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Glass clinks against the wood as they make a lazy circle between them, four bodies folded into the cramped warmth of the crow’s nest while the sea breathes dark and steady outside. The lantern hooked overhead swings just enough to smear gold over all of them in turns, over Zoro’s lazy grin, Sanji’s irritated mouth, Law’s long fingers around the neck of his drink, Luffy sprawled across the floor, sandal dangling off his dirty foot.
They’ve long since stopped pretending whatever drinking game they’ve been stumbling through has rules.
“Your turn,” Sanji says, pointing at Luffy with the sternness of a man already more than a little drunk and trying not to be. “Uh. Ask a question. Or whatever.”
Luffy blinks at him, cheeks faintly pink from sake, then tips his head back against the wall. Luffy doesn’t normally join in on the crew’s drinking games, but tonight he followed Law up to the Crow’s Nest like a puppy at his heels. While he’s certainly not going drink-for-drink with the resident alcoholic swordsman, Luffy’s been keeping an even pace with the former Warlord currently hitching a ride to Dressrosa. Go figure.
“Okay. Uh.” Luffy squints, wet tongue peeking from the corner of his mouth, serious in the way he only gets right before saying something fucking insane. “What’s the word for when you want to know what someone feels like on the inside but like, um, the all of them, wanna know what all of their body is like inside?”
Law takes a slow drink. “A thorough post-mortem,” he says at last, his smooth, deep voice rumbling from his lanky frame. “Possibly exploratory surgery if you’re trying to keep the subject alive for a little while. Depends how cooperative they are. Heh.” He smirks to himself, lips tight and thin like a blade.
Luffy lights up. “Oh, that’s cool. We already did that, kinda!”
“That isn’t cool it’s creepy,” Sanji snaps.
“It means you wanna fuck them,” Zoro says, punctuating his epiphany by hacking up a glob of phlegm to spit wetly near Sanji’s feet.
Sanji whips around. “Could you, for once in your life, not behave like you were raised by bandits?”
Luffy stiffens, then giggles a little. “Hey! I was raised by bandits!”
Law sighs, chugging half his drink before muttering. “I kind of was, too.” Luffy chuckles and looks at Law with intrigue. For it, Law hides a shy smile behind his drink.
Zoro shrugs, already reaching for his bottle again. “What? It does.”
“That is not,” Sanji says through his teeth, “the only possible interpretation of what he said.”
“It’s the obvious one.”
“To you, moss-for-brains, every thought leads back to rolling around on a floor somewhere with some kind of sword.”
Zoro smirks into his drink. “Heh, yeah.”
Luffy keeps looking at Law.
“How do you know if you do wanna, uh.” He scratches his cheek. “Fuck someone. How do you know you wanna do that?”
Law chokes with a loud gurgle. It’s abrupt and sputtering and deeply amusing to everyone in the room except Law himself, who folds forward coughing into his fist as sake goes down the wrong pipe. Sanji startles, then immediately starts laughing, bright and helpless, leaning over to thump Law pityingly between the shoulder blades.
“Oh, wow,” Sanji says, still laughing as Law glares murderously at the floor. “You all right there, Torao?”
Law coughs again, voice shredded. He wrinkles his nose at the nickname Luffy—and thus his crew—has bestowed upon him. “Fine. 'M fine.”
Sanji grins and gives him one more entirely unnecessary pat on the back before straightening and flicking his hair neatly over his eye. Then he turns, smirking, toward Zoro. “Well? Go on, shitty swordsman. Since you’ve apparently appointed yourself resident expert. Tell us how you know when you want to fuck someone.”
Zoro takes a drink. Swallows. Shrugs once.
“I dunno,” he says.
Sanji scoffs. “Stunning insight.”
Zoro ignores him. His gaze drops to the neck of the bottle in his hand, thumb rubbing once over the glass. When he speaks again, his voice is rougher, quieter. “It’s not just that you think they’re hot. But yeah, that.”
There is a little pause. Zoro is a man of few words, but it’s obvious he has more to say.
Even Sanji shuts up.
Zoro tips his head back against the wall, eyes half-lidded, as if he’s trying to find the words somewhere in the wood above them.
“It’s when they get stuck in your head,” he says. “When you start noticing stupid stuff. The way they sound coming up the stairs, so you always know it’s them. The way they hold a cup, and bring it to their mouth. What they look like when they’re tired. When they’re pissed off. You start wanting things you never cared about before. You want them to eat. To sleep. To stop doing reckless shit for five minutes.” His mouth twitches. “You want to be the one they lean on without acting like they’re leaning.”
Sanji has gone completely still.
Luffy, too, though in a different way. He’s listening with his whole body, wide-eyed and intent.
Zoro keeps going, not looking at any of them now.
“And then one day you realize it’s worse than that. It’s not just wanting to touch them. It’s wanting to know all the parts nobody else gets. The ugly parts. The embarrassing parts. The parts they hide.” He rolls the bottle slowly between his palms. “You wanna make room for all of it. You wanna be let in, even when it’s inconvenient. Even when it pisses you off. Even when they bite, you wanna bite back. The idea of not being able to touch them, to know them, is unbearable.”
Luffy’s gaze flicks, helpless and immediate, to Law.
Law is already looking at him.
For once there is no irony in Law’s face, no dry amusement, no practiced boredom. He looks surprised, younger somehow, an openness about his face that speaks to an internal realization of some kind. Something naked enough that Sanji, despite himself, glances away and then right back because it is impossible not to watch a wound open in real time.
Zoro huffs a laugh through his nose. “And yeah,” he says, “usually you also wanna fuck them, cuz they’re hot.”
Sanji makes a tiny, strangled sound.
Zoro finally glances over, and there is something almost sheepish in his expression now, as though he only just realized he said all that out loud. “But that part’s easy,” he mutters. “The other stuff’s how you know you’re down bad or whatever.”
Nobody says anything.
The ship creaks softly around them. The lantern sways. Somewhere below, a wave breaks against the Sunny with a hush like breath.
Sanji is staring at Zoro as if he’s never seen him before.
Actually, no. That’s not right. He’s staring at Zoro like he’s seen him too clearly all along and has just been handed proof that the feeling goes both ways and Sanji has never felt like more of an idiot. Sanji’s face feels hot. His cheeks are flushed bright with drink and something much less innocent. The expression on his face is so openly stunned, so blatantly wanting, that if anyone had dropped a match in the room he probably would have gone up like lamp oil.
Luffy turns toward Law fully now, eyes bright, soft, fearless in the way only Luffy can be.
“Torao,” he starts, and there is a whole world of something in it, in the shape of Law’s name in his mouth, in the way he leans a little closer. “I think maybe I was trying to ask cuz I like when you look at me like you wanna cut me open again, but—”
Law moves with startling speed, muttering his little room, shambles and flicking his hand in a manner Sanji does not wish to linger on. And suddenly the two of them are gone, leaving only one of Luffy’s sandals and a small bar napkin behind.
Sanji watches them blink out of reality, then slowly turns back to Zoro.
Zoro raises his brows. “What.”
Sanji just stares at him for one molten, stupefied second longer. Then he sets his drink down very, very carefully and tackles Zoro to the ground.