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Every harvest, the names of every eighteen-year-old went into the drum, and one came out. That person was taken to the border tree and left there as payment to whatever monster lived in the mountains. Surviving your name not being drawn was supposed to be its own blessing. A year of good fortune was promised to anyone who'd watched a friend or neighbor get walked up the mountain in their place. Nobody questioned any of it, the lottery, the luck, or the arrangement underneath both. Questioning the process had never been allowed.
Sanji had grown up watching it happen to other people's children. In the past, Judge had made sure that none of his children were at risk. Reiju's name had been quietly struck the year she turned eighteen. Ichiji had been struck the same way the year it was his turn. Niji’s too.
Sanji's name should have been struck from the drum entirely, but Sanji had never assumed the same courtesy extended to him. His birthday had come and gone eleven months back, which meant his name had already gone into the drum once at the last harvest and come out clean. He'd let himself believe, these past months, that the worst of it was over. He'd had his one year of risk and survived it.
The old woman read his name aloud anyway, her voice quivering slightly, like even she hadn't expected to see it in the drum.
He looked for his father out of habit more than hope. Judge stood near the front, arms crossed, face giving nothing away.
They walked him to the tree the next morning. Sanji didn't fight any of it. He let them bind his wrists to the trunk with rope, let the elders say their yearly prayers to the mountains, let his own family stand at the edge of the gathered crowd and watch. Niji wasn't even trying to hide the smirk. Ichiji's was smaller, but it was there too.
He thought, distantly, that this made sense, in a way. Judge had spent eighteen years telling him that he amounted to nothing, that he'd never be worth the food it took to raise him, that the family's name would be better off without him attached to it. Sanji had stopped arguing the point a long time ago. Compared to his siblings, Judge had a point.
When the villagers turned and walked back down the mountain path, leaving him bound to the tree at the edge of the world with the sun already starting to dip, Sanji didn't scream after them. He stood there with his face dry and told himself this was simply the last thing he'd been asked to do, and he could do this one thing right.
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The forest went quiet once the village was gone from earshot and Sanji stood there in that silence and felt something in his chest start to come apart.
Then, somewhere off to his left, a stick snapped. It was a small sound, but something about it broke through whatever numbness had been holding Sanji together. All at once he understood fully that he did not want to die out here.
He didn't decide to cry. It simply happened, violently and suddenly, his whole body shaking with it, the rope biting into his wrists as he hopelessly pulled against it.
"Please," he said, to nobody, to the empty trees, to whatever was out there. "Please, I don't want this, I take it back, please, somebody—"
Nobody answered. Of course nobody answered. There was nobody left to hear him, and even if there had been, nobody was going to risk dooming the rest of the village.
He kept begging anyway, voice cracking, the words breaking down into something that barely sounded human. Then he heard footsteps coming closer through the brush.
The thing that stepped out of the tree line had green hair and a human enough face, shirtless with large, dark wings folded against his bare back, horns curling backward from his temples.
Sanji went completely silent.
The monster looked at him for a long moment, head tilted.
"Huh," he said, finally. "They still do this?"
Sanji couldn't make himself speak. His whole body had gone rigid against the tree, every instinct screaming at him to do something, run, fight, beg, anything, but he just stood there, frozen.
"Don't see why they bother," the demon went on, stepping closer, looking Sanji over with interest. "You're skinnier than the last one. Hardly worth the rope."
Sanji flinched at that, a sound escaping him that he hadn't meant to let out.
"What, you got something to say?" The demon crouched slightly, bringing himself level with Sanji's face. "Don't see the point in crying about it. Nobody's coming back for you."
"I know," Sanji managed, the words barely audible.
"Then why are you still shaking."
He straightened back up and circled Sanji slowly, the way someone might walk around livestock they were deciding whether to buy, and Sanji's breath came faster with every step.
"You're really not going to fight me at all?" the demon said, something almost like disappointment in it. "That’s it?"
The word landed in some old wound, the same place Judge had carved his way into years ago, and Sanji's breath caught hard, a fresh wave of tears spilling over.
The demon's expression shifted. "Hey." He said it differently this time. "I didn't—that's not what I—"
Sanji's breathing was coming too fast now, his vision narrowing at the edges, the crying tipping over into something closer to full panic, his whole body shaking hard enough that the rope dug into the wood behind him.
"Okay. Stop. You're—" The demon held both hands up, palms out. "I'm not going to hurt you. I shouldn't have said that. I don't actually—just breathe, okay? Breathe."
His sobbing didn't ease. The demon watched him for a long moment. His jaw set. He reached behind himself and drew something that flashed in the last of the light, a blade, curved, unlike anything Sanji had ever seen.
Sanji flinched hard. The demon didn't say anything else. He simply cut the rope in a singular stroke that freed both of Sanji's wrists at once, and when Sanji's legs gave out beneath him, the demon caught him before he hit the ground, gathered him up, and started walking away from the village.
Sanji didn't fight it. He couldn't. He hung there too tired to do anything but watch the village lights shrink below them. The cold cut through his thin shirt, and at some point the demon shifted his grip, pulling him in closer.
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The cabin sat high above the tree line, nearing the peak of the mountain. From its single window, Sanji could just make out the lights of the village far below. The demon set him down on the low bed by the hearth, and the moment his back touched the blanket something in Sanji's chest seized up entirely. He was on his back, exposed, the demon standing over him with horns and claws.
"Please don't eat me," Sanji said, the words coming out small.
"Hey." The demon must have seen something shift in his face, because he took a step back, hands coming up. "Hey, what—"
Sanji couldn't answer. His breath coming in short, useless pulls, his body locking tight against the blanket
"Okay, you're not breathing right." The demon crouched down near the foot of the bed. "I'm not going to touch you. I'm not doing anything. Just look at me."
It didn't help. Sanji's eyes had already snapped up to the demon's face, and what he found there was worse than nothing. Slit pupils, a dull amber glow at the edges of the iris, nothing human in them at all. It made things even worse. A sound tore out of him, half gasp, half scream.
"Okay. Okay, wrong thing to say." The demon ran a hand back through his hair. "Don't pass out. I don't know what to do if you pass out."
Sanji's chest was so tight now it ached, sound starting to tear out of him that wasn't quite words anymore, and the demon's expression went from frustrated to something closer to actual alarm.
"Please don't eat me," Sanji said again, almost shouting this time.
The demon glanced over, something flickering across his face. "I won't eat you," he said. "But I can bite if you want."
Sanji's mouth opened and nothing came out. Whatever had been building in his chest just stalled completely.
"Worked, didn't it?" The demon looked almost surprised at himself, some of the tension draining visibly out of his shoulders as Sanji's breathing started, slowly, to even back out. "You're cute when you're not crying. See, you’re calmer already."
"That's not—you can't just say things like that to someone."
"You're breathing though."
"They left me out there," Sanji said, before the whole story started spilling out of him. The lottery and his father's silence and eighteen years of being told he was worth nothing, his family watching from the crowd. The demon listened, his expression hardening as Sanji kept talking, until by the end his jaw was set tight enough that Sanji almost stopped talking out of fear.
When Sanji finally went quiet, the demon got up without a word, pulled a heavy blanket off a shelf, and draped it over him.
"Sleep," he said. "You’ll be safe up here."
Before shutting his eyes, Sanji finally got a chance to look around the cabin. It wasn't what he expected. Shelves of books stacked unevenly along one wall. A few jars of dried herbs. Two more blades above the hearth, older than the one the demon carried. A worn chair by the window.
Sanji hadn't expected sleep to come easily, not with his nerves raw from everything that had happened, but the blanket was heavier than anything he owned at home, and his body had been through constant stress throughout the last day. He drifted in and out for a while, surfacing each time to the sound of the demon quietly moving around the cabin.
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Sanji woke to darkness.
He sat up slow, the blanket pooling around his shoulders, and for one disoriented moment thought he might have imagined all of it, the demon and the rescue and the climb up the mountain. Then as his eyes adjusted, he saw the curved blade resting by the door, and knew he hadn't.
He wrapped the blanket around himself and went to the window.
The village was burning.
Sanji pulled the blanket tighter and went outside, the cold air sharp against his face as he stepped out onto the small ledge of rock in front of the cabin. Smoke rose in thick columns from several points across the rooftops, the fire underneath it burning a strange shade of green. He could make out shapes moving between the buildings. People were running, scattering toward the tree line. The square where they'd read his name was a scorched black ring at the center of it all.
He didn't know how long he stood there before he heard the wings.
He turned fast, heart hammering, and found the demon standing just behind him. Sanji tipped his head back to look at him properly, soot smudged along one cheekbone.
"It's done," the demon said. "Your father's dead. So are the elders. I saw to both.”
Sanji stood there for a moment, looking at him, then looking past him at the smoke still rising over the village he'd grown up in.
Sanji closed the distance and wrapped his arms around the demon's middle, face pressed against his chest. "Thank you," Sanji said. "Thank you, thank you, I don't—"
"You don't have to thank me." The demon's arms came around him. "I'm just sorry it took me this long to realize they were still doing it." His voice had gone quieter. "There used to be a deal, a while back. Long before you were born. It ended. I assumed it stayed ended." He was quiet for a second. "I should have checked, I just never thought to look.”
"It's not your fault," Sanji said. "You didn't know. You couldn't have."
"It doesn’t matter."
"It does to me." Sanji pulled back just enough to look up at him. "I don't care how long it took or why. You came. Nobody else in eighteen years ever came. I'm grateful for that for the rest of my life, however long that ends up being."
"If you want to thank me anyway," he said, eventually, his voice gone careful, "there's a way you could."
Sanji blinked up at him. "What?"
The demon didn't answer. He brushed his thumb once along Sanji's jaw, before he leaned down and kissed him, slow at first, then deepening when Sanji’s hands wrapped around his back. He tasted faintly of smoke. One hand stayed at Sanji's jaw, the other settled at the small of his back, holding him steady against the cold.
After a minute, Sanji stopped and looked back up at the demon. "I don't even know your name."
"Zoro."
"Sanji."
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They moved within the month, packing up the first cabin, travelling far enough that nobody from Sanji's old village would ever recognize his face, but still close enough to a trading post. Zoro had wanted to take him somewhere truly remote, but Sanji had asked if they could stay close enough that he could still see other people now and then. Zoro couldn’t say no to him.
Chopper had wandered into their lives the second winter, a young reindeer who'd lost his herd and refused to leave once Zoro fed him scraps from the porch. Most nights he slept curled up at the foot of their bed.
"He's going to be too big for that someday," Zoro said one morning, watching Chopper trying to squirm into Sanji’s lap.
"He's been saying that for six months," Sanji mumbled into Chopper’s fur, scratching behind the reindeer's ears. "I don't think he knows what he’s talking about."
That evening Chopper climbed up between them on the bench, settling his head across both their laps. Sanji laughed and let him stay.
"You ok? You seem quiet," Zoro said, arm settling around Sanji's shoulders, pulling him in against his side.
"Just happy," Sanji said.
Zoro looked at him for a moment,, then leaned over and kissed him, his free hand coming up to rest against the side of Sanji's face while Chopper huffed and shifted between them, entirely unbothered.