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Sanji watched his two patrons as he prepared drinks, trying to muster up something to say and falling woefully short. A part of him wanted to keep up his pretense of being angry that the sniper had managed to snag one of the most beautiful diamonds on the ocean– by pure luck alone!-- and start an equally beautiful family with her. He wanted to make a snide comment or shoot a fiery gaze that made his old friend shiver… but the joke was old. The emotion was old. That version of Sanji was old, and tired, and by now quite forced.
He had already reconciled with Usopp over his outrageous and unexpected relationship a long, long time ago, and to see him now….as a father, it was too weird to comment.
Yes, Usopp was a father. He was a father like none any on this ship had any experience with, and it was hard to muster up any emotion that wasn’t welling and proud when he looked on the man sitting together with the wiggling little boy, huge jade eyes wandering the room until his attention was once again brought to the spoon in his father’s hand.
“Oi, Nico! It’s a cactus bat! See it flying all around?” he swerved the spoon full of oatmeal– made by Sanji, pureed and smooth and full of all the nutrients a growing child could need– in haphazard arcs with the slightest bounce to them, like a bat propelling itself through the air with hurried wings. “It’s trying to find its way into the saguaro boot! Can you help the little guy out?”
Nico, obedient and cheery, opened his mouth wide to accommodate the spoon, happily eating the oatmeal and swinging his legs happily as he did so.
Sanji stared.
How many on this boat had ever met their own father? How many knew even their faces? And of those, how many had fathers who were anything less than cruel or dismissive?
None, surely, had fathers who would dote on them as infants, feeding them and caring for them while their mother “did her math-brain-navigator-stuff,” as Usopp put it.
Sanji was about to say something that caused his tongue to fight with his brain, the internal struggle of his psyche struggling against the endearing point that had sharply pierced its way into his mind. He sucked in a breath, and as he carried over the tray of drinks he released it while muttering, “It was good that you were the one there for Nami.”
“Huh?” Usopp looked incredulous, and as Sanji set down a cup of hot cocoa for his friend, the sniper moved it about a foot to the left without even thinking about it. Out of the toddler’s reach.
He was a damned natural at dad-ing. Shocking.
Sanji cleared his throat, handing over a small sippy-cup of juice to the boy before taking a seat across the table from Usopp, gripping his own hot drink. “You were playing soldier all this time, huh? Get any stronger? Want to spar sometime?”
“Ha! And get my butt kicked? I didn’t get that strong. But I did what I could with training, since my pop greens are gone. Rotten into the sea.” He shrugged, handing off the juice to Nico. The cup was a design Sanji had not seen before, one rounded on the edges and made to avoid spilling. No doubt an Usopp-design, with clear signs of his whittling at work. “Or entirely fictional. I still don’t really know.”
“And Nami…?”
“Oh, she didn’t get to train much. She, uh, played the role of the housewife, and hated every minute of it for sure! I mean, we had to do what we could to keep hidden, and her tattoos were kind of a giveaway…so most of the time she kind of secluded herself. No sunbathing, either. As much work as training with Pell was for me, I know the past two years were just miserable for her. Well, for the most part.” He fluffed Nico’s soft curls, at that, but the toddler was very singularly focused on drinking his juice and mostly ignored the action.
Sanji frowned, unhappy with such an answer. But this was Usopp being honest, brutally so, which made it seem as though he had been dying to say it out loud for a long time. It almost sounded like an apology or something, and so Sanji thought it best to just shut up and listen.
“She’s so strong. I can’t believe she took that for two whole years…she did it for him, of course, so that helps. She’s a good mom. She just… didn’t deserve to have to stop being everything else, too.”
“A pirate,” Sanji supplied, sipping his tea. “We’re all just made that way, aren’t we? What could ever entice us to leave the sea?” Even when he reached his dream, even if he started some world-famous restaurant one day that served every fish in the ocean, he could still only see himself on a boat. Like the Baratie. It was in his blood, in his stars, to live free like that.
Nami and Usopp were the same, even if they were the more cautious of the Straw Hats.
“Yeah. I mean, with my regiment we sometimes went off on naval training sessions at the Tamarisk port, but Nami stayed at home with Nico. You know, he’s both too old and too young for this world, and in the early days she was terrified someone would clock his age and figure out who we were by that fact alone.”
True. The two year old, eating another scoop of food with wide eyes trained on his father’s suddenly-serious face, was, uh.... created when the world slept, and that was not a fact easily explained-away to anyone who put a moment’s thought into it.
“But you’re…you know what you’re doing, with him,” Sanjo noted, sending Nico a soft smile as those eyes moved over to him, now. They were the same shape as his mother’s. In fact, much of the boy’s appearance took after the navigator, which perhaps helped to soften Sanji’s opinion of the entire situation (which had been kept so deceptively quiet from him before the two-year break up on the crew).
“Oh, well yeah! I took care of Nico a lot in the early days, and I mean, I couldn’t exactly be there to do half the work, but I was there. Every minute I had free.”
There was a crash from outside, some laughter, and a very gruff shout from just overhead, where Law’s office was.
“You know, I always thought of Law as the frowning, silent type. The only time I’ve ever seen the man show any kind of real emotion was when Nami needed him– she’s probably the only one that can get him to act like a regular human. But when Luffy’s involved, I guess even the thickest shell can be broken, huh?”
Sanji smirked, looking out the port window as Luffy called out a rushed apology before ducking the stream of a squirt gun (Franky, perhaps, just out of view?), the water spraying up and towards the second balcony.
“AH! What the HELL kind of pirate ship is this!? Why can’t I get a goddamn moment of peace!?”
“Oi, skinny jeans! I’m trying to work, here! Stop yelling!”
“ME!? This is on your idiot captain–”
“--Get used to it!”
Usopp snorted at the distant voices. “Ah. See? Nami knows how to deal with him. Well, Nami knows how to deal with just about anyone.”
Sanji had nothing to add to that apt observation, because it really was true: in addition to her endless beauty and grace, their navigator was one hell of a manager of people.
“Mommy!”
Usopp’s eyes crinkled as he looked down at the boy. “Yeah, but you’ll have to wait for mommy. She’s busy.”
“Busy…” the boy made an odd whine, shifting away from the proffered spoon, now. “Blue! My blue! Want go outside!” Little hands reached, grasping for the door, his body shifting and scooting nearly out of his makeshift booster seat of stacked books held together with belts.
“Hey, I can put together a snack box out on the deck next time, since he seems to like it out there so much,” Sanji offered. It was true: Nico was obsessed with wandering the lawn, gripping the balustrades of the rail and staring out at the sparkling ocean for longer than one would think the attention span of a two-year-old could last. It was Franky who had taken the initiative to pen-in a selected space with soft netting, worried the tiny boy would fall right through to the water, which Nami had seemed to appreciate.
Sanji smiled at the little person sitting at his dining table. “Would you like that? A picnic?”
“Pic-ic.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“You know,” Usopp began, slow and oddly hesitant, “I don’t think I ever told you about when I asked Nami to marry me.”
No shit. Sanji almost said something snide, but managed to hold it inside; this was a new, more mature Sanji. He could hold it in, right? Just be happy for his friends? “It had better be about the exact moment you found out she was pregnant, then.” Okay, so he still added a hint of threat to his tone with regards to Nami’s well-being…he couldn’t help himself.
“Of-of course! Ha, she turned me down very swiftly at that point, though… it was more of a panic-response? But that’s not what I mean: I mean when I asked for real. When she agreed.”
“Oh? Do tell–I think I’ve tried every magic combination of words on the planet, but Nami never would have given me a second thought. So how, exactly, did you convince our independent navigator to settle down?” It was a legitimate question, but also… Sanji couldn’t help that spring of curiosity/jealousy that welled up inside. He was a man of romantic words, while Usopp had never purported to be… so how the hell…?
“It wasn’t how I said it. Not really. It’s just… you know, I think you can judge how much love a person has by what they’re willing to sacrifice.”
Sanji blinked at the abrupt change in subject, and couldn’t stop a smirk from spreading (though he tried to hide it behind his coffee cup).
Usopp rolled his eyes. “No, I don’t mean it’s a sacrifice to marry me! Geeze… you’re such a–” whatever expletive the man was about to use, he just eyed the juice-swigging toddler at his side and cut himself off. “I mean that Nami was trying to make me leave her at the time.”
“So… she married you right after breaking up with you?”
“No! Well, kind of. Not really. How to put this…” Usopp pressed a hand to the side of his head, scratching at his poofy hair. “She told me she may have to give up on her dreams. That she might not be capable of being a pirate anymore. She said… she said that she had decided to have a baby without my input on that choice, so it wasn’t really my burden to bear.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever–” Sanji growled, despite the words originating from such a clever woman’s mouth, but Usopp cut him off.
“--yeah! Yeah it is, isn’t it!? But I don’t think Nami was fully in her right mind by that point. She’d been… stewing in this for a long time. She wanted to let me go, let me rejoin the crew and pursue my own dreams at sea, and if I married her she would feel abandoned if I left her afterwards. So… she couldn’t marry me, because she wanted me to leave her without breaking any promises. Does that make sense?”
Sanji made no move to answer.
Usopp leaned heavily on an open palm, sighing. “I told her I would get strong enough for both of us. I told her I would take care of her, and our baby, and we would all go out to sea again one day together, and I told her… I told her that if I failed, then we would all fail together. That I meant to keep my promises. If she had to let Luffy down, then she wouldn't do so alone. Luffy is…” Usopp met Sanji’s eyes, and it was hard to place the emotion there; something hopeful and light, but ringed by a melancholy acceptance gazed back at him. He had never seen that look on the sniper, before. “Luffy is our whole world, isn’t he? For all of us? Being here, with him, feels right. It’s our destiny. No matter how terrifying it can be traveling on this boat, I know it is always right to do so. But if Luffy is the whole world, then I was willing to give up the whole so Nami wouldn’t be alone. Because… that’s love too, isn’t it?”
Again, Sanji couldn't answer; he found himself moved, but was still at war with his internal stubbornness to a degree that kept him frozen… still, yes, that was love.
God, he couldn’t even be sarcastic about the couple anymore, could he? In every way, he approved so heavily of Usopp’s decision that he was struck dumb.
“My own mother loved my father. She loved him so much that she told him to leave and pursue his dreams. That’s the exact same sacrifice Nami was trying to make, so I… I knew right then how she felt. And I knew how much pain that kind of sacrifice is. I saw my mother suffer through it right until the day she died.”
Usopp tapped the table, no longer meeting Sanji’s eyes. “But that’s not love. Not by itself. Sacrificing for one person alone can’t be love, because love is mutual. Nami’s love would not be respected or reciprocated if I accepted an offer like that, and I didn’t even consider it for a single second. Nico is my son, just as much as he is hers, and so what kind of man would I be if I left? It got me thinking… loving her made it absolutely impossible to hurt her like that. Even if she didn’t agree to marry me, even if she was stubborn to the last, I would have found a way to be nearby and be useful to her, and to Nico. If I left, it would only be because I did not really love her the way she loved me.”
Sanji’s own father did not love his mother. He had known this since he was a young boy… that man couldn’t love anyone but himself. But Usopp had been proud of his pirate father for all the time that Sanji had known him– any mention of the Red Haired Pirates brought on this outpouring of hope and excitement in the young man in a way that seemed to mirror Luffy’s own esteem for the rival pirate captain. It felt… bleak, to acknowledge this sudden change in perspective, and if they were not seated across the table from each other he may have patted the sniper’s back to offer some semblance of comfort.
“It made me realize that my father could not have loved my mother.” This was unnecessary to say out loud; Sanji got it.
Still…
“You can’t judge two very different situations the same. You’ll never know what’s in someone else’s heart, so that’s not a call you can make. However… you can certainly judge a man’s worth by the honor of his actions.” Sanji folded his arms in front of him. “You’re an honorable man, Usopp. Never thought I’d live to see it–”
“--oi!”
“--but you are. You’re certainly the best example of a father I’ve actually witnessed, for whatever that’s worth.”
“It’s… worth a lot, actually. Thanks, Sanji.” He shook himself, a little, as if waking from some foggy dream, his hot cocoa long gone and Nico’s juice bottle teetering on the table as the toddler pushed it away with a little whine.
“Want go! Want go!”
Chubby little hands reached and grasped towards Usopp, his little body bending awkwardly as he tried to slide out of the tall chair, and the sniper grabbed him quickly to lift him onto his own lap. “Alright, let’s go play outside then. Wanna come, Sanji?”
The cook stood, clearing the items on the table onto his tray as he shook his head. “I think I’ll bring Nami a snack, instead. She’s probably hungry after pouring over her maps all afternoon.”
Usopp smiled, standing with the child balanced in his arms, huffing a little. “You’re getting big… Oi, Nami really likes that cardamom coffee from Alabasta– I know you’ve made it once or twice in the past. Do we have any?”
“Of course!” Sanji was excited to learn about how his dear– that is, his crewmate’s tastes had changed. Living in the desert nation for two years no doubt gave her and the sniper a bunch of new favorites, and he had purchased a cookbook long, long ago before they left Vivi on those rocky shores.
And this was how Sanji showed his own love for his friends: he would learn, and he would feed them.