Chapter Text
Sanji’s feet carried him down dark halls, the echo of his footsteps driving home the loneliness and isolation of the palace after dark.
How strange, to have free reign of almost anywhere in Germa – but still be a prisoner. The gold bracelets on his wrists seemed to warm unpleasantly at the thought, whispering of explosives and consequences.
Damn Judge, damn Vinsmokes, damn Germa, rearing their ugly heads and dragging him back into a life he’d done everything to leave behind.
‘Not everything’, his thoughts mutter, ‘You could have dyed your hair, lied about your name. You could have stayed behind on the Baratie and they never would have found you.’
The unspoken words taste false and foul in his mouth. In a darkened window he glimpses his reflection and sees golden locks falling in waves over one eye, taking in the slope of his nose and the angle of his cheekbones.
Even exhausted, beaten, he can’t find the will to wish himself changed. He looks so much like her. In those things that are her and not Judge, he carries her with him. In hair that tumbles instead of spikes, in eyes that crinkle and are already tracing the beginnings of laugh lines – god, is that what his crew has done to him? Laugh lines at twenty-one. In slender fingers and yes, by now, even that gentle sadness he’d seen in the set of her mouth and the depth of her gaze. He knows it would break her heart to see him inherit that, too.
He is no Vinsmoke, but he is his mother’s child. And in the depths of despair, that fact brings him a small comfort. He brings his hand up to cover the worst of his dark stubble, then reaches inwards and brushes against his heartbreak.
He lets himself think of love. Of brilliant brown eyes alive with passion beneath flaming hair, of a giga-watt grin under a smiling scar. Of cotton candy and gears and cowboy hats (he hopes Robin wears that hat again someday, even if he isn’t there to see it – she made it look amazing). Of liars, musicians, and marimos, of smiling sheep and lions and home.
Of a braided moustache and a restaurant far, far away. Of the father he’d found but never deserved.
It hurts. It breaks his heart all over again, but before the hurt there is warmth and fondness. For a moment – a precious, tentative moment – he sees his mother smiling at him from the impromptu mirror.
Then the smile quivers and the tears swell. The spell is broken, and it’s just him.
Broken, failed Sanji. Alone and aching. Bound not by a helmet and bars but bound all the same. A gilded shackle is still a shackle, and running would only bring Germa's fury down on everything he wants to protect - and that, more than what would happen to his hands, is what stops him.
He wants to go home. He wants his friends. And damn it all, he wants his dad – his real dad.
Sanji wrestles with the pain, shoving it deep, deep down to the place he keeps his worst secrets. A dungeon inside himself, where he doesn’t have to look at the little helmeted face peeking desperately out at him through the bars. He shoves his bleeding heart into that cold, musty cell, then runs and runs and runs until a thousand doors and a hundred miles are between him and his vulnerabilities.
At some point, he started running outside of his head too. His bruises ache, but damn if it doesn’t feel good to move. No servants or doctors around to witness his loss of composure, just him and the drumming of feet on unforgiving stone.
Corridors race by him and time loses meaning, until he's finally tired enough to slow down. He comes to a stop some place deep in Germa’s unfeeling heart, guided by a phantom tug that had taken root in his gut. The only windows were interior, looking into myriad labs for some division he’s not familiar with. As he breathes in the reek of stale chemicals and ozone, he has the dawning realization he doesn't think he’d ever even been here before. The walls are as sterile and plain as every other wall outside the palace, but something about the architecture is different – maybe the way the ceiling lights are arrayed, or the width of the doorframes? Regardless of what is different, Sanji cannot deny that it is.
Either Judge has expanded the place, or Sanji hadn’t seen everything he thought he had. He finds the notion... unsettling.
'Tug, tug,' goes the burn in his abdomen, pulsing in time with the blood in his heart. His muscles sizzle with a rising heat, and his feet resume their journey.
Instinct pulls him deeper, down the dimmed corridors and winding passages. From the gloom, an end emerges, and with it a lab door. Save for a buzzing bulb that sputters overhead like a senile spotlight it is wholly identical to its predecessors, but he’s drawn to it as a moth to flame. It’s locked of course, with a keypad blinking an innocuous red light at him just to the side. He considers kicking the door in – because feeling solid metal crunch underfoot would do wonders for his crumbling self-esteem – but the rational part of him (the part that knows what he’s doing and calls himself Mr. Prince) tells him it would almost certainly set off an alarm, and that’s the last thing he wants to deal with right now. They may not be able to kill him, but he knows from experience there are so, so many things worse than death.
And they know it too.
So. He flips open the keypad. To his surprise and bitter amusement, there’s a damn clue taped to the underside, written on a scrap of yellowed paper with softly weathered edges.
He could swear Germa used to have better security than this. All the technological posturing in the world, and Judge kept hints next to the keypads. Sanji had felt disgusted with Judge plenty over the years, but for the first time he was truly disappointed. Not just because his biological father was a monster, but also because he was somehow very stupid for a smart man – and that Sanji had let himself be captured by said man.
‘Honestly’, he thinks, staring at the clue, “Germa 66?”
He’s a little surprised when his first attempt comes up rejected. “0124” made perfect sense, but apparently he was one digit short.
Then his stomach gives a queasy turn, and he wonders just how old this keypad even is. If Judge had grown complacent enough to not bother updating the code, even after all these years.
Maybe, even, he hadn't been down here in years.
With dawning revulsion, Sanji pushes back against the tugging in his gut. He refuses. Whatever is on the other side of that door, it surely isn't worth the price. He’s not lumping himself in with the monsters upstairs. He forces himself back two steps with teeth-gritting effort, determined to leave and let Germa's evils lie.
But the pull. It's so strong now, so insistent. Despite himself, Sanji spins reluctantly on his heel. He stalks back to the door, feeling for all the world like a man marching to the gallows. Biting back bile, he punches in the likely code as quickly as he possibly can. His fingers tremble against the cold, faded buttons.
At least it’s kind of funny that the passcode to this door, secreted away in Germa’s belly and so obviously something Judge wants to hide, is literally ‘01234’.
So, so stupid for a genius.
The light blinks green, as approving as it is condemning. He hears the door unlatch and he twists the handle, stepping into the darkened lab within. Cluttered desks and old filing cabinets silhouette themselves in deepest blacks against the walls. He nudges an office chair out of the way with an uneasy foot.
He could fumble for the light switch, but doesn’t bother. It isn't needed. Not when a cool blue light casts soft shadows across the room, brushing tenderly against his face. The source, a pod at the back of the room, is a mass of wires and blinking lights. It looks so much like the ones Yonji had shown him, the ones for the clones. And yet...
The pull is unbearable now, dragging him forwards step by unwilling step. The sound echoes in the subdued quiet of the dead lab, his heels clopping on smooth laminate.
Tap, tap, tap.
He realizes that he couldn’t turn back, even if he wanted to, and his heart begins to race with dread. His feet bring him to a stop an arm's length away from the mass of glowing fluid and metal.
Tap, tap. Squeak.
He faces the pod. He looks into its depths, and what he sees takes his breath away.
Because it is impossible. For a moment there is silence, and then a fury the likes of which he has never known. He’s burning. He’s drowning. His own lungs are trying to choke him.
Judge would dare-
But there is another voice in his head that tells him to look closer. And even through the red haze smothering his senses and screaming for patricide, he sees what his instinct tells him is there.
A little white scar on the hand, where a page of Liar Noland had sliced her thumb. Another at the corner of her mouth from a surprise fish bone, from a lunch she had insisted on eating anyways. So many little, tiny things that Judge would never think to reproduce, not for a clone.
Once again, his heart shatters. For the second time in as many hours, he stares at his mother’s face.
And now, it’s not a reflection.
