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Sanji yawns as he leaves the galley, stretching his arms above his head as he strolls bare-footed down the stairs. There are no clouds in the sky, just stars dotted across the darkness and the moon shining gently down on the deck.
They left Thriller Bark behind not three days ago, another adventure and a new crewmate added to their ranks.
Speaking of their new crewmate - music is in the air, a reminder that Brook is on his first watch tonight. Sanji stops on the lawn, feet buried deep in the grass, and listens.
It's not Bink's Sake, this time.
This melody is sadder, floating along the deck with a soft, serene tone.
It's familiar, and fills Sanji's heart with a bittersweet longing that makes his chest hurt.
- - -
Sanji has been aboard the Orbit for half a year when an older staff member dies of a heart attack. He didn't know her; never will, now, but he looks at Ged and Andy's faces and understands that this woman will be missed.
That night, Ged wakes him up and tells him they're holding a funeral. Sanji, still half asleep, joins the cooks up on the deck, along with the servants and mechanics and navigators and all the rest of the Orbit's crew.
It seems this woman was well known and a long-time staff member, because most of the crew are crying. The Captain holds a very nice speech for her. A few of the old woman's closest coworkers (friends?) say several words about her integrity, her love, her sense of humor.
Northerners bury their people on land, so Sanji is in awe when they burn the woman's body and let her ash spread on the waves. It seems like a much nicer way to go, joined with the beautiful ocean. They all stand by the rail, row upon row, quiet and facing the waves. Keeping watch.
Sanji is squished between Sato and Andy, tiredly swaying on his feet when the Captain begins to sing. His voice doesn't carry far, throat thick with emotion and rust, but Sanji hears the words.
It is time to go now
Haul away your anchor
A voice joins in, then another. A woman behind Sanji sings loud and steady despite the tears running down her cheeks.
Haul away your anchor
'Tis our sailing time
Sato raises his voice, taking on the high note. Andy starts singing right after him, so deep Sanji barely barely hears more than a hum.
Get some sail upon her
Haul away your halyards
Slowly, steadily, the whole crew starts singing. No one stumbles over notes or cracks their voices in sadness and tears. The melody is full of grief, but also love.
It's a melody of mourning.
Haul away your halyards
'Tis our sailing time
Sanji has never heard anything so beautiful. His heart burns in his chest, the lump in his throat grows big. He wonders if, when he dies (really dies, not a pretend-death for people to forget he exists), someone will sing a song like this for him.
At the end of it, people are still crying, but also smiling. They watch the waves with new light in their eyes, chuckling fondly as someone starts telling a well-remembered story about the old woman.
Sanji goes to bed that night with the melody still stuck in his head. He whispers the words he remembers into the darkness, hoping that they might reach his mother somewhere far away.
- - -
After, when Sanji is stuck on a rock with a terrifying pirate sitting on the other side, he thinks about the funeral. The Orbit crew, and all of its passengers, deserved a funeral like that.
Except here there are no bodies to burn, no people to sing and harmonize with, and Sanji is only a small, starving boy lost in the middle of the ocean.
He tries, sometimes, speaks the little bits of text he remembers and hums over the things he has forgotten. His throat soon becomes too dry and damaged to do any singing.
Even later, after Sanji has discovered the (terrible, selfless, unworthy) kindness that has been done to him, Zeff hums the same melody to himself one night when he thinks Sanji is asleep. He never hears it again.
- - -
Now, standing on the deck of his home in the middle of the night, he hears Brook play a melody so achingly familiar his breath hitches. Sanji looks around and finds the musician sitting by the railing, watching the sea with his feet dangling over the edge.
He strolls over to the skeleton, who doesn't seem to hear him coming. Sanji stands behind him for a moment, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, suddenly nervous.
"Hey," Sanji says, stomach churning as he breaks the silence. He watches Brook's bow slow down for a second, hears the melody falter, before it quickly catches up again.
"Hello there, Sanji-san," Brook hums. Sanji stands for another moment before he sits down next to the musician, plucking a smoke out of his breast pocket. "You mind?" He asks, solely out of habit, and his cigarette is already lighted before Brook answers, "Oh, not at all."
He blows out smoke and watches it drift across the sea and into the night as Brook keeps playing.
"So," Sanji says, aiming for casual and probably (definitely) failing. "That song."
Brook slows down until the melody fades, and Sanji feels emptiness settle in his stomach.
"You know it?" Brook asks, tilting his head to look at him. Sanji shrugs and grips the fabric of his pajama pants tight with one hand. "I guess. The Eastern version's a bit different."
"Oh? I wasn't aware there was a version from the East Blue."
Sanji stiffens.
Fuck.
Maybe he's wrong. Maybe Sanji's mistaken Brook's beautiful melody for some stupid funeral song he heard once as a kid, and now he's fucked it all up with this akward idiot conversation-
"Though I guess it's only natural," Brook continues thoughtfully. "Death happens in all parts of the world. That you have a mourning song like ours isn't much of a surprise."
Sanji sucks in a breath, relief flooding his chest. "Y-yeah," he stammers, "that makes sense."
They ease back into silence.
Sanji's leg is bouncing, up and down and up and down as he stares aimlessly out at the sea. The night and the stars that are usually so calming and welcome suddenly feel suffocating and a little too close, and yeah maybe he's starting to freak out a bit.
The mourning melody is spinning in his head, along with names and faces and smells and feelings that are all the Orbit, the ship and the staff and the guests and little Sanji, feeling useful and safe for the first time since forever.
Brook doesn't pick the music back up, but Sanji desperately wishes he would, just so he could hear the melody again even though it's wrong different, so that he might be able to pick up the sunken, broken pieces of the Orbit and its crew from the bottom of the sea and hold them close for a little longer.
He's the sole survivor of one of East Blue's biggest cruise ships and it's wrong because it should have been anyone but him.
He was the small, weak kid who snuck on board and begged on his knees to stay, who couldn't cook fast or well enough or keep his balance on deck or even speak the damn language properly. He cried too much and hid when he was scared, and messed up and spilled soup and kept stumbling over his words.
(Sanji survived a pirate raid and a storm only because he was saved - and at ten years old, starving and scared and grieving, he hated Zeff for it. Hated the pirate with all his might, because he hadn't saved anyone else, and now Sanji was all alone again.)
He never knew all their names - and that may be his biggest regret, the fact that he was so shy and scared he never thought to get to know people.
Some yes; the kitchen staff, the waiters, the captain - but there were so many aboard that Sanji never knew, never will get to know. So many who will never be remembered.
(Zeff knew his crew. Their names, their favorite foods, their dreams. He's told a few stories of them, mostly in his retellings of their Grand Line adventures. (Sanji doesn't remember Zeff ever actually grieving, but he was ten and small and Zeff will always pretend to be an unemotional old bastard.))
Brook lost his whole crew to disease and death, and then he was alone for fifty years. He kept their bones to be buried, kept their memories and names and their song recorded to be treasured forever. He waited on his own, alone and suffering and slowly going insane, until the Strawhats showed up.
Brook, the last remaining Rumbar pirate.
Sanji, the only survivor of the Orbit shipwreck.
Sanji doesn't have any bones to bury or bodies to burn.
He has half of their names, no dreams and few memories - but he knows how it is to be alone, to lose everything you know so suddenly and brutally.
All the Strawhats do, in one way or another - the loneliness in Brook's eyes are mirrored in Sanji's own, just like it is in Zoro and Luffy and Nami and Robin and Chopper and Usopp and Franky's.
It's a trait they share.
(Though, to be honest, Sanji hasn't felt lonely since Luffy appeared, pestering him to join his weird little pirate crew - Sanji's favorite people, now.)
"That grave Usopp and Franky made," Sanji says, "The one for your crew. It was a nice one."
Brook makes a noise in agreement, absently tracing the lines of his violin with a skeletal finger. "Indeed, it was a worthy grave. I have to admit it warmed my heart quite, although I don't have a heart."
Sanji doesn't laugh at the dumb joke. He just huffs out a breath and takes a last drag of his smoke. Fiddles with the stump, before he butts it out on Sunny's metal frame and sticks it back into his tincase.
"I was part of a big crew once," he suddenly says into the quiet night. "A little brat working in the kitchen of a cruiseship."
Brook goes still. Sanji opens and closes his mouth a few times, tries to remain calm even as his mind is screaming at him to retreat reatreat you can't tell him this you've never told anyone what are you doing-
"They all died back when I was ten. Passengers, workers, sailors." He swallows, once, twice, trying to soothe his dry throat. "We, uh, we were raided during a storm that sunk both ships. I was miraculously saved, but not by anyone from my own crew."
He waits. A moment that feels like seconds, like a lifetime.
"You know the guilt then," Brook finally says, "the burden one carries as a survivor."
Sanji pauses, before he nods. Yes, he knows that burden. Will carry it for a long, long time. Maybe forever.
"I don't understand how you manage to go on," Brook says, and Sanji's not very good at reading skeletal expressions yet, but he hears the desperate brokenness of the old musician's voice, the plea that lies in his words, in his heart.
"It's too much sometimes. Seas, I couldn't save a single one of them. It was my fault. I was their captain, I- I should have been able to do something, anything, to make sure that someone else- ... that someone else survived."
Instead he doesn't say, but Sanji hears it loud and clear. He chuckles bitterly.
"That's the million berry-thought, isn't it? The unescapable question. The thing that keeps you awake at night, eating away at your insides."
He shrugs. "Tough shit, though. There isn't anything you can do about it but go forward."
Brook looks at him, dead face unreadable. Sanji suddenly feels a bit akward, pushing down his grief in front of someone currently dealing with their own.
He wracks his brain for something to say, and remember something Zeff told him one late night on the rock, when Sanji had asked if he missed his crew.
"You always find new people to live for, new dreams to follow. Things that make every single shitty day worth it."
A small grin creeps onto his face as he thinks of his own dream. "I'm gonna find the All Blue one day, y'know. For myself, and for my old man. I'll travel around the world with the Sunny and you guys, see Luffy become King of the Pirates."
He looks up at Brook. "And you're going with us to see Laboon again, yeah? He's been waiting so long for you. And the old flower-geezer too. They'll both be happy to see you alive."
Sanji thinks if Brook had a face, his cheeks would be wet with tears. They're not though, because he doesn't have any (not a fucking skull joke), but it doesn't make the emotion any less real.
"Thank you, Sanji-san. It seems we have much more in common than I thought."
Sanji snorts, even though his hands are shaking. "Not really. We're as different as people can get."
Brook hums, amusement present in his tone. "Still, I think there is a special kind of bond in shared experiences. Though I'm very sorry that happened to you."
"Don't be. Wasn't your fault."
Sanji starts another smoke. Brook turns his violin over and over in his hands. A cool breeze blows by, reminding Sanji he's barefoot and in his pajamas. But he doesn't want to go back to bed just yet.
"I don't know how you do it out West, but that song of our in the East was a polyphonic melody." Sanji pauses, steeling himself to ask for this, this one thing he was too much of a coward to ever ask from Zeff, from the guys at the Baratie.
But Brook is like him. Brook is a musician.
"It's not really proper to sing it alone. And I guess, I- I never really got to... do it, for them."
Brook looks at him for a long moment. This time, when he speaks, the tears really do flow down from his hollow eyes. "The Farewell should never be sung alone," he says. "You are not alone, Sanji. I would love to sing it with you."
He lifts his violin, playing a few trying tones before he softly starts the melody that makes Sanji's heart want to burst out of his chest. "You still remember the words?"
Sanji nods, because the lump in his throat makes it hard to talk. Brook starts singing, his voice strong and lovely and caring, carrying the words across the silent sea.
Get her on course now
Haul away your foresheets
Haul away your foresheets
'tis our sailing time
Sanji does not want to proclaim himself as any sort of expert on music, but Zeff liked to put on the old sailor songs on the den-den sometimes, and seafarers and pirates have always loved a good beck-and-call. Sanji has heard enough singing from cooks and guests alike to be able to easily join in with a second voice.
When your sailing's over
Haul away for heaven
Haul away, oh heaven
Sea be by your side
It's not perfect. Brook is crying softly and Sanji keeps stumbling over his words. They're only two people, singing a song meant for a crowd, but they work their way through the whole thing together.
When they're done, Sanji closes his eyes and sends a small prayer out to the people who were his first safety.
I'm sorry
Thank you
I hope you rest well now
It should have been anyone but me
Sanji doesn't hate Zeff for saving him anymore. He knows he's got a life to live, and if not for himself then for all the people that has pushed him forward. All the people he has left behind.
Brook sniffs, dries his tears away with his sleeve. His dead face is expressionless, but Sanji thinks he looks happier. Relieved. (The same emotions that are mirrored inside himself.)
"Hey Brook?"
"Hm?"
"Tell me about your crew."
"Are you sure? I can be quite the rambler, especially about that lot."
"Of course I'm sure. I wouldn't ask you if I wasn't. And, y'know, if you want, I could tell you about my old man and his restaurant."
"Yes, I would like that."