his head around and leans back, “LUFFY!”

“Damn, Curly, you’re an awfully inconsiderate neighbor,” Zoro mimes checking his watch, “It’s 10:30 at night, don’t you think it's rude to be yelling that loud?”

“Oh, I’ll show you yelling,” Sanji grits out, opening the basement door and hollering up the stairs, “LUFFY!”

“He’s not here!” Nami yells back from somewhere. It’s accompanied by the slamming of a door. Sanji winces. 

“Good going, Curly,” Zoro, who has already made himself comfortable on one of Sanji’s work benches, laughs, “Now you’re really in the dog house.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Sanji snaps, “Do you– Do you even know what you’re offering to do?”

“Night deliveries?” Zoro shrugs, “Yeah, Luff told me, and I got open hours and a broom, so. What else do I need? A fucking resume?”

“You also have one working eye and the directional sense of a steamed hamster,” Sanji reminds him, “And yes, a ‘fucking resume’ as you put it, is often required when applying for a job.”

“I have the Witch’s little compass thing, and Luff said he’d pay me straight coin, none of that tax and withholding bullshit.”

Sanji opens his mouth to say that Luffy doesn’t get to make those kinds of decisions around here, then closes it when he remembers that Luffy does get to make those kinds of decisions around here. His name is on the shop deed and business registration.  

Zoro seems to take his hesitation of acquiescence because he gets up and dusts his hands, “Nice, glad we got that sorted, what do I gotta deliver today?”

“Tonight,” Sanji amends, glancing at the clock, it's a quarter to eleven. He’s been down here brewing since noon.

“Tonight,” Zoro grins, it’s the most lively Sanji has seen him in ages. He tends to be quiet when he comes over for dinner, drinking too much but always helping Sanji do the dishes afterward. 

“Tonight,” Sanji repeats, glancing at the shelf full of tonics. Hell, even if Zoro finds a grand total of three mailboxes a night, it’s still three more deliveries than what was getting done previously. Which was nothing. 

Sanji exhales loudly, “What kind of broom do you have?”

“An Okinawa Rail,” Zoro nods proudly. Sanji smiles. It's kind of cute, boys and their broomsticks. He has no doubt Zoro cares for it in the same fastidious manner that he does everything. Even the dishes on Friday nights. 

“From the late 80s,” Sanji guesses, he knows nowhere as much about brooms as Usopp and Luffy do. He has an old Bluejay in storage, but it hasn’t seen the light of day in months. If there’s somewhere he can’t get by train, he’ll backpack on Luffy or Usopp’s.

“Nah, this is a newer line, ‘97,” Zoro looks to the side, “It was a gift.”

“It’s not a racing broom, is it?” Sanji doesn’t like those; they look flimsy and don’t tend to hold too much weight well.

“It’s a long hauler,” Zoro shrugs, “I used it all the time when I went artifact hunting.”

“Ok,” Sanji breathes in deep, which is probably not a good idea on account of the fumes, “Okay, listen, we can give you saddle bags with everything and the list of addresses. We don’t offer flyers’ insurance, though, so you’re on your own with that. Right?”

Zoro grunts in response, which is irksome. Sanji feels his own temper start to bubble like the cauldron he has on the leftmost burner. 

“Listen up, you moss colored guinea pig, we have a reputation with our customers, ok? So everything needs to be delivered to the right address, on time, and undamaged. That clear?”

“Yeah, yeah, the Witch already gave me the rundown. So did Usopp. Even though he was sorta shaking the whole time. So, can I start?”

“Fine!” Sanji throws up his hands, “whatever. Talk to Usopp, he’ll get you the addresses. You are going to get the saddle bags out of the closet in the hallway and load up these boxes under my careful supervision. Let it be known that I do not trust you with glass bottles.”

Zoro makes a face, which might mean ‘but you trust me with your precious crockery?’ which Sanji ignores. Dish washing after Friday's dinners is a different thing altogether. It’s a liminal time and space under the dim kitchen light and in the hot steam carrying the scent of soap, where Zoro and Sanji become something else. A new kind of organism, a well-oiled machine. It’s a sacred place, where Sanji can say the warmth in his face whenever Zoro leans closer to take a plate is from the steam, and no one questions it. 

As much as Sanji likes his arguments with Zoro, the half-hearted barbs and insults they throw at each other, he can’t help but quietly hope for another set of quiet moments—something where he doesn’t have to consistently spout well-crafted jibes at him to get his attention. 

It’s one more awful thing about Sanji, to want another man’s attention like this. Somehow, somewhere, what he had with Nami and Usopp and Luffy and Zoro stopped being enough. It’s almost a comical fairy tale level sort of greed. He has everything a person could ever wish for, and still, he wants. 

Sanji fishes the ladle out of his cauldron with another ladle as Zoro pads off in search of the saddlebags. Sanji expects it’ll take him a good while. Zoro is abysmal at finding things on a good day, and between Usopp, Luffy, and, he’s ashamed to even think it, Nami, the organization of their personal belongings leaves much to be desired. 

Surprisingly, Zoro reappears after a few minutes, saddlebags held aloft. Grinning wide, like he’s begging Sanji to say something. 

“Usopp, show you where they were?” Sanji asks wryly. 

“I found them myself, actually.” Zoro is a horrible liar. And the fact that Sanji finds it endearing is likely an indication that he is sick in the head.

“Did you now?” Sanji turns off the burner and moves to the shelf to watch Zoro load the packaged bottles into the bags. Somehow, the guy manages to bungle the job.

“No,” Sanji rolls his eyes, “Here– just. Stop. Take them all out.” He leans over and points to the arrangements of the bottles on the shelf, “I already have them put in order from closest delivery to farthest, these go at the front, and those go in the back.”  

“Hey, I’m the one doing the deliveries. I have my own system for this,” Zoro grumbles. 

“What fucking system? It’s literally your first day.”

“It’s a good system. Better and more efficient than yours, actually,” Zoro says as he starts arranging the bottles exactly how Sanji had told him to, “You impressed?”

It’s days like these that Sanji hopes one day one of Usopp’s kooky fixer-uppers will gain sentience and murder them all in their sleep. It seems like a decent enough way to go. 

“I’m impressed that single-celled organism in your head you call a brain could come up with it,” Sanji reaches up to hand the bottles from the top shelves to Zoro. Their fingers brush past each other as the bottle exchanges hands, a whisper of a touch. 

Sanji really needs to stop wanting forbidden things. It cannot be good for his skin. 

=

Usopp claims he’s discovered a new curse every week, but Sanji is starting to believe his theory about the delivery flyer curse isn’t a total salted slug, because not a week after he starts, they lose Zoro.

In the literal sense.

There’s also a bit of a scare regarding losing him in the metaphorical sense, mostly because Sanji decides the best way for him to not doze off and fall headfirst into a cauldron of boiling mint jelly is to keep the radio on as he works.  

“-- and traffic and weather together on channel 679 with a headlining story regarding suspected air malfunctions–”

Sanji yawns and rifles through the drawers for a spoon to taste the jelly. It’s very fresh. Minty even. 

“-- later stated by the grand line airspace patrol to have been targeted by yet unidentified airborne objects–”

He starts laying out the glass jars, holding one up to the light to try and eyeball how many he will need to hold the majority of the jelly. It’s now turned a pleasant cool green color. It reminds him a bit of Zoro.

“-- two delivery flyers, one of whom died on impact, another who has been hospitalized in critical condition–”

Sanji sniggers at the comparison, pondering whether to gift their newest hire a jar when his brain tunes back in to what is being said.

“-- independent, the other worked for the local post office whose staff wish to share a heartfelt–”

The jelly could go another couple of minutes, but Sanji flicks off the burner as he rushes over to the radio. The segment has ended, but if it’s a big enough story, another channel should cover it. 

Sanji does not know if his trembling fingers are a byproduct of his late night or the growing pit of worry in his stomach, but they make it frustrating to turn the stupid tiny dial on the stupid tiny radio. He flicks through the channels rapidly, keeping an ear out for anything to do with air accidents.

“-- one outbound from the East Blue, another from the South when they were both struck down over the Red Line–”

Sanji flicks back to the channel. Their shop runs out of the East Blue, and he knows that Zoro prefers to take the Red Line, a high-speed crossway of artificial wind currents connecting towns, when he has long-haul deliveries. 

“-- both collisions taking place nearly a kilometer apart, the airspace patrol has shut down the area, so be sure to expect a delay in morning air travel, folks. The accident was called in by a late commuter who saw one of the flyers go down at around 3 AM. The second was discovered by airspace patrol just two hours later, though it is suspected that both incidents occurred around the same time—” 

The announcer moves on to describing the condition of the recovered broomsticks following the accident but Sanji has heard enough. He switches off the radio as he makes his way up the basement stairs in a daze. Plenty of people did night deliveries; he could name more than a dozen businesses that employed late-hour flyers off the top of his head. He doesn’t even think Zoro had any deliveries last night outside the East Blue. He would have no reason to be near the Red Line at all. 

“Morning, Sanji!” Usopp calls from the kitchen table as Sanji walks past, “You good, man?”

“Usopp,” Sanji’s voice comes out croaky with disuse, “Usopp, did we get the paper yet?”

“Uhh, dunno why do you—” Usopp pulls up his goggles to meet Sanji’s eyes, what he finds there must not be very encouraging because it has him dropping whatever doodad he’d been immersed with and jumping out of his seat, “Tell you what, I’ll go check while you take a sea,t maybe. You don’t look too good.”

Sanji doesn’t feel too good. Something churns heavy and painful in the pit of his stomach. He hopes it’s not the jelly. 

He occupies himself with putting on the kette until Usopp comes back. He’s meant to be starting breakfast anyway. Nami and Luffy should be getting up soon, and sometimes Zoro manages to drag himself in for breakfast before he leaves to pass out in some unsuspecting corner of his apartment and–

Usopp returns, brandishing the paper, which Sanji almost snatches out of his hands. He doesn’t need to flip far to find the article. “Double Crash over Red Line” in large print stares back at him from the second page.

He skims the article until he gets to the part about the two flyers. They mention one of them by name: Raki, the flyer from the post office. She’d survived the initial impact and been air lifted to a hospital; the article speculates it was her helmet that saved her. Did Zoro wear a helmet? Sanji has never seen him do so; he doesn’t even know if Zoro owns one. 

“Holy fuck,” Usopp mutters as he leans closer to see what Sanji has been reading, slinging an arm over his shoulder. 

Sanji ignores him, scanning further down the article. The second flyer is unnamed. All Sanji knows about them is that they were employed by an independent company and died on impact. 

The kettle whistles. 

Sanji hands the paper off to Usopp and makes for the phone, dialing Zoro’s contact number from the list of employees and vendors they have taped next to the cradle. 

It rings once. Then twice. Then thrice. And the call goes to the answering machine. Which, as Sanji could have predicted, is full.

He slams the phone down and tries again. If Zoro isn’t lying on a cold forest floor with his neck at an odd angle, eyes glazed over, then Sanji is going to strangle him with the telephone cord. Wrapping his fingers around said cord, he tries calling Zoro a third time. 

He doesn’t answer. 

“Were you calling Zoro? Did he answer?” Usopp, no doubt having read through the remainder of the article, looks up at Sanji from the table, eyes wide. 

“Does it fucking sound like he answered?” Sanji snaps before taking a deep breath, “Sorry, no, he didn’t. How do you want your eggs?”

“Should we, like, go look for him?” Usopp asks as Sanji sets the frying pan on the stove. He’s got some bell peppers from Usopp’s garden in the freezer; those might pair well with an omelet. 

“He’ll turn up,” he always does. Sanji yanks open the fridge and sighs. There’s no cheese save for the pre-sliced stuff. It’s not the worst substitution he’s ever had to make in a dish, but he seriously considers telling Nami that he’ll do all the groceries from now on. 

“If you say so,” Usopp sits back down and picks up the hunk of metal and wires he’d been fiddling with, “But just in case, shouldn’t someone–”

Sanji exhales loudly as he cracks an egg; a piece of shell ends up in the bowl. “Fine. I’ll go look for him if he doesn’t turn up for breakfast. Happy?”

“I’m just worried, man–” Usopp starts, then stops when Sanji fixes him with a look, “And I will be significantly more worried following breakfast.”

Sanji fishes out the piece of shell using a butter knife, another dish he has to wash now. “He’s always wasting time somewhere; no need to get worried.” The yet floats with the scent of butter in the room between them. 

Sanji pours the beaten eggs into the pan, adjusting the flame as the butter sputters. Zoro’s a big boy; he can handle himself. And in the very minuscule chance that something might have happened, their shop’s contact is sewn onto the saddle bags, so they would be the first to hear.

The phone sits ominously at his peripheral, like a giant shiny black beetle, as he plates the omelets and grabs the bread off the counter. A crash directly above them shakes the dangling kitchen light and also reminds Sanji who he is feeding. Placing the bread back, he opens the fridge to fish out the bacon. Stupid. He should have fried up the bacon first, then done the eggs in the leftover fat.

Nami makes her appearance in a bathrobe that is in no way a detriment to her beauty; in fact, its threadbare, ragged look only serves to highlight her radiance. She greets them by slamming her head down on the table and reaching out her arm in a silent plea for her morning cup of coffee. 

Which Sanji hasn’t started yet. Shit. He’s off his routine here, and there’s no doubt that litchen covered asshole is at fault. Who’d asked him to work nights anyway? He could have done the deliveries during the day when things were well-lit and visible, but no.

 The toast comes out a tad crisper than he intends it to. Which is not a problem at all; it is not as if Luffy takes the time to judge the crumb of his toast before shoveling it into his mouth. Sanji is considering the necessity of hashbrowns when the phone rings. 

Sanji snatches it out of the cradle before either Usopp or Nami has the chance to blink. 

“Hello?”

“Hi! Can we interest you in our top-of-the-line broom insurance? The process is simple, first set up–”

“Fuck this,” Sanji hangs up the phone and stomps over to the coat rack to grab his scarf. He can do hashbrowns for the celebratory brunch he's going to make after he tracks down Zoro, who he’s sure is alive by the way, and throws him down a full flight of stairs for the undue stress he’s caused everyone.

He’s angrily pulling on his left boot when he hears the bell above the front door ring, followed by heavy footsteps.

“I’m back,” grunts the mossy bane of his existence, no doubt tracking mud all over the shop’s floor.  

The bead curtain leading to the front of the store tinkles as Zoro brushes it aside to stare down at Sanji, “Where the hell are you going so early?”

The sound of his right boot hitting Zoro square on his obnoxiously large forehead is the best thing Sanji has heard the entire morning. 

=

“So the logical conclusion that you all jumped to was that I was dead?” Zoro says around a mouthful of toast. He sprays crumbs all over the table as he talks. Sanji looks away for his own mental well-being, 

“Yes,” says Usopp.

“No,” says Sanji, louder than Usopp.

“Zoro was late,” Luffy points out. There’s jam on his cheek. Sanji lives in a zoo. 

Zoro mutters something under his breath. 

“What was that?” Nami prompts, nails tapping against her second mug of coffee. 

“I said, I got turned around, okay? I missed the exit to East Blue, and it took me a while to figure out how to get back.”

Sanji scoffs. Go figure. 

“You got something to say?” Zoro glares, which is undercut by the breadcrumb stuck on his upper lip. If he leans closer, Sanji can see the start of the world’s most pathetic mustache. The green still surprises him; he knows Zoro likely uses a potion to get it that way, but Sanji has never heard of a potion that changes the color of all the hair on a person’s body. Perhaps it's an ingestible?

“Hello? Ground control to Sanji Black?” Usopp’s question breaks him out of his musings. He must be more tired than he initially assumed to have spaced out like that. And looking at Zoro too.

“Ignore him, he never sleeps, so his brain’s fried,” Nami rolls her eyes, “And you. What happened to that compass that I gave you? I told you a million times, follow the needle; it should be simple enough.”

“It must be broken or some shit,” Zoro grumbles, crossing his arms, “It kept on spinning in circles last night.”

“Yeah, cause you probably broke it,” Nami waves her mug. Sanji passes the coffee pot wordlessly, “I’ll take a look at it after breakfast.”

“Whatever,” Zoro goes back to his toast, and Sanji starts gathering dishes. On his way to the sink, he reaches over to wipe the jam off Luffy’s cheek. He trails his fingers along Zoro's back in a silent welcome as he walks by—and to get the stickiness of the jam off his fingers. 

He tells himself it's mostly for the jam. 

=

Nami working on the compass means that Zoro sticks around for the normal morning business hours. Sanji knows nothing about his sleeping habits aside from his general nocturnalness, but soon comes to learn it involves a lot more migration than what is normal.

Following breakfast, Zoro passes out on the rickety couch next to the kitchen. Sanji can hear his soft snores as he does the dishes. However, not two hours later, he heads upstairs to gather laundry while Usopp sits at the register and finds Zoro eagle spread on Luffy’s bed. He shrugs it off; the couch isn’t the most ideal place for sleeping anyway, especially for someone of Zoro’s size. 

“Wazzat?” Zoro mutters when Sanji nudges his leg to pull the twisted sheets out from under him. 

“Go back to sleep,” Sanji pulls the covers up to his shoulders and, out of habit, leans over and brushes his hair back. He snatches his hand away like it's been burned the second he realizes what he’s done. 

He flees Luffy’s room without any of the laundry he’d come searching for. He needs to stop babying Chopper, its making him more prone to doing weird things.

Around two in the afternoon, Sanji finally finishes gathering the laundry between attending to customers and checking in on his ‘goodnight sleep solution’ simmering on low in the basement. He takes the basket down to the laundry room and nearly drops it when he trips over Zoro’s legs sticking out from where he dozed, wedged between the washer and dryer. 

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Sanji kicks at him for good measure, which does nothing but encourage him to lean into a more comfortable position.

Whatever, the dryer is warm, Sanji can understand that much. Where he draws the line is when he stumbles back into the basement sometime during the evening to get a second of shut eye and finds a patch of moss growing on the worn daybed he uses for quick naps. 

“Okay, that’s it, LUFFY!” Sanji shouts up the stairs, “Luffy, get down here and get your boy!”

“He’s not here!” Usopp yells back.

“Typical,” Sanji shoots the patch of algae photosynthesizing on his pillow the middle finger and goes to curl up on the overstuffed armchair next to his workbench. 

When he wakes, it’s dark outside, and he’s on the daybed with the blanket pulled over his shoulder. 

=

Zoro must take the permission as an invitation because the following week, he takes to sleeping in awkward places around their house instead of, Sanji doesn’t know, his own goddamn fucking bed in his apartment that Sanji has been to exactly once and felt jittery about the whole time. It had just been so strange being surrounded by so much of Zoro, his belongings, his desolate kitchen, the slight metallic scent that seemed to cling to him. He was everywhere, beneath Sanji’s feet, under his hands, in his nostrils. 

The problem with this new arrangement, aside from the fact that he keeps tripping over the bastard, is that Sanji becomes accustomed to him. He sets an extra place at breakfast regularly instead of grabbing an additional plate if and only if Zoro happens to show up. Zoro’s jacket starts to smell like their house, like a medley of spices from the basement and the faint floral whispers from Usopp's greenhouse that had started spilling into the house not a week after he’d started it. 

When he counts heartbeats on the nights where sleep evades him and the thought of closing his eyes in a dark room sends a jolt of panic through his chest, Sanji counts from one to four then back down again.

Over the weeks, Zoro becomes part of the house. Sanji’s house, where he keeps his particular belongings in particular orders. Unlike Usopp’s claims, Sanji does not have a thing. He has a system, sure, where everything is in its place as he needs it. The basement is fastidiously organized and stocked with everything Sanji needs to keep the potion, tonic, and salve end of the business running. The kitchen is a bit more of a communal space, but every new thing that finds a spot on the counter does so with Sanji’s permission and precise instructional placement. 

The same goes with his people. Sanji might stumble through most weeks in a sleepless haze, and perhaps also slightly high from whatever he’s been brewing in the basement, but he makes it a point to keep track of where everyone is. He knows what shops and old warehouse districts Luffy combs through, remembers Usopp's weekly tea dates with Kaya, and even tracks when Nami steps out to wander the farmers' market. 

The Zoro Problem, as he’s taken to calling it, throws a new ladle in his cauldron. Short of running a tracking spell on him all through the night, which might be the final straw that sends Sanji into a magical overuse coma and straight six feet under, Sanji cannot think of a way to reliably figure out where Zoro is going to be. His delivery schedule changes almost daily, and Sanji doesn’t have the time to fly alongside and learn all his delivery routes.

The solution comes to him when he walks in on Usopp mirror dialing Kaya with his shirt off at ten fifteen in the fucking morning. 

“Have you even heard of knocking!” Usopp shrieks, trying to cover both himself and the image of a concerned Kaya in the mirror with the same shirt. 

“Hello, Miss Kaya,” Sanji waves over Usopp's protests of “I had a weird rash on my back, this was purely a professional call!”

“Usopp, stop screaming,” Sanji pinches the bridge of his nose. “That looks irritated. There's rash cream in the laundry room.”

Usopp flees his own room with the majority of his dignity and his shirt, leaving Sanji to awkwardly wish Miss Kaya a wonderful afternoon and end the call.

The idea gets him thinking, though. That evening, he reviews some of his old scrying spells, the ones Zeff had practically drilled into him to keep watch on unattended cauldrons. 

The next morning, he sends Usopp up into the attic to battle the spiders as payment for having to inspect his weird rash. Usopp comes back down with spiderwebs on his sweater and one of the three 70’s standard 85% enchanted crystal scrying balls they have in storage. Luffy had been given those as payment two years ago for breaking the fourth in the set– that had been enchanted to replay the same scene of someone’s grandpa in the shower– and thus removing a generational curse that had the men in the family falling victim to various bathroom-related incidents. 

Sanji also makes Usopp check for images of naked old men when he plugs the thing in. He’d seen enough geriatric privates to last him a lifetime, those two years ago. 

The first night, Sanji writes a loose will on the back of a napkin, which details that, in the scenario that a thirty-year-old crystal ball turns his brains into pudding, all his earthly possessions will go to Nami to do with as she sees fit. After several moments of debate, he scribbles in a clause stating that Usopp could have his basil plant should he wish to raise it in his stead. He leaves Luffy his secret store of canned goods beneath the false bottom of the downstairs pantry. 

To Zoro, he leaves nothing, on account of the fact that Sanji is risking permanently sauteing his consciousness for his sake. 

Sanji shuts off all the burners, plugs in the crystal, casts the scrying spell, burns the tuft of Zoro’s hair he’d cut off while he napped in Nami’s walk-in closet, and lies down on the ratty daybed in the basement with the blanket pulled up to his chin. He stares at textures on the ceiling, counting from one to three, skipping four, and going back again until sleep claims him. 

=

Sanji wakes hurtling towards the ground.

“What the fuck!” he screeches, trying to move his arms as the wind rushes past his face. They lag behind the notion, as if his limbs were moving through syrup. He feels disconcertingly like a fly caught in a glue trap. One that someone had tossed out a fifth-story window. 

“What the fuck- Curly?” he’s not physically there, but Sanji can still feel the uncomfortable way his stomach swoops as the fall ceases, then evens out until he’s hovering several hundred feet above the Grand Lake. 

The moonlight filters through the clouds, turning the waves below into molten silver. The breeze flirts about, and the world is quiet save for the breathing of two souls. 

It’s almost romantic, Sanji thinks hysterically. 

Of course, then he opens his eyes proper and comes face to face with Roronoa Zoro at a very unflattering angle. Sanji can see the individual pores on his face clearly, but everything else around them blurs, wrapping them in a cocoon of solitude where the only thing that exists is the other. 

Save for the fact that Zoro can’t see Sanji, as is evident from the way his head whips around, “Curly? Was that you?”

“Yeah,” Sanji can feel his hair sliding over his face as he turns in his sleep, but finds himself unable to do anything about it, “What the fuck were you falling out of the sky for? And why are we over the lake?”

“Where are you?” Zoro is still whipping his head about like a frantic owl, “Are you like dead?”

Sanji tries to kick him in the shins, but predictably, it doesn’t work. “Moron. You literally saw me two hours ago. How could I be dead?”

“So? You could have died after I left,” Zoro argues, “and now you’re haunting me.”

“If, if, I were to refrain from my journey into the great beyond and linger on this mortal plane longer than necessary, it would most certainly not be for you.” Staring Zoro straight in the face when he can’t look back is getting more unsettling by the minute. Sanji cranes his neck to test his range of view and feels himself warp around the scene, now positioned to look over Zoro’s shoulder.

“Did you do something?” Zoro turns his head from side to side, jolting when Sanji speaks. 

“Change of view. Got tired of looking at your ugly mug. You never answered my question, What are you doing above the lake?”

“That’s creepy, it’s like you're speaking right into my ear, ugh,” Zoro shudders dramatically, “And none of your business, asshole.”

“I’m paying you to deliver potions, not do loop de loops above the water,” Sanji reminds him, even though he’s not technically the one paying him; the sentiment is the same.

“Yeah, yeah, I get all that shit done,” Zoro grumbles, turning his head. Sanji is suddenly overcome by the warmth emanating from his back, his nose filled with the lightly metallic tinge from Zoro’s apartment. If he’d thought being in a small room alone with Zoro had been bad, this is a million times worse. Sanji almost feels as if he were seated on the broom behind him. 

“What are you spying on me for? Do you seriously think I don’t know how to do my goddamn job?” Zoro snaps, leaning down. Sanji feels his stomach swoop again as they start their descent. He doesn’t have any arms in the corporal sense, but in the moment, he’s overcome with the instinct to wrap them around Zoro’s waist.

Sanji must take too long to think of an answer because Zoro just scoffs. They descend in silence, Zoro guides them down until they’re close enough to the surface of the water to touch. Sanji can feel the way Zoro’s core tightens to keep him blanched as he trails one hand down to run his fingers through the waves. 

“The water is nice,” Zoro whispers, so quiet that no one but Sanji and the lake hears him, “Sometimes I take the long way round so I can look at it.”

“Yeah,” Sanji agrees lamely, and they lapse into silence again. It’s awkward as hell, Sanji curses himself for staying up so long the previous night. Now he likely won’t wake for another handful of hours, which means he’s stuck behind Zoro until then.

Eventually, even their walking, talking plant has his fill of the water and they drift on a lazy air current to Loguetown. Zoro follows the needle of Nami’s compass, mounted to the top of his broom handle, like a pirate does a treasure map; carefully and with great efficiency. 

They drift down amidst a tangle of tall houses, and Sanji watches as Zoro digs through the saddle bag to withdraw a handful of packages. He moves them under a streetlight to squint at the label before sliding them into the correct mailboxes. Again, it’s very careful and deliberate, Sanji wonders if he’s doing this just cause he’s being watched.

Somewhere between the neighborhoods, the awkward silence lapses into something almost calming. Sanji half drifts in and out of consciousness as Zoro makes his deliveries. It’s quite comfortable, with the ghost of a cool wind at his back and the idea of warmth from Zoro’s broad back pressed against his front.

It makes Sanji want terrible things. Like Zoro’s warmth in his moth-eaten daybed. 

“Why were you sleeping in Nami’s closet?” Sanji murmurs as they make the twenty-minute flight between towns. 

“Dunno, she asked me to move something for her and then…” Zoro trails off, “Why are you watching me sleep?”

“Stupid mosshead, it’s cause you’re a tripping hazard. And we’re always carting around hot cauldrons and weird cursed objects, wouldn’t want you to get bitten in the ass by a rogue banana clip.”

“What is it with you guys and stuff that aims for the ass?” Something rumbles across Sanji’s consciousness, and it takes him a second to figure out it’s Zoro chuckling, “At this point, just change the name of the shop to Merry Ass-porium.”

“That makes it sound like we cater to a whole different clientele.” To be fair, Sanji has tried to brew his own lube once, mostly out of curiosity. He must have messed up the ratio for the scents because the whole thing had congealed and ruined a cauldron so thoroughly that Sanji had just caved and brought a new one instead of subjecting Usopp to scraping crystallized lube off glassware during his lunch break. 

“You went quiet, you’re not thinking of freaky stuff, are you?”

“Ew,” Sanji tries to make a face to represent how vanilla and un-freaky his thoughts are, but abandons the attempts when he remembers Zoro can’t see him, “You asshole, of course I’m not.”

“Hmm, what were you thinking of then?” Zoro hums.

“You’re really gonna ask me about my thoughts?”

“I’m trying to be polite. Fuck else are we gonna do on this broom, play cards?”

“For your information, I was thinking about a potions incident that rendered a cauldron non-reusable. I had to buy a new one. Of course, these days the quality of cauldrons has really gone down the drain; they’re all so bottom-heavy it just gives the illusion of durability, but if your liquid rises above a certain point, then bam! You have essence of dragonfly all over your robes. No, the better option is to buy second-hand.”

Sanji pauses after that, overcome with the sudden, shameful realization that he’s been talking too long. He tries very hard not to do that. He’s not sure why he’d gone on for so long; must be the scrying slowly gelatinizing his brains. 

“So did you find one?”

“What?” Sanji asks, leaning closer to hear Zoro over the wind in his metaphorical ears as they start to descend. 

“Did you find a cauldron? Second hand?” Sanji can hear him yawn through the question; it must be getting late. He thinks of the newspaper article from last month. Dead on impact, it had said about one of the flyers. Sanji still doesn’t know what caused the accident, but nothing good ever came out of flying half asleep.

“Of course, I found one, you’ve seen it, it’s the big one with the golden lip. Actually, Luffy found that one; he knows a guy who knows a guy who sells old brewing equipment. I’ve been inside their warehouse and honestly, they must have robbed a school lab or something because…”

Sanji talks as the saddle bags grow lighter and keeps talking until the sky begins to age, streaks of grey appearing in the darkness. They’re on their way back to the East Blue when Sanji remembers what he’d said earlier that night.  

“Zoro,” Sanji starts as the sun begins to peek over the rooftops. This is a serious statement and he wants Zoro to recognize it as such; thus, the name, “Earlier, I didn’t -uh mean to imply that you were incapable of this job or anything. It’s just–” again, he can’t find the words for it. 

“Just–” you’ve become one of mine in a way you weren’t before, and I need to count all four heartbeats before bed or else I’ll never get a full night’s sleep.

Sanji would rather swallow a live toad than say that aloud, so he settles for, “Just thought I’d familiarize myself with your delivery route, in case you end up chasing your city guard dreams.”

“Why the fuck would I become a city guard?” Even from behind him, Sanji knows exactly what sort of stupid face Zoro is making, upper lip scrunched, left brow furrowed.

“I can only wish that Koby has a similar revelation before it is too late for that kid.”

“Who the fuck is Koby?”

“He used to do the deliver–”

Sanji gasps awake with half his hair in his mouth and Nami loudly inquiring about the location of the coffee pot from on top of the stairs. 

“Fuck,” he mutters, unplugging the crystal ball. His face, reflected on its now dark surface, reflects that sentiment. 

= 

(Then)

When Luffy asks if he can have a friend over for dinner, Sanji doesn’t think twice about it. In the two weeks he’s been living with them, there has already been a rotating cast of characters coming and going, not only from the shop but their living room cum kitchen behind it. Sanji has already had the honor of entertaining the lovely Miss Robin, who runs a bookstore in the city, and the eccentric Brook, a musician whose name had sounded strangely familiar, until Usopp had pointed Sanji in the direction of their old Rumbar records in the attic. 

Sanji almost calls Zeff that day, if only to brag about having met the lead singer of his favorite old man band. 

That night, as usual, Sanji breaks out the fine china. Which, in their case, means the only matching set of dinner plates and glasses they own. There are no matching bowls, so if Sanji ever decides to add soup to the menu, he's thoroughly fucked. 

Roronoa Zoro walks in as polite as any other guest, sitting on the step with a huff to unlace his books instead of kicking them off like Luffy and Usopp as they follow him inside. 

He’s a bit strange-looking, what with the bright green hair, scar across his left eye, and three almost delicate-looking gold teardrop earrings in his left ear. He gives Nami an appropriate greeting and politely nods Sanji’s way in a very manly show of acknowledgment. 

Of course, not twenty minutes later, it all goes to shit. 

Sanji has just put out the bread basket when his eye catches the stain on Zoro’s shirt, revealed after he shucks off his jacket.

“I’m sorry, is there-” Sanji bites his lip so it comes out more as an observation and less as an accusation, “Is there blood on your shirt?”

“What,” Zoro looks down, “Oh yeah, shit didn’t see that.”

Sanji exhales to calm himself down lest the mashed potatoes still in the oven be reduced to ashes. He’s worked with live potion ingredients before; he’s no stranger to a little blood on his person. He wouldn’t be caught dead at the dinner table in such a state, but that’s just him. “Do you er-know where it’s from?”

Zoro smirks, “Don’t worry your pretty brows about it. It’s mine.”

Sanji doesn’t even register the insult over the scream Usopp lets out as the candles on the table flare violently, “I’m sorry, could you repeat that? I don’t think I heard you correctly.”

“Sure,” Zoro looks a bit too smug for an injured man, “It’s my blood.”

Sanji peers closer, still regulating his breathing, the flames on the candles spark and pop, “That looks fresh.”

“Yeah, that’s usually what happens when someone’s bleeding,” Zoro replies, reaching out for a roll.

Sanji snatches the basket back, “You mean to tell me that you are sitting in our kitchen, at our dinner table with an open wound?”

Zoro shrugs, “Yeah, wanna see?” and then starts unbuttoning his goddamn shirt right there.

There is certainly a wound. A shoddily wrapped one that stretches across Zoro’s torso, bleeding through the bandages. 

Usopp faints. Luffy whistles. Nami gets up and dials Chopper.

Sanji makes it just in time to snatch the potatoes out of the oven and slam the door shut before the temperature in the room rises by several dozen degrees. 

=

Sanji learns the feel of Zoro’s skin under his hand before he learns his family name. 

Chopper shows up with tears in his eyes, yells at Zoro for three whole minutes, then commandeers the largest flat surface in the room, which happens to be the dining table, for a bout of impromptu surgery. 

The tablecloth is sacrificed to the cause. Usopp is roused with a handful of ice and a particularly putrid mushroom in a jar Luffy had been saving for a post-meal show and tell, and made to bring several cauldrons of water to a boil. Nami gets the kettle going. Luffy remains seated, reaching out and tangling his fingers with Zoro’s, his thumb slowly stroking the back of his hand. 

Sanji ends up as Chopper's second, holding down Zoro’s shoulders as he works, and inadvertently making little sushing noises whenever he flinches at the dab of the antiseptic-soaked cloth or the tightening of a stitch. 

“Whatever possessed you to come here in such a state?” Sanji mutters, using his handkerchief to dab at the sweat on Zoro’s forehead. He’s been keeping up a mostly one-sided stream of chatter to keep Zoro awake and alert.

“Luffy invited me,” Zoro mutters. “Also,” he mumbles something under his breath. 

“Yeah?” Sanji leans closer, smoothing a thumb over Zoro’s shoulder. It’s broad; Zoro must work out often or have a physically demanding career to be so built. 

“I wanted to ask…” Zoro whispers, his eyes half-lidded, glazed over in pain. A single tear drips from the corner of his right eye. Sanji brushes it lightly off his face. 

“You can ask me anything.”

Zoro takes a ragged breath. 

“Who the fuck even are you?”

Sanji doesn’t know why he sends his ass home with leftovers. 

=

“Well, if it isn’t the Marimo that nearly bled out on my dining table?” Sanji greets the second time Zoro comes over for dinner. 

He looks a lot better. His face has a healthy flush to it as he mouths the word ‘Marimo’, brushing a hand over his close-cropped hair. He looks so sweet for a moment that Sanji almost has a half mind to forgive him.

Almost. He’d still spend four hours that night sterilizing the kitchen floor to ceiling. His back has not yet given up on reminding him of that. 

“Luffy invited me,” Zoro mutters as he brushes past Sanji. This time, he kicks off his boots right next to Luffy’s.

Zoro is a barely acceptable dinner guest. He drinks too much, doesn’t care for small talk, and engages Nami in a belching contest all before dessert gets out.

“So you’re the cook,” he grins, crooked incisors and scrunched nose. 

“So you're Luffy’s pet seaweed?” Sanji’s smile holds an edge of violence, further exacerbated by the carving knife he’s gripping. Zoro looks as nonplussed as ever. Sanji is really starting to dislike the guy.

Zoro does, however, finish everything on his plate. Even the dessert, which Sanji catches him making a face at. He says a soft “thank you for the meal” when he gets up from the table.

He also calls Sanji a ‘damn nagging waiter’ in the same sentence, so Sanji feels justified in stepping on his foot when he comes by to grab the plates. Zoro knocks against his shoulder, not five minutes later, almost making him drop an armful of glasses. 

Sanji sends him home with leftovers anyway. 

=

The third time is the charm, the saying goes, but Sanji considers the third time to be more of a curse if anything. The third time Zoro comes over, Sanji, still disparaging the state of his wine cupboard, sticks his name on the chore wheel. 

Truthfully, he expects Zoro to protest. But he dutifully puts down the cards from the game he’d been playing with Nami and follows Sanji back into the kitchen, rolling up his sleeves. 

“Zoro,” he warns each time he passes the Marimo a plate. The guy has a sleepy look about him, and between the warm steam from the sink and the low kitchen light, the last thing Sanji needs is for him to doze off and drop his good crockery. 

“Zoro.” A bowl.

“Zoro.” A glass.

“Zoro.” A spoon.

“You don’t have to keep saying my name, you know,” Zoro mutters as he takes the offered utensil and dries it, “I’m the only one here.”

It’s true. There is no one else in the kitchen. Just Sanji and Zoro.

“I know Zoro,” Sanji hands him a fork this time. 

Zoro leans over to shove at him, but it comes out more of a shoulder bump. 

A sudden, awful thought bolts through Sanji’s gut, but even that isn’t enough to draw him away from the sink. He finishes the dishes with what feels like a whole family of frogs in his throat, ready to croak his shameful secret should he open his mouth even the tiniest bit. 

Zoro is a good-looking guy and nice enough despite the rough exterior and serious lack of table manners. Sanji imagines he has a girlfriend, a soft-spoken girl who he wraps an arm around as they walk the street, or even a girl as rough and tumble as him, who punches him on the shoulder each time he injures himself attempting a foolish stunt, and reaches over to roll one of his earrings between her fingers when it is just the two of them alone.

A kind, caring girl who would no doubt frown at the idea of someone like Sanji. Another person, another man, sneaking glances at the man she loves out of the corner of his eye. Waiting for him to draw closer again so he can hand him another water-warmed plate. 

Sanji wonders if she cooks for him.

He sends Zoro home with enough leftovers for two.

=

Between the fifth, sixth, and seventh dinners, Sanji discovers that there is no sweet-faced girlfriend, a fact that does nothing to alleviate the guilt of his unreasonable attraction.  

Zoro only seems to think of three things: swords, brooms, and booze. If he doesn’t have one of them in hand, then he’s working on acquiring them. His bladework is inspired. Sanji watches him chop carrots for a salad once, the batons clean, precise, and mostly uniform.

Through the ninth, tenth, and eleventh dinners, Zoro’s presence becomes a tradition in and of itself. Fridays mean a large home-cooked family-style dinner, and Zoro. 

In the midst of dinners fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, Sanji manages to tamp down the jolt that races through him when he and Zoro touch. It's exhausting, waiting for Zoro, thinking of new half-hearted barbs to throw back at him over desserts, and then biting his lip so hard it bleeds whenever he draws close.

Zoro flies through a rainstorm for some god forsaken reason and misses dinner number twenty-three because he catches a truly horrific cold. Sanji goes to his apartment to mock him for his snotty, miserable state, and to stuff his fridge full of meticulously portioned meals made to be easy on the stomach. 

Dinners thirty, thirty-five, and forty pass by. Sanji yells at all the right moments and smiles at all the wrong ones.

And then their fourth delivery flyer in six months hands in his letter of resignation. 

=

(Now)

Dinner forty-three occurs three weeks into Zoro’s stint as their delivery flyer and nearly a month after dinner number forty-two. In fact, Sanji isn’t even aware that dinner number forty-three is going to be a thing until Zoro kicks off his filthy boots in the foyer and slides into his seat at the table.   

“What’s for dinner, cook?” he smirks. It makes him look ridiculous.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” It's a genuine question. Zoro is usually off for deliveries by now. Sanji had saved him plates for those three weeks he’d been working for them, but quickly realized that by the time Zoro came back, it was easier to serve him breakfast, still warm. 

Since that one disastrous morning when Sanji feared they would need to put up a job posting again, Zoro has been his first customer, so to speak. Sanji finds his slumped form at the table a constant companion as he sweeps the floor and starts the coffee. 

Sanji glances at the clock. It’s near eight, and he’s woefully underprepared for an extra person at the dinner table. He can feel Zoro’s gaze on his back as he rinses more rice and starts up the rice cooker again. By the time the rest of the crew files in, he has another round of thinly sliced beef sizzling on the stove that Luffy tries to sneak a bit of, burning the tips of his fingers in the process. 

“Oh, Sanji, this looks good!” Nami, ever well-mannered and kind, says as he sits down. Luffy blows on his fingers and tries to steal from the pan again. 

“Are we out of orange juice?” Usopp asks with his head buried in the fridge, “Who was supposed to do groceries this week?”

Sanji stays silent to avoid incriminating himself. In his defence, he usually goes on the weekend, but he hadn’t accounted for the extra mouth at breakfast when planning the trip.

“Uhh”, Usopp makes a weird noise, and Sanji turns around to see him take out a plastic bottle filled with a bright yellow liquid. “Remember that rule we made about not storing  work stuff in the communal kitchen.”

“The rule we made because you put floor polish right next to the cooking spray and nearly killed us all?” Luffy, the only one of them with significant magical resistance against poisons, asks. 

“Yes, that one, thank you, Luffy.”

“That is pineapple juice,” Sanji grits out. He’d meant to put that in the basement fridge. Stupid Zoro and his stupid habit of occupying Sanji’s thoughts far past the legal, healthy amount a male coworker should. 

“Oh,” all traces of disgust evaporate off of Usopp's face. He eyes the bottle critically, “Can I drink it?”

Luffy successfully manages to nab a piece of beef from the pan. “You know what, go ahead,” Sanji sighs, defeated. It’s been a long week.

If Sanji had thought he’d been unprepared before, the awkwardness of sitting across Zoro, when he’d been metaphorically perched on his shoulder all of last night, is a whole new beast. 

Zoro takes a bite, moves the food onto one side of his mouth, cheek bulging, then takes another bite, doing the same to the other side before he starts chewing. There’s a grain of rice stuck to the corner of his lip. He licks the corner of his mouth, and it disappears. 

Sanji could have done that for him. 

He practically chokes on a piece of cabbage as the thought crosses his mind. Improper handling of food, besides, there is no reason his tongue should be anywhere near Zoro’s mouth. 

He spends the rest of the meal surreptitiously ignoring Zoro. Barely looking at him, even as he spoons more rice into his bowl. If everything goes his way, then they will both go their separate ways following the meal, and Sanji will have the whole night ahead of him to ruminate on his bad decisions. 

The flaw in his plan is made apparent when he turns the sink on to start washing dishes and finds himself elbow to elbow with Zoro, already holding a dish rag. Typically, Sanji would have remarked about him being a well-trained dog, but the words die on his lips. 

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” he exhales, “Go do your job and let me do mine.”

“You’re not coming along tonight.” Zoro is too goddamn close. Sanji can tell if the brush of warmth against his skin is from the steam curling from the sink, Zoro’s ridiculously high body temperature, or his heart getting its last few pumps in before it explodes.

“Nah, I’ve seen enough of you struggling to open mailboxes. It’s a skill most toddlers have down, by the way.”

“Some people have weird ass mailboxes,” Zoro mutters, which would be fine and dandy if he didn’t lean closer as he said so, "Remember that dumbass one that looked like a microwave.”

“It was a microwave,” Sanji leans away, the counter digging into his back, “And it still took you a whole minute to figure out how to open it.” 

“Did not,” Zoro says mulishly. Then he moves even closer. He’s got to be doing this on purpose. Sanji doesn’t know why, to intimidate him, tell him to back off in some weird alpha male posturing competition. If he turns and runs out of the house, does he lose?

“Are you gonna wash those?”

“What?” Sanji can’t concentrate on anything that is not Zoro’s face scant inches away from his own. If he moves even a smidgen closer, Sanji could tilt their foreheads together and–

Something wet touches his back, and Sanji springs forward with a yelp, nearly knocking his head into Zoro’s. The water in the sink has filled a bowl and started spilling onto the counter. Sanji springs into action, closing the tap and dispersing the dishes into a less of a tower. 

When he turns back, Zoro has moved back a respectable distance. He still holds the dishcloth expectantly, waiting for Sanji to give him a dish.

Sanji exhales an awkward laugh as he turns back to the dishes. The tips of his ears burn, yet inexplicably, he feels cold. 

=

Sanji tucks the crystal ball into the back of his supply closet, but still, the visions persist. Terrible things that leave him equally angry and wanting. 

He wraps his arms around Zoro on the back of his broom. He’s just so warm, a veritable furnace against the cold wind biting at Sanji’s ears that he just can’t find it in himself to let go. 

Between one moment and another, the dream shifts and so does Zoro, turning around in bed to pull Sanji closer, still hot enough to burn even as Sanji settles in his hold, breath caught in his throat at the ease of the action. Then there’s an inexplicable prickling all over, the pit of his stomach, the back of his knees, as Zoro squeezes him impossibly tighter, constrictingly, like a snake, wrapped around him from head to toe. That dream always ends with Zoro brushing his lips against Sanji’s throat.

It shifts again, and Sanji is in the dark. But he knows, instinctively, somehow, that he is not alone. He reaches out his arms and wraps them around Zoro’s shoulders, drawing him close, resting their foreheads together, and pressing so hard that it's almost painful. It’s easily the most vivid of his dreams; every sensation is too sharp, from the bite of the cold to the ragged way Zoro exhales when they finally meet, like Sanji’s touch is not only welcome but a balm, a relief from something unnamed but painful just the same. 

Real-life Zoro somehow becomes even more awkward and stilted around Sanji. They have a shouting match about his organization system after the clinking of Zoro putting bottles in the saddle bags becomes overwhelming. Real Zoro sneers at Sanji, all biting teeth and equally biting words as he storms out of the basement. 

That night, Sanji dreams he’s back on the broom. Zoro hovers over the lake again, handle clenched in both hands, head tilted down.

“What the hell are you doing up here again?” Sanji murmurs to himself, then feels his stomach swoop nausiatingly as Zoro startles, nearly sliding off his broom as he turns to find the source of the noise. 

“Cook!?” dream Zoro screeches, “What the fuck! Stop doing that!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sanji rolls his eyes, or well, attempts to. This is so obviously a dream, everything is soft around the edges, his motions and thoughts light and floaty, unlike the sticky lag of scrying. 

“You didn’t answer my question.” Dream Zoro never talks back; the most Sanji has heard from him is a shaky breath, “You were here last time, too. What do you do here? And don’t give me some bullshit about looking at the water.”

Zoro goes quiet. Sanji is secretly hoping the dream will transition to the one where they are both warm in bed when he answers. 

“There’s this move in broom races,” Sanji scoffs, boys and their brooms. 

Zoro inhales, as if the noise had rankled him, “Asshole, why did you ask then?”

“No, no, go on,” Sanji wants to see what happens next, “What stupid life-risking stunt are you trying to imitate?”

“There’s no stunt, racers get points for different maneuvers in the obstacle course,” Zoro mutters, “You’d know if you ever watched. The one I want to try needs a sheer drop, so,” he gestures to the water below. 

Sanji thinks of the flyer from the news, cold and glassy-eyed in the woods. Sanji doesn’t even know their name, much less what they look like, but in his mind's eye, their features all too closely resemble Zoro’s.

“Stupid life-risking stunt,” Sanji repeats, “I’d better not catch you doing that shit on company time.”

“It’s not like I can,” Zoro sniffs, “The only time a Yamada–Meijer was performed was in a partner race, you need two people to do it successfully.”

“Then what are you doing up here?”

“Thinking about it,” Zoro shifts on the broom, and Sanji tries his hardest not to look at the waves below as Zoro pulls the broom up almost vertical, winding a leg around it to keep him steady, “It starts like this and then spirals,” he extends his other leg and leans back. The broom tilts to adjust for his weight and begins spinning in lazy circles.

“I’m not heavy enough,” Zoro explains as Sanji watches him turn. It almost looks as if he is orbiting the moon. “There needs to be a second person for balance. Then you both spiral down together, it’s good for quick turns and descents.”

“Get Luffy to do it with you then. Or Usopp,” Sanji thinks about the last time he’d backpacked on Usopp's broom, “Maybe not Usopp.”

Zoro looks away, “I wanted to learn it with someone before.”

“Who?” Sanji has never heard Zoro talk about anyone in his personal life except for his freaky flying coach with the bird name.

“Doesn't matter,” Zoro shakes his head. Sanji wonders if he’s getting dizzy, “She’s not here anymore.”

She. Sanji tamps down the acrid feeling that threatens to bubble up his windpipe. He has no reason to be jealous of Zoro’s old flying partner. 

They both lapse back into silence. Eventually, Sanji closes his eyes, and the dream drifts off as Zoro completes another slow circle around the moon.

=

Dinner forty-four is late because that morning, someone brings in their grandmother’s old doll collection for Usopp to restore and forgets to mention a key detail about the freaky little fucks. 

“I was gone for twenty minutes,” Usopp gestures at the empty case that had once held four little painted porcelain figures in flouncy dresses, “How the hell was I supposed to know to lock the case?”

“Hmm,” Sanji mimes tapping at his chin, “Did the containment spell etched into the glass not tip you off?”

“All my schooling was done in an Eastern medium,” He shuts the case and grabs a magnifying glass to check the runes scratched into the glass, “Forgive me for not knowing everything from Merlin's Modern Age Magics off the top of my head.”

Sanji sighs, “Let’s just get them back into the case.” It shouldn’t be too hard a task. Those things were barely a foot tall. How far could they have gone?

“Sanji?” Nami calls nervously from where she’d been searching in the kitchen, “How many kitchen knives do we own again?”

Sanji turns to look at Usopp.

“Shit,” Usopp says.

They spend the afternoon ripping apart the living room and each of their respective bedrooms. Nami finds one of the dolls in her bathtub, which is filled to the brim with a mysterious red liquid, and screams so loud that Sanji nearly burns down the curtains.

“This cannot be good for the plumbing,” Usopp notes as he plucks the sodden doll out by the collar with the tips of his fingers. Sanji sticks his hand into the unknown, ominously red liquid to pull the plug out. It makes a gross blub, blub, blub sound as it drains.

“I am using your shower from now on,” Nami informs them, “It better be clean.”

Sanji finds the second doll when he yanks open the basement pantry and is nearly brained by a dozen aluminium cans of cranberry jelly and a very expensive glass jar of distilled toad skin secretions. He manages to catch the jar, the aluminium cans clatter to the ground. One of them bursts, spraying the floor with gelatinous red chunks. 

On a day when Sanji was less prepared for supernatural fuckery, that mess could have been the contents of his skull. The doll on the top shelf of the pantry smiles a painted smile, as if it is aware of this. 

They catch the third doll on the shop floor, perched atop one of the shelves. It has a red crayon clutched in its grubby little glass hand.

On the white ceiling of the shop, a mess of jagged red lines comes together to read ‘Murder’ in capital letters. 

“It adds to the ambiance of the place?” Usopp suggests as Sanji brings the step stool to grab the mable-eyed menace from the shelf. Nami hands him a mop and a bottle of cleaning solution in response.

They do not find the fourth doll, nor Sanji’s second favorite chef's knife, by the time dinner rolls around. Zoro and Luffy walk into the kitchen to find Nami and Usopp poking the ceiling with brooms while Sanji sporadically knocks on different vertical surfaces. 

“It’s in the walls,” Sanji explains when Zoro tries to raise an eyebrow in question. The motion is aborted halfway through, but Sanji gets the meaning: “And it’s got a knife.”

‘Knife’ seems to be the keyword that activates Zoro’s long-suppressed haunted doll hunting instincts, because not twenty minutes later, he proudly presents their fourth little problem, trapped under Sanji’s laundry hamper, knife laid across its lap. 

“Caught it crawling out the vent,” he says smugly. 

“You dumped my clothes all over the stairs, didn’t you?” Sanji doesn’t need to see to know.

Zoro has the gall to ask him for a drink after that.

=

When Sanji comes to, he’s back on the broom.

“Gods, not this again,” he sighs, and nearly flips over as Zoro jerks to a stop.

“What the fuck!” He yells, “Stop doing that!”

“And deprive myself of your glorious reaction each time? I think not,” Sanji chuckles. The dream bobs and weaves, pushing things in and out of focus; everything more than a dozen feet ahead of them becomes a swirling blob, but he can smell cinnamon on Zoro’s jacket.

“Mnm, you left this downstairs, didn’t you?” Sanji murmurs, “Everyone wants everything pumpkin spice these days.”

“What the hell are you talking about? What do pumpkins have to do with anything?” Zoro mutters, guiding the broom down. Surprisingly, they are not over the lake today. They settle into a breeze and ride it slowly, with Zoro making little adjustments to the handle to keep them on course. 

“Pumpkin spice,” Sanji punctuates, “Contains no actual pumpkin, surprisingly. It's mostly cinnamon and cloves and such.”

Zoro exhales loudly. Sanji sees him open his mouth to say something and then close it.

“What?” he asks. He’s never known Zoro to mince his words. If he starts doing that around Sanji, then that is a sure-fire sign that there is something wrong between them.

“Nothing,” Zoro mutters.

“It’s not nothing. Tell me.” Sanji demands. Were this real, he might have let it go, but he cannot let him and dream Zoro have any misunderstandings. It’s pathetic, but Sanji cannot let go of this, even though he should have long ago. 

“It’s just,” Zoro hisses, “You.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Sanji snaps back even as something in his chest stutters. You. Him. Sanji. Sanji is the problem. 

“I can’t figure you out,” Zoro makes a sharp turn, and Sanji feels himself list to the side, “You act like a complete asshole sometimes, and then you turn around and tell me about shit like pumpkin spice.”

“What the hell is your problem with pumpkin spice?” Sanji is caught between being both hurt and confused. Is Zoro talking about how Sanji's brain is irreparably damaged to the point where his normal human functions are impeded, or is he insulting Sanji’s culinary techniques? 

“This has nothing to do with the goddamn pumpkin spice. I just,” Zoro leans over, shoulders hunched, Sanji can’t see his face, “I just can’t figure out what’s wrong with you.”

Sanji wakes up with a lump in his throat. It’s been a long time since his dreams were this cruel.

=

The next morning, Sanji leaves before Zoro shows up.

He makes sure breakfast is ready on the table and leaves a little note as well, letting them know he’s gone shopping. It’s a paltry excuse; barely any of the shops are open at this time, and everyone knows it. Sanji just needs to get out of the house, is all. Spending weeks on end cooped up in the basement, breathing in fumes, would be enough to drive anyone mad. Even someone as well-adjusted as him.  

He can almost hear the cacophony of laughs that follow the thought. For some reason, it sounds like his brothers, even though Sanji hasn’t heard from them in years. But it’s true, Sanji is well adjusted: he has a job, a place to live, and friends he spends time with. Sure, his work-life balance could use some tweaking, and he knows not everyone occasionally gets frazzled enough that they find themselves unable to breathe. But those are minor glitches. A couple of flies over the cauldron. By and by, Sanji is living a perfectly normal decent life. 

Sure, he wants for things. He’d be hard-pressed to name someone who doesn’t. He wants a new stock pot, a matching set of bowls, to see the ocean again, to call Zeff without that telltale ache in his chest. 

Also, possibly a long-term girlfriend. 

He thinks of dream-Zoro. Then the real Zoro, who should be getting home by now.

Maybe not a girlfriend just yet. Sanji should hold off on any long-winded romantic endeavors for now. He’s young, he’s got time to flirt, go on dates, and the like. 

Sanji silently pushes away the fantasy of going back to meet Zeff with a nameless, faceless girl. Someone kind who would accompany him as he fixed up things around the house, and whose presence meant that he and Zeff could talk about banal things without it turning into a full-blown yelling match. 

Perhaps he could pay Nami to come with him for the Winter Solstice. 

Sanji takes the early morning train downtown. It’s silent and mostly empty save for a handful of people in formal robes blinking blearily out the window. The dawn hour office workers, most likely. Sanji doesn’t envy them. He likes the odd hours he keeps; he wouldn’t even know where to start if he had to structure himself around some semblance of a sleep schedule. 

There are a few stands open, so Sanji takes the time to wander around. He measures the length of string beans, smells oranges, and knocks on squash to gauge how ripe they are. Autumn is officially in full swing, maybe Sanji sould invest in bowls for all the soup recipes he wants to try. 

Sanji wanders until his feet ache, then wanders some more. Then, finally, concedes that he cannot push lunch any further without blending it into dinner and starts to head back to the station. 

He’s standing outside the station, smoking his second, very much needed cigarette of the day– the morning one didn’t count– when he gets accosted by the bane of most, if not all, of the problems in his life currently. 

It’s easy to pick him out through the crowd with his stupid green hair and the ever-present scowl. He turns his head side to side as if looking for something, and the scowl grows deeper whenever someone brushes too close. It’s odd seeing him surrounded by so many people. 

Sanji can pinpoint the moment he is spotted by his personal prickly little mold problem. 

“Hey,” says Roronoa fucking Zoro, broom in hand, looking unreasonably hesitant, “You want a lift back?”

Which is how Sanji finds himself backpacking Zoro’s 1997 Okinawa Rail, headed back to Merry Emporium. 

It’s very awkward, Zoro goes slow and sticks to the lower airways. Sanji sits in the back, his bag of groceries set firmly between him and the warm, wide expanse of Zoro’s back.

Neither of them says a word until someone zips past them, forcing  Zoro to tilt to the side to let them pass. Sanji feels himself list to the side and has to scramble to get his arms around the groceries and, consequently, Zoro.

“Asshole,” Zoro mutters as he readies them back on course, “You good, Cook?”

Sanji nods, then remembers that Zoro can’t see him and mutters a low, “Yes.”

It’s like something out of his worst nightmares, being pressed up close enough to Zoro like this. Thank goodness for the bag of veggies between them. 

Sanji inhales deeply, drawing in a lungful of fresh air. Zoro’s jacket still smells faintly of cinnamon. 

Zoro tilts the broom down to begin their descent, and Sanji feels himself slide closer. “Sorry,” he mutters, starting to unwind his arms from around Zoro, when he feels a warm hand over his own. 

“It’s fine,” Zoro looks both ways before making a one-handed turn, “Wouldn’t want you falling off now, would we?”

“I’ve flown on a broom before, Asshole,” Sanji says, very matter-of-factly, to distract from the fact that Zoro is still touching him. Zoro squeezes his hand in response, and Sanji feels the guilty lump in his throat rise back up. 

“Aren’t you asleep at this time?” Sanji asks instead.

“Usually,” Zoro grumbles, “But someone wasn’t here for breakfast, so I had to go look for your stupid ass.”

“I left a note,” Sanji squeezes Zoro around the midriff to make his point, “And I made breakfast too.”

“Don't play dumb cook,” Zoro says, which pulls Sanji up short.

“What exactly am I being dumb about now, your Mossyness?”

“You know– wait a second,” Zoro’s hand leaves his as he places it back on the broom handle to steady them. Sanji’s hand feels cold in its absence. 

“You know what I’m talking about,” Zoro continues, “Is it really that difficult for you to believe that I came looking for you?”

Sanji does not know, “I can’t believe the thought of you looking for anything, period.” Sanji draws in a deep breath and holds it as he slowly slides his arms back, looping one around the grocery bag and using the other to grasp the broom.

A beat of silence follows. Sanji waits for a similar barb in return, likely about his eyebrows or his general appearance or his penchant for serving Nami first at every meal, but nothing comes. 

“I actually think I lied,” Zoro says instead.

“What?” Sanji tightens his grip on the broom. 

“The first time we met,” Zoro continues, “I asked you who you were, but thing is I already knew. Luffy had told me about you. So it was kind of a lie.”

“Not really, you were just high out of your mind on pain and whatever tonic Chop had just shoved down your throat,” Sanji huffs out a laugh, recalling how Zoro had looked up at him from where he lay on the table, eyes glazed, “But it was a pretty good lie, all things considered. The Great and Powerful Usopp would be proud.”

Sanji can’t see his face, but he would put money on Zoro rolling his eye at the remark.

“He told me we would get along,” Zoro says after a beat, “You and I. Luffy did. One of the first things I knew about you was our compatibility.”

“Luffy asked me last week if a manticore and a griffin mated, if they would produce a whole lion,” Sanji explains. Luffy isn’t right about everything all of the time. 

Zoro tilts his head, “Wouldn’t they?”

“No, they would not.” Sanji had spent an hour looking up the answer to that question. Apparently, manticores were incapable of breeding. 

“Oh, but still, Luffy told me we’d understand each other.”

“Do we?” Sanji questions. Dream Zoro had said otherwise last night. 

“Most of the time I think,” Zoro pauses, “I’d like to think.”

“Really, thought it was all empty up here?” Sanji looks down; they are pretty high up. He cannot bring himself to let go of the broom to tap the back of Zoro’s head, so he settles for knocking his own head against Zoro’s.

“You’re not getting the point,” Zoro grumbles, reaching up to rub at his head. Of course, he makes no effort to elaborate on what it is that Sanji does not understand. 

“No, I think I am,” and Sanji gets it. Even if there is no outstanding relationship goal for them to reach, even if Zoro and Sanji never become a Zoro and Sanji, it has to be enough. So as long as they can understand each other.

“I just can’t figure out what’s wrong with you.” Dream Zoro had said last night. Sanji takes a deep breath and dismisses the weight he’d carried on his chest ever since he’d woken up that morning. 

“Yeah, and pumpkin spice has pumpkin in it,” Zoro mutters as he starts to guide the broom down towards the familiar roof of Merry Imporium. 

“Pumpkin spice does not have pumpkin in it,” Sanji corrects almost automatically, “It’s mostly just–”

“Cinnamon and shit, yeah, yeah,” Zoro leans his weight forward to begin their descent properly, “You told me last night.”

It takes a minute for Sanji to register exactly what has been said. Once he does, he nearly slides off the broom. 

“I said what?!” he nearly shouts, grabbing at Zoro’s arm to steady himself. The broom jerks, and Zoro swears as he leans back to steady it. 

“Watch it, Curly!”

“When did I say that!”

“Stop yelling at me, you’re the one who was going on about that pumpkin shit all last night.”

What was their last conversation the previous night? Something about Zoro’s drinking habits following their brief rejoice-for-we-have-not-been-murdered-by-dolls celebration.

And then there was the dream.

There’s a dreadful feeling pooling in the pit of Sanji’s stomach; he feels like he’s going to be sick. Last night hadn’t been a dream. Zoro’s “I just can’t figure out what’s wrong with you,” echoes once before it is overtaken by the barrage of other embarrassing things Sanji had said. 

What else had not been a dream? He recalls Zoro spinning lazy circles on his broom, the two of them alone in the moonlight. Only Sanji hadn’t been there. But apparently he had, in spirit, or metaphysically, or some shit.

No wonder Zoro has been acting weird. Sanji has been blabbering, loose, sleepy, and unguarded in his ear for nearly two goddamn weeks.

Zoro lands the broom softly, and Sanji almost sends both of them to the ground in his hurry to get off of it. 

“Thanks for the ride,” he manages as he makes a run for the door, it comes out more frazzled than he means it to. His chest is constricting, and oh gods, Sanji knows what is about to happen. He practically throws himself down the basement stairs to find a corner to ride out his little freak-out in peace. 

His final thought before the impending darkness overtakes him is that Sanji is going to throw that crystal ball into an industrial furnace if it’s the last thing he does.

=

By the time he comes to it's practically dark outside, and there is a heavy weight against his side. 

“Sanji wasn’t moving,” Luffy says from where he’s plastered against Sanji like a slug on coral. 

“Sorry, captain,” he manages, his limbs aching from sitting in one position for so long. Sanji glances around. The candles on his workbench have been burned to nubs, the drippings forming a waxy waterfall over the side.

“What time is it?” he yawns. These blackout panic episodes always take a lot out of him; this is perhaps the first time he hasn’t come back to himself alone. 

Sanji feels it when Luffy hums in response, “It’s almost dinner time. Sanji was gone all day.”

“I came back during lunchtime,” Sanji remembers, mostly. He can’t quite figure out what his freak-out had been about. He recalls going shopping early in the morning. Was he avoiding someone? Zoro. He was avoiding Zoro. Sanji racks his mind for the answer until his temples throb, but he can’t remember why. He and Zoro argue a lot; maybe they’d fought, and he was putting some distance between them so that they could cool off. 

“Sanji was gone all day,” Luffy repeats, unwinding his arms from around Sanji’s but making to effort to move away, “But he’s back now.”

“I should get started on dinner, shouldn’t I?” Sanji wonders what they’d done for lunch. Sandwiches maybe. 

“Where did you go?” Luffy starts slowly sliding down to the floor, “Were you looking at things like Usopp?”

Sanji doubts it; he’s never had any visions during his blackout episodes. He shakes his head. The grocery bag is sitting on his workbench, and one of the onions has gone rogue and rolled under the table. 

“Should we ask Chopper?”

“Nah,” the kid has been busier than usual this past week, Sanji doesn’t want to bother him during the little downtime he has from the hospital, “These have happened to me since I was little. It’s nothing new.”

“I didn’t know about it,” Sanji adjusts his legs so that Luffy can lie across his lap like a spoiled cat, “Sanji should say if he’s hurting.”

“I’m not–” hurting, Sanji should say, but it isn’t the complete truth. “I just can’t figure out what’s wrong with you.” Zoro had sounded so defeated as he said it. 

“I’m used to it,” he settles on, his head throbs as the remainder of the day comes back to him in pieces. Meeting Zoro at the station, backpacking home on his broom, Zoro’s hand warm on Sanji’s, Zoro talking about-

“Pumpkin spice,” Sanji whispers, voice hollow. The dreams that weren’t dreams.

“What’s wrong with pumpkin spice?” Luffy wriggles around until Sanji lets him up. Then he leans down and offers Sanji a hand, “Everything Sanji makes is good.”

“Not so sure about this one, Luffy,” Sanji takes the hand and lets himself be pulled up, feeling momentarily like a small child, even though he stands a whole head above Luffy. He has to look down to meet Luffy’s eyes, “I think I really messed up.”

“Then fix it,” Luffy shrugs like it's the easiest thing in the world, like Sanji can just go up to Zoro and say ‘I didn’t mean to show you those parts of me, so if you could kindly forget them, please and thank you, so that our relationship can go back to what it was before, where I wash the dishes and you dry them.’ 

“I’ll try,” Sanji says, the words feel heavy. 

=

Sanji ruminates on this new revelation for about a day and a half, during which he takes great care not to fall asleep for more than twenty minutes at a time. 

This works well right up until he adds a tablespoon of dragonroot to his Clearsight potion instead of the regular teaspoon and a half tempered with worm wine. The whole thing instantaneously evaporates, filling the basement with a purple cloud of foul-smelling smoke that takes him nearly an hour to clean out.

It also makes him hallucinate a half dozen snakes slithering about his workbench. He counts. 

At that point, he concedes and decides to consult a professional. 

Unfortunately, the only professionals that Sanji can trust with such a matter happen to be his coworkers and housemates. As such, he waits until Zoro is off for his nightly deliveries to call a meeting in the laundry room. 

“I have gathered you all here today,” he begins solemnly, with the weight of the knowledge that these are perhaps the last moments he will have in his life devoid of Zoro-related pestering from his friends.

“You’re not quitting, are you, Sanji?” Nami narrows her eyes, “Because I’ll remind you that you still have six months left on your lease.”

Sanji was not aware that he had signed any lease. He doesn’t even have his own room; he quite literally sleeps in the basement next to his work kitchen. He shares a closet with Usopp.

“No, I’m not quitting, I just…wanted to get your opinion on something.” This is turning out harder than Sanji had imagined. How did people have heart-to-hearts with their friends without cringing themselves into oblivion?

“Which is…” Usopp prompts.

Sanji blinks at him, “Why are you sitting inside my laundry hamper?”

“It’s comfortable, and it’s fireproof, next question.”

“Your laundry hamper’s fireproof?” Nami leans forward from her perch on the dryer, “Where did you get it from?”

“I etched the spell myself.” Puberty had not been kind to Sanji or his clothes; several of his most worn robes have fire-repelling charms sewn into the sleeves with wobbly stitches, “As I was saying.”

“Dude, where were you the other day? Zoro was looking for you?” Usopp rests his head on his knees.

“As I was saying.” Sanji continues, he can worry about Zoro until after this has been sorted out. 

He takes a deep breath.

“Sometimes I scry Zoro, to check in on him, cause he’s alone all night.”

“With what?” Nami asks, “There’s no way the mirror holds up for that.”

“I use one of the old crystal balls from the attic,” Sanji explains, “But listen, I think that–”

“The one that shows naked people in the shower?” Luffy tilts his head, “You watch Zoro in the shower?”

“No!” Sanji protests, throwing his hands up, “You broke that one ages ago, remember? Saved the guy’s grandson from drowning in the toilet bowl– will you guys just listen to me!?”

“Shut the hell up!” Nami yells, and the laundry room falls silent. Sanji is going to leave this woman every last coin in his bank account when he dies. 

“As I was saying,” Sanji swallows dryly, now all three of them are looking at him expectedly, “I scried Zoro once to check in on him, and now I keep on having dreams about him. And I need to figure out how to stop them. The dreams.”

“So you summoned us all for advice at 10:30 pm.” Nami is wearing her ratty old nightgown, which is truly in a horrendous condition. Every day, Sanji prays that she come to her fashionable senses and throw it out.

“Yes.”

“What kind of dreams are these?” Usopp automatically shifts into problem-solving mode, which Sanji loves about him, “Like, sex dreams?”

Nevemind, Sanji actually hates him. 

“No,” Sanji grits out, feeling his face warm, “They are completely normal dreams, where we spend time together and talk while he does his deliveries. Only they’re not dreams. It’s real. I’m talking to Zoro literally every other night, and I would like it to stop.”

“Because you’re in love with him and you don’t want him to find out,” Luffy nods. 

“Yes, because I’m in,” Sanji splutters as he realizes what Luffy had said, “No! What! Ew! Gross! That Mosshead? Never! I’m just trying to be a good coworker and not distract him while he’s flying several hundred feet above the ground.”

“Sanji, bro,” Usopp sighs, “I hate to break it to you, but you totally like him.”

“It’s true,” Nami adds on. Sanji wants to melt into a puddle and die. “Are they good sex dreams at least?”

“They’re not sex dreams!” Sanji hisses, his ears feel hot, and from the way Nami is barely hiding her smile, he knows that he’s gone all red and blotchy in the face. 

Nami ignores his protests, “You didn't deny liking him, though,” she grins.

“Everybody likes Zoro,” Sanji makes a last pathetic attempt, “He’s really likable.”

“I’m telling him you said that.”

“Please don't tell him I said that.” Nami’s grin grows wider, which means that there will likely be a price attached to the fulfillment of this request. 

“I mean, he’s my friend and all, but I wouldn’t exactly describe Zoro as likable,” Usopp continues, “He’s a real softy on the inside, but he’s just got one of those faces, ya know? The kind where mothers point him out to their bratty kids and tell ‘em, ‘If you don't behave, that man over there is gonna get you’.”

“But Sanji likes Zoro’s face,” Luffy reaches over to pat Sanji on the shoulder, “So it's alright.”

Sanji does like Zoro’s face. It’s a very nice face, very well balanced between the hard line of his jaw and the soft slope of his nose. His eyes, well, eye, is a nice color as well. Grey almost. Sanji has never seen anyone with eyes like that before.

Shame about his irritating personality, though.

“That’s the problem,” Sanji groans, burying his own face in his hands. He should have tried the library first.

“I mean, I’m pretty sure he likes you back, so I’m not really seeing the problem here,” Usopp says. 

“Don’t tell him that Usopp, he’s already stressed out.”

“Yeah, and I am trying to make him less stressed out by telling him that the attraction is mutual. Have you seen the way Zoro looks at him when they do the dishes?”

“Don't remind me, I feel sick just thinking about it.”

Usopp and Nami’s argument fades into the background as Luffy leans over to tap Sanji on the shoulder.

“Maybe Sanji’s dreams are trying to tell him something,” Luffy offers.

Sanji looks up, “For the last time, Luffy, they’re not dreams. They’re actually happening.”

“If they happen while you’re asleep, they’re dreams,” Luffy grins, “And they sound pretty good. I’m glad Sanji is having good dreams!”

“What do I do about them?” Sanji groans, “I can't spend the rest of my life following Mosshead around in my dreams.”

It would be a disaster. Sanji will never get a good night's rest again. And in his sleep-addled state, he’s bound to do something stupid like use floor polish as cooking spray and kill them all or drop magnesium in a tempering solution and blow up the entire shop, which would also have the side effect of killing them all. 

“Well, if your dreams are magic, then it’s probably a spell,” Luffy muses.

“Or a curse,” Sanji says, which has Usopp’s ears perking. 

“If it’s a curse, then you can definitely undo it,” Usopp tries to get out of Sanji’s laundry basket and nearly eats shit, “wait here!”

He bolts out of the laundry room and comes back clutching a leather-bound tome, which he deposits in Sanji’s lap.

“21st Century Curses,” Sanji reads, then flips the book open to a page including a graphic illustration of blueberry boils on someone’s exposed nethers. 

“The first rule of curses is that they’re reciprocal,” Usopp, impervious to the fact that Sanji now needs to bleach his eyes, explains, “Which means there’s always a chance of backlash, that is why whenever someone invents a curse, they tend to invent the counter alongside it.”

Sanji slams the book shut and slides it back to Usopp, “So if I’m cursed, how do I find the counter?”

“Well, first step is to find out who cursed you,” Nami points out, “Piss off anybody recently?”

“No,” Sanji has been too busy to pick fights with anyone recently. Well, anyone except for “Zoro, maybe?”

“You think Zoro cursed you to dream about him?” Usopp hums, “That definitely means he likes you, right?”

“Zoro can’t tell the difference between mint and cilantro. I highly doubt he’d curse me,” Sanji notes. Most of the curses he knows of require a poultice and a bit of the person one is trying to curse, like their nail clippings. 

Or hair.

Sanji vividly recalls burning a tuft of Zoro’s hair for the scrying spell. The spell he uses to keep track of potions needs a little glass bead made of the same material as the courdron he’s scrying. Following that logic, he’d guessed that a bit of Zoro would help focus the spell.  

“Oh shit,” says Sanji. Now he’s gone and tied himself to Zoro in some metaphysical cosmic sense. Sanji is going to dream about Zoro till he has a stress-induced heart attack and dies. He’s never going to know peace again. 

“Was that a good ‘shit’ or a bad ‘shit’?” Usopp squints at him, “Sanji, man, what the hell did you do?”

“Something weird,” Sanji admits, “but I might know how to fix it.”

=

Once Nami and Usopp make their way back to their respective rooms, Sanji drags Luffy from where he’d fallen asleep on top of the washing machine, and lays him down on the couch next to the kitchen. 

Then he goes downstairs and digs out the ’70s standard 85% enchanted crystal scrying ball that had started this whole problem from the back of his supply closet. He doesn’t have any more of Zoro’s hair, but he doubts he needs any; he’d never reset the ball, nor had he destroyed it in a fit of rage, so it should still work. 

He plugs the thing in and settles on his bed. 

This time, sleep comes easily. 

He wakes above the lake again. Zoro hovers still, moonlight spilling over his features. Sanji watches him take a deep breath before he tilts his body forward, and the broom plunges straight towards the water. 

Sanji feels his stomach turn, though not with the same intensity it would have had he been sitting in the back. Still, it's a bit harrowing to see the lake rush up to meet them like a dark abyss. 

Moments before he would hit the water, Zoro pulls up the broom handle vertically, looping one leg around it and completing the rest of his descent in tight spirals until the bristles of the broom flirt with the surface of the lake, leaving small ripples in its inky expanse. 

“I thought you needed two people to do that,” Sanji recalls, and Zoro lets go of the broom and falls straight into the water below.

Panic grips Sanji’s chest for a moment before Zoro resurfaces, swearing and spluttering, “I told you to stop fucking doing that!” he shrieks as he hoists himself, still dripping, back onto his broom. 

“And I told you to stop messing around above the lake, it’s unsafe. Don’t these things have any safety equipment? I know most riders wear helmets,” Sanji chatters as Zoro floats them up back onto one of the air pathways. His hair is still dripping. 

“Damn, I got you good, didn’t I?” Sanji chuckles to himself.

“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up,” Zoro mutters through clenched teeth, “See if you're still laughing when I put a frog in your bed.”

Sanji laughs even harder at that. He can feel his own physical chest heave with the effort it takes to get enough air to talk as he scrys, “pfft, a frog? Really, that’s the worst thing you can think of?”

“My first choice was a spider, but then your girly ass would probably burn the whole house down,” Sanji can only see the back of Zoro’s head, but he can practically feel his smug grin.

“You bring any filthy insects into my workspace, and I will slow roast you,” Sanji coughs, “Alive, by the way.”

“That’s why I said a frog.”

“Yeah, yeah, what do you have to deliver now?”

“Barely anything, it was already a slow night, and you showed up pretty late,” Sanji feels the breeze blow past as Zoro makes a wide sweeping turn,“ I think I’ve got two mailboxes left.”

“In the East Blue?” Sanji recognizes the buildings in the distance.

“Yep, so we’re headed back.” Zoro leans forward to squint at Nami’s compass, “What took you so long?”

Sanji blinks. Had Zoro been waiting for him? “Got held up, I was investigating a curse.”

“A curse,” Zoro whistles, “Damn, that's some serious shit. Anyone we know?”

“Dunno, are you planning on quitting anytime soon?”

“You planning on quitting smoking like a damn chimney?”

“You planning on stopping drinking like a–” Sanji tapers off; he’s too tired to come up with anything.

They drift in silence. Sanji feels the ghost of a breeze on his face. Directly under the light of the full moon, Zoro’s hair looks nearly silver. Deliriously, Sanji thinks he wouldn’t mind doing this for the rest of his life. 

“I have a hard time understanding you,” Zoro whispers, it’s loud in the empty space around them, “sometimes. That’s what I meant the other night.”

“I’m a complicated person, Marimo,” Sanji jokes, but it rings true. He is complicated, and not in an easily palatable way either, that much is obvious. Even Zeff found it hard to deal with him outside of small doses. 

“Yeah, everybody is, don’t know why that makes you so special.” Zoro stops, leaving the two of them suspended in the middle of the air, “The problem is that I want to understand you.” 

“Whatever would possess you to want that?” Sanji wonders. 

“Dunno, call it stubbornness or whatever. Luffy said we’d understand each other, and I want us to. All the time.”

“All the time huh?” Sanji huffs, “What, you like me that much, Marimo?”

“Yeah,” Zoro says softly, “Yeah, I do, and I don’t know if you realize how irksome it is, always having to talk in circles around you. You’re so–you’re so honest with me sometimes, when you tell me about shit like pumpkin spice or your stupid cauldron accidents, but then that just goes away once I try to talk to you in person.”

“Zoro–” Sanji tries, but Zoro is still going. This is the longest Sanji has ever heard him speak. It’s both flattering and disconcerting that he himself is the topic.

“--and I just don’t get it sometimes,” Zoro exhales lightly, “Is it like that for you too?”

Sanji thinks about Zoro, sweating on his dining table, Zoro, arguing with Sanji over the best way to organize packages for delivery, and then finally, Zoro, under the blinking light on top of the kitchen sink, wordlessly rolling his eyes as he takes another plate from Sanji to dry.

“Yeah,” he whispers, “It’s like that for me too.” 

“Okay,” Zoro clears his throat and pulls up the broom handle, so they start rising. It’s hard to tell with the fuzziness of the scrying and the dark of night, but Sanji thinks that Zoro’s ears might be red. 

“Okay,” Sanji repeats, and for once in a very long time, he feels settled. The scrying stretches the scenery, turning trees into sticky drips of molasses and smearing the moon as Sanji leans closer. 

For the rest of the night, it doesn’t matter that Zoro is technically a coworker, or a man, or the person Sanji is most prone to picking fights with. Zoro knows him and still wants to know him better. 

Sanji burrows deeper into the idea of heat emanating from Zoro’s body.

It’s the most anyone has ever given him. 

=

Sanji wakes up to the birds singing right outside his window. He groans as he sits up, cradling his pounding head. The crystal scrying ball has gone dark, so the spell must have ended. If Sanji wants to see Zoro again, he’s going to have to recast it.

Surprisingly, he feels alright about it.

He yawns as he heads upstairs to wash up and start breakfast. It’s nice outside, pleasantly cool, but not cold enough that he needs to grab his cloak when he steps outside to smoke his first cigarette of the day– the one that doesn’t count. 

Breakfast is the typical fare, Sanji fries eggs and bacon in the correct order, and butters toast. He also takes the time to juice the oranges he’d brought a couple of days ago for Usopp.

He’s finishing up the dishes when he realizes that today is likely going to be a late start for the rest of his friends. He feels slightly guilty about keeping them up so late last night. 

Sanji wraps everything up and sticks the juice in the fridge with a note attached. 

He’s downstairs scrubbing one of his old cauldrons clean when he hears the faint ring of the bell above the shop door. Zoro must be back then. Against all of his core moral beliefs, Sanji finds himself smiling slightly at the thought of their conversation the other night. Zoro and Sanji, who knew. 

There's a thudding sound on the stairs when Sanji goes to put the newly washed cauldron back in the supply closet. Sanji peeks out to see Zoro pick himself up off the ground and make a beeline for Sanji. 

“What–” he starts, but is cut off by Zoro’s lips on his own. 

“Mph!” Sanji makes a sound of surprise as the two of them stumble into the closet. Something clatters to the floor as Sanji scrambles for a handhold on one of the shelves.

Zoro’s idea of kissing seems to just be pressing his closed mouth against Sanji’s as hard as he can, but at least he is persistent with it. When he draws back with a soft wet sound, all Sanji can do is stare at him, dazed. 

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Zoro mumbles, eyes trained on the shelf next to Sanji’s head. It would have been cute had Sanji not just been assaulted in his own storage closet. 

“Aren’t we going to talk about this at all?” Sanji gasps. Zoro is too close, smelling of pine firs and steel. He’s still wearing his jacket. Sanji slowly reaches out his hand and places it on his shoulder; the fabric is damp to the touch.

Zoro blinks at him, “We did?”

Sanji raises a brow, “When?” 

“Last night! I said I liked you and you said it back!”

“Well, you have to give me a little more than that asshole,” Sanji mutters. He’s read enough romance novels to know the importance of a proper confession. 

“Fine,” Zoro grumbles, hands hovering over Sanji’s shoulders, “I like you. Is that good enough for you, your highness?”

“Oh, forgive me for having standards…” Sanji trails off as Zoro draws closer again, this time angling Sanji’s head how he likes it with his nasty, damp gloves. 

Their second kiss is softer, a delicate press of lips. Zoro’s face is now fully red, and Sanji takes the moment to learn the heat of his skin under his lips for himself. 

Sanji hums in satisfaction when Zoro awkwardly leans over to kiss his cheek in reciprocation, “Now I really hope you never join the City Guard.”

“Nothing you say makes sense,” Zoro huffs, slowly lowering his hands to rest on Sanji’s arms. He still can’t quite look Sanji in the eye.

Perhaps at some point, Sanji will reveal to him the truth about the dreams that weren't dreams, and Zoro will call him a moron, sparking yet another fight between them.

For now, he leans closer to Zoro, pressing their foreheads together. Zoro exhales raggedly when they finally meet, like Sanji’s touch is not only welcome but a balm, a relief from something unnamed but painful just the same.