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The new chore boy wore a dirty straw hat and carried himself with a surety Sanji had never known. He claimed he was a pirate. Sanji understood pirates well enough; the Baratie never saw an end to them, and Zeff had never quite let go of his pirate branding. One of the items on their latest dessert menu was a coconut shaved ice drenched in vanilla-lime syrup, always topped with a miniature jolly roger on a toothpick.
Sanji knew how to feed a hungry pirate, both ways. He could whip up a fluffy fried rice in minutes for the sallow, haggard men forsaken by the sea; he could also serve a cracked jaw and broken rib to the presumptuous bastards who stormed in with pistols and cutlasses, demanding money and foodstuffs and anything else that wasn’t nailed down.
This chore boy carried no weapons and seemed genuinely apologetic for the damage he’d done to the restaurant, but he did have presumption. His name was Luffy, he was going to the Grand Line, and Sanji was going to join him as the cook for his pirate crew. The fact that Sanji abruptly turned down this ridiculous proposition did not deter him. There was a conclusiveness to his smile, a relaxed conviction in his shoulders; he never stopped speaking to Sanji with a cheery ease, as if everything was already decided and they were already crewmates.
If Sanji let himself think about Luffy’s invitation, he might have found that he’d let the leeks had sauté for a minute too long, and now the flavor of the potato soup was subtly off—still delicious, because he’d had his eye on the pot the whole time, but also a little overcooked, because part of him had been gazing out onto a horizonless sea filled with fish he had only ever seen in books.
So he didn’t let himself think about it.
Luffy had companions.
They were a small group. Dressed in simple, threadbare garments; radiating an unaffected youth, with the appetites to match. To Sanji’s surprise, there was even a lady amongst them—a rarity, for supposed pirate types. She had stiff sun-bleached hair and a raucous giggle, and Sanji professed (lied) that he would follow her anywhere.
Luffy freely lounged with his friends on the clock; teasing, pranking, yelling and being yelled at in turn. It might have been endearing, if wrangling Luffy into doing his job had not already become an excruciating ordeal.
After closing, Luffy polished off plate after plate of leftovers while Sanji completed his back-of-house chores. Luffy still regarded him with that easy grin, offering vigorous compliments to the food. Join my crew, he entreated, the words ringing through the air, sharp and caustic and unbearably loud.
Against his better judgement, Sanji wondered what it would be like to feed someone like this for long weeks at sea. At least there would be no food wasted.
“I’m going to go back to my ship,” Luffy announced, stretching. “Man, the food here is great! Thanks, Sanji!”
So Luffy’s companions had dropped anchor for him instead of sailing away with the rest of the clientele. So there was loyalty between them: gentle and placid. Sanji swallowed. “See you tomorrow.”
Luffy flashed him a buoyant gaze and was out the kitchen the next second. “Hey, Usopp!” His voice echoed across the vacant dining hall. “I’m done!”
“About time!” It was the voice of the boy who had refused to eat his mushrooms. Sanji listened as he and Luffy bounded away together, their footsteps light and synchronized with their chatter.
He ached to retreat to his room and throw himself onto his bunk, yet something held him static and suspended. There it was—that gentle, insistent stirring. The whispers of want that threaded through his well-assembled matrix of routine. They glued him to the kitchen floor, tuned his ear to the sounds of lighthearted teasing that floated in through the shuttered windows. Sanji heard a thump, a giggle, and then Luffy’s voice: I’m sorry! I’ll try to lie next time!
The entrance to the staff’s quarters gaped at him in disbelief. He coughed out a laugh and slipped back into the silhouette of sense.
Zeff had told him that he was not needed at the restaurant anymore. That he was free to leave whenever he wished. That he was free to be a pirate.
But if he left, who was going to ensure that the vegetables were always fresh and seasonal? That the canapés were always perfectly assembled and plated? That the fruit tarts were not made with stale berries? That each soup was served at its perfect temperature? That the rice did not mold?
Who was going to bargain for the best discounts on local spices? Who was going to inspect each stovetop and cutting board at cleaning time and yell at the lousy cook who overlooked a splatter of grease? Who was going to grit their teeth and bus tables while the old man searched for new waitstaff?
Realism held endless, immediate demands. And Sanji was practiced in fulfilling them.
Sanji was used to being the youngest. First he had been the youngest employee on the Orbit—a cook’s apprentice, eight years old, surrounded by chefs who had seen the world and had fairly set opinions on what was or wasn’t in it. They traded stories of strange fish, ornery passengers, and far-flung islands; they took Sanji to markets, bought him new clothes and the occasional street stall snack. They laughed at him when he attempted a recipe beyond his ability and gently patted his shoulder when he succeeded. Two of them had children of their own, growing up on distant ports. Sanji never met them.
Then it had been him and Zeff, opening the Baratie together. A man with half a leg missing and a boy who could make a half-decent stir-fry, leaving out a latchstring for every cast-off cook in the East Blue. There was a revolving door of staffers at first: men who didn’t quite understand how Zeff taught, with a coarse insistence that meant pain and acceptance in equal measure. But then there were hires who settled, and Sanji learned about permanence with them as they stayed one year, then two, then four. They took kicks together, they strained stocks and made reductions and julienned vegetables together, and eventually Sanji found a rhythm in moving around and between men he called colleagues.
But there was always that distance. First the teasing, the ribbing, the refusal to take him seriously because ‘he’s just a kid the head chef looks after’—which had morphed into cowed disdain when Zeff had promoted him to assistant chef. Then the teasing had shifted into jealous whispers and the ribbing into barely concealed antagonism. It rarely surfaced into open anger—except for when Sanji fed the customers who couldn’t pay.
Sanji knew that there was a rumor amongst his colleagues that he planned to take over the restaurant. He evaded it. There was no point in addressing it. For the Baratie might be built on love or friendship or magic or whatever bullshit Patty liked to spout in the mirror, but none of that translated into affection. And when the shifts ended it would always just be Sanji, alone, combing his hair down above his eyes to obfuscate memory and form; seeking a daily sliver of invisibility amongst the chaos of line cooking.
The green-haired swordsman with Luffy was a suicidally foolish bastard. He spoke with his hands resting on his swords and with a setness to his jawline that suggested immovability; he set his terms firmly: no one calls me a fool but me. And Sanji could not explain just why this tiny crew of no-name pirates irritated him so much. He rationalized that it was on behalf of the lady with them—it wasn’t fair to her that she should be dragged along with their absurd plans.
“What’cha making, Sanji?”
Sanji did not need to raise his head to know that Luffy was standing beside him: on his toes, head tilted at an improbable angle, eyes flicking between the bubbling pot of pasta and the sauté pan of olive oil, pepper flakes, parsley, and garlic.
“A snack,” Sanji said absentmindedly.
Luffy’s smile was wide and immediate. “Cool! Can I have some?”
“I have yet to eat dinner and you’ve been eating all day, shithead,” Sanji responded. “I’ll give you a bite.”
Luffy’s second day at the Baratie had been a quiet one, all things considered, with Sanji taking just the morning shift. He’d spent the afternoon laying on his bunk, stubbing out cigarette after cigarette and flipping through his cookbooks without reading any of them. He’d skipped dinner. No use bothering anyone when he had no appetite.
“Shouldn’t you be back on your ship by now?” Sanji asked, swirling a scoop of pasta water into the pan. “Your shift ended an hour ago.”
Luffy pouted. “The old man said I wasn’t allowed to leave until I picked everything up, and I broke a lot of plates today.”
Sanji’s lips twitched. “You got off lightly, you punk.”
“And he kicked me a bunch of times!” Luffy grinned. “I felt some of them, even though I’m made of rubber!”
“If he really was trying to kick you, it wouldn’t matter what you were made of.” Sanji fished out a strand of pasta and tasted it. A bit undercooked—perfect. “Don’t underestimate the geezer.”
“Right! He’s a pirate!” Luffy bounced up to sit on the countertop, and Sanji didn’t have the heart to tell him to get down. He sank a strainer ladle into the pasta pot and fished out as much as it could hold. “Man, I bet he was so cool back in the day!”
The ladleful of pasta in Sanji’s hand suddenly became profoundly interesting. A plume of steam kicked up as he dumped it into the sauté pan, softening the edges of the words stumbling from his mouth. “His shitty kicks used to be famous. Before he lost his leg, that is.”
Luffy rocked forward on his hands. “I see! No wonder they hurt.” He rubbed his cheek contemplatively, watching Sanji as he shook the sauté pan and stirred the pasta within. The expression he wore was inscrutable; caught half-way between a smile and a frown. Not for the first time, Sanji wondered if Luffy somehow knew how to peel back the layers of duty he draped over himself as cover.
“Agitate oil and water together at the right temperature to form an emulsion,” Sanji spoke, itching to fill the abrupt silence. “Finish cooking the pasta in the oil and stir vigorously so that it releases its starches. That way, you’ll end up with a creamy sauce.”
He shook and he swirled and he stirred and he ladled; and slowly the sauce began to take on the form and viscosity he looked for—that Zeff had taught him to look for, years ago, when he had still been learning to walk on his peg leg. Sanji still remembered the lessons; especially the times Zeff had pushed himself out of his chair and hobbled over without his crutches, just to get a closer look at how the dish was coming along. He learned to recognize when, on instinct, the old man tried to shift a little too much weight to his right leg—there was always a little grimace that crossed his face when he found only wood to support him. When it happened, Sanji would stand a little taller, so that Zeff could put a hand on his shoulder to steady himself.
Are you okay, old man?
Worry about the pasta, little eggplant. It’s about to overcook.
The sauté pan scraped against metal stove grates and Sanji thought about bone scraping over rock, of flesh as food and food as forfeit for a life that would never be worthy of it.
Luffy didn’t know the reason he could never leave this kitchen.
Sanji twirled a heaping forkful of pasta onto a clean plate and passed it to Luffy. “Here you go, you shitty chore boy. Spaghetti aglio e olio.”
The green-haired swordsman with Luffy was Roronoa Zoro, the notorious pirate hunter, and he was dying in the sea.
Sanji had not quite known what to expect when the kid had stepped up to Hawk-eyed Mihawk, stuffed a sword in his mouth, and demanded a fight. Of course he’d heard of Roronoa Zoro—it was hard to avoid the name, especially in an establishment frequented by pirates. But what could anyone do against a man who could cut a galleon to pieces without breaking a sweat?
Not much, as it turned out.
The pirate hunter threw himself against the World’s Greatest Swordsman, again and again, crashing like a relentless wave against a cliff that refused to erode. For a full minute, the air filled with the thrash of desperate steel against supple deflection. And then—silence. The wave was broken into stillness upon the tip of a knife; the storm calmed into a slow, steady patter of blood drops on driftwood.
And even then, Roronoa Zoro refused to yield, refused to step back even to keep his life. The set of his jawline remained even as blood spilled down it, a smirk shaping around the white hilt of the sword in his mouth.
I prefer death to defeat.
Sanji’s mouth went dry, and his irritation crested over. Why couldn’t the kid just give up? Why couldn’t he accept defeat? What—who gave him the permission to possess that dogged determination in pursuit of the greater?
It’s easy! Give up on your dream!
The green-haired swordsman with Luffy was a suicidally foolish bastard, and Sanji felt his stomach roil with fear and indignance and envy.
“You’re joining my crew, aren’t you?” Luffy spoke with a spoon still dangling from his mouth, his left arm wrapped protectively around a tray of leftover roast potatoes.
Sanji groaned. “For the last time, no.”
“Why not?” Luffy demanded. “You never told me your reason.”
Sanji swiped a damp washcloth over a stainless steel counter and pretended he was too busy to look Luffy in the eye. “Isn’t no enough of a reason for you? Why do you care so much, anyways?”
“Because I want you as my cook!”
“And why me, specifically? You’ve only known me for half a day.”
“Don’t care.”
Sanji paused. He felt tempted to ask Luffy questions that treaded too close to vulnerability: What about me do you even want? What could I do for you that someone else couldn’t do better? How could I ever hope to give you enough to deserve a spot on your crew?
Instead he asked: “So what’s with the hat?”
Luffy laughed and patted the straw creation on his head. “It’s my treasure!”
“Treasure, huh?” Sanji lit a fresh cigarette. “Did someone give it to you?”
“Yup!” Luffy beamed. “And I made a promise with him on this hat that I would become a pirate and gather a great crew.”
“Hell of a promise,” Sanji muttered.
So there were promises made in the world that didn’t weave webs of self-denial. Agreements formed with the assurance of the limitless. Covenants kept with freedom.
Or perhaps Luffy was just special.
“And you’re going to be part of that crew!” Luffy continued. “The old man gave you permission!”
Sanji exhaled. Arguing with this kid was impossible.
The second night of Luffy’s stay, Zeff had come down to the kitchen an hour after Luffy had eaten his pasta and gone to find Sanji methodically grinding a seventh cigarette into the ashtray by the corner sink.
“You’re going to ruin this kitchen with your smoke,” he said, by way of a greeting.
Sanji grit his teeth. He really wasn’t in the mood for this right now. “The food still tastes fine.”
“I’d hardly trust you to be the judge of that,” Zeff replied. “I told you not to smoke, little eggplant.”
“I’ll keep the smoking outside the damn kitchen if you want me to,” Sanji barked. “That okay with you, shitty geezer?”
“I’d prefer you kept it outside my restaurant entirely,” Zeff answered, his voice low and harsh.
Sanji snapped. “Don’t try this again with me,” he shouted. “I told you yesterday. I’m staying. Right. Here!”
He braced himself for a kick to the shins, but Zeff only turned his back to him. “Keep it down, little eggplant. It’s late.”
Watching Zeff retreat from a confrontation was rare. It hurt—not the stinging pain of a kick, but a different, nastier kind of ache that made him feel anchorless, hollowed out. Sanji seethed. He crushed the cigarette down harder, wishing he could stab it through his own hand.
“I won’t waste words on you if you’re dead set on being a fool,” Zeff called, by way of a good-night. “Go to sleep. You have a morning shift tomorrow.”
Perhaps Sanji was always meant to repay his debts in blood.
Pearl’s iron armor slammed into him and Sanji could feel fractures zigzagging through his bones, shooting up his spine and down into his toes. Blood hit the deck and he knew it was his, objectively it had to be, but also it wasn’t his because his blood belonged to Zeff and the Baratie. The tab that had begun running on the Orbit took most of its payment in service, but blood also sufficed.
Sanji tried to laugh, but his ribs rebuffed him. He wondered just how cracked they were. Perhaps if Pearl pulled them out one by one and presented them to Zeff in a casserole dish, the debt between them could be called even.
But then Luffy yelled something and shot his leg into the sky, and before Sanji could register what was happening he’d brought it down with a crash on the fin, splitting the heavy wooden structure in half. And for a moment the air itself was suspended on Luffy’s words—until he cracked his knuckles and declared I’m going to sink this ship.
Sanji wanted to wring his neck.
You didn’t interfere with your swordsman’s fight, he ruminated, frantic with fury. You let him impale himself on Hawk-eyes’ dagger. You let him throw his life forward in the name of an impossible dream. You gave him space to fight his own battles and now you’re going to take over mine?
Of course, Luffy didn’t—couldn’t—understand the weight of what Zeff had given. Of course he thought the old man’s treasure was all something to be toyed with. Of course he thought that Sanji—
Luffy stared at him resolutely, listened to Sanji scream, and then grabbed him by the collar. And suddenly the rubbery chore boy was a pirate captain who knew sacrifice and knew loss, and Sanji’s fingers went numb as an agonized realization ran through him.
He does understand.
Sanji tasted bile, and he wasn’t sure it was due to Pearl’s surprises.
The green-haired swordsman, Roronoa Zoro, stayed under Sanji’s skin for longer than he would have liked to admit. And he hardly even knew the guy.
It went like this: Zeff had saved his life, nine years ago, and Sanji had been carrying the burden of his gratitude ever since. So it had morphed, quite seamlessly, into a rigid dedication to the shitty geezer’s restaurant. He never spoke this aloud, never told his colleagues his reasons; after all, it did not matter what people thought. Sanji’s life belonged to his damn restaurant and Sanji kept his word.
He knew it wasn’t asked of him. He knew that Zeff didn’t care if he stayed or left. He knew that in the grand scheme of things, he was extraneous—just a boy saved on a rock, a half-decent chef and a terrible waiter. He might know how to concoct a recipe or two, but he was otherwise replaceable.
There was an invisibility to dedication, a brutal self-effacing logic to promise. Promises were meant to be kept close to the chest. Promises were meant to be made with oneself through gritted teeth and served with practiced grace. Keeping a promise was rather like fulfilling an order—you took it to the kitchen, you braised and you boiled, and then you carefully plated the results and served it to the guest out in the dining hall, who could savor the dish with nary a thought to your existence.
Promises were not things that you shouted out for the entire sky to hear on the tip of an upraised sword.
How could someone feel so comfortable dissolving into his devotion, stitching it onto his bare skin with the world as witness?
“Ever hear of the All Blue?”
“No.”
“What?” Sanji gasped. “You don’t know about that wondrous ocean? In those waters, it’s said that one can find fish from every ocean in the world.”
“Every ocean?” Luffy asked, expression owlish.
Sanji gestured out at the green waves below them. “The world is split into the four Blues, right? East Blue, South Blue, North Blue, West Blue…”
Luffy nodded excitedly. “And the Grand Line!”
“Yeah, and the Grand Line. So the sea life we have here in the East Blue is different from that of all the other Blues, right? It’s hard to get ingredients from the other oceans here because most fish can’t swim across the Grand Line or find any way over the Red.”
“So that’s what’s so special about the All Blue?” Luffy questioned.
“There’s been legends of it passed down through generations of seafaring cooks,” Sanji said slowly, startling at the reflection of his smile in Luffy’s eyes. “That somewhere in the world there is a sea where life from all the Four Blues meet. And there you’ll find spikefin tuna from the South Blue, and carmine eel from the West Blue; and cutlass-fish from the North…”
“Those sound cool!” Luffy cackled.
“I know, right?” Sanji held up his fingers. “So many possibilities. Thousands—no, hundreds of thousands of species of fish that we’ve never encountered here. I wonder how they school? How they hunt? The food chain there must be wild, right?”
“Amazing!” Luffy shouted, clapping his feet.
“I’ve always wanted to see a puffenbugle carp, but West Blue fish never come here,” Sanji sighed. “‘Cause it’s on the opposite side of the world, and all. So in the All Blue, I’d finally be able to catch sight of one. They say that when it expands, it blows up in seven different directions!” He waved his hands for emphasis. “Plus I’ll finally find jackalope clam, and zinnia shrimp… and the seaweed must be fantastic. I heard that in the South Blue, the kelp forests grow not just along coastlines, but up from the abyssal zone.”
“Wow!”
“And think about the whales,” Sanji continued. “There are nine species of whale in the East Blue, right? Just think—if there are at least nine species of whale in all the Blues and the Grand Line, that’s forty-five species in total. But I bet there are more. I heard that in the West, there are whales that grow as big as islands.” He spread his arms out wide.
Luffy leaned backwards, tilting his head towards the sun. “The All Blue must be so big.”
Sanji took a long drag of his cigarette. “Well, if you believe the stories, then yes,” he said. “But then, the geezer and I think it’s somewhere on the Grand Line. So maybe it isn’t that big if it fits into that narrow sea.”
“So maybe it’s dense!” Luffy suggested.
“Yeah, maybe,” Sanji shrugged. “Everyone says that if the All Blue really existed, then we would have found it already. I don’t think that’s the case, though. There has to be something to all the legends. The Pirate King and his crew were the only ones to have ever circumnavigated the Grand Line in recent memory, and I bet they still missed some stuff. I just know it’s out there somewhere.”
“Yeah, it’s got to be,” Luffy affirmed. “I’m going to be Pirate King, so we’ll be the ones to find it.”
Sanji smiled. He didn’t even feel like challenging the we this time.
Perhaps Sanji was always meant to repay his debts in blood, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a little terrified of that prospect.
Okay, maybe more than a little terrified.
He might know how to kick a man’s head in, but he was a cook, and cooking was an activity of survival. There would never be a part of him that could be trained to view death with the pure indifference that had once been expected of him. Perhaps that was a failure of his programming.
This was turning out to be a day with far too many death scares. First it had been the shitty green-haired swordsman and his esoteric self-destruction at the end of Hawk-eyes’ blade; now it was his turn, apparently. The fight Gin offered him was short, and Sanji didn’t even have the energy to feel embarrassed when it was over.
Still, he nearly shit himself when Gin’s hand closed over his throat and his tonfa was raised to the sky. An absurd thought shrieked through his head—what if the iron tastes bad?—and he almost jerked out of the man’s hold in sheer terror.
Gin ended up sparing his life, and Sanji hated himself for the pit of gratitude that opened up in his gut.
Maybe it would have been better to get it over with now.
Minutes later, Gin shoved a gas mask over his face right before doubling over and coughing up blood. And Sanji stared up at the sky through the holes of the mask, trembling with the frenzy of being alive. Why me?
The kid in the straw hat was just as suicidally foolish as his swordsman. He stared down Don Krieg and asserted he would be Pirate King. He punched through a spiked iron cape and took direct blows from an exploding spear.
Watch carefully, Zeff said. So Sanji watched.
There was never a second of hesitation from the boy who said he would be king, never a flicker of doubt on his face. He averred this won’t be my grave, and Sanji wondered if he was also shoveling dirt back into the grave Sanji had begun digging for himself.
Luffy defeated Krieg by slamming the admiral’s head in; and Sanji felt his hands ache to cook late-night pasta for him again, to cook him anything he wanted, because there was a bright, limitless, joyful want to him that sang, It’s okay to want so much that your life is on the line for all your wanting.
And for some reason, Luffy wanted Sanji as his cook.
A week before Luffy and his crew arrived at the Baratie, Zeff did something strange: he knocked on Sanji’s door.
“Old man?” Sanji yelled, because Zeff never knocked. Most days, he didn’t have much of a reason to enter Sanji’s room in the first place; and when he did he always stepped in without fanfare.
Zeff opened the door and walked over slowly, his peg leg sounding with an unusual weight over the floorboards.
“Is there anything wrong?” Sanji asked, threading his fingers together. “Shit, I didn’t fuck up the tomato sauce, did I? I knew I let it simmer for too long. I’ll go fix it right now—”
“It’s not the sauce, little eggplant,” Zeff cut in. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”
Sanji sucked in a breath. This was something new—the sympathetic finality in Zeff’s tone, the distant smile tugging at his mustache.
“Yeah?”
“You’re nineteen now,” Zeff said bluntly. “It’s time you left this place.”
That was not quite what Sanji expected. The words fell like a blow.
“Wait—what?”
“You heard me, little eggplant.” Zeff sat down heavily on Sanji’s bed. When was the last time he did that? “You should get out of here. You can’t stay working for me forever.”
Instantly, anger slicked through Sanji, hot and heavy as oil. “What, the sauce I made was that bad?”
Zeff narrowed his eyes. “When did I say anything about sauce? You’ve been twiddling your thumbs here for months now, and your cooking’s getting sloppy. You should go and pursue what you really want. The All Blue.”
“The All Blue?” Sanji gaped. “You’re bringing that up now? I thought you said you weren’t going to search for it anymore.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Zeff said, exasperated. “ I said you should go and try to find it. Send me pictures when you get there.”
Sanji shook his head. “You’re being ridiculous, old man. You know you can’t run this restaurant without me.”
“Have all those cigarettes gone to your head?” Zeff grunted. “I’m telling you to get out there. Love a woman. See some sights. Learn new recipes. This restaurant isn't your final destination in life.”
“It is my final destination in life!” Sanji exploded. “You know why I’m here! You’re the reason I’m here! What do you mean, I should just leave?”
Do I really mean so little to you?
“I can run the restaurant perfectly fine without you,” Zeff retorted. “You don’t bring all that much to the table.”
“What the fuck?”
“I said what I said,” Zeff said stiffly. “I didn’t save your life because you had talent for cooking, boy.”
“Then why even fucking bother?” Why not let me starve?
Zeff did not answer immediately. Instead, he picked up the copy of The Four Blues: An Oceanic Encyclopedia that sat on Sanji’s bedside table—a present for his eleventh birthday that Zeff had left outside his door and said nothing about. With a swift gesture, he flipped to the page Sanji had dog-eared seven times, and Sanji felt like choking.
The All Blue: A legendary ocean. Said to be a sea where marine life from all four Blues and the Grand Line converge…
The corner of Zeff’s eyes crinkled. “You already know why, kid. How many times have you reread this damn book?”
Sanji swallowed. “It’s not important.”
Zeff set the book down. “I ought to kick you for talking back to me today,” he said, his voice gruff.
“Try it, shitty geezer.”
And Sanji ate a roundhouse to the face.
It went like this: Sanji wasn’t exactly sure his life was his.
Nine years ago, on a rock out in the middle of the sea, a pirate had paid for Sanji’s life with his leg. He had given his greatest weapon for the continued existence of some brat nobody wanted. It was a price tag Sanji still could not even begin to fathom.
Zeff had said that it was because they shared a dream—but Zeff had paid in his dream. Sometimes when Sanji imagined it, the All Blue tasted like blood and gristle and human meat on baking stone, because that was what Zeff had eaten to keep Sanji alive.
The least he could do in return was work at the old geezer’s shitty restaurant.
So he had a dream. So he wanted for more, yearned for it with every nerve in his body. So his eyes dusted over with visions as he read and re-read that page on the All Blue. So he yearned to taste distant waters, to drink fonts of love, to know people who could truly know him back. So he yearned to see his reflection in the eyes of the ocean and receive as deeply as he gave.
What did any of it matter?
That was wanting, and Sanji had only ever trained for fulfilling. And perhaps that was why swordsmen who shouted vows to the sky and kids in straw hats with improbable appetites and their twinned dedication to seek the greater twisted Sanji’s innards. They were those who had been given permission to fling themselves into the sun. They were those who had learned that they were deserving of wings.
Perhaps the wax in between the feathers would melt under the heat of their ambition, but then they could at least touch the ocean and say they’d flown.
Will you take him with you? The Grand Line is his dream.
Sometimes, Sanji reminisced about the day Zeff had unveiled the strange ship with the fish’s mouth, soon to be the Baratie.
“Awesome!” The word had formed slightly hollowly around his hunger. Even months after being rescued, he still never quite felt full.
Zeff had chuckled and ruffled his hair; Sanji remembered leaning into the phantom of that touch for months afterwards. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, little eggplant. Perhaps we’ll get some customers stopping over on their way to the All Blue.”
“A week’s worth of clothes… that should be enough,” Sanji muttered to himself. “Toothbrush, toothpaste.. I don’t know how often Luffy likes to stop at port, so better pack extra cigs…”
The restaurant was quiet, holding its breath. Sanji rolled up a final pair of socks and stuffed it into his cloth pack. “There. That should be it.”
The Four Blues: An Oceanic Encyclopedia gazed at him solemnly from his bedside table.
Sanji sighed and rolled his shoulders. I’ll find another copy out there, if I ever get the space for books on that tiny ship.
Downstairs there was a clang of pans and a faint yell. The cooks were up to something. Unbidden, Sanji’s mind slipped back into the net of realism: I wonder who will manage the clean-up times? Who will put in the bulk flour orders? Are Patty and Carne competent enough to manage the new hires?
It had never seemed to matter that none of his coworkers liked him. That they argued during smoke breaks and spat at each others’ cooking. That they put up with him because he was, once, the kid the head chef was looking after; now the assistant chef they had to listen to. Distance was inevitable. Petty hostility was all that Sanji required to maintain his mask of indifferent anger. He’d put up with far worse.
Yet somehow, they had known about his dream. They cared enough to want him to chase it. They had put on a whole show of spilling their soup all over the floor, just to try to goad him to leave and pursue his foolish wanting.
Sanji didn’t know what to think about that.
He contemplated asking for one of Patty’s confectionary abominations to go. He could take it as a keepsake to slowly savor on the journey out, let the wind whip the crumbs off the side of his boat as the restaurant disappeared over the horizon.
One of the strange fellows that had traveled with Luffy flew into the Baratie in the mouth of a panda shark, told him that they needed to leave urgently to chase after a missing crewmate, and Sanji had to make his choice.
It went like this: Sanji decided to chart a new course of dedication.
Join my pirate crew.
If Sanji let himself think about Luffy’s invitation, he might have found that there was a catch in his throat and a shake in his hands, and a vision of an endless ocean— unfathomable in depth and breadth—churning in his mind’s eye. An ocean teeming with fish, molluscs, jellies, corals, plants, and cetaceans beyond imagination. An ocean whose turbulent surface reflected back a version of Sanji that had cooked and tasted the infinite.
So he lit a cigarette, stepped into the waves, and gave himself permission.