Archive of Our Own

The hospital has this eerie silence that Zoro hates immediately, the lights too white and the walls too white and even the vending machine looking aggressively clean, like somebody’s gone and bleached all the flavour out of it.

Sanji’s in room 412 with a concussion, fractured ribs, a busted wrist and enough scrapes to make Zoro’s stomach go tight when he looks at him for too long. He’s fine, technically. The doctor’s already cleared him and Nami’s already given Zoro a laundry list of fact sheets and warnings about not letting Sanji overdo it for the next few weeks. When he does finally leave the room it’s only because Sanji’s been bitching about hospital food for twenty straight minutes and it finally escalated to: “If you wanna be a good boyfriend you’ll come back with something that doesn’t taste like cardboard.”

So now Zoro’s in the hallway, headed towards the cafe with the vending machine and whatever truly fucking tragic sandwiches they have down there as his only mission. He’s trying to make this as quick as possible, even though he knows it’s silly: it’s not like Sanji’s going anywhere. He’s half drugged, mostly exhausted and under orders not to leave the bed without help. Still, the second the door clicks shut behind Zoro he feels a shift in his chest, some instinctive unease that says too far. He gets maybe halfway to the nurses’ desk before somebody steps out from a side hallway so abruptly he almost shoulders him on reflex. The guy is tall and well dressed — no, expensively dressed, which already makes Zoro dislike him. He’s got a dark coat and clean shoes and a whole lot of hair, and the kind of posture that says he’s never once in his life been told no without trying to buy his way around it. He looks at Zoro the way you look at a chair you nearly tripped over, before dismissing him to find the nearest nurse.

“I’m here for Sanji Vinsmoke,” he says.

The name catches so strangely in Zoro’s head that it takes him a few seconds to place it: it’s on documents, on forms, on mail Sanji sometimes gets and never actually opens in front of him, but nobody calls him that. Nobody who knows him, at least.

The nurse looks up from her computer. “Visiting hours are limited right now.”

The man’s mouth tightens. “I’m not a visitor.”

That, by itself, would be enough to irritate Zoro but it gets worse because the nurse asks: “And your relation to the patience?” and the man says, without hesitation: “I’m his father.”

Zoro freezes, the first thought immediate and stupid, probably, because obviously Sanji’s father is Zeff. Admittedly Zoro’s never cared enough to ask questions that weren't his business, so he’s a little muddled on how biological that is, but regardless Zeff’s presence has always felt obvious enough that Zoro’s never really bothered turning it over. Sanji talks about Zeff and complains about Zeff and quotes Zeff at weird times, like the old man’s voice is built into the framework of him. Sanji has never, not once, talked about any other father which means the man here is lying… or is the exact kind of truth nobody wants.

The nurse, to her credit, stays calm. “Do you have ID?”

The man produces it with a look that suggests the entire procedure is beneath him. The nurse checks it and purses her lips. “Mr Vinsmoke.”

Zoro doesn’t move, but every part of him goes on alert at once. He knows the outline of Sanji’s life, sure: restaurant, old man, impossible work ethic, and maybe some kind of family money or politics or bullshit int he background he’s never wanted to poke at because Sanji’s face shuts down whenever it gets too near. In the past three years he’s learned Sanji’s got landmines on him and that some names are doors he’s not ready to open. Most importantly, he knows that if Sanji wanted this man here then Zoro definitely would have heard about him before today.

Vinsmoke taps one hand against the desk. “I’d like to see his chart.”

The nurse blinks. “I’m… sorry?”

“His medical records,” The man drawls. “Current condition, attending physician, scan results. I assume those are available.”

Zoro actually snorts and the nurse glances at him, then back at the man. “Yeah, nah. They’re not available to you without the patient’s consent.”

Vinsmoke’s expression cools another degree, which Zoro hadn’t thought possible. “I’m his father.”

“And he’s a grown man?” The nurse scoffs. “You’ve got Buckley's. Unless he waltzes out here and okays it himself, we’re not getting anywhere.”

Zoro’s hand goes t his pocket before he fully thinks about because he doesn’t really know what else to do. This guy hasn't raised his voice os swung a fist — he’s just standing there being exactly the kind of threat doesn’t doesn’t leave bruises right away and Zoro doesn’t know enough to proceed here. He doesn’t know what Sanji would want, doesn’t know if going back into the room and telling him immediately would make it worse. He doesn't know if this man can legally force his way in, or whether calling backup would somehow create a bigger scene but he does know, above all else, the way his whole body’s screaming not good.

He leaves them to argue, moving far enough not to draw attention to call the only person he knows who can cut straight through panic. Luffy picks up on the second ring in amongst the background noise — traffic, maybe, or just the way the world sounds whenever Luffy’s moving through it. “Zoro’s? What’s wrong?”

“Some guy’s here,” Zoro whispers. “Says he’s Sanji’s dad.”

Luffy goes quiet int eh way he does when he’s actually thinking and not just feeling his way forwards with his whole heart. “Did Sanji say he was coming?”

“No.”

“Does Sanji know he’s here.”

“No.” Zoro looks down at the hall towards room 412 and its closed door. Everything beyond it feels too far away.

At the desk, Vinsmoke’s voice goes flatter and shaper. “Then get me someone who can override policy.”

The nurse says: “Are you — no?”

“Don’t let him in.” On the other end, Zoro hears Usopp’s voice faintly in the background, asking something about snacks or whether hospital gift shops sell flowers. Then Luffy comes again, more focused: “We’re coming over.”

Zoro nods before realising that’s useless over the phone. “Okay.”

“Don’t punch him unless he deserves it, yeah?”

Vinsmoke is still at the desk, still composed, still looking very much like ht deserves a punch or two, still trying to pry open hospital policy with the word father like it should just magically work on strangers. There are two nurses arguing with him now and he hasn’t raised his voice, but that makes it seem worse. He just keeps pressing in the same smooth tone, like he’s accustomed to the world folding around him eventually. “I’m not asking for anything unreasonable.”

The first nurse, who Zoro is now prepared to defend with his life, doesn’t even blink. “We’ve got a real different ideas about unreasonable, pal.”

“I asked for medically relevant information about my son.”

Zoro’s tossing up whether he should say something or not when the elevator opens, permitting Law through in navy scrubs. He looks exactly the way he always looks when someone's interrupted his day with any kind of nonsense, which is to say exhausted and irritated and somehow more awake than everyone around him. “Can I help you?”

Vinsmoke turns at the sound of the voice and his expression, already frigid, goes flatter. “Who are you?”

Law stops at the desk, glances once at Zoro, once at the nurse and then finally back at Vinsmoke with that kind of cool, clinical boredom that Zoro reckons has probably made grown men confess all kinds of things by accident. “Surgeon.”

“Then perhaps you can be useful.”

Law’s eyes go dead. “Unlikely.”

Zoro almost smiles but Vinsmoke draws himself up, the movement neat and contemptuous. “I am here for Sanji Vinsmoke. I’ve been informed the staff here is under the impression that paternal relation does not entitle me to his medical records.”

Law’s head tilts very slightly. “In a shocking turn of events, they’re correct. He’s an adult. You’re not his proxy. You’re not listed as his next of kin on his intake file so, no, you do not get his records, his imaging, his labs, his notes or a guided tour of his symptoms because you showed up and had a little tantrum.”

The nurse looks like she wants to marry him a bit, but Vinsmoke goes still int hat way rich white men do when they’re not used to being spoken to so plainly. Law, clearly encouraged by this, continues.

“In fact,” he says, voice getting softer in a way that’s somehow meaner. “What you do get is one warning: if you continue to pressure staff for protected information, I’ll have security escort you out and document the attempt in the patient access log. Then if the patience wakes up and wants to know whether anybody tried to violate his confidentiality, there’ll be a little record waiting for him.”

Something electric hums int he air for a second before Vinsmoke exhales, once, through his nose. It’s sharp and contained. He straightens his shirt. “I’ll return when Sanji is capable of speaking for himself.”

Law doesn’t even blink. “Then I suggest you wait to be invited.”

Vinsmoke’s gaze hardens into something purely cutting before he turns and walks away, slinging his coat over his arm and spine rigid enough to split wood. Nobody speaks until the elevator doors close behind him and then the first nurse lets out a breath. “Cunt.”

Law rubs a hand over his face. “That’s one word for it.”

Zoro pushes off the wall, the knot in his chest finally forced into a shape he can stand upright around. “Cheers.”

“He awake?” Law glances down the hallway and frowns. “Don’t tell him yet.”

Zoro kind of freezes, already thinking about how to do exactly that. “Why?”

Law’s expression goes flatter, which usually means he’s saying something he thinks should be obvious. “Because he has a concussion and blood pressure that spikes everytime he pretends he isn’t in pain. The last thing he needs is surprise family politics. There’s clearly a reason he didn’t go speak to Sanji himself.”

Zoro exhales. “Right.”

Law studies him for a second longer, eyes dark and sharp and slightly too knowing, as always. “You should eat, too.”

“I’m fine.”

Law’s stare means that’s not a real answer but he’s clearly too tired to trouble himself about it. “Right, well, I’ll get back to my actual patient if you don’t mind.”

The hallway seems too quiet once he’s gone, until the second nurse gives Zoro a small smile. “Your boyfriend's got interesting friends.”

“Yeah,” he mutters, because what else can he say?

He heads for the stairs instead of the elevator and by the time he hits the ground floor cafe the whole thing has started settling in under his ribs in pieces instead of one solid block: the name, the entitlement, the way he’d said my son like Sanji was some random paperweight he’d misplaced and come reclaim. Underneath that, though, sits the duller discomfort of realising maybe he doesn’t know that much about Sanji after all.

He knows what Sanji looks like when he’s lying about being tired and the exact pause before Sanji throws the first insult and which vegetables Sanji cuts finger when he’s stressed. He knows the smell of his preferred cigarettes, the sound of his laugh when it slips out real, the weight of him asleep against his shoulder. He knows Sanji walks into every room like he’s daring it not to deserve him and how soft he gets around children and old women and anyone hungry enough to be honest.

He know show to kiss him.

He doesn't know enough to understand what happens when a man with Sanji’s voice shows up and says father.

He stands in front of the little case full of sandwiches and diced watermelon and gross chia puddings and feels suddenly, violently, like he’s fourteen and underqualified for everything again, because he’s realising he doesn’t know if this is even normal. This is his first relationship technically — he doesn’t know how this works. Maybe people get together and then find out the ugly pieces later, one at a time, and everyone keeps walking because that’s just how time works? Maybe Sanji not telling him isn’t about trust. Maybe it’s just… his and Zoro’s not entitled to any of it yet.

The barista asks if he wants the chicken sandwich toasted and Zoro blinks. “What?”

“The sandwich?”

“Yeah. Toast it.”

He gets tea, coffee, two waters and a yogurt that looks like some form of punishment. He’s standing there while the sandwich press hisses and thinking about asking sometime if they know more when his phone buzzes in his pocket. Zoro stares at Zeff’s number for a seconds before answering, hesitating only because the number of times Zeff has willingly spoken to him has been approximately zero. “Yeah?”

Zeff doesn’t bother with hello. “How bad?”

Zoro shifts the bag of food to one hand, throwing a nod to the barista as he shuffles out. “Looks worse than it is.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

Zoro glares out through the hospital reception glass at the grey morning rain. “Concussion? Doctor says it could linger. Broken wrist. Cracked ribs. Knee’s fucked up but they don’t think it needs surgery.”

He hears Zeff huff about it on the other end. “He awake?”"

“Yeah.”

“Being a pain in the ass?”

“Constantly.”

Zeff grunts. “Good.” That, weirdly, is the warmest thing anyone’s said all morning.

Zoro pauses to stare at the vending machine. “He’s alright.”

“I know he’s alright,” Zeff snaps. “He’s too stubborn to die in traffic.”

Zoro almost smiles but then the question rises and sits on his tongue, heavy and awkward and wrong. He could ask. Zeff would know, probably, or at least know enough to tell whether that man showing up means danger or just trouble. On the other hand, Zoro can already feel the cost he’d have to bear if Sanji ever found out. “I’ll get him to call you.”

“I’ll call him myself.” The line goes dead and Zoro stands there with his phone still in hand, staring at his reflection in the vending machine, someone who can cut through whatever and still has no fucking idea what to do with either of Sanji’s fathers.

By the time he gets back to the hospital room the tea has gone lukewarm in the cardboard tray. He stands outside the door longer than he needs to, noting that the nurse at the station has changed. Everything looks normal enough again that for one stupid beat Zoro almost wonders if he imagined it all, right up until the looks down at the cup in his hand and remembers Law’s face when said don’t tell him yet.

Inside, Sanji’s still propped against the bed with the blankets twisted around one leg and the TV on mute to some daytime cooking show he’s definitely not watching. The room is dimmer now; one of the blinds has been half shut against the glare. His hair is still a mess, face still too pale under the bruising, one arm still in the sling. “Wow, you look like shit. Did you fight the cafeteria lady?”

Zoro shuts the door behind him with his hip. “Won easy.”

Sanji’s mouth twitches. “Did you get me real tea?”

“Depends on how low your standards are.”

“So, no.”

Zoro shrugs and sets the food down, feeling the words he needs to stay sitting under his tongue like a splinter. He hates this kind of thing, honestly, this balancing act of tell him / don’t tell him. Worse, he hates how he doesn’t know if telling the truth in this room’s going to make everything worse or just make him feel less like he’s lying by omission.

Sanji picks up the tea with his good hand and squints at it. “Did you —”

“Your dad was here.”

Sanji turns his head very, very slowly. “Zeff’s on the other —”

“No. Your… the other one. Big boofhead looking guy.” He swallows. “Wanted your records or something.”

Sanji’s fingers have gone too tight around the cup and Zoro watches in real fucking time how everything that makes the blonde recognisably himself — the edge, the sarcasm, that restless intelligence in his mouth and eyes — just disappears, making him look younger and older both, like somebody stripped down to the bone. Then, almost as quickly, he throws himself back together. The whole thing snaps back into place with so much speed it’s almost frightening. His tone comes out bright and harmless. “Well, what a charming fucking surprise. And here I thought the day had already done its worst.”

Zoro watches him take a sip of tea and pull a face. “I said he was asking for your records, Curls.”

Sanji shrugs with his good shoulder. “Sounds like him.”

Pulling the visitor chair closer, Zoro drops into it because standing there while Sanji does this fake little routine feels like watching someone balance on a tightrope and pretend the drop doesn’t exist. “Law shut it down. I guess Luffy called him?”

Sanji closes his eyes for a second, exhaling steadily. “Sure. Of course.”

Zoro scrubs a hand over his face, knowing this is the part he’s bad at it — the part where there’s something real moving under the surface and he has to get it out through a mouth that’s, so far, mostly built for arguments. “I didn’t know if I should tell you.”

The shift in Sanji’s expression is tiny but immediate. The brightness dims by just enough. “Right.”

“But…” He has to stop himself because the but is the whole fucking thing and he doesn't have the right words lined up. He doesn’t know how to have the right words lined up. He looks down at his own hand, wrapped around his own coffee. “I figured it’s… your shit. So you should know. I”m not… Curls, you know I’m serious about this, right?”

Sanji blinks at him. “What?”

Great, fantastic, incredible. Zoro would very much like for the ground to open up and swallow him whole, but in lieu of that he grits his teeth. Sanji’s still looking at him like the conversation took a left turn he wasn’t prepared for, so Zoro makes a point of slowing the fuck down and trying not to sound like he wants to fight his own voice. “I know it’s new and I know maybe this stuff is… different. For you. Or private? Or whatever. But I’m not — I’m not messing around here. With you.”

The words are clumsy and not enough and too much and he wants to say i’m not temporary and i’m not here for the easy version of you and i want to be let in when it’s ugly, too but what comes out is: “I just. I mean it.”

Sanji’s face does something terribly complicated, edging into baffled before tipping straight into incredulous. “Yeah? I know you mean it?”

“Oh.”

Frowning, he leans back against the headboard very carefully, that awful too bright cheer dropping the hell away enough to show whatever’s happening for him underneath. He rubs his temple with his fingers. “That's not the problem, Moss.”

Zoro can feel the way his mouth flattens. “Then what is it?”

Sanji looks at the blanket instead of him, the TV chef silently moving in the corner of the room. Somewhere a monitor goes off and the tea gets colder and when Sanji finally speaks his voice is quieter than Zoro’s heard it in months. Years, maybe. “I know you’re serious. We both are, we wouldn’t be here if…”

“Then why didn’t you tell me?”

“You make it sound simpler than it is.”

“It should be simple.”

Sanji glances up with the old flash of heat in his face. “Oh, should it?”

Zoro’s temper stirs in reflex, tale as old as time, but whatever answer he was going to give dies when he really looks at his boyfriend, at the old wariness sitting on the blonde’s face that Zoro can’t place and doesn’t have the context for. Sanji turns the cup in his hand. “It’s not like I didn’t tell you because I thought you’d dump me. I know you’re not… like that. But I don’t know how to explain it without sounding insane.”

“Try.”

That gets him a sharp look before Sanji sighs. “It’s not about whether you mean this. It’s not even about trust, fuck. It’s just that some things don’t get better by being shared, you know? Some things just get… bigger. And if I tell you something shitty then I have to see what it does to you, too, and maybe that’s selfish or stupid or whatever but I know how to deal with my problem. I can do that. I don’t know how to… fix it for you, too.”

Zoro leans forward, elbows on his knees, coffee forgotten. He’s trying very hard not to say the wrong thing, which mostly means he’s saying nothing and getting angrier by the second. The whole problem feels stupidly close to his hands and impossible to grab. “If something’s bad I’m not asking you to tell me so I can fix your feelings or whatever. I just want to know. I want you to let me know.”

“Wow,” Sanji mutters. “This is my first concussion in ages and it’s still somehow not the worst headache you’ve ever given me. I can’t believe you really thought I didn’t know you were serious about this.”

Zoro’s face heats. “Yeah, well. You make it hard to tell what you know sometimes.”

Sanji looks at the sling and the blanket and the tea and anywhere but at him. His lips are pursed. “I know.”

“You can tell me anything.”

Against all odds, Sanji looks even more baffled. “Again, that’s not really the issue here.”

“Yeah.” Zoro slouches in his chair, letting the sting hit. “I’m getting that.”

After a few minutes Sanji takes a bite of the sandwich and makes an expression of mild surprise. “Wow. This is actually decent? Maybe I should get hit by trucks more often.”

“Try it and I’ll kill yo myself.” Zoro sits there while Sanji eats the hospital sandwich and drinks terrible cold tea and pretends none of this is as bad as it is. He still doesn’t know who Vinsmoke really is to him beyond father and asshole. He still doesn’t know hwy seeing Sanji’s whole face change in the space of one sentence made something in him go cold. Worse than all of it, he doesn’t know what, exactly, he’s supposed to do with the fact that love and access and trust are possibly not the same thing in Sanji’s head.

But when Sanji finishes half his sandwich and, without looking at him, nudges the other half towards him on the tray like sharing’s easier than saying anything else, Zoro takes it and stays.

Sanji gets discharged a few days later under a cloud of paperwork and warnings and Chopper’s increasingly specific instructions.

“No bright lights if you can help it,” he says, standing at the foot of the bed with a tote bag full of pull bottles and pamphlets and the righteous authority of a man the third of everyone’s size and twice as terrifying. “No long shifts. No drinking! No heavy lifting. No screens if they make the headache worse. No pretending your headache isn’t bad when it’s bad!”

Sanji, wearing his own clothes again and looking more human for it, though still too pale and too tired around his mouth, nods along with visible impatience. “Yeah, I got it, Chop.”

“And no turning to go back to work in two days!”

Zoro, leaning against the wall by the door with the flowers Franky insisted on and exactly one of the hospital blankets that somehow got folded into their things by accident, nearly smirks. “Trust me, he’s not going back.”

Chopper nods, satisfied. “Good.”

Sanji glares at both of them like they’ve both committed mutiny and it’s almost weird how quickly Sanji’s apartment rearranges itself around the injury. The pain meds and water bottles take over the kitchen bench and the couch gets a permanent nest of blankets because Sanji’s headache’s better in the lounge room in the afternoons because the light’s softer there. An extra pillow appears in bed for the knee. Zoro’s bag ends up by the wardrobe and then doesn’t leave. He’d said matter of factly, while Sanji was trying to lower himself onto the couch without looking like it hurt: “I’m staying.”

Sanji had glanced up form the under the hair that Nami really needs to trim, tired and suspicious both. “‘Til when?”

“Until your head stops being stupid.”

“My haed is not stupid?”

“Your stupid head got hit by a truck.”

Sanji had laughed and then immediately regretted it when his ribs complained, and Zoro’d been beside him before the sound had fully left his mouth, one hand already at his side and the other hovering uselessly because he still doesn’t know where to touch when pain’s involved and love’s making him panic.

Their friends come through in waves, Luffy bursting through the door the day after discharge with enough groceries to feed a family of six. “I didn’t know what you’d need!”

Sanji, horizontal on the couch with a cool cloth over his eyes, flinches. “Bloody hell.”

Law comes in carrying a smaller bag and looking like he’s hating his life, which is pretty standard. He checks Sanji’s pupils with a penlight despite not being Sanji’s doctor, like, ever. “You still have light sensitivity.”

“I have you sensitivity.”

“Hopefully it’s fatal. Hold still.”

Luffy, meanwhile, has ended up seated crosslegged on the floor by Sanji’s knees, unpacking snacks with the grave concentration of someone preparing emergency rations for the winter. “I got the good crackers, the wattleseed ones you like.”

Sanji blinks down at him, expression gone affectionate. “Thanks, Luff.”

Luffy beams like he’s been handed the moon and the visits keep coming. Nami sweeps in one evening in a coat that costs more than Zoro’s bike repairs for a month and takes over the kitchen. She brings flowers, fruit, three different kinds of electrolyte drinks and a spreadsheet on her tablet that she sets down like a threat, divvying up every single one of Sanji’s alleged chores between the whole friend group. Robin comes with books and a kind of serene menace that makes the whole apartment feel safer somehow, sitting by the window in the low light and reading awful, smutty romance novels aloud when Sanji’s headache is bad enough that conversation feels like gravel under skin. Usopp and Chopper come together and make the place feel younger; Usopp brings magazines and stupid little gadgets and, at one point, puts on a whole-ass shadow puppet show.

Sometimes the apartment is full and sometimes it’s just one person dropping in after work, staying an hour and eating the food Zoro reheated wrong. Through it all, though, there’s the small miracle of normalcy reasserting itself: Luffy asleep half off the chair and Nami arguing on the phone in the hallway while Robin waters Sanji’s basil and Usopp losing at cards, somehow, to a concussed man because he’s too busy telling a story and Law standing in the kitchen at midnight, reading ingredient labels because Sanji had said the pharmacy painkillers were packed with garbage and has taken that as some kind of challenge.

They settle into a rhythm Zoro doesn't have a name for, Sanji on the couch with his head tipped against Zoro’s shoulder while some terrible cooking competition murmurs from the television and Zoro in the kitchen making tea badly enough that Sanji heckles him and the two of them in bed, not always touching but always aware of where the other one is. One evening Sanji wakes cranky and starving and with the kind of headache that makes overhead lights feel like a personal attack, so Zoro cooks. He likes to think he’s improved over the last week but Sanji sits on the stool in one of Zoro’s shirts and lasts about thirty seconds before he scowls. “You’re cutting those wrong.”

Zoro doesn’t look up from the carrots. “Really not.”

“You’re hacking them.” Sanji’s watching him with his chin propped on his hand, eyes still a little dull from the headache but way more himself than he’s been in days. There’s a faint groove in his cheek from the pillow and the sight hits Zoro so damn softly in the chest that it almost pisses him off.

“You wanna do it?”

Sanji lifts the bad wrist with a smirk. “Aw, sucks to be you.”

Later, after dinner and meds and a card game Nami starts over DenDen and Luffy hijacks, they end up on the couch again, Sanji half curled into the corner with his head against Zoro’s shoulder. Zoro has one arm along the back of the couch and the other resting low across Sanji’s thigh and Zoro’s so fucking in love with him that he has to stare at the muted TV and think about how weird it is that something can feel so new and so, so inevitable at the same time.

He tilts his head against Sanji’s hair. “You want anything?”

Sanji doesn’t open his eyes. “Mm. Stay.”

Zoro’s throat tightens. He presses a kiss into the blonde. “Alright.”

A week later, Zoro takes his first shift at work since the accident, doing a half day so he can come home for lunch despite Sanji’s repeated insistence that i’m fine, moss, i don’t need a fulltime babysitter. Work’s brutal in a very physical way, leaving him smeared with grease and grime and somebody’s oat latte they’d spilled on him, and by the end of the shift all he wants is a quiet night on the couch. Maybe they’ll find something terrible on TV and maybe Sanji will wear one of those old, soft shirts he only wears at home, leg stretched out because the knee’s still bad enough that bending it too long pisses him off. He stops by the pharmacy on the way and then the Thai place next door, grabbing pain meds and too many noodles for two grown men to reasonably consume.

He unlocks Sanji’s door with the spare key, instantly relieved that the apartment’s warmer than the world outside, already full of the layered smells of Sanji existing. There’s low music playing from somewhere in the lounge room, too soft to make out, floor lamps on instead of overhead lights. He shrugs his jacket off and shakes the rain out of his hair and then realises there’s a woman standing near the coffee table, tall and pink haired. Zoro’s brain has just enough time to register that she looks like Sanji — same bones somewhere under the polish, same mouth in a different shape — before he realises Sanji has frozen on the couch and that’s what tells him this is bad. His face smooths over as whatever room lives inside him goes dark.

The woman’s gaze flicks over Zoro, quick and assessing, before shifting softer in a way that feels deliberate. “You must be the boyfriend.”

Zoro doesn’t get a chance to answer — Sanji’s voice comes flat and quick. “Reiju was just leaving.”

Zoro feels the name drop into place and make everything worse, even as Reiju looks at Sanji. Whatever she reads in his expression seems to settle something inside of her because she slides her arm into her thick coat. “I was.”

Sanji doesn’t look at her and the tiny agreeable sound he makes is somehow more alarming than if he’d snapped. Zoro has to set the bag down on the floor because his hand’s started tightening almost painfully around the handle.

Reiju only pauses when she reaches the front door. “Think about it.”

Sanji’s jaw tightens. “Yeah. I heard you the first time.”

Reiju’s expression changes by almost nothing. The click of the door shutting behind her sounds too loud, Sanji staring hard at the wall above the TV while Zoro just stares at Sanji. He’s seen Sanji angry plenty of times, is the thing. He’s seen the blonde smug and furious and starving and sleep deprived and bleeding and hungover and incandescent with the need to yell at someone, but this? This cold little absence? This is new.

He clears his throat. “What’s going on?”

Sanji shrugs with the good shoulder, too careful of the other, and too practiced about pretending the movement doesn’t hurt. “Family crap.”

The answer is so useless it almost makes Zoro laugh. “Family crap,” he repeats, sounding a hell of a lot blanker than he feels.

Sanji’s expression is enough to be a warning, but not sharp enough to be fully alive. “Yeah.”

“And she’s your sister, right?”

“So?”

Zoro puts the bag on the kitchen bench harder than he means to. “And you’re just gonna leave it there?”

Sanji’s eyes narrow. “What d’you want me to say?”

The question lands harder than it should because Zoro doesn't actually know. He doesn’t know what the correct question or answer is here. They’ve only been dating for a few months, sure, but they’ve been in each others lives for years now and somewhere in Zoro’s head those two facts have already braided themselves into something permanent. Sanji, though… Sanji’s looking at him like this still belongs in some private place Zoro hasn’t earned a key to, hospital conversation be damned.

“I want to know what that was,” Zoro says slowly.

Sanji lets out a breath through his nose. “My sister came by?”

“No shit.”

“Then congrats, Moss, you know what happened.”

Zoro feels his own temper spike, hot and frustrated. “That’s it? That’s all I get?”

Sanji’s mouth twists. “You’re not ‘getting’ anything. I’m not a fucking prize machine.”

The line should piss him off more than it does, but it doesn’t. It sinks right into the tenderest part bruise he’s got because that’s the truth of it, isn’t it? He’s never thought he’s owed anything for showing up with noodles and pain meds like some stray hoping to be let inside. He knows better — he’s always known that Sanji gets to keep whatever pieces of himself he wants. Still, standing here in the quiet that Reiju left behind, Zoro can’t help the smaller, quieter hurt from unfolding anyway, cracking open a little behind his ribs. Maybe Sanji hasn’t even tried letting him in. Maybe he never will.

“Right,” he mutters.

Sanji rubs at his forehead with his good hand, fingers pressing carefully. His shoulders are drawn right, exhaustion and pain laced through every line of him. “I’m not doing this tonight.”

Zoro lets out a slow breath, the fight draining out of him before it can really catch. He drags the bag over to the coffee table and the gesture feels heavier than it should, like an offering he’s not sure will be accepted. “You eat?”

“Not since breakfast.”

“Good. Means I brought food at the right time.” He opens the lids because Sanji’s cast makes it awkward while Sanji complains about the soup being from the wrong place, but eats it anyway. Zoro hands him his meds with water without being asked and Sanji takes them with only a little grumbling. The record turns over into something softer and the apartment warms again, or at least pretends to. Later, he helps Sanji up because standing still makes the knee lock weirdly and god knows getting to the bathroom’s some kind of demonic project management. Sanji hates every second of it, obviously.

“Don’t hover,” he mutters while Zoro steadies him by the elbow.

“You’re wobbling.”

“I am not wobbling.”

“You’re literally wobbling.”

“That’s because you’re distracting me with your ugly face!” Sanji brushes his teeth with his bad wrist held away from the sink and when they get to bed it’s all quieter .The apartment lights are off except for the one in the hallway and the soft orange spill from the streetlight outside. The room smells like the smoke that’s always in Sanji’s hair no matter how many times he washes it. Sanji gets in carefully, all the easy grace he usually carries stripped down to sheer logistics, and Zoro leaves enough space that Sanji can choose what he wants, which is apparently to move closer. The line of his good shoulder fits against Zoro’s chest when he finally settles and Zoro puts a hand over his waist and breathes him in, smoke and all. For a while they just lie there listening to the city through the window, until Zoro swallows and tries again. “Sanji.”

Sanji breathes in and out and keeps his voice very even. “She just invited me to dinner.”

The word invited sits there between them, Zoro’s hand tightening at the other man’s waist before he remembers himself. “That doesn’t sound like an invitation.”

“No shit, Moss.”

Zoro stares into the dark over Sanji’s shoulder. “When?”

“Next Thursday.” Sanji shifts carefully, face turned into the pillow now, voice already starting to go blurred with exhaustion. “She says it’ll be easier if I go.”

“Easier for who?”

He lets out one of his awful dry laughs. “Exactly.”

The frustration in Zoro’s chest is too heavy and too deep to be simple anger anymore and the words feel useless the moment they leave his mouth. “You don’t have to go.”

“I do.” Sanji makes a small, tired sound, something between a sigh and surrender. Zoro feels the shift happen: the slow uncoiling of tension in his frame, muscle by muscle, until his weight settles heavier against Zoro’s side, warm and solid and impossibly trusting in sleep.

“Curls,” Zoro murmurs, one last try, but there’s no answer so he lies there in the dark while this new piece of the map lodges itself in his throat, cold and unfamiliar and jagged. He knows the Sanji who built himself sharp and brilliant and untouchable, but he doesn’t know the foundations underneath. He doesn’t know what was torn down or buried or burned to make room for the person he’s holding now.

maybe this is just how it works, he thinks. Maybe being with someone means discovering, bit by bit, how many safes they carry inside of them. Maybe a few months in, this is as close as anyone gets. The thought doesn’t comfort him at all because he wants in anyway, wants to be the one Sanji calls before the sister walks in.

He just… doesn’t know how the hell to get there.

x

When he meets up with Luffy the next day the dojo’s mostly empty. The smell of it usually settles him quicker than anything else on the planet (except, maybe, one very smoky man) but it’s taking a little longer to kick in tonight. There’s something about a room built for impact that makes the world simpler, all polished boards and stacked mats and lights buzzing overhead, highlighting the familiar give and drag of bare feet against a sprung floor. In a place like this, every problem reduces down to distance and timing and angle and force, a language Zoro understands better than any.

The beginners karate class had cleared out ten minutes ago, leaving behind one abandoned water bottle by the mirrors and the only sound now is the rain ticking against the windows and the occasional thud from another room where someone’s doing bag work.

Luffy bounces on the balls of his feet at the centre of the floor, grinning like he’s been promised dessert and violence in equal measure. “You’re late!”

Zoro drops his bag by the wall. “You’re annoying.”

“Yeah,” Luffy says cheerfully. “You look worse.”

Zoro ignores that in favour of peeling off his shirt, tossing it aside to roll his shoulders out. The tightness there doesn't shift; it hasn’t shifted since he opened Sanji’s door to find his sister standing inside. Luffy watches him with that open, bright face of his that fools strangers into thinking there’s nothing going on behind it, but there’s always something going on behind it. “Stretch properly.”

Zoro flips him off.

Luffy beams. “See? Worse.”

They bow because old habits are built deeper than thought, then circle. Luffy comes in first quick and loose, all instinct and joy. Zoro blocks and pivots, landing a hit to the shoulder that Luffy takes it with a delighted laugh before he ducks low and weeps. Zoro jumps it clean and for a blessed minute the room narrows to easy things like weight and balance and breath. The problem is, his body’s off. He knows it by the third exchange: he’s overcommitting, following through too hard and leaving openings he normally wouldn’t. His timing is there, sure, but his focus keeps sliding just before contact.

Luffy’s foot catches him in the ribs before he hops back. “You’re thinking too loud.”

Zoro wipes sweat off his mouth with the back of his hand. “Shut up.”

Luffy tilts his head. “See?”

Zoro comes in on the next pass with more force than he needs but Luffy takes it, redirecting to shove. Zoro ends up taking two steps back to keep his footing but Luffy doesn’t press, not this time. Instead, he bounces twice before dropping into a loose stance and says, like they’re in the middle of a normal conversation and not halfway through kicking the shit out of each other: “Sanji, right?”

Zoro’s jaw tightens.

Luffy points at his face. “That’s your Sanji face. It’s kinda like your regular face, but more angry.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means you’re worried.”

Zoro exhales through his nose and gestures vaguely with one hand. “Again.”

They go again but Luffy’s always been impossible to spare with properly when he’s talking. He fights like a storm and talks like he’s eating, which is to say constantly and happily, with no sense of conservation. Zoro clips his arm and Luffy lands a heel against his thigh and they break and circle and close.

“When’d you know?” The words slip out in the middle of movement, falling into the open before Zoro can really stop them.

Luffy blinks, then grins so wide Zoro briefly considers walking the hell out. “Know what?”

Zoro nearly says nevermind but he huffs and catches Luffy’s wrist to spin him away. “With Law.”

That gets Luffy’s full attention: he resets his stance, softer now and less playful.

“When it stopped being one thing,” Zoro continues because god knows if he says the rest of it straight he might actually die on his floor. “And became… something else.”

Luffy’s quiet for exactly one heartbeat. “It didn’t stop being the first thing. He’s still my friend. It just got… more.”

They trade a quick burst before Zoro has to jerk back from it, breathing a little harder, trying to figure out how to explain that it’s not that he expects Sanji to tell him everything just because they’re dating now. He’s not ignorant enough to think that a few months changes the way privacy works. If anything it’s the opposite: to Zoro they’re still everything they were before — friends, best friends — and now there's more on top of it. He had thought, stupidly maybe, that Sanji felt that too.

Luffy watches something change in his face and punches him in the shoulder. “Don’t get all dramatic in your head.”

Zoro rubs the spot. “You talk too much.”

“Yeah.” Luffy rocks back on his heels. “You do when you’re upset, too, but only inside.”

“Inside is private.”

Luffy snorts. “Not if your face keeps telling on you.”

They circle again, slower this time. It’s less sparring now and more moving their bodies through the shape of it so that the talking can happen without having to sit still and look each other in the eyes like civilised people. “If somebody doesn’t tell you stuff… the bad stuff. The old stuff. Does that mean they don’t trust you?”

Luffy’s expression morphs, just a minutely. He gets quieter, even as he wipes the sweat from his forehead, hands running through his sopping hair. “No, not always.”

They comes together again, more out of habit than need. Luffy catches Zoro’s forearm and Zoro catches his shoulder and they break. The floor groans a little under their feet.

“Sometimes it means it hurts,” Luffy explains, voice a little clipped, a little careful. “Sometimes it means they don’t know how to talk about it yet. Sometimes they think keeping it to themselves is helping.”

Zoro thinks of Sanji n the dark, already halfway to sleep, saying i do in that voice like it was obvious.

Luffy shrugs. “Sanji gets weird about stuff that hurts. He thinks he’s gotta handle it.”

Zoro looks away, towards the mirrors, to where their reflections are moving, one all lean weight and restraint and the other loose and bright and impossible. Something in his chest pulls tight. “I don’t know if I’m asking for too much. I know he doesn’t have to tell me everything. I’m not saying —” He cuts himself off, jaw working. “It’s just…”

Luffy waits patiently, head cocked until Zoro scrubs a hand over his face. “I don’t know if he gets that it’s different now.”

It’s not like Zoro’s doing this casually. He never was. He doesn’t know how to be casual with anything, let alone the first person he’s ever wanted. Loved. He’s with Sanji for as long as Sanji will have him, but maybe Sanji still doesn’t believe that. Or, worse, maybe he does but doesn’t know what to do with it.

Either way, Zoro keeps running into that fact like a wall.

Luffy taps his toes, thinking. “You’re one of us and you’re his boyfriend. Those aren’t different teams.”

Zoro sighs, because yeah, that’s what he’s been failing to explain even to himself. He doesn’t want to stop being Sanji’s friend just because they kiss now and sleep in the same bed and know how the other one sounds right before they come. He doesn’t want a new category that erases the old one — he wants the old one to mean more now, wants to be allowed to carry different weight with it.

They move again, more lightly now. Luffy throws a kick; Zoro catches it and shoves him off balance and the other man just goes with it, rolling and springing back up with entirely too much delight.

“How’d you know?” Zoro asks eventually. “If you are pushing too hard.”

Luffy answers so quickly it’s obvious he doesn’t need to think about it. “You ask.”

Zoro scowls. “That’s not —”

“And then if he says no, you listen,” Luffy says over him. “But you can still tell him you wanna be there for him.”

The dojo hums around them as Zoro looks down at his hands and thinks of Sanji’s apartment and the cast and Reiju standing in the warm light looking at him, like she was passing off responsibility or asking for help or both. He thinks of Thursday. “I don’t know if he’ll let me help.”

Luffy drops down to the floor and rocks around a little, stretching out those long limbs. His expression is pensive. “Law doesn’t tell me everything either, not right away. Not when it’s bad. He gets all weird and quiet and acts like if he just keeps holding it all by himself, it’ll stay smaller.”

That sounds familiar enough to make something in Zoro’s chest ache. “So what do you do?”

Luffy smiles, certain. “I stay where he can find me.” Zoro rolls his shoulder again and the tightness in them hasn’t gone, exactly, but it’s changed shape. It feels less like panic and more like some kind of decision and Luffy brightens all the way back up. “There! You’re less stupid now.”

Zoro lunges at him just to stop the talking and Luffy yelps with delight, meeting him head on. They hit the mats hard, laughing and swearing and trying to choke each other out — Zoro gets Luffy down eventually, forearm braced across his chest and knee pinning his arm until Luffy laughs, thrilled. After, they both sit on the edge of the mat for a minute, sweat cooling and shoulders knocking. Outside, the rain has softened to a whisper. Luffy takes a drink from his water bottle and says: “If you love somebody, you tell them where you are. Then they can come get you.”

There isn’t really anything safe to say to that, not without cracking open doors he’s not ready to walk through, so Zoro pushes to his feet, snatches his towel and smacks it across Luffy’s face with just enough force to make him laugh.

Later, stepping out into the damp night, Zoro finally knows what to do with the knot that’s been twisting under his ribs for days.

He still doesn’t know what vinsmoke truly means to Sanji, what kind of poison it carries or how deep the scars run or what version of himself Sanji has to become at that dinner table, or whether any of this is normal. He knows where he stands and that what he can’t live with — what would hollow him out — is pretending the line between friend and boyfriend means he should stand back now and give Sanji more space instead of pressing closer. Closer to the sharp edges, closer to the ugly parts, closer to whatever Sanji’s still trying to carry alone. He won’t do it. He can’t.

And if on Thursday Sanji tells him no… well. At least they’ll finally have the fight honestly instead of letting it rot in the dark.

x

The days leading up to the dinner fray from bad to worse, but the decline is so quiet and so carefully hidden that no-one else seems to notice. They see Sanji moving and talking and cooking but Zoro clocks it immediately, the way he reads the smallest shift in the balance of his swords: by weight, by muscle memory, by the faint wrongness that settles under his skin and refuses to leave. He knows the shape of Sanji’s moods like he knows his own blades, intimate and instinctive and impossible to ignore once felt.

Sanji returns to work in short, cautious shifts where he’s banned from anything that isn’t planning menus and ordering stock. He comes home smelling like garlic and onions and fish and then cooks anyway, disappearing into the methodical rituals of chopping and stirring like it’s the only language his hands trust right now. He still calls Zoro a seaweed-brained idiot with that spark, still lights his cigarettes with the same flick of the wrist, still collapses into bed beside Zoro at night.

The real change is subtler. Sanji, who usually moves like forward momentum given human force, has started disappearing in plain sight. He’ll stand at the kitchen bench with a knife in his hand, eyes fixed somewhere far beyond the tiles, lost in a silence so complete it feels like he’s stepped out of his own body. Then, without warning, he’ll jolt back with a too bright anyway! like he can outrun the gap he just left behind.

Each time it happens something twists sharper and helpless in Zoro’s chest. He wants to reach in and pull Sanji back to solid ground. He wants to stand between him and whatever ghosts are crowding in but all he can do is watch and sit with the knowledge that the man he loves is folding in on wounds Zoro himself isn’t allowed to see. He starts catching the blonde staring at the kettle as it boils and at the dark apartment window after midnight and at his own phone facedown on the table like it’s a dead animal he doesn’t want to touch. His wrist’s still stiff and his knee’s still a problem and the concussion is a jerk in quieter ways, bringing headaches and fatigue that drops on him at random times, and an ongoing sensitivity to shop lights that make him come home meaner than usual.

His phone goes off at all hours now, and sometimes he ignores it outright but sometimes he checks the screen before putting it back down. Reiju, maybe, but there are so many random numbers that flash across the screen and Zoro doesn’t ask. That’s becoming its own quiet strain: the way he catalogues every small fracture and says nothing because speaking feels too much like pressing a thumb into an open burn. He doesn’t want to pry. He doesn’t want Sanji to think being together automatically grants him keys to every secret inside of him, but underneath that careful restraint sits the deeper frustration that he knows is unfair. Or maybe it isn’t unfair, maybe it’s just impatient. A few months isn’t a lifetime, after all, but Zoro’s body had made its decision long before the calendar caught up, that this person was his to stand beside, his to fight with, his to hold thorough whatever came. The want had rooted deep and fast, stubborn as the rest of him, long before they first kissed.

So, he hovers. When Sanji cooks Zoro leans in the kitchen doorway pretending to scroll on his phone, stealing glances at the tense line of Sanji’s shoulders. When Sanji slips outside for a smoke, Zoro follows without excuse, settling his shoulder against the cold brick beside him while the city murmurs below. When Sanji dozes off halfway through a show on the couch, Zoro stays right there, one broad hand resting warm and steady on Sanji’s ankle, the TV’s flickering light washing over them. In return, Sanji shuts down in waves, lashing out in unpredictable bursts, all sharp jokes and sudden fights, nitpicking the way Zoro holds a knife, anything to drag the room back into safe, familiar ground. Zoro lets him, every single time.

He’s also getting very, very tired of letting him.

On Saturday they have dinner with the others because Nami announces they’re seeing the world and none of them are allowed to object. They go to some little neighbourhood izakaya that has cheap beer and grilled skewers smoking under the vent. Luffy’s already on his second plate before everybody’s sat down. On the surface it’s a normal night with their friends: Zoro sits beside Sanji and the others spill around them in bright, noisy waves. Nami steals half of Robin’s edamame and Luffy reaches across three plates for more karaage and gets his hand slapped by just about everybody in range. Usopp starts a debate about whether one could survive a dingo attack by projecting enough confidence and Sanji laughs and throws comments like knives, relaxing into Zoro’s shoulder and it’s normal except for how it feels like some part of the blonde’s running separate from the room, parallel to it, counting down to something nobody else can see.

Zoro feels it everytime Sanji’s phone buzzes in his pocket and Sanji doesn’t check it, and in the way Sanji comes back from the bathroom looking exactly the same except for the tiny set of his mouth. Luffy notices, too, catching Zoro’s eye across the table while Usopp’s in the middle of claiming he could absolutely seduce a dangerous heiress if the mission required it, and gives him one brief, very un-Luffy like frown.

Zoro looks away fast.

On the way home, Sanji’s quiet and back at at the apartment he peels off his coat and hangs it up with too much care, then stands there with his hand still on the wall like he forgot what comes next. Zoro watches him from the kitchen doorway, irritation moving hot and liquid under his skin.

Sunday is marginally better but Monday is worse again. Tuesday passes in a blur of work and painkillers and one stupid fight over nothing that ends with Sanji apologising too quickly and Zoro feeling like an asshole. By Wednesday the air between them has become so loaded with what they’re not saying that even the good moments feel sharp edged which is why, maybe, the softness catches them both off guard when it comes. Sanji’s standing by the wardrobe in boxers, hair damp and curling at the ends where it brushes his neck. He pulls the shirt over his head one-armed, with more awkwardness than he’d ever admit. It catches for a second on his wrist and he swears under his breath, so Zoro gets up and hooks his fingers into the hem, smoothing it down over Sanji’s ribs before pulling him into a kiss, sleepy and warm. The kiss is familiar in a way that still surprises Zoro sometimes — that this is his now, this mouth, this body leaning in, this private ease after years of sparking off each other. Sanji kisses like he does most things, with skill and attention and an edge of wit even when he’s half gone, and Zoro kisses direct and certain and learning by contact: together, they make something that still feels kind of miraculous.

Sanji’s fingers catch in the front of his Zoro’s shirt and Zoro’s hand slides from his waist to the small of his back as the world goes quiet around them. Sanji’s mouth curves against his and Zoro kisses the smile because he can and because it pulls that small pleased sound from Sanji.

“Better mood,” Zoro murmurs against his mouth.

Sanji’s eyes are still closed. “Maybe.”

Zoro kisses the corner of his mouth and his jaw and the soft skin just under his ear and then, because he’s an idiot and his brain stupidly mistakes tenderness for safety, and because he’s still trying to feel his way around where the line is now, he says easy and offhand: “Reckon your family’ll kill me if I don’t know what a cumberband is?”

Sanji goes completely rigid under Zoro’s hands. The shift hits him before his brain catches up, and Zoro’s stomach plummets like he’s missed a step on a sheer drop. “Forget it,” he says at once, voice rough with instant regret. “Bad joke.”

Sanji takes a single step back, but the distance feels cavernous, like the whole room just stretched thin and cold between them. His voice comes out flat. “Yeah. No shit.”

Zoro opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again. The words tangle uselessly. “I didn’t mean —”

“I know.” Sanji sits on the edge of the bed, spine straight, and at this point Zoro’d rather Sanji yell or throw something or kick him out or tell him to fuck off. Anything but this dead, polished calm that makes Zoro feel like he’s standing on a glass floor.

“Sorry,” he mutters. He doesn’t even know how much of it he means — sorry for the joke, sorry for pushing, sorry that every step closer still feels like it costs Sanji something.

Sanji rubs the back of his neck with his good hand, slow and tired. “S’fine. I hadn’t scheduled a fight in tonight, but we both know I’m flexible.”

Zoro forces his breathing steady, trying to keep his pulse from kicking up. “Who said anything about a fight?”

Sanji finally turns his head and looks at him, the eye contact landing like a punch. “We’re definitely having one eventually. Might as well not waste the evening.”

Zoro knows he should back off: they still haven’t figured out how to fight without drawing blood, not like this. The words slip out anyway. “I’m not trying to waste anything, Curls.”

Something flickers across Sanji’s face — guilt or frustration or just the awareness that they’re both fumbling around the edge of a knife neither of them knows how to hold without cutting themselves. Then it shutters closed and Sanji lies down with his back to Zoro, and the rejection stings deeper than it has any right to. He turns off the lamp and slides in beside him anyway, careful to leave space. The sheets feel colder than they should. After a long stretch of silence, Sanji inches back until their calves brush, tentative and wordless, a small bridge in the dark.

Zoro lies awake longer than he wants to, listening to the steady rhythm of Sanji’s breathing, then the faint creak of the mattress whenever one of them shifts. He thinks about timing, about categories that refuse to stay neat, about all the ways two people can be closer than ever and still feel worlds apart. About how maybe loving Sanji means learning to sit with the secrets and the sudden silences and the fear that he’ll always be one clumsy word away from making it worse.

Tomorrow can go to hell, he decides. Right now all he wants is the quiet warmth of Sanji’s leg against his and the stubborn certainty that he’ll keep trying anyway.

x

Tomorrow does go to hell.

The morning light slips through the curtains thin and reluctant, the kind of pale winter bleed that never quite commits. It pools across the sheets, doing nothing to warm the mess of dread that’s already lodged behind Zoro’s ribs when he wakes up. Beside him, Sanji’s already awake, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling with that weird, robotic stillness; Zoro watches the subtle bob of his throat as he swallows and the faint tension at the corner of his mouth. Then Sanji turns his head on the pillow. “You’re running late.”

Zoro grunts. “Got the day off.”

Sanji’s forehead crinkles, faint and confused. “Why?”

Zoro gives him a flat look. “Really?”

Sanji blinks once before something softer catches him off guard; his mouth goes a little blank, like he doesn’t know where the put the weight of this gesture. “Oh.”

Zoro rolls onto his back and folds his hands behind his head, trying to make it look casual, like he always takes days off for shit like this, like he isn’t already trying too hard. The ceiling stares back at him, the same boring white it always is but it’s easier than looking at Sanji’s surprised face right now. “C’mon. We’re not sitting in this apartment all day waiting to die.”

Sanji snorts, the sound fragile. “Optimistic.”

“I’m serious.”

“I can tell. It’s awful.”

Zoro elbows him under the blankets. “Shut up.”

The day goes better than it has any right to, at first. They walk two blocks for coffee because Sanji declares that if he has to face his blood relatives tonight he at least deserves a decent long black, which seems fair. Afterwards, they wander the neighbourhood slowly, shoulders brushing every now and then as they pass the florist with its peeling sign and the corner shop where the owner knows Sanji’s cigarette brand by heart yet judges him for it every single time. They pass the park where the grass has mostly surrendered to mud, where two kids in oversized puffer jackets are wrestling a kite into the weak wind with more hope than sense. Sanji talks the whole way, about the coffee’s bitterness and the idiot at work who thought their aioli came from a bottle and the ridiculous little dog they pass wearing boots and a yellow raincoat. He talks about anything except the clock ticking onwards, every sentence another brick in the wall he’s building between himself that the evening. Zoro plays along, letting himself be pulled into a silly debate over whether the dog looks cute or tortured. Zoro says tortured and Sanji says cute. They nearly stop at a bakery window, then don’t. At one point Sanji falls half a step behind as his knee catches and Zoro slows without comment until they’re back in the same rhythm.

For a while, the day almost feels salvageable. Sanji’s shoulder bumps his at a crossing and they bicker over whether to get groceries now or tomorrow but end up at the market anyway because Sanji insists they need lemons. Zoro retaliates that they don’t need twelve lemons — Sanji claims Zoro’s palate was ruined in infancy. The stall owner watches them argue their way through apples, parsley and a loaf of bread with the nonchalance of someone with no fucks to give.

The moment they get back to the apartment, though, the fragile normalcy starts to fray. Sanji puts the groceries away too hard, cupboard doors slamming with sharp little bangs. He stands too long at the sink after, both hands braced on the edge and head bowed over nothing, shoulders tight beneath the shirt he’s changed into. His fingers keep drifting to press against the wrist cast through his sleeve, checking it’s still there like some kind of talisman.

Zoro watches the next few hours fold inwards around the coming evening. Sanji’s edges sharpen. The banter thins, the pauses between his words stretching longer and emptier, pieces of him already leaving the room ahead of schedule. By three he’s pacing, window to kitchen and kitchen to bedroom and bedroom back to the lounge room — like a caged thing trying very hard not to look caged. Zoro sits on the couch with one arm slung over the back, pretending to be absorbed in some terrible action movie playing too low on the TV. He wants to say something but he has no fucking idea what.

you’re going to wear a hole in the floor. sit down. talk to me. don’t go. it’ll be fine. we don’t need them.

He draws in a deep breath and hopes for the best. “You should eat. It’s not like you’re gonna eat there.”

Sanji stops in the doorway between the kitchen and the lounge room and looks at him like he’s been addressed from underwater. “That’s stupid.”

Zoro shrugs. “Fine. Pass out at the table, then.”

That earns him a glare but it’s a weak one, barely there. Sanji drags one hand through his hair then abruptly crosses back into the lounge room. He stops right in front of the couch, and Zoro straightens on instinct. Sanji just… looks at him. His eyes are too bright, too wired, like every fear and dread and surge of adrenaline he’s been trying to outwalk all day has finally caught up and is clawing for an exit. His hands tremble faintly.

“Curls?”

Sanji leans down and kisses him, immediate and desperate and starving. Zoro kisses back instantly, because Sanji kissing him has always short circuited the careful parts of his brain: god knows Sanji’s mouth has always been the fastest way out of his own head. But even as Sanji climbs into his lap, pushing back into the cushions, and even as the room turns hot and close and electric all around them, Zoro knows what this is: Sanji grabbing for the nearest escape hatch inside his own body and dragging Zoro through it with him. Sex is simpler than waiting and want is simpler than dread, but Zoro doesn’t mind, not really.

His palm finds the warm dip of the other man’s waist and hold on, trying to anchor something — anything — through touch alone. They kiss fast and messy, breathless, Sanji making a wrecked little sound when Zoro’s teeth catch his bottom lip that shoots straight down Zoro’s spine. By the time Sanji’s kicked his jeans aside and settled atop him again, Zoro’s blood is roaring so loud in his ears that nothing else exists: Just skin and heat and the raw sounds Sanji lets slip when he forgets to hold them back.

Afterwards, the apartment settles around the heavy quiet. Zoro sits there catching his breath, listening to the both of them slowly return to earth. Sanji presses a kiss into his collarbone, then another to his hairline, almost reverent, and Zoro’s thumbs stroke slow arcs over the bare skin above the blonde’s hips. He can feel the faint tremor still running through Sanji’s thighs as the silence stretches, as it becomes clear Sanji’s finally run out of ways to outrun himself. He’s already starting to drift again, pulling back into that familiar guarded distance even while their bodies are still tangled and it hits Zoro like a slow blade: the helplessness, the frustration coiled tight in his gut because no matter how close they get in these moments he can’t reach the parts that Sanji keeps locking tighter. He wants to be let in so badly it spikes and the spike just keeps growing until the words tumble out, surprising even himself. “My parents died when I was a kid.”

Sanji licks his lips slowly, his expression softening into something puzzled and almost tender. “You really know how to pillow talk, Mosshead.”

Zoro stares up at the ceiling, heart still hammering against his ribs, the words feeling half formed before they leave his mouth. “You know Koushirou pretty much raised me.”

Sanji goes quiet, even though he does already know. Luffy knows. Nami knows. The whole damn group does, because some histories don’t arrive clean — they come in jagged fragments over years of friendship until they become part of some shared map. But Zoro says it anyway because this isn’t about telling Sanji something new. It’s about trying, badly, to wedge a door open where none eixsts. A clumsy, imperfect offering because it’s all he has to give.

“Koushirou was…” Zoro frowns, searching. “Good. Quiet? Didn’t say much unless he had to. Just let me smash my own face into shit until I figured out how not to.”

Sanji snorts softly against his shoulder. “Shocking that that suited you.”

“Yeah.” Zoro hesitates for half a breath, then pushes forward. “Whole friend group’s got shit parents or dead ones, apparently.”

Sanji lifts his head now, eyebrows arched in open disbelief. “This your attempt at comfort?”

“It’s not worse than your attempts.”

Sanji lets out an exhausted sound, something that might’ve been a laugh once, his eyes fluttering shut as he rocks back into it again, finding a lazy rhythm. Zoro’s hands slide up the warm length of his back, feeling the stubborn tension knotted along his spine. Sanji’s breath ghosts uneven and warm against Zoro’s neck, fingers twisting tight in his shirt. Every roll of Sanji’s hips drags through Zoro like a current, pulling him under even as he keeps talking.

Sanji’s voice comes out strained, kind of breathless. “It’s not the same.”

“I know it’s not. I know I had someone who gave a shit about me and you clearly didn’t. Not the way you should’ve.”

Sanji goes very still for a beat, before his hips press deeper, giving a deliberate, grounding roll that drags a sharper breath from the both of them. He buries his forehead harder against Zoro’s neck, like he can disappear there, and Zoro keeps going because he needs Sanji to keep talking, to stay here, anchored in this moment instead of slipping away again. “I don’t know what they did to you but I know you’ve come a long fucking way from whatever they tried to make you into it.”

Sanji doesn’t respond with words. Instead, his body answers, moving like he’s trying to press the truth of it into Zoro’s bones, like motion can outrun memory. Zoro feels the way their breathing has gone uneven and synced, hears the quiet sounds Sanji presses into his collarbone and for a moment it feels like they’re actually getting somewhere, like the door is cracking open just a little, until Sanji’s phone alarm blares from the coffee table, sharp and insistent.

Sanji freezes completely as Zoro opens his eyes, hands still firm on Sanji’s waist, still buried deep inside him. The alarm keeps ringing into the sudden, awful silence and Zoro swallows, hard. “We should… get dressed?”

“We? You’re not coming.”

Zoro blinks up at him in confusion as Sanji eases off him, the loss colder than it should be. Sanji kills the alarm and disappears into the bedroom without another word, pale in the light, mouth pressed into a hard line. Zoro stays there a second longer, chest tight with that familiar helpless frustration, before he does his jeans up and follows. He waits outside the ensuite door until Sanji reappears.

“Yeah,” Zoro says, quiet but stubborn. “I am.”

“No.”

Zoro leans back against the bedpost, folds his arms and scowls. “That’s not your call.”

Sanji laughs once, short and sharp and utterly humourless. He pulls on a new pair of pants with quick movements and pulls out one of his nicer button-up shirts. “It’s literally my family, Mosshead.”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly what?”

“Exactly why I’m coming.”

Sanji stares at him and for one second there’s almost no expression on his face at all, just that terrible flatness Zoro now recognises as danger. Then everything comes back too fast at once: anger and disbelief and a flash of something that looks a lot like fear before it hardens. “Absolutely fucking not. Cut it out.”

“Cut what out"?”

“This!” Sanji flaps his hand between them, clearly furious. “This stubborn macho bullshit where you decide the answer first and expect me to clap because you think you’re, what, protecting me?”

Zoro’s jaw tightens. “You think that’s what this is?”

“I know exactly what this is.”

“No,” he snaps. “You don’t.”

“I’m going to a dinner I don’t want to attend with people I don’t want to see,” Sanji’s voice is climbing now, clipped and bright and dangerous. “I don’t need you deciding to make some big fucking point in the middle of it because your pride got involved.”

Zoro takes one step closer. “My pride.”

“Yes, your pride,” Sanji sneers. “This absolutely has your stink all over it. You heard family and immediately decided somebody had to bare their teeth on my behalf.”

“That’s not what this is.”

Sanji barks out another laugh. “Then enlighten me!”

The room feels smaller but the rain at the window sounds louder and Zoro’s pulse is up now: he can feel it in his neck and his hands and he back of his teeth. The frustration that’s been building under his skin all week flares hot and ugly. He’s tried so hard not to make this about him, not to let his own hurt twist Sanji’s pain into some referendum on whether they’re actually together, but Sanji’s making it goddamn impossible. “I’m coming because I’m with you.”

Sanji’s mouth twists. “Oh, for fuck’s sakes. What d’you want? You want me to thank you, darling, for appointing yourself to a job nobody asked you to do?”

Zoro snarls and folds his arms tighter, harder, meaner. “There’s that thing you do, where you act like caring about you is some kind of insult.”

Sanji’s face flashes. “Don’t.”

“Why, hit a nerve?”

Sanji takes one limping step forward and stops too close, eyes bright with rage stretched over panic so thin it’s almost transparent. His voice is low and vicious. “You have no idea what those people are like.”

“Then fucking tell me!”

Sanji recoils half an inch and that small movement hurts more than any yelling has. “You don’t get to ask me that now. I’m an hour away from having to sit at a table and let them look at me and I’m already wasting too much energy on you.”

Zoro goes dangerously still. He sees the instant flicker of regret behind Sanji’s anger, and then watches it get shoved down and buried. It still lands like a blow. “Right.”

Sanji drags his hand through his hand. “Oh, don’t do that. Use your words if you’re going to be pissed off.”

Zoro’s laugh rips out of him — mean and awful and sour, nothing he ever wanted to hear himself make. “You want words? At some point this stops sounding like safety and starts sounding like you just don’t want me there.”

The room goes dead silent. Sanji stares at him like Zoro just slapped him across the face, Zoro’s heartbeat thudding wildly in his ears, louder than the rain lashing outside. He keeps going anyway — the wound’s open now and pretending it isn’t feels impossible. “You keep acting like I’m standing outside this. Like I’m just one of your friends waiting around for you to come back once the shitty part’s done.”

“That’s not what this is, Zoro.” Sanji’s hands clench at his sides. “This is me trying not to take you into a room full of assholes who’ll figure out exactly who you are to me and use it.”

“Oh, so now you’re worried I’m just something else for them to ruin.”

Sanji’s temper snaps completely. “Fucking hell, you really do love making this all about you, don’t you?”

Zoro takes another step forward, forcing Sanji to tilt his head down to hold eye contact. “I’m making it about the fact that I’m your boyfriend.” The word comes out hard, almost accusatory, because if he says it softer he’ll hear too much of his own raw need underneath.

Sanji’s laugh is a disbelieving sound that cracks in the middle. “And, what, that changes the fucking laws of physics? Suddenly you’re bulletproof?”

“It changes where I stand!” Zoro’s voice rises to match, the frustration that’s been building boiling over, hot and ugly and unable to be shoved back down.

Sanji’s mouth opens, then closes. For a beat he looks truly lost, like the idea hasn’t occurred to him in the same shape — like he’s genuinely understood that to Zoro boyfriend means the line’s moved. That it means standing closer, not further away. “To you.”

Zoro goes cold all over. He should back off: any sane person would hear that quiet to you and leave the room before the rest of the damage lands, but the hurt’s louder than sense right now. “You think just because it’s only been a few months that I’m only here for the easy parts? That’s it? What, we just fuck around and I don’t have to care about anything that matters to you?”

“I think,” Sanji spits, breathing too fast, “That you’re trying to walk into a room full of sadistic monsters with no fucking clue what they’re capable of because somewhere in that thick skull of yours you’ve decided this is romantic.”

“I know it’s not romantic,” Zoro snaps, the words tearing out of him. His throat burns. “I’m just saying I love you.”

The confession drops between them like a livewire: Sanji stops moving completely. The whole room feels different with those words hanging in the air, like the walls have shifted, like nothing fits the same way anymore. Zoro hears his own ragged breathing and, horribly, his own voice echoing like something that can’t be unsaid. Sanji’s face has gone blank again, but not the cold kind. This is worse, somehow, all struck through and wrecked, like he doesn’t know which part of himself to react with first. When he finally speaks he sounds like he’s barely holding his voice together. “Can we not do this right now?”

Zoro’s throat tightens painfully. Before he can answer, Sanji’s phone lights up on the bed, casting a harsh beam upwards into the dimming room and he sighs, dragging both hands over his face like he can wipe the whole conversation away. “Car’s here.”

“They sent a car?”

Sanji snatches the shirt back off the bed and starts wrestling it on one armed, furious and graceless. The movement clearly aggravates his wrist but he powers through it. “Of course they sent a fucking car.”

Zoro steps in automatically, reaching out. “Let me —”

“Don’t.” Sanji jerks away, getting the shirt on by himself, breathing hard by the end of it. He buttons it wrong the first time, swears viciously under his breath, rips two buttons open and then starts again. His phone digs once more. He stares down at his wrists for a second, like he’s considering cufflinks before his shoulders slump in defeat. “Just… hurry up and get dressed. You can’t wear that.”

They leave the apartment without touching, the silence between them heavier than the rain drumming against the windows. The car waits downstairs like something out of a nightmare, long and black and polished to an obscene mirror shine that catches every streetlight in thin, predatory streaks. It idles with its engine purring low as the driver steps out, umbrella snapping open crisply.

Zoro had already figured Sanji comes from money, given whatever he’d already glimpsed of Vinsmoke at the hospital, but this is worse, somehow. Clinical. It occurs to him, uneasily, that he has no idea if Sanji gave them this address or if they’ve simply known all along.

Sanji looks at the car like it’s a corpse he once buried and is now being forced to dig up with his bare hands. The fight still hums between them, line gone cold but wedged somewhere under the skin. Zoro can’t stop hearing his own voice cracking open in the apartment: i’m just saying i love you. He can still see the way Sanji’s voice had emptied out, the way he’d been completely unready for it and, worst of all, the way neither of them had been allowed to do anything with it. The confession had spilled out raw and clumsy in the middle of a screaming match, another weapon instead of the offering it was meant to be and absolutely nothing like the way Zoro’s ever wanted to tell him.

The regret sits in his throat, a weight that only gets heavier as they climb into the car. He keeps replaying it like a fool, the way he’d pushed and the way he’d let his own hurt twist everything until the truth fell out sideways. He’s spent months trying to prove, without ever saying it, that he’s here for all of it and now the first time the words actually leave his mouth they landed like a grenade in the middle of a battlefield.

He catches Sanji’s wrist, blurts: “Wait,” and doesn’t even know what he’s asking for — some small confirmation that they’re not walking into this as strangers, maybe — but he folds Sanji’s hand into his palm anyway. The contact twists something deep in his chest, hot with everything he doesn’t know how to say right.

Sanji pulls back, fast. “Don’t.”

The rejection slices clean through him; Zoro feels it settle low in his ribs, then rise sharp and hot behind his eyes. He blinks hard but one stubborn tear still pricks the corner of his eye, threatening to spill until he wipes it away roughly. He’s not the guy who cries in the back of some asshole’s luxury car. He’s the one who stands, the one who fights, the one who keeps showing up even when Sanji keeps trying to build distance, but right now it hurts more than any sword cut ever has — this awful helpless sense that no matter how hard Zoro pushes closer, Sanji might always flinch back. That maybe this relationship means something different to each of them.

The city changes the further they drive, streets straightening and widening, growing cleaner and also colder. Old stone facades rise behind carefully manicured hedges and delicate iron fences that no-one ever actually leans on. The noise of the city fades completely as Sanji sits angled towards the window, one hand braced tight against his knee, every line of his body locked down and held too still. Zoro watches the reflection of his face slide across the dark glass and thinks he might throw himself out of the damn car if the silence goes on any longer.

“Is your… are we going to your house?” He forces, latching onto any sense of practicality he can.

Sanji doesn’t look at him. “No.”

The car turns off the main road onto a narrower street bordered by tall stone walls and dark trees dripping rain. At the end sits an estate too massive to be called anything but a compound, beautiful in the way a blade’s beautiful, all white stone washed silver by the wet and tall windows. There’s a sweeping front driveway and wide steps completing the picture — even from inside the car, Zoro can tell this place isn’t a home. It’s staged: a fortress dressed up as a house, built to impose.

“Not theirs,” he mutters.

Sanji glances once through the window at the looming building before glaring back at he seat in front of him. “No.”

They leave the car under a fine mist of rain that slicks the stone steps and beads on their coats. A man in dark clothes is already waiting with an umbrella, posture too perfect and stance too balanced and Zoro doesn’t need to ask — he knows a fighter when he sees one. His whole body shifts into alertness without conscious thought, muscles coiled and instincts sharpening. Besides him, Sanji seems to shrink and harden at the same time. The soft, exhausted man who had been trembling in Zoro’s lap just hours ago, the one who let himself be held open, is gone and in its place is someone sharper, already retreating behind layers Zoro hasn’t earned the right to touch tonight.

As much as he wants to, he doesn’t reach for Sanji’s hand again. He’s learned that lesson, at least.

The man at the entrance inclines his head. “Mr Vinsmoke.”

Sanji’s face stays perfectly still. “Evening.” His voice isn’t fake, exactly, but it’s been hollowed out, every trace of warmth stripped out so nothing can be grabbed and used against him. This is the version of Sanji built for houses like this, Zoro realises, where sincerity’s a liability.

The man’s eyes flick to Zoro. “Your guest has been accounted for.”

Zoro bares his teeth in a smile that carries absolutely no warmth. “How reassuring.”

The entrance hall is enormous and lifeless, from marble floors to dark wood panelling and paintings so expensive and impersonal they might as well have been chosen by a committee on another planet. A sweeping central staircase vanished into shadow overhead and somewhere deeper int he house, a string quartet recording plays. Flowers bloom everywhere, perfect and scentless and artificial.

Reiju appears from a side hallway before they can be announced further. She’s dressed head-to-toe in black, like the whole family gets off on attending their own funerals. Her eyes move from Sanji to Zoro, relief flickering briefly before something heavier settles in: worry, maybe. Resignation, definitely. “You came.”

Sanji scowls. “You sounded pretty sure I would.”

Reiju winces, the movement so small most people would miss it. “I’m glad you did.”

Sanji laughs once, low and bitter. “Makes one of us.”

She doesn’t bite back. Instead, her gaze cuts to Zoro again. “it’s in the dining room.”

They follow her down a long hallway lined with more soulless art and that’s when Zoro sees them — two men who are definitely not butlers. Their jackets sit wrong, the way the way they stand is wrong, the way their hands rest is wrong, the faint bulge under their jackets is definitely wrong.

Zoro’s stomach drops like he’s missed a step on a cliff, pulse spiking hard and brutal. He’s trained with blades since he was a kid, spent years turning his body into a weapon through sweat and broken bones and sheer stubborn will. But guns? Real ones, carried openly in house like they’re part of the dress code? The realisation hits him at once, that this isn’t just everyday family drama but something way worse, and that maybe had Sanji had meant bulletproof literally. Maybe the Vinsmokes aren’t just rich or mean or rude — maybe they’re the kind of powerful that keeps armed guard on the payroll like it’s normal.

Maybe this is the kind of deep shit where normal rules don’t apply and people like Zoro gets erased without a trace.

Sanji must feel him tense, because without turning around he mutters: “Don’t start anything.”

Zoro’s jaw locks so tight it hurts. “Not starting anything.”

“Wonderful. A low bar.” There’s strain bleeding through the sarcasm and it twists in Zoro’s chest even harder now. He wants to say i know or i see it or even why the fuck didn’t you warn me? He wants to grab Sanji and drag him back out the front door before whatever’s waiting for them can sink its teeth in, but it’s too late.

The dining table is a masterpiece of intimidation, all white linen and crystal and silver cutlery laid with surgical precision, candles burning in perfect alignment. Zoro feels the threat of it is in his spine and his clenched jaw, and in the empty weight in the hands at his side. His body reacts before his mind finishes cataloguing the threat: this isn’t dinner. This has never been dinner.

Vinsmoke stands at the far end of the table like a man posing for his own portrait, still a mess of hair, clothing immaculate and every angle calculated. Beside him sit three brothers, identical to Sanji, malice carved into the family mould so clearly it turns Zoro’s stomach. “You deigned to come.”

There are no servants now, just people in dark suits stationed too precisely near every door and in every corner. All Zoro can think about is how he’s barged his way in, thinking it was about pride and locked doors, and it turns out this has been about something worse all along.

Sanji stops beside his assigned chair. “That was the arrangement.”

Vinsmoke’s gaze slides to Zoro, slow and assessing. “And you brought company.”

“Zoro,” Sanji cuts in before Zoro can speak, providing only a name without context, without claim. Zoro doesn’t know if he’s meant to feel insulted or not.

The blue-haired brother smiles, small and amused and instantly punchable. “Interesting.”

Vinsmoke ignores it, nodding at Sanji. “Sit.”

The worst part — the part that makes Zoro’s stomach clench like a fist — is how Sanji obeys without hesitation. His body folds into the chair on pure muscle memory, so Zoro sits beside him because there’s nowhere else he belongs and because if he stands there any longer he’ll start thinking about the dead look that just crossed Sanji’s face.

That way lies murder, so.

Reiju takes the last seat and the room settles into a silence that feels preloaded. Wine appears, poured by one of the suited ghosts without a word. No-one touches it. Vinsmoke folds his hands on the table like he’s a king holding court. “The Baratie remains under pressure.”

He says it like he’s laying a knife in the middle of the table but Sanji’s expression doesn’t flicker at all, despite how sharply Zoro feels the floor tilt under him. The Baratie. Zeff. Sanji’s whole damn world. What the fuck does Vinsmoke have to do with any of it?

“The present structure is no longer efficient,” Vinsmoke continues, smooth. “Too many intermediaries. Too many quiet monthly interventions. Too much discretion wasted in the wrong direction.”

Zoro’s mind is reeling, repeating the words monthly interventions on a loop even as the facts slot into place, even as it becomes obvious that Sanji has been doing this — paying and appeasing and feeding this monster — all along. Right under everyone's noses, because Zoro knows enough to acknowledge Zeff would never let Sanji put himself in this position and that Sanji would never let Zeff know. He presses his lips together until it hurts, biting down o the inside of his mouth, fists curled tight on his knees under the table.

Sanji’s voice stays eerily calm. “Then say what you want.”

Vinsmoke inclines his head, almost pleased. “The restaurant is viable. The data is useful. The old man remains in place. There is no need for this to become unpleasant.”

The red-head brother laughs softly into his glass. “Picturesque, even.”

Sanji says nothing so Vinsmoke keeps going, each sentence measured and civil and utterly fucking vile. The debt can stay manageable. The lease complications can be fixed. The pressure can stop. All Sanji has to do is stop pretending he’s outside the family by making some appearances and joining some consultations. Using the Vinsmoke name. Head a future hospitality venture under Germa’s luxury arm, legitimised by Sanji’s own talent and reputation. It’s not outright ownership. It’s something cleaner and so much worse: they want to take the life Sanji built in spite of them and knead it back into family property like it always belonged to them. Zoro looks at Sanji and sees that he already understands every clause and has probably been dreading this exact conversation for years.

Sanji laughs only once, venomous. “Wow, there it is.”

Reiju tries, quietly. “Father —”

“No,” Sanji cuts across her, his eyes never leaving Vinsmoke. “Let him say it.”

And Vinsmoke does, calm and reasonable, laying out extortion disguised as negotiation while Zoro listens on in horror, something inside him going very, very cold.

The green-haired brother smiles at Zoro over the rim of his glass, all lazy venom and perfect teeth. “You look surprised. Did you think this was personal?”

Sanji’s fingers tighten on the stem of his water glass until Zoro hears the faint creak of crystal, but Vinsmoke doesn’t even glance at Zoro. “Sanji has become unexpectedly marketable. It would do us well to indulge in our investment.”

That one lands like a blade between the ribs, enough that Reiju flinches visibly. The last ghost of life in Sanji’s face collapses inward until there’s nothing left — even his breathing looks like calculated performance.

Zoro keeps his own face locked down while Vinsmoke lays out the rest, talking terms and money and visibility and control. The Baratie stays safe only as long as Sanji remains useful. And then, just when Zoro thinks the night can’t any more fucking vile, the blue-haired brother turns towards him with a soft, almost kindly smile. “You should feel special. He usually only saves this little act for people how actually have something to hold over him.”

The words detonate.

Zoro’s chair scrapes back, fist landing clean across the asshole’s jaw, impact singing up his arm, noting the sickening crunch of teeth behind a split lip. He goes sideways out of his chair with a strangled, childish yelp, blood already bright and smeared between his fingers as he hits the floor.

The two guards by the wall most instantly, jackets flaring open as their weapons are pulled free — one steps towards the table while the other shifts to block the door. The exist vanish so quickly it makes Zoro’s stomach lurch with animal horror.

“Zoro!” Sanji snaps to his feet as the brother claws upright, blood dripping down onto the pristine white linen.

Rage has stripped every ounce of polish off his face, revealing the spoiled vicious little monster underneath. “You son of a —”

“Stand down, Niji.” Vinsmoke doesn’t raise his voice. He hasn’t moved from the head of the table. Niji freezes mid-lunge, blood on his mouth and murder in his eyes. The guards halt, too, and Vinsmoke finally turns his gaze to Zoro, cold and dissecting.

Reiju is on her feet now as well, worry cracking through her composure. “That's enough.”

It’s not clear who she’s talking to: Vinsmoke ignores her completely while Niji spits a thick wad of blood onto the table runner, the red stain blooming obscenely between the candles. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and laughs, short and wet. “You brought this animal here,” he sneers at Sanji. “And this is what he does?”

Beside Zoro, Sanji has gone deathly pale, almost green in the light. His chair is still shoved back, one hand white knuckled on the table edge, the other clenched at his side. He looks furious, glaring at the guards and the guns and at the walls closing in exactly the way he’d tried to warn Zoro they would.

Vinsmoke folds his hands neatly on the table. “You misunderstand the scale of your place here, Roronoa. You were extended a courtesy because of Sanji’s momentary lapse in judgment, not because you matter to the arrangement.”

“What the fuck did you do?” Sanji hisses at Zoro, voice cracking with the rage of it all.

Zoro wants to snarl back what he deserved or what you should’ve done years ago but behind every defence he hears the soft shift of holsters, the quiet threat of men who kill for a living. His mouth twists anyway. “He needed it.”

Niji laughs again while Reiju closes her eyes like she’s praying for strength. The other two bothers are leering at each other like this is the best entertainment they’ve had in months, but Zoro ignores all of them.

Sanji scowls. “Yeah, we’re done here.”

The guards shift again; Vinsmoke doesn’t. “You’re confused.”

“Nope,” Sanji snarls, voice low and feral. “I got it now, cheers.”

Reiju’s voice cuts through, thin but steady. “Sanji, go.”

“If a single fucking thing touches the Baratie —”

Vinsmoke cuts him off with a single withering look. “Then perhaps you should have chosen your company more carefully.”

That’s the last thing said before Zoro realises if they stay one more second he’s either going to deck Vinsmoke himself or Sanji’s going to kick someone’s teeth in — either way, it won’t end well. Sanji falls into step beside him without touching him as they lave, together and not together. The space between their shoulders crackles with everything still unsaid, rage and fear and betrayal and exhaustion. Reiju doesn’t follow. THe brothers stay silent. Vinsmoke lets them walk out because, in a family like that, freedom is just another leash.

The drive back is its own kind of violence. Rain streaks down the windows in thin silver blades, smearing the city into bleeding colours while traffic surges around them like nothing happened. Up front, the radio murmurs softly about market futures or an incoming cyclone or both, for all Zoro cares. The driver might as well be a statue. In the backseat, Sanji sits twisted towards the window again, coat buttoned wrong, every line of his body wound so tight it looks like it hurts to exits. Zoro can’t stop seeing the guards’ holsters, the way the exits sealed shut the second his fist connected, the calm with which Vinsmoke let is all unfold.

He can’t stop thinking about how Sanji had known the whole fucking time and still walked in there with him. The hurt of it burns like acid under Zoro’s ribs: months of watching Sanji disappear in pieces, of fighting for scraps of closeness, and all of it because Sanji was out here doing fuck knows what to keep his family off. By the time they get upstairs, the fight is already waiting for them like a third person in the room. Sanji gets inside and delivers a roundhouse kick to the door so vicious the wood splits and buckles. He makes it three steps before he spinning around. “Well?”

Zoro drops his coat over the back of a chair. It misses and slides to the floor but he doesn't pick it up. “Well what?”

Sanji laughs and it’s a fucking awful sound, shredded and vicious and cracking at the edges. “Oh, you wanna pretend like you don’t know what just happened?”

Zoro’s temper ignites instantly, hot and ugly. “I know exactly what happened.”

“Do you?” Sanji takes one step closer, then another, catching himself hard on the bench when his knee buckles. “You wanna explain what the fuck you thought you were doing in there?”

There are a hundred answers, all of the wrong and all of them true. Zoro goes with the ugliest one first, voice low. “He deserved it.”

“No shit, Zoro. We were all fucking there.” Sanji’s voice climbs with leftover adrenaline and nowhere safe to put it. “You still think this is about whether that piece of shit deserved it?”

Zoro grinds his teeth until his jaw aches. There’s too much in him right now, fury at the Vinsmokes and at Sanji’s endless walls and at himself, most of all. “No.”

“No?” Sanji repeats, the word cracking like a whip. He’s trembling now, hands fisted at his sides, eyes bright with rage and something that looks a lot like fear still bleeding through. “No? That’s fucking incredible, because from where I was sitting it looked exactly like you decided one line hurt your precious feelings and gave you permission to turn the whole fucking negotiation into a bar brawl. With armed men in the room, Zoro! Do you have any idea what you’ve done?!”

Zoro’s chest tightens painfully, humiliation and anger surging in hot, equal increments. He did fuck it up, he knows. He let his rage take the wheel the second they insulted Sanji, exactly like Sanji had fears he would. He’d wanted to protect him and instead he’s probably painted a bigger target on both their backs. “I would have if you’d told me about it like I asked!”

Sanji’s voice breaks higher, raw and furious. “You have no fucking idea what I’ve been juggling for years to keep the Baratie and Zeff breathing! The payments, the favours, the fucking — all of it! And you just — you just punched your way into it like it was some bloody sparring match!”

The words land like blows. Zoro feels them in his gut, the years of silent sacrifice and the financial drain, the emotional rot Sanji’s been carrying alone while smiling and cooking and pretending everything was fine. The hurt twists deeper, mixing with white hot anger at Sanji for never trusting him enough to say it, and even hotter at himself for proving Sanji right. “You never told me, not once. Not even a hint that we were walking into a room full of fucking criminals!”

“Because I didn’t want you there!” Sanji shouts, stepping closer until they’re nearly chest-to-chest, voice shaking with everything he’s been holding back. “I didn’t want you seeing it, I didn’t want you in it and you went and proved exactly why I was right to keep you out!”

That hits like a slap to the face. Some small part of Zoro is embarrassed, humiliated in that deep gut twisting way he’d rather die than admit out loud. He’d walked into that house like a blunt weapon and gotten handled like one, like a fucking amateur who didn’t even know the rules of the game. He drags a hand through his hair, voice harsher than he means it to be. “Yeah. I was exactly the kind of problem you said I’d be. But you should’ve fucking told me.”

Sanji blinks at him. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“No, I heard you, I just…” Sanji laughs, the sound jagged and disbelieving, shaking his head. “Of all the fucking things you could decide to be pissed about right now.”

Zoro’s voice drops low and mean, controlled in a way that feels dangerous even to him. “You let me walk into a house full of guns and, what, hired killers without a single warning.”

“Oh, fuck you. I told you not to come.”

“No.” Zoro cuts him off sharply stepping closer. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to act like Im demanding your deepest darkest secrets. You could’ve just told me they were dangerous. That this wasn’t normal family bullshit.”

Sanji’s jaw clenches so tight Zoro can see the muscle jump. “I knew exactly how dangerous it was to tell you.”

“Bullshit! You let me go into it blind!”

Sanji looks like he might actually hit him. God, Zoro would almost welcome it at this point. “And what the fuck d’you think would’ve happened if I’d told you, huh?”

“At least I would’ve known! At least I wouldn’t have just strolled in there like a fucking idiot!”

Sanji laughs again, furious enough to shake. “Oh, that’s brilliant. Right. Because what that evening really needed was a version of you who knew there were guns before you sat down. That definitely would’ve made you calmer, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t have done something stupid the second they looked at me wrong?”

“No,” Zoro snarls, “But it would've made me less fucking surprised when I realised how bad it actually was.”

“Exactly the problem!” Sanji explodes, pushing off the kitchen bench and starting to pace despite the obvious pain in his knee. Every third step buckles but he powers through it, the movement frantic and unhinged. “You think if I’d said ‘by the way they’re criminals and, oh, sometimes they have bodyguards’ you would've gone in there and been subtle? You think I don’t know exactly what your face would've done the second I said the word gun? You would’ve walked in already loaded, ready to swing, exactly like you did anyway!”

Zoro opens his mouth, furious, but snaps it shut because some part of him — the worst, truest part — knows Sanji’s right. He would’ve been worse.

Sanji keeps going. “I was trying not to walk into that house with a weapon pointed at our heads! And you get to be mad at me for not handing you the detonator?!”

Zoro stares at him, stunned, hands opening and closing uselessly at his sides. The image flashes too vividly: the guards drawing, exist vanishing, Vinsmoke’s cold voice saying stand down and the gut-wrenching knowledge that if Vinsmoke had wanted it worse, well. It would have been a lot worse. He drags a hand down his face, fingers catching on the rough stubble along his jaw, still feeling the ghost of Niji’s teeth under his knuckles. He flexes his fingers like he’s trying to shake the memory out. “Look, I’m good in a fight. I’m good when somebody comes straight at me. Maybe you’re right, maybe dinner with criminals isn’t my strong suite.”

Sanji’s mouth presses into a thin, bloodless line. He rubs at his temple with two fingers, then drags the same hand down over his mouth like he’s trying to wipe something filthy off his skin. “That’s not what I meant, Zoro.”

“It’s what happened, isn’t it?”

“No.” Sanji’s shoulders curl inwards for a second before he forces them back. “No. What happened is I didn’t know how to tell you enough without making you exactly what they'd use against me.”

Zoro looks at him and feels it land somewhere low and hideous. He can see it now, the nights Sanji must’ve spent turning this over in his head, weighing every angle and every possible outcome. How many times he must’ve almost said something and swallowed it down instead, carrying the weight of it because he thought he had to. The thought twists Zoro’s anger into something messier.

Sanji’s eyes drop to the bench between them. His fingers twitch once against his thigh, like he wants to reach for Zoro but has stopped himself. He stays quiet long enough that Zoro almost thinks the conservation's done before he says, very softly: “I didn’t — I should’ve told you, yeah.”

It should help, but it doesn’t. Zoro has to stand there and breathe through his nose like an animal trying not to bolt. He glares at a knot of wood in the bench until his eyes sting, pulse still roaring in his ears.

“God, if this is it, just say it.”

Zoro’s mind genuinely blanks. “What?”

Sanji laughs again, but this time there’s nothing warm int, just nerves and expectation and the kind of pain that’s learned how to hide in anger. His eyes are already shining too bright at the edges, wet at the lashes, and he blinks hard, clearly angry at himself for it. “C’mon, Moss. Don't make me drag this out, I know how it goes. So just — say it. Save us both the fucking speech.”

Zoro stares at him in confusion and realises they’re not having the same conversation at all. For a split second the apartment blurs at the edge as his mind drags him backwards, fast and uninvited, to the first time Sanji had kicked him in the head during a spar and then grinned, sharklike, when Zoro had returned the favour. The way Sanji had started cooking for him without being asked, always too much food, always pretending it was leftovers. The lat nights on Luffy’s balcony when everyone else was asleep, Sanji smoking and Zoro pretending not to watch the way the ember lit up his face. The first time they’d kissed, four months ago, like it was a fight they were both trying to win and the way Sanji had started letting Zoro touch him, careful at first before turning hungry, like he trusted Zoro not to break anything important. All the small, stupid, perfect things that have built into something Zoro’s based the past few months of his life around.

The thought hits him like a blow, that they might actually lose this before it’s even really started. Before Zoro has the chance to prove he can be steady, before Sanji has the chance to believe someone will stay when the ugly parts show up armed. The possibility sits cold and heavy in his gut, worse than any punch he’s ever taken. He takes a step closer without thinking, the floor breathing under his weight. “You think I’m leaving?”

Sanji’s face flickers, something flashing across it before he locks it down hard. His mouth twists into something cruel and self-deprecating, the kind of joke that tastes like blood. “I think you just walked out of a houseful of my family’s bullshit and realised I’m a mess, so forgive me if I’m not assuming that improves my odds of keeping you around.”

Zoro’s mouth goes flat. “Don’t call yourself that.”

Sanji gives a frayed snort, finally looking at him properly. His eyes are glassy now, tears threatening despite how fiercely he’s trying to blink them back. Embarrassment burns hot across his cheeks. “Don’t pick one fucking word out of —”

“I’m not leaving.” Zoro hears himself say it before he’s fully decided to, the words coming out rough, almost angry with how much he means them. “I’m pissed off. I’m not gone.”

This close, he can see the way Sanji’s pulse jumps in this throat and the tremble in his fingers. Zoro reaches out and catches his elbow, carefully, listening to the way Sanji’s breath hitches. His good hand comes up to close around Zoro’s wrist, fingers pressing in like he’s not sure if he’s holding on o pushing away.

Zoro keeps his voice low, steady, even though everything in him feels cracked open. “I’m angry because I’m in this, not because I want out.”

Sanji’s eyes slide shut for a second. “You don’t know what being in even means.”

“Then tell me.”

Sanji shakes his head, exhausted and furious and open in all the places that hurt most. His fingers tighten around Zoro’s wrist. “It’s all terrible.”

Zoro lets out a quiet, rough sound that’s almost a laugh but can’t quite get there. His thumb strokes once, slowly, over the inside of Sanji’s elbow through the coat sleeve. “Yeah, you know what else is terrible? Thinking I’m going to fuck you over just because things are shit.”

Sanji closes his eyes again. A shaky breath leaves him. “Yeah.”

“Look, I… I know I shouldn’t have hit him.”

“No, really? You think?”

Zoro’s thumb keeps moving in small strokes against the fabric and then underneath, until he can feel Sanji’s pulse under his fingers, grounding in the same way it’s always been. “But I’m not leaving, Curls. That’s not what this is.”

Sanji looks at him like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop anyway, like he’s already bracing for the moment Zoro realises he’s made a mistake. The tears have dried on his lashes but the rawness is still there, sitting heavy in the space between them. “Okay.”

Zoro’s chest feels too tight. He’s still angry — angry at the Vinsmokes, angry at Sanji for carrying all of it alone, angry at himself for proving every fear Sanji’s ever had — but underneath it is the louder, simpler truth that he almost lost this tonight and, before he can talk himself out of it, he presses a kiss to the inside of Sanji’s wrist. It’s too much. It’s everything Zoro doesn’t know how to say out loud right now. He’s about to say something when Sanji yanks him forward by the front of his shirt, pulling him into a kiss that’s nothing like the careful one Zoro offered. It’s messy, Sanji’s mouth crashing into his like he needs proof that Zoro’s still here, still choosing this, still choosing him after everything. Zoro makes a startled sound and kisses back just as hard, one hand sliding up to cradle the back of Sanji’s neck while the other stays wrapped around his wrist.

They don’t pull apart so much as break for hair, forehead pressed together, breathing ragged. Sanji’s fingers are still twisted in Zoro’s shirt like he’s afraid Zoro will disappear if he lets go, so Zoro shifts just enough to press another kiss to Sanji’s temple, then one to the damp corner of his eye where a tear had slipped free.

Sanji lets out a shaky laugh. “You’re such a fucking idiot.”

“Yeah,” Zoro murmurs because that’s definitely not up for debate. He presses another kiss to the corner of Sanji’s mouth, softer this time. “But so are you, so.”

One of his hands finally loosens the death grip on Zoro’s shirt to slide up instead, fingers curling into the short hair at the back of Zoro’s neck, another anchor. “This is…. you know it’s going to be fucked up now, right?”

“No shit.” Zoro exhales slowly, the last of the fight draining out of him in one long breath. He wraps his free arm around Sanji’s waist, pulling him in properly and they stand like that for a long time, long enough for the rain to soften against the glass and long enough for the worst of the adrenaline to finally ebb into something softer and quieter.

x

Morning comes thin and grey and mercilessly normal. Zoro wakes to the pale wash of city lights through the curtains and the groan of the heater trying and failing to make the apartment warm. His body feels like it’s been put through a meat grinder, jaw sore from clenching, knuckles stiff and swollen. There’s an ache in his chest that only comes after too much stress and not enough sleep, and the kind of argument that shifts the floor under your life by several centimetres.

Sanji is warm along his front, half on him and half under him, all heavy exhausted lines. One leg is tangled with his own, one arm folded awkwardly between them because of the wrist brace, face tucked into the hollow under Zoro’s jaw, breath slow and warm against his skin. Zoro can feel the tiredness in Sanji’s body, too, the way he’s still curled, like he’s bracing for something even now.

“Morning,” Zoro says, voice rough with sleep.

Sanji squints up at him, eyes still heavy-lidded. “You smell disgusting,” he mutters, but there’s no bite in it.

Zoro brushes his thumb once, lightly, over the back of Sanji’s neck. Before Sanji can pull into himself and before the day can start piling on them, Zoro pulls him into a kiss. Sanji’s good hand slides up to the side of Zoro’s throat, still kind of clumsy with sleep, and he exhales steadily against his mouth. they make out for a while in the morning light, Zoro’s hand splayed wide at the small of his back. There’s an occassional wince when one of them forgets about Sanji’s ribs and shifts wrong, and a quiet laugh into a kiss when Zoro’s stubble drags across sensitive skin and Sanji mumbles: “S’like making out with a wire brush, fuck.”

Zoro kisses him harder for that and for one dangerous, gorgeous moment the whole room narrows to mouths and heat and the certainty that wanting each other is still the easiest thing they do. When they finally part, Sanji leaves his forehead against Zoro’s for a beat. Zoro lets his hand travel up and down Sanji’s spine. “So, what the hell do we do now?”

Sanji groans and closes his eyes again, face still tucked against Zoro’s neck. “I dunno. I know they’ll move fast. Whatever they do next, they won’t sit on it.”

Zoro nods. “You think they’ll hit Zeff first.”

Sanji sighs and nuzzles at Zoro’s skin, biting his collarbone lightly before resting his chin there. “I think they’ll hit whatever’s easiest and Zeff’s the quickest target if they wanna hurt me.”

Zoro looks at the ceiling for a second, then back at him, feeling the weight of it settle deeper. “So we need help, then. Luffy. Nami. Robin. Usopp? Law, probably.”

Sanji makes a face. “Can we scrap that last one?”

Zoro brushes his knuckles over Sanji’s cheek, thinking about the crew, about how they’d burn the world down for one of their own without hesitation. “We’ll need Zeff, too,” he adds carefully.

Sanji goes kind of still for a moment, voice small. “He’s gonna kill me.”

Zoro strokes at his hair, shrugging. “Probably. But he’ll still help.”

“Yeah.” He’s quiet for a beat. Then, so softly Zoro almost misses it, he says: “I, uh. I didn’t have the best… things were bad, when I was a kid.”

Zoro’s hand pauses in his hair. He can feel the shape of it; Sanji small and alone, already carrying weight, already learning how to survive people who should’ve protected him. The anger that rises in him is sharp and protective and helpless all at once — he wants to go back in time and find that kid. Wants to burn every Vinsmoke to the ground, wants to go back to last night and slam his father’s head into the table. Instead, he just pulls his boyfriend closer and keeps his voice low. “That’s… sorry.”

Sanji shrugs against Zoro’s chest, like it’s nothing, even though they both know it’s everything. “Not your fault. Just… how it was.”

After a while, Zoro says more carefully: “You could go to the cops.”

Sanji lifts his head and stares at him like he’s suggested they go commit arson together. “Are you fucking insane?”

“They’re criminals, right? Extortion, whatever the hell else they’re running. IF you know anything — enough of anything — you could tell them.”

Sanji’s face does something complicated, fear flickering behind the exhaustion. “He’ll have contacts everywhere, they change their shit all the time. They don’t settle. We could tell the wrong person and it’d be over before we even left the station. They’d know, Moss. They always know.”

Zoro lets the thought breathe before answering, more gently now. “Then we figure out what you’ve got, what they’ve got, who actually handles this kind of shit when it’s bigger than us. We do it smart.”

Sanji’s eyes narrow. “That sounded almost thoughtful.”

“Don’t be an asshole.”

“You like when I’m an asshole.” Sanji’s voice is quieter again. He looks down at the sheets, at their tangled legs, at Zoro’s hand resting against his skin. “It’s been me against them for so long.”

“I’m not saying it fixes anything tomorrow, Curls. I know it won’t. I’m just saying we stop acting like they’re the only ones allowed to have a system.”

Sanji exhales slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, alright, I’ll think about it.”

There’s a softness in him now that Zoro almost doesn’t know what to do with, less certainty that every hard conversation is secretly a prelude to loss. Zoro brushes his thumb under Sanji’s ear, then kisses his temple and nose until Sanji laughs, shaking his head, and tucks his face back into Zoro’s chest. For a long moment he just stays there, breathing against Zoro’s skin like he’s trying to gather the words. When he finally speaks his voice is soft and rough, almost reluctant, like the confession’s being dragged out of him by the weight of everything they’ve survived in the past twelve hours. “I love you, too. Obviously. Years.”

Zoro nearly forgets how to breathe for a second. “Years,” He repeats stupidly, something that feels n awful lot like hope springing up in him, so fast it’s almost a little dizzying.

Sanji doesn’t lift his head. His fingers tighten once in the fabric of Zoro’s shirt. “Obviously.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, was I supposed to make your life easier?”

Zoro’s startled into a laugh, rough but real, and Sanji watches him with that look still in his eyes so he shifts closer to kiss him again, gentle and slower this time, like he’s trying to answer with his mouth what he can’t quite get out in words yet. When he pulls back he rests his forehead against Sanji’s. “Yeah. Me too.”

Eventually Sanji exhales. “So. We tell the others. And Zeff. And maybe, if I don’t vomit first, we talk to somebody in law enforcement… if they’re not crooked assholes.”

Zoro nods. “Yeah.”

Sanji squints at him. “You enjoying how often you get to be right this morning?”

Zoro kisses him again for that and when the kiss ends, Sanji stays close. "

“Alright, Moss,” he says with the smallest ghost of a smile. “Let’s figure this out.”