Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Zoro first meets Sanji because of Luffy which is, in retrospect, the first of many things he blames Luffy for.

At six the world’s small enough to have borders Zoro can point at with a grubby finger: their neighbourhood is theirs. The patch of cracked sidewalk outside the corner store where the gum is always stuck to the bottom of your shoe — that’s theirs. The basketball court with the dead hoop that only Luffy still pretends works, the laneway behind the laundromat that smells like hot lint and bleach and sometimes like the old man who sleeps back there, the steps where they sit in the afternoons with scraped knees and stolen ice blocks and dirt ground into every crevice of their skin — that’s all theirs too.

Mostly, though, Luffy is his. They’ve been together for what feels like forever, which in six year old terms means at least a thousand years. Luffy lives two buildings over and climbs things he shouldn’t and steals bites of Zoro’s lunch and once put a frog in his pocket for luck that escaped and lived in Zoro’s house for three days. He's sticky and impossible and the only person Zoro has ever met who can make a whole day feel like it has an engine in it, something roaring and bright and slightly dangerous that makes Zoro’s chest feel too tight and too full at the same time.

All this to say that when the new kid appears and walks straight up to Luffy like he belongs there Zoro hates him immediately. The first problem is that he’s blonde, mostly because six year old Zoro thinks blonde hair on a little kid looks stupidly bright, like someone drew him too hard with the wrong crayon. He’s kind of skinny and kind of snooty looking, dressed in nicer clothes than anyone should wear around here. He walks up right to where Luffy’s crouched by the gutter trying to build a boat out of bottles and asks: “What’re you doing?”

Luffy looks up, all delight and missing several teeth. “A race.”

“With rubbish?” The kid squints down at the gutter and says something Zoro doesn’t understand. 

Luffy just grins wider. “You wanna play?”

And the kid says yes, unfortunately. He crouches down like he’s done it a hundred times, like this space belongs to him already, and starts examining the bottles like it’s serious business. Zoro knows, immediately and with perfect clarity, that this is bullshit.

“Hey.” He scowls and points at Luffy. “He was playing with me first.”

The kid’s face goes flat. “So?”

Luffy, delighted by the conflict before it’s even really started, looks between them and says: “Yeah!” which should settle nothing and does, in fact, settle nothing. 

“What’s your name?” The blonde kid asks and Zoro crosses his arms. “So I know who’ll lose the race.”

Luffy howls with laughter, the sound bouncing off the buildings and Zoro, naturally, shoves the kid who shoves back immediately with enough enthusiasm to make Zoro understand in one hot, ugly instant that this is not a one day problem. This is the kind of problem with legs, the kind that moves into your neighbourhood and steals your best friend’s attention. 

“What’s your name?” He demands because now it’s a threat. 

The kid lifts his chin, smug. “Sanji.” 

“Stupid name.”

Sanji shoots something back with those other words, that other language alien to Zoro, quick and sharp like a reflex he didn’t even mean to show. Zoro doesn’t need to know what the words mean: the tone is clear enough. “Green hair’s ugly!” Sanji adds, like he’s winning something here.

Luffy falls over laughing and the race is completely forgotten in the favour of the much more important game of Zoro and Sanji trying to kill each other while Luffy cheers. Zoro gets a handful of that awful hair and Sanji gets a knee into Zoro’s side and they roll into the gutter before Luffy throws himself into the mix giggling and sticky, still the thing that makes everything worse and better all at the same time. 

That’s more or less how it starts and, afterwards, he stomps home with gutter water in his socks and the absolute certainty that his life’s been ruined. Kuina’s already on the front step when he jumps the fence, a practice sword balanced across her knees. She takes one look at the dirt on his face and the way he’s holding his side and grins. “You lost.”

“I didn’t lose,” Zoro snaps. “There was this kid. He talks weird and he just — he just showed up! And Luffy let him!”

Kuina’s grin widens. “So you lost to the new kid.”

“I didn’t —”

“Inside, both of you,” Koushirou says from the doorway. He doesn’t raise his voice; he never does. “Clean yourself. Then you can explain why you’re fighting with someone on their first day here.”

Zoro grumbles the whole way to the bathroom, Kuina following just far enough to keep talking through the half open door while he tries to wash the dirt off his skin without needing a full shower. “What’d he say that was so bad?”

“Everything.”

Kuina snorts and does a perfect handstand, one that Zoro’s been trying to imitate for months now. “Aw, bad loser.”

Koushirou’s footsteps pass in the hallway on the way to the kitchen. “Quiet, both of you. Dinner in twenty.”

For a while, Zoro doesn’t even think of Sanji as a person so much as an obstacle with very loud opinions. He’s apparently moved into one of the nicer buildings a few blocks over and he appears almost every day after that. Every day. Every single day! If Zoro’s climbing the fence behind the grocery store Sanji appears at the bottom with his arms crossed and makes fun of him. If Luffy decides they’re pirates for the afternoon, Sanji’s suddenly there insisting the ship needs a cook and drawing them a fucking map. If Zoro and Luffy are sharing lollies under the tree, Sanji materalises out of nowhere and says something rude in that other language.

He’s infuriating. 

He steals Luffy’s attention all the time and so they fight over it constantly: who gets to sit next to Luffy and who gets the red ice block and who saw the cat first and whose turn it is to pick the game and whether dinosaurs can beat pirates and whether pirates are cooler than knights and Luffy thinks this is ideal, apparently. He holds both their hands crossing the street and then drops them without warning to sprint ahead, wanting to be chased. He shares food with whichever one is closest and then wonders why the other one gets offended and says my friends with such careless, perfect certainty that Zoro wants to shake him.

“He’s not my friend!” Zoro says often, always loud enough for Sanji to hear.

Sanji always says: “Good!” and sounds like he means it and then, five minutes later, they’re both running after Luffy anyway because he’s decided to climb a tree.

One afternoon Zoro’s complaining loudly about it while they wipe down the dojo floor. His arms are aching from drills and his knee is scabbed again, and Sanji had called him a stupid mosshead in front of Luffy and then had run away smirking. Kuina works the far corner without looking up, listening halfheartedly before she rocks back on her heels. “Makino said their mum died. S’why they moved here. Maybe that’s why he’s rude, like he’s sad or whatever.”

Zoro’s hand stops from where it’s been working into the floorboards. “What?”

Kuina shrugs, like this is just another thing people say about the new family in town. “I dunno. I’m just saying maybe that’s why he’s weird about stuff. Or maybe he’s just annoying. She said there’s a bunch of kids in there and now they just have their dad left.”

Zoro doesn’t have anywhere to put that, not really: his own parents are two names Koushirou mentioned once and then never again. He doesn’t remember his mother, let alone remember how to miss her. “Whatever,” He mutters, and scrubs harder at a spot that was already clean. 

Kuina glances over and, for a second, it looks like she might say something else. Then she just flicks water at him with her hands and grins. “Race you to the kitchen. Loser sets the table.”

Zoro throws his rag at her and runs anyway.

By seven, everyone in the neighbourhood treats them like a unit. Makino from the corner shop asks: “Where are your little friends, Zoro?” like they’re a matched set. The old guy who fixes bikes outside the hardware shop says, “Ah, the three musketeers,” and gets two separate insults thrown at him for his trouble. Zoro’s is the loudest by far, Sanji’s the most creative and Luffy just laughs and laughs, like he’s in on some joke. 

Kuina makes fun of Zoro for it relentlessly. “So he’s staying your friend?”

“No way.” Zoro drops his bag hard enough that it slides. “He’s just — there. All the time!”

She leans back on her hands and smirks. “You talk about him a lot for if he isn’t staying your friend.”

Zoro scowls at her and goes inside to wash his hands. Koushirou is at the table and doesn’t comment, which is its own kind of comment, and later in the yard Kuina knocks Zoro’s sword wide and sticks her tongue out at him. “If he’s that annoying you should just beat him properly and get it over with. Unless he’s too strong for you?” Zoro lunges harder after that and still loses, but she does let him get one big hit in at the end, so.

Sanji becomes part of life. Zoro knows that if he wakes up and goes downstairs after breakfast that Luffy will already be outside causing problems, and that Sanji will probably be there too, standing too straight in a shirt for rough play and pretending he absolutely didn’t rush out the door. The scuffles between them become a normal part of Zoro’s world, from shoulder checks at the road to a shove over whose turn it is to throw the ball. Sanji kicks Zoro in the shin one day because he called him princess and spits angry words with real venom. Zoro tackles Sanji to the ground the next morning because Sanji told Luffy that Zoro cries when he loses, which is slander (and also once when he was four technically true). They find each other’s weaknesses fast — Zoro figures out that Sanji will lunge if he’s called a spoiled brat and Sanji clocks Zoro will lose all higher thought if anyone implies he’s scared. They use this knowledge without mercy and somewhere, under all of that, Zoro starts to learn the shape of Sanji in smaller ways, too.

He learns that Sanji hates it when anything gets on his fingers and will wipe them obsessively on whatever’s closest and that he’ll always split food exactly in thirds even when no-one’s asked. He learns that Sanji gets meaner when he’s embarrassed and meanest when he’s frightened, words changing into little blades. He learns that the other language Sanji uses is apparently a real, actual language in the world and not just babble, and that Sanji can’t resist correcting adults whenever they’re wrong, even if it gets him in trouble. He learns that Sanji talks too fast when he’s relaxed — words spilling out about food and stars and how the ocean works — and almost not at all when something’s wrong. 

It’s the last one Zoro notices first, even though at seven years old his emotional intelligence is mostly located in his fists and in his general refusal to back down from anything ever. There are days he’ll smile at adults too quickly and answer too politely and will get weird if Luffy grabs at him too suddenly, flinching like he’s been shocked. There are days he’ll act like he’s starving but split his food anyway, claiming he wasn’t hungry at all. There are days he shows up with bruises, anything from a yellow green smudge at his elbow or small marks on his upper arm. There’s a split at the corner of his mouth one day that Sanji says is from tripping over, which is stupid because Zoro watched him fall off a wall the week before and he landed like a damn cat.

Kuina notices the days Zoro and Sanji fight, and always goes to wet a tea towel for him whenever his knuckles are split. Sometimes she asks who started it and Zoro just kind of grunts. Once, after his eighth birthday party that Luffy comes to and Sanji doesn’t, he throws himself onto the couch and glares at the ceiling, sullen. “He’s always hurt.”

Kuina’s oddly silent in response before she flops down next to him. “Yeah, I guess so.” She doesn’t explain how she’s come to that agreement and Zoro doesn’t think to ask. They finish tidying the room in silence before she challenges him to first blood before dinner, which is how they both prefer to leave things. 

There’s one afternoon, late in autumn, when Sanji’s weirdness gets under Zoro’s skin enough to go sour. The block they’re on stinks of sausages someone’s frying on a barbecue somewhere and Luffy’s busied himself chasing the pigeons that keep appearing, screaming triumphantly whenever one takes off in a burst of wings. Zoro and Sanji are sprawled on the grass watching, arguing over whether Luffy would make a better pirate captain or a better criminal mastermind.

“Those are basically the same,” Sanji scowls, kicking his feet against the grass.

“You’re the same thing as a bug,” Zoro snaps. “That means you suck.”

Sanji opens his mouth to reply with something mean, probably, but then he shuts it quickly enough that Zoro glances at him with badly hidden surprise, because Sanji never misses the opportunity to be fucking unbearable. There’s a bruise darkening under his jaw, low enough that his collar almost hides it but high enough it shouldn’t be there. The skin around it looks like it still hurts to touch, all red and wrong.

Zoro stares at it and, in that beat, the loud easy shape of the afternoon pauses around the shared awareness. Everything shrinks to the space between them and the mark Sanji didn’t quite hide in time. Then Sanji lifts his chin and his scowl deepens. “What?”

Zoro jerks his gaze away. “Your face’s ugly.” Sanji waits anyway; he’s oddly good at waiting when he wants something. Eventually, Zoro picks at the grass and tries to figure out how to ask. “You got hit.”

Sanji’s shoulders go rigid, eyes flicking away towards the pigeon and their shared best friend, to anything that isn’t Zoro’s face. He says something in that other language — French, Koushirou has explained — and Zoro doesn’t understand the words at all but does understand the tone, bitter and tired.

He blinks and says: “Huh?” but Sanji doesn’t answer again and Zoro, the whole of eight, doesn’t know what to do with the conversation from there. There are no tools in him for this, only wrongness and heat and the sudden vicious urge to find whoever left that mark and do something about it. He says the worst possible thing. “You should hit them back.”

Sanji looks at him with a face Zoro will remember for years afterwards, too still and old for eight years old. Something ancient and quiet moves behind his blue eyes, there and gone in a blink, but then he grins and jumps to his feet. “Luffy! You’re doing it wrong! You gotta trap ‘em first!”

The afternoon resumes, noise flooding back in. Sanji chases pigeons with way too much theatrical drama and the day goes on like nothing happened. Something in Zoro stays caught on that smile all the same, and on the way the other boy had gone so still under his stare, like being seen was the most dangerous thing that could happen to him. He tells Kuina about the bruise later, not really meaning to because they’re doing footwork drills but he keeps missing half of them. She stares at him like he’s the idiot here. “You told him to hit back? Oh my — next time just shut up. Or don’t. Your funeral.”  She doesn’t sound mean about it, resetting her stance easily and beating him even easier. 

After that, he starts noticing more, like how Sanji never wants them near his home. He’ll steer them away from the end of the street with a joke or a shove or a sudden demand that they race to Makino’s shop before it closes, even if it’s nowhere near closing time. He declines invitations to playdates and birthday parties in ways that sound fake and he lies badly about food, and really really well about almost everything else. Sometimes he vanishes for a day or two and comes back ruder than usual, with sharp eyes and sharper words, like whatever happened inside that house chewed him up and spat him back out harder. Sometimes, if an adult raises their voice too suddenly, Zoro sees Sanji’s whole body brace before he can hide it. 

Zoro doesn’t know what any of it adds up to, but he’s got enough gut instinct to figure out that Sanji’s house is bad. He doesn’t understand systems or patterns yet, just that Sanji’s house is dangerous in the way broken glass is dangerous: even when you can’t see all of it you still have to step carefully or bleed. The knowledge sits in his chest like a piece of tinder he doesn’t have a name for and, because he’s a kid and all his strongest feelings come out sideways, this mostly makes him nastier to Sanji. He picks fights more often — stupid ones, over nothing — just to hear Sanji snap back and prove he’s still here and still fighting. He hovers without meaning to, lingering at the edge of whatever game Sanji and Luffy are playing until Sanji notices and yells at him to stop looming like a weird tree. He gets furious if Sanji doesn’t come outside when Zoro expects him to, pacing the street or kicking at loose bricks until Luffy appears and drags him into some new chaos. He says things like: “You coming or not, idiot?” in a tone that means maybe if i stand here long enough you will. maybe if i make enough noise maybe the bad house won’t win today.

Kuina watches him pace around from the kitchen doorway and, later, sits on the edge of his bed while he’s pretending to read. “If he gets really bad you can bring him here, you know.”

Zoro’s ears go hot. He turns his page and mutters: “I don’t care,” and Kuina flicks the light out on her way, ignoring his outraged yell.

Luffy, somehow, understands both the least and the most. He doesn’t see the patterns either, or if he does he translates them into the simple language of his own heart, which is to say he realises that whenever Sanji’s sad it means that Zoro’ll be mad. He never stops calling them his friends, though, and never stops reaching for both hands when they cross the street, even when they’re nine and too cool for it. 

At nine, the neighbourhood starts feeling smaller in the way all childhood places do before you go and outgrow them. The alley isn’t a fun adventure anymore, just an alley with too many broken bottles and, by nine, Zoro and Sanij have figured out how to fight without even needing a reason. It’s practically a dialect, at this point: Sanji will claim Zoro is blocking the breeze and Zoro will snap that Sanji’s blocking everyone’s happiness. Luffy will ask who wants the other half of his lolly bag and both will say me! at the same time and then glare at each other. Zoro knows how to push Sanji into a real laugh and how to push him into a real rage, and the exact difference between the two. On the other hand, Sanji seems to have figured out when Zoro’s bluffing with bravado and when he’ll actually do the stupid thing, like climb the highest tree or mouth off to the wrong adult. They start to track each other by instinct across a whole afternoon without seeming to look, like some part of them’s always listening for the other’s footsteps even when they’re pretending not to.

Most of all, Zoro’s started to piece together the signs of wrongness in Sanji into some kind of pattern. Sanji’s always hungrier in the afternoons than the morning and always relaxes more after dark than before it, unless it gets too late — then something in him winds tighter instead. He gets tense around the stupid prank phone calls they do on the street phone and hates when other kids ask too many questions about his family or his big fancy house. He flares at pity like it’s acid, like the very idea of someone feeling sorry for him is worse than whatever made them sorry in the first place. Kuina likes Sanji, tragically enough, or at least she likes laughing whenever Zoro loses in a fight to him. When he protests she just grins, huge and beaming, until his face heats.

When they’re ten, everything weird about Sanji kind of slams together hard enough to become something almost understandable, at last. The sky’s low and white and Luffy’s convinced them to build some kind of ramp out of scavenged branches and milk crates so he can jump his bike over exactly one puddle. Zoro’s trying to stabilise the ramp with a rock that keeps rolling away while Sanji yells about angles and physics or whatever, Luffy making engine noises with his mouth and revving an imaginary throttle. Then the guy who owns the fish and chip shop a few blocks away sticks his head out of his car window and says: “Sanji! Your dad’s looking for you!” and the whole park changes. Luffy keeps making engine noises for a beat, but Sanji’s body has gone stiff and his face has emptied. All the loose annoying spark of him snaps inwards behind something dead, something that looks an awful lot like the face he uses for adults with too many questions. 

Luffy, oblivious, grins. “Tell him we’re busy! We’re doing science!”

Sanji doesn’t respond and Zoro takes one single look at him, understanding that something bad is going to happen. Sanji looks like prey smells, like something small and cornered. 

The fish and chip shop owner grunts from where he’s idling on the road. “He said now, kid.”

Sanji drops the plank and says: “I’ll be back,” to Luffy in that wrong voice that doesn’t usually belong to any of them. He starts for the street, but Zoro moves before he can even think it through, grabbing the blonde’s sleeve. Sanji stops like he’s been yanked on a string and stares down at Zoro’s hand, visibly furious. Luffy’s engine noises cut out abruptly as he stills behind them. “What?”

Zoro realises, a little too late, that he’s got no damn plan here. There’s no sentence ready in his mouth or his brain, and no shape to the thing in his chest except don’t go there. He mangles it, badly. “You don’t have to go right now.”

Sanji’s eyes narrow, something flashing there before he locks it back down. His mouth shifts into something ugly. “Oh, okay. I’ll just go say my idiot friend says I don’t have to.”

“I’m serious.” His grip on Sanji’s wrist tightens without meaning to, even as something in him goes a little hot at the word friend. 

Under his breath, the French slips out like it always does when the questions get too close to the bone. Zoro, understanding it as the threat it’s meant to be, lets go at once, watching the way Sanji’s face goes red in two bright spots high on his cheeks. He doesn’t look at Zoro or Luffy again — he just turns and starts walking home with his shoulders set like he’s marching into some kind of battle.

Luffy waits until he’s halfway down the block and sighs. “He’s not coming back for a while.”

Zoro turns sharply. “What? Why?”

Luffy shrugs with his face gone grave in that strange way it does sometimes, when whatever he’s feeling is too big for his small bones. “Just know.”

That pisses Zoro off too, and he kicks the ramp hard enough to knock one milk crate sideways. The puddle ripples, but Luffy doesn’t stop him. He just shoves his hands in his pockets and watches him, bike tipped against his leg. He says, very small: “I hate his house.”

Zoro glances at him in surprise and Luffy looks back, the thing they both know sitting between them without grown up words or intervention plans or legal definitions or any kind of helpful vocabulary. That afternoon stretches on forever: they don’t race the bike or even finish the ramp. They just sit in the gutter with bad moods and don’t talk about Sanji’s house anymore, because they have no fucking idea how. When Sanji does finally come back out the sky has darkened towards the evening and he’s got a scrape on the side of his face, walking like every step’s an argument he’s losing. The first thing Zoro does when he sees him is stand up so fast he almost trips over his own feet, which is embarrassing as hell, but luckily Luffy bounds over like he’s been released from some kind of spell. “We didn’t do the jump! I reckon I can do it in the dark, but Zoro said no and also he kicked the ramp anyway and —”

Sanji looks at Zoro sharply and then at the ramp, at the milk crate askew, before back at Luffy grinning in the dark like waiting was the easiest thing in the world and also a language of love all on its own. “You’re idiots,” He says as he crouches by the ramp, but it’s fond and said around a laugh that sounds realer than anything else he’s said all week. “The angle sucks. You’re both gonna die.”

Zoro kneels beside him because the alternative is standing there with his hands empty and his chest full of things he doesn’t have words for. “No, it’s good.”

Luffy throws himself between them with a snort. “I’m still jumping it!”

“Good,” Sanji sneers. “We’ll bury you together. Zoro can dig the hole.”

That night, Zoro comes home late enough that Koushirou talks about grounding him before pursing his lips and going to bed. Kuina sneaks into his bedroom as soon as he opens the door, blinking down at the dirt on his clothes. He wants to tell her about the whole day, about the fish and chip shop owner and the way Sanji’s face had folded in and how badly he wants to know what goes on in that house, how badly he wants to know what goes on in Sanji’s head, but he doesn’t know how. He just looks at her and lets her look back, and when she takes his hand he follows her down the hallway to the bathroom so she can clean his face.

He doesn’t really understand yet that this is what growing up beside someone feels like, like hating the sound of their voice and still knowing it’s missing and memorising their damage before you even know the word for it, that it can feel almost like gravity — something that pulls and something that holds, and something he can fight and fight and still never quite escape.

x

Kuina dies three days later. 

It’s one of the things Zoro will remember forever, even though at ten he doesn’t really know what forever means in any useful kind of way… only that some details arrive in the body and stay there. The day of the week, the smell of rain stuck in the hallway carpet, the fact that he left his bokken under the bench and she’d yelled at him for it that morning with one hand holding toast and her hair half braided and her face alive with irritation — alive, alive, alive in a way that should have been permanent. 

By evening the whole house is wrong and that’s the thing about death, Zoro will think much later: the way it makes no sense long before the hurt arrives. Adults know things and still keep moving around you in ways that make you think maybe the world hasn’t ended, but. 

But.

He comes back from playing at dusk with his knees muddy and his shirt rumpled because Luffy had decided they were mountain thieves and the first thing he notices is that Kourishirou is home too early. The second thing is that he isn’t alone. There are shoes in the hallway that Zoro doesn’t know and low voices coming from the kitchen and all the lights are on, even in rooms nobody’s using. He drops his sneakers at the door and calls: “I’m back.”

No-one answers right away and he hesitates, almost, before Koushirou appears in the doorway, looking older than he did that morning, like the stillness in him has weight pressing down on his shoulders.

Zoro stops. “Where’s Kuina?”

Koushirou’s gaze moves over him once, quick and searching. He frowns. “Come sit down.”

That, more than anything, makes the world tilt because come sit down is never good, come sit down means the world is about two become two worlds, before the sentence and after it. Zoro doesn’t move. “Where’s Kuina?”

The next few minutes will never sit in his memory properly. It’s only pieces, really: Koushirou kneeling in front of him and the word accident and the phrase didn’t suffer which means nothing and everything. The grammar of the past tense arriving too soon. Kuina is gone. Kuina won’t be coming home. The sentences keep rearranging themselves in his head like they’re trying to find a shape that doesn’t hurt. Zoro stares at his guardian’s mouth moving and feels like maybe he’s become stupid. A person can’t be alive at breakfast and dead by evening. That’s too fast. 

“No,” He says and it comes out like somebody else is using his mouth. 

“Zoro —”

“No.” He turns and runs before Koushirou can decide whether to stop him, out the back door and down the steps and into the wet evening where the sky’s low and grey after the rain. Zoro runs anyway and ends up where he always does, at the wall by the church and the crooked little laneway behind the laundromat, charting the geography of childhood, the map he knows with his feet even when the rest of him is coming apart. Luffy finds him first, barrelling around the corner with Sanji behind him, mid argument about the sky. They both stop dead when they see his face. 

Luffy’s expression changes immediately. “What happened?”

Zoro opens his mouth but nothing comes out at first, until suddenly it does, suddenly he says: “Kuina died,” and it changes nothing. Shouldn’t the street crack open? Shouldn’t somebody scream? Shouldn’t the world rush to correct itself? Instead the bus keeps groaning nearby and the dogs keep barking and the world stays wet and normal under his feet.

Luffy just stares. Next to him, Sanji goes white and even at ten Zoro already knows how rare it is to stun Sanji all the way out of speech. He thinks, distantly, that if even Sanji doesn’t have a comeback then maybe the sentence is real in some awful, terrible way. 

When Luffy steps forward the look on his face is all open horror, even as he throws his arms around Zoro’s middle, clinging to him like if he just holds on tight enough Zoro can be anchored against this whole enormous tide. Zoro stands there stiff as a board and then, because he’s ten, he starts crying so hard it hurts. Luffy clings harder and Sanji stands there with his hands half raised like he has nowhere to put them. After a moment he takes off his own jacket, which is too small and light and damp to be helpful in any way, but he lays it across Zoro’s shoulders anyway. 

Zoro has never, in his life, wanted to be kind less. He jerks away from the jacket like it burned him. “I don’t want it!”

Sanji kind of flinches and that shouldn’t be what makes Zoro feel worse, but it does. Luffy, still hanging on, sighs. “Zoro —”

“I said I don’t want it!” He shoves the jacket back so hard it nearly falls into the gutter, until Sanji catches it against his chest, face gone hard. For a second he looks like he might say something in French — the kind he uses when he’s too angry or too helpless to stay in English — but he swallows it down and responds in the language they all share. 

“Fine, don’t.”

And there it is, hidden right under the grief: the old shape, the one where cruelty’s easier to survive than pity and anger’s easier to hold than sorrow. Zoro scrubs at his face with the back of his hand hard enough to hurt. “Shut up.”

Sanji glares at him. “You shut up.”

Luffy pleads: “Don’t fight right now,” and that’s what it does it, in the end. The fury arrives quick and hot, sharp enough to cut through the worst of the crying. Zoro knows fury, at least. Fury is walkable ground. He shoves Sanji’s shoulder and Sanji shoves back immediately and Luffy makes a distressed noise. 

“Idiot,” Sanji snaps. 

“You’re the idiot!”

“You’re crying all over the place!”

“That’s because she died!” It lands like a body thrown into water. Everything stops — Sanji’s face empties and Luffy’s grip around Zoro tightens until it’s painful. Zoro hears the sentence leave him and something in his own chest rips wider around it, real in the air where anybody can hear it. He breaks all over again but this time the crying comes quieter and meaner, like it’s clawing its way out. Luffy holds on anyway, small and fierce and warm, the only solid thing in the world. 

They stay like that for a long time, Luffy with his whole body wrapped round Zoro and Sanji with his jacket balled in his hands, until the cold starts to seep through Zoro’s clothes and his face starts to feel tight from crying. 

At some point, much later, when the sky’s gone completely black and the apartment lights along the street have shifted, Sanji sighs. “You should probably go home.”

Zoro says, too fast: “No,” instant and childish and with a panic so pure he almost wants to throw up from it. Home in the wrong lights and the wrong shoes and the absence at the centre of every room, home is Koushirou’s face looking older and smaller and if he goes back now Kuina will still be dead there, too. 

Luffy buries his face into Zoro’s stomach. “You can come to mine.”

Zoro almost says yes, thinking of the warm kitchen and Garp out late doing whatever Garp does and Luffy’s couch and his brothers and one more night before he has to walk past Kuina’s room and know it’ll never be loud with her again. 

Sanji’s the one who cuts in, eyes still on the street like he doesn’t want to look at either of them. “He should go home. If you don’t, it’ll still be there in the morning.”

Luffy makes a small unhappy sound and tightens his arms further. Zoro hates the both of them suddenly for being right in different ways. He hates the street and the lights and the wet cement under them and the way his own body keeps breathing when it should have stopped hours ago. Luffy walks him home and when they get to Zoro’s house the verandah light is on, Koushirou waiting on the top step. He looks up when they come into the little square of light, relief moving through his face so quickly and so nakedly that it makes Zoro’s chest throb all over again. He stops at the bottom of the steps, feeling the way Luffy’s hand finds his wrist to squeeze it once before letting go. 

Kuina’s wake is full of adults Zoro barely knows, too many bodies in black clothes and damp umbrellas dripping onto the floor and too many flowers making the air sweet and cloying in a way that turns his stomach. The incense doesn’t help; neither does the tea nobody is drinking or the little plates of food nobody touches, or the way the whole house has become tangible grief. Everyone bows their heads and sits too close together and says things like tragic and too young and such talent, like any of that means anything at all, like any words can fill the space she’s left.

Zoro’s in a black mofuku because Koushirou put the clothes in his hands that morning and said, quietly, please. He hates it but he puts it on anyway because he understands there are rules for this, even though he thinks there shouldn’t be. He should be allowed to kick holes in walls and scream at all of them until their soft voices stop, but he’s ten and the mofuku itches at the neck and everyone keeps looking at him. He stands in the hallway for most of the afternoon with his hands fisted so hard his nails cut into his palms and glares holes into the floorboards and says nothing. Koushirou moves around speaking to everyone, quieter than Zoro has ever known him. 

People come and go. Some bow and cry and tell Koushirou stories Zoro doesn’t want and won’t hear. A boy from the dojo says Kuina once helped him fix his stance and then starts sobbing into his mother’s sleeve and Zoro has to leave the room before he hits him. 

He isn’t sad, not in any helpful kind of way. He’s furious, at the stairs she fell down and at the air for failing to keep her in it and at Koushirou for still breathing when she isn’t. At himself for not being there, for being out with Luffy and Sanji and their stupid ramp and their stupid arguments while she was dying. At Kuina most of all, which is the ugliest part of it all.

He’s so angry that it makes his teeth hurt, that there’s nowhere for it to go.

Luffy and Sanji come late, appearing through a gap in black coats and flowers and Zoro wants, instantly and violently, for them not to be there. Luffy’s in a black shirt too big for him and undoubtedly Sabo’s, with shoes he’s clearly been told not to scuff but has scuffed anyway. His face is different, like that simple open grief of the first night has settled into something quieter. Ace is with him, unusually stoic, because he’s old enough to know what this means: the finality of it. Sanji looks like he’s been dipped into formalwear against his will, in a long black thing Zoro takes too long to recognise as a dress, with his hair flat and his mouth so thin it almost disappears. 

Zoro feels the anger hit him with such force it almost makes him dizzy. 

“Hey,” Luffy says quietly, with both hands half raised like he doesn’t know if Zoro wants to be touched today and is preparing for either option. His eyes are too big and too dark and too full of things Zoro doesn’t have room for, so Zoro just stares at him before he finally realises Sanji’s — holding flowers?

“You look bad.” He holds the flowers out like they might bite him and Zoro knows, deep down, that they’re probably from Garp or some adult, but Zoro doesn’t care. He hears the sentence and sees the pink blossoms and all the fury in him finds the right familiar target. 

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

Sanji blinks once before his face hardens. “What?” 

Zoro steps forward and Luffy startles, says: “Hey!” but Sanji squares up anyway, the way he always does when Zoro comes at him — and it’s not Sanji, obviously, not really. Zoro wants to hit Kuina and the stairs and the concept of a god and fate. Sanji just happens to be the nearest object with a face he knows how to fight. The punch isn’t good, technically, its aim wild and desperate and so off balance that Zoro doesn’t even clock Luffy moving into it before it’s too late, staggering back against the force of the blow. Everything in Zoro’s body turns to static as Luffy’s face crumples. Somebody gasps and the whole house seems to pull itself taut around this, all the soft voices faltering for the first time all day.

Sanji says Luffy’s name and then something in French, quick and sharp, but Luffy’s only looking at Zoro with that open hearted, bewildered hurt that only Luffy can produce. His mouth trembles once, ten and ancient and unbearably kind all at once. “If you need to fight, then fight me.”

Zoro stares at him, at the shoulder his fist landed on and at the set of his mouth, all the terrible stupid bravery of offering himself up like this and the fight goes out of him so fast it feels like being gutted. He makes a noise he can’t describe and then bolts for the back room, Kuina’s room, the only place in the house where the air still feels enough like her to hurt in a direction, rather than everywhere at once.

Sanji catches up almost immediately; Luffy would have followed too, Zoro knows, but Luffy gets intercepted by adults and their concern, so when Zoro spins around on Kuina’s carpet he nearly crashes into the blonde. “Get out!”

His face is hot and his throat hurts and he can still feel the phantom impact of hitting Luffy, sitting in his body like a poison that’s gone thick and spreading. The room smells like Kuina’s shampoo and sheets that will never be washed again. Her practice sword is still leaning against the wall like it’s waiting for her to come pick it up again.

“No.”

“I said get out!”

“Yeah, and I said no.”

Zoro lunges for him but Sanji catches him wrong and they both slam sideways into the wall, all awkward kid-height fury and grief and nowhere to put either. Zoro’s hands catch on the front of Sanji’s chest, fisting the black fabric that doesn’t belong on him, and Sanji shoves at him harshly. They grapple without grace until Sanji hisses at him and Zoro snaps back and, gradually, the shape of it loosens, purpose draining out of it, until they’re just two furious kids panting in a dead girl’s room with one of them trying very hard not to cry all over again. They can hear the wake through the walls in little muffled bursts. The hair ribbon tied to the light switch sways slightly from the impact of their bodies against the wall.

Sanji glances around at the books and the practice sword and the bed and frowns. “You hit Luffy.”

Zoro scrubs at his face with both hands. “I didn’t — it was meant to hit you.”

“You’re scaring him. You can’t hurt the one person who —” He stops and breathes, like something tired has crept into the anger.

Zoro, on the other hand, feels himself go rigid again, this time with shame. He says the cruelest thing available because it’s the only weapon left in his hands. “Why’d you even come? Why are you in a ugly dress anyway?”

Sanji takes it like a slap, something awful flickering across his face before he shuts it down. He says something mean sounding in French, spitting it out as he whirls around for the door and that’s worse, somehow. Sanji leaving because of something Zoro said feels, for one wild awful second, too close to the other leaving, too close to absence and the impossible fact that people can simply be here and then not. That doors can close and never open again.

“Wait!” His throat closes around the next sentence because it’s not good, he knows. It’s not an apology. He doesn’t know how to climb backwards from whatever grenade he’s just launched into the room. “I’m mad at her. I know she’s dead, I know that, I just —” His breath catches. “She wasn’t meant to.”

Sanji comes back enough to sit down on the edge of Kuina’s bed, frowning a little before picking up one of her pillows and lobbing it at Zoro’s head. “There, use that.”

Zoro stares at him, the absurdity of it so total that it punches a hole through the grief for half a second. “What?”

“The pillow,” Sanji sighs, impatient. “Use the fucking pillow.”

Zoro throws the pillow back, only to get a second pillow square to the chest. Sanji catches it on the way back by way of his face, and they both kinda freeze. “Oh, you’re dead,” Sanji promises before launching for him again, this time with a pillow. It’s vicious and short, feathers escaping through a small tear somewhere until the bed’s turned into a battlefield of twisted blankets and scattered pillows.

At some point Luffy bursts in too, after escaping the adults, wordlessly grabbing whatever pillow’s landed close to him, and joins in until there’s nothing left in any of them, until they’re lying in the mess of it staring at the ceiling. 

“I miss her,” Luffy says eventually, voice kind of puffed from all the activity. The sentence is so simple it hurts worse than all the soft adult language downstairs. 

Zoro turns his face away, swallowing hard. “Yeah.”

He sleeps in her bed that night, and the next. And the next night, too and for a while it’s just because he can’t stand the idea of the bed being empty. Then it’s because he tells himself somebody should use the room, and then it just keeps happening. Her books stay where she left them and her practice sword stays by the wall. 

Koushirou doesn’t comment on it, grief swallowing up whatever vague parent-shape he used to have and leaving behind a quieter, sharper man who feeds and clothes Zoro but no longer seems to know how to reach him. The house gets quieter; dinner gets shorter and the space where Kuina used to fill the air becomes a hole they both learn to walk around. Zoro gets up earlier and stays longer after practice, throwing his body at forms until his shoulders shake and the world narrows to just breath and impact and pain. The mat becomes the only place where the anger has somewhere to go. The neighbourhood is still there the next day and the next and Luffy still climbs things he shouldn’t and Sanji still picks fights and the corner shop still sells the same stale lollies and the same newspapers with the same old men glaring from the front pages. The streetlights still come on at the same time. The rain still smells the same.

Zoro still trains and goes to school and still breathes which, for a long time, feels like the worst kind of betrayal.

x

Eleven’s wrong from the start because Kuina should be twelve and that fact sits under everything like some kind of second floor nobody else can see. Every day of being eleven has the same hidden knowledge under it, that Kuina would’ve  gotten here first. She should be taller and meaner and smug about it. She should be beating him at sparring and stealing the last dumpling and calling him a baby if he sulks about turning eleven without her. She should be turning twelve, making the whole house loud about it, complaining the cake’s too sweet and eating it anyway.

Instead, Zoro’s birthday comes and he refuses to have it. Koushirou asks once, quietly, a week before if he wants Luffy over and Zoro doesn’t even pause his math homework to say no.

“Alright,” Koushirou says, and that’s it. He doesn’t try to negotiate that it might be good for Zoro, actually, which in turn might’ve made Zoro kick his chair over and leave the room, so. The quiet between them has gotten thicker since the wake, since Zoro started sleeping in Kuina’s bed and Koushirou started disappearing into his office earlier and staying there later.

His birthday comes and passes almost without shape, but Luffy shows up in the afternoon. He arrives with a wrecked single cupcake balanced on a paper tray and two plastic forks stuck in his back pocket. They sit on the little strip of cement under the clothesline in the backyard and eat the cupcake and talk about nothing. They don’t talk about Kuina or birthdays or grief, just school and a cat Luffy swears has a human face and Luffy’s new theory that he can jump off his garage without breaking anything important. Afterwards, Zoro’s so angry about how perfect it was that he has to excuse himself from dinner to hit the practice post until his hands sting and the skin splits across his knuckles in thin, bright light lines. He sits on the back step with Wado across his knees because that’s where she used to sit, and the wood still holds the shape of her if he doesn’t look too hard. The evening’s thin and blue and the house has been so fucking quiet and he keeps catching himself listening for footsteps that are never going to come. 

He tries not to think about her, but it never really works. Training just makes his arms shake faster than it used to and eating makes his stomach feel wrong. Sleeping makes him wake up angry at the dark, already reaching for a sound that isn’t there. He keeps expecting her to come and tell him his left side’s still trash, and the silence where all those things should be sits inside him like something he swallowed deep, deep down and will never be able to dislodge. Koushirou moves through the house like he’s carrying something heavy in both hands and won’t set it down, all silence and structure. He’s more absent when he’s home than Zoro remembers him being before, like he’s taken all the parts of himself that made noise and folded them away somewhere private, where children can’t touch them. The house feels smaller without Kuina and smaller still without whatever Koushirou used to bring into the rooms. The kids at school ask once, awkwardly, and then stop asking when Zoro doesn’t answer. Luffy brings over ice blocks and sits on the step with him without talking and, one afternoon, says he doesn’t remember his parents like it might be the same thing. It isn’t, though — Luffy’s parents have always been a story someone else tells. He’s never had to watch a house change around a missing person who was there last month. Zoro doesn’t know how to explain the difference to him, so he doesn’t. He just sits there while Luffy swings his feet and feels the loneliness settle deeper, that awful kind that comes from being the only one who knows what the hole feels like from the inside. The only person he can think of with a comparable problem is Sanji, and he thinks back to the conversation with Kuina, on the floor, that he hadn’t cared about the time because it had meant nothing to him. He hadn’t known what a missing mother was supposed to feel like, so the information had just sat there, wrong and unfinished. 

Now, he does. Now, he sits with Wado and wonders if Sanji felt like this, too, and if the awful stupid constant shape of it is what Sanji’s been carrying around under the shitty attitude and the clothes. Most of all, he wonders if it’s gotten better, if there was a morning Sanji had woken up and the missing had shrunk enough that he could finally breathe around it. Zoro wants to know. He wants a number. A month, or a year, he doesn’t care; just something he can point at and say that long, and then it stops. He wants someone to tell him the loneliness isn’t permanent but the thought of asking Sanji any of this is humiliating. Sanji already looks at Zoro like he knows too much half the time, so Zoro’d rather take a knee to the ribs. He’ss not going to stand there and admit he doesn’t know how to make this smaller, or that he’s so lonely without Kuina sometimes it feels like he can’t breathe right. 

So, he trains harder and longer and worse. At eleven, strength begins to mean something new to him. Before Kuina died it had meant rivalry and hungry and forward motion, it had meant i’ll beat her and i’ll be better. After, it becomes more brutal. Training hurts and occupies his body and can be measured, in some way. The post doesn’t care if he’s eleven or twelve or a hundred — he only cares if he hits it correctly. He gets up early and stays late and takes corrections from Koushirou with a clenched jaw and a vicious focus that borders on disrespect some days. He spars like every round’s revenge, until the smaller kids in the dojo start avoiding him and the older ones watch him warily.

Koushirou pulls him aside one day, after he nearly knocks a smaller kid flat from pure unmodulated force. The kid’s crying and Zoro’s hands are shaking, the dojo around them quiet. “You need to control it.”

Zoro grunts. “I did.”

The lie’s obvious but Koushirou lets it sit there between them for a moment anyway, watching the afternoon light slant across the map. Zoro waits for more, like a lecture or a hand on the shoulder or one of those shitty adult sentences about pain not being an excuse for hurting other people. Instead, he only frowns. “Again.”

Zoro hates him all over again for that, too.

He ends up spending most of his time at Garp’s house, after school and on weekends or during random evenings when Garp’s out and Ace and Sabo have taken over the kitchen. Garp’s house is loud in a way Zoro’s stopped being used to — it’s not happy, exactly, because there’s too much surviving in that place for pure happiness, but it’s alive. There’s Ace shouting from the stove about how Sabo’s burned the food again, and Sabo reading at the table while pretending not to supervise anything. There’s Luffy physically incapable of sitting in a chair, legs hooked over the back and head hanging off the seat. Zoro loves them all and resents them all.

Ace flicks him in the forehead and drawls: “You’re too snippy, kid. Relax or I’ll feed you to the sharks.” Sabo finds books he might like and explains them with excitement. Luffy grabs his wrist and drags him upstairs and promises Zoro he can sleep here whenever he wants. 

They’re each other’s brothers so easily. They fight and sprawl and steal food and shout and love without ever making it feel negotiated, without having to earn it or survive the earning. They just… are, and Zoro envies it with a heat that embarrasses him and it’s not even because he wants Ace or Sabo in his family, specifically, but he wants the ease. He thinks once, while watching Ace and Sabo shove each other over sink space while Luffy chants for more violence, that if Kuina were still here she’d hate all of them and fit in anyway. She’d call Ace an idiot and mean it affectionately and would correct Sabo’s posture. She’d roll her eyes at Luffy like she’s done a thousand times before.

The thought hits him so hard he has to leave the kitchen and, after, Luffy finds him in the hallway and says nothing about the red around his eyes. He just leans against the wall and waits, like he has all the time in the world and none of it matters as long as Zoro’s still here, still breathing, still loved.

At eleven, they also finally meet Sanji’s brothers properly. 

There are three of them, which in Zoro’s opinion is three too many. Luffy, Zoro and Sanji are on the street playing cards very badly and accusing each other of cheating, the grass warm under their legs. It’s a Sunday and the neighbourhood is full of sun and grit and noise, and Sanji smirks with his whole face when he wins a hand. 

Luffy groans. “You counted wrong!”

“I counted perfectly.”

“You make numbers up!”

“They’re French!”

Zoro opens his mouth to tell them that they’re both idiots when a car door slams. It catches his attention because he knows, instantly, that it’s one of their cars — it’s too dark and polished and expensive looking to belong to anyone but the Vinsmokes. Three boys get out of it in matching versions of the same school uniform, with jackets slung open. They’re all identically eleven and identically punchable, moving like they’ve practiced being awful together, like cruelty’s a team sport that they’re very, very good at. Luffy’s chatter cuts off mid breath, probably because he’s also seen the brothers but mostly because Sanji has gone uncharacteristically still. Zoro feels the atmosphere shift with it and sees, with confusion, the way Sanji’s fingers go white around the card he’s holding. 

They all have Sanji’s eyes and face, just in different broken configurations. 

“There you are,” Says the blue haired one and Sanji doesn’t get up, which more than anything tells Zoro that this is going to go badly.

The green haired one sighs and glances between them. “You’re filthy.”

Luffy, because he’s Luffy, brightens. “Thanks!”

The knife faced one ignores him. “Father says come home.”

Sanji picks up another card and studies it. “Tell him I’m busy.”

The awful blue haired one kind of laughs and says: “She’s got balls today,” and Zoro — who has been itching for a fight for weeks now — is on his feet before he can think better of it. The blue haired one gives him an amused once over. “And what are you gonna do?”

Luffy makes an excited noise under his breath when Zoro spits: “Kick your ass.” 

The red haired one steps forward with a grin but Zoro doesn’t get to swing — Sanji grabs the back of his shirt and yanks hard enough to throw him off balance. Zoro kind of stumbles sideways, all the anger in him instantly redirecting because now the nearest betrayal’s behind him instead of in front. Sanji’s knuckles press between his shoulder blades, hard. 

“What the hell –”

“Shut up.” His eyes are lit up with that old, bright dangerous rage that Zoro’s come to know as a serious threat. His face is flushed.

The brothers have gone still with attention now, amusement sharpening around the edges because apparently this is better entertainment than an actual fistfight. One of them says, sing song, touchy and someone else sneers, she always is and they all laugh together, raucous and awful. Luffy makes a snarling animal sound, startling enough that even the brothers blink. When he opens his mouth, though, Zoro steps in front of him quickly because god knows he’s less likely than Luffy to get killed in three seconds flat.

Sanji still has a fistful of his shirt and the whole thing is like a knife’s edge, the warm afternoon pressing in and these three shitty, terrible boys with Sanji’s face. 

“I hate them,” Luffy says, low enough that only Zoro and Sanji should hear. 

Sanji’s grip tightens once before it loosens. He starts towards the car, having clearly worked out that the cost of not doing this exceeds whatever dignity he’s been trying to protect. The brothers part for him with visible delight.

Luffy takes one shocked step after him. “Hey!”

Sanji glances over his shoulder, just barely, and for one second he looks exactly like he did the night Kuina died. Zoro hates that look almost as much as he hates the brothers.

He spends the rest of the afternoon furious, at the brothers and at Sanji and himself, maybe, although that’s harder to hold. Mostly, he’s pissed off at the fact that Sanji had an answer ready for the whole thing but the answer was just… surrendering. He doesn’t even really understand why it makes him so angry, but he knows it has something to do with the way Sanji never seems to swing back. There are three of them, sure, but Sanji could use his teeth or the cement or just… anything. He could make them regret ever touching him. That he doesn’t do this reads, to eleven year old Zoro, as some kind of impossible passivity. It’s refusal to answer pain with pain and to make the world pay in the only currency Zoro understands, so when Sanji shows up two days later with a cut at the corner of his lip and a bruise on his arm Zoro immediately gets mean.

“What happened?”

Sanji shrugs. “Your face.”

Zoro can feel Luffy hovering a few metres away, tense and uncertain, even as he points at Sanj’s mouth. “Why don’t you ever hit them back?”

Luffy scowls. “Zoro, cut it out.”

Zoro does not cut it out. He just gets angrier. “They’re your size. There’s more, okay, but you could still — you could kick the shit out of at least one of them before —”

Sanji shoves him, hard, angry enough to rock him back on his heels. Zoro’s body answers before his mind does and pushes back harder, the force of it jarring something loose in him. Luffy lunges between them instantly. “Cut it out!”

Sanji’s breathing has gone sharp and wrong, face bright red. His hands are shaking, which Zoro hates noticing even as he notices it. The bruise on his jaw stands out sharper against the flush. “You don’t know anything.”

That only makes it worse. “Then tell us!”

“No!” Sanji laughs, bitter and furious and older than any eleven year old should be. “You think this is a fight. You think if I just — hit someone then everything will be normal!”

The sentence goes through Zoro like a nail because, yes, exactly, that’s what he thinks. Not just about Sanji’s brothers but about everything, really, from Kuina to Koushirou’s silence to the whole ruined shape of his world. Hit the right thing hard enough and maybe it comes back. He grinds his teeth. “At least I’d do something.”

Sanji’s face empties and Luffy makes the kind of horrified sound that means Zoro knows he’s crossed a line somewhere. Sanji says, flat: “Yeah,” and walks away. 

Luffy rounds Zoro immediately. “What’s wrong with you?!”

Zoro laughs, because if he doesn’t then he might start crying right there and then and he’d rather fucking die. “Nothing.”

“That was mean, Zoro.”

He can’t explain why he said it — won’t, maybe. There’s no answer that doesn’t lead back to the same terrible centre, that he’s eleven and his foster sister’s dead and Koushirou barely talks to him and Sanji keeps showing up bruised and not fighting back and everything in the world feels like a test of whether people will leave if you don’t hold onto them hard enough. Later that night, though, he lies awake in Kuina’s bed staring at the ceiling and thinking about the blank look on Sanji’s face. He thinks about the brothers saying she and how Sanji had clearly hated it, and then thinks about how many of Sanji’s bruises he’s already counted and how often the stories don’t match. 

The idea comes to him then, not as a complete revelation but as an ugly grasp at a pattern: maybe it isn’t just the brothers. He doesn’t know what else it would be, not yet, but the thought lodges. 

x

The first time Sanji visits him overnight, it’s when Luffy’s camping which matters because Zoro knows that if Luffy were home there’s no way in hell Sanji would’ve chosen him. Luffy’s house is warmer and louder and full of love and chaos and the kind of affection that doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else. Luffy would open the window or the door or both and would make room. He wouldn’t ask the wrong questions first.

But. Luffy’s gone interstate with Ace and Uncle Shanks on some terrible fishing trip, so. The knock comes at seventeen minutes past one, not on Kuina’s window but on his. For one stupid heartbeat he thinks he’s imagined it completely, blinking awake in Kuina’s bed with utter confusion.

Then the knock happens again and he’s up, shuffling across the hallway back to his own room to yank the curtains aside. Sanji’s balancing, badly, between the tree branch and the windowsill, a foot on either, and looking like hell spat him up. Zoro’s seen the other boy bruised a thousand times, but this time there’s fresh blood at his mouth and his shirt’s torn and his shoulder’s dark with something, expression terrible. He climbs in carefully, moving like he’s trying not to make a sound and also possibly in a boatload of pain. When his shoes finally hit the floor he stays hunched for a second, one hand braced on the windowsill.

Zoro stares at him. “What the hell happened to you?”

Sanji leans one shoulder against the wall and laughs under his breath, tired. “Hello.”

“You’re bleeding in my room.”

Sanji glances towards the hallway. “Thought you moved out.”

Zoro’s body goes hot with the instant unreasonable fury of Sanji always seeing him too clearly. “Shut up.” 

The expression Sanji makes is worse than if he’d smiled and Zoro takes the moment to check the damage: lip split, knuckles skinned raw, face streaked with red lines like there was something pressing down against the skin for hours, bruising under the eye. And beneath it all is the thing Zoro’s started recognising without knowing what to do with: the distance, the way Sanji sometimes seems half a step away from his own body, like the real Sanji’s somewhere else. 

“Sit down,” He says finally and Sanji looks like he wants to argue on principle, but his shoulders drop and he lowers himself to the edge of Zoro’s bed with the grace of a fucking corpse. Zoro goes to find some kind of cloth, wetting a dirty shirt in the bathroom and when he comes back Sanji’s shuffled all the way back to the wall, with his head tipped back and his eyes closed. Zoro stands there just long enough for the anger in him to shift shape, that old irritation at the sight of Sanji hurt and saying nothing helpful about it and the reflexive viciousness that says fight back, idiot. Over that is the exhaustion and the relief that and that ugly, mean tenderness of Sanji still being here all the same. He chucks it at Sanji with a gruff: “Clean your face.”

Sanji glances at the face towel and rolls his eyes, settling back and ignoring the way Zoro moves closer, planting one hand on Sanji’s shoulder to keep him from jerking away. He starts cleaning the blood off the other boy’s mouth and Sanji hisses, once, through his teeth before he goes still, probably because he’s too tired to put up his usual fight. The skin under the blood is already darkening so Zoro works carefully around it, trying not to make it worse. Up close like this, he can see the way Sanji’s collarbone sticks out sharper than it should, the way he holds his arm a little closer to his body. It makes something in Zoro’s chest go tight. “What happened?”

“Nothing.”

He catches Sanji’s wrist before the blonde can move it away, peeling up the ripped sleeve to see that the scrape under it is angry and half clotted but shallow, better than it could’ve been. Worse than it should’ve been. “Did they… was it them?”

The answer to that is obvious and not obvious all at the same time because Zoro has started to understand, dimly, that the shape of Sanji’s house is bigger than sibling cruelty. He just doesn’t know what the bigger thing is yet, so it stays in his head as a pressure system. A wrongness. A structure with too many locked doors where nothing really fits, but the bruises keep coming and Sanji keeps refusing to explain and Zoro’s fists keep wanting to answer questions that don’t have any answers.

Sanji shrugs one shoulder, too careful with the other. “Sure.”

Zoro huffs and wants to push, but he almost knows by now what happens if he does. Sanji will go cruel and disappear, so instead of arguing he sets his mouth. “Go have a shower, you stink.”

Sanji rolls his eyes again, slowly this time, but stands up. He wobbles a little but disappears into the hallway anyway, and Zoro sits there until he hears the shower start. He looks around the room, which he hasn’t sat in after midnight in months. He comes in here, obviously, to get clothes and books and the few things that belong to him, but sleeping has been different. Sanji comes back later in a towel that gets traded for one of Zoro’s old shirts, his hair damp and sticking up. After he’s dressed, he stands in the doorway like he’s forgotten why he’s even here. “Your room’s ugly.”

“Go to hell.” He kind of expects the blonde to collapse or fall asleep standing up, or even kick him in the shin before passing out from the effort but instead Sanji wanders over to peer down at Zoro’s desk. 

“Why’s it in French?”

It takes Zoro a moment to realise what he’s referring to, and then his face goes so hot so fast it’s alarming. “Nothing. It’s just a stupid video.”

Sanji just kind of stares at him, mouth twitching, coming alive again apparently. “It’s French.”

Zoro glares at him. “I thought it’d be easy to learn but it’s bullshit.” The second it’s out he wants to die, earnest in a way that should be criminal, actually.

Sanji laughs so hard he has to sit down, wiping at his mouth which has started bleeding again. “Oh my god, you’re trying to learn French?”

Zoro scowls, somehow going even hotter. “Forget it.” 

“No, no, no.” Sanji’s still laughing, “Please put on the nice French bird movie, Mossy.”

Zoro nearly pegs the video at his head, but he jams it into the player with more force than the poor machine deserves. “You’re a jerk.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Sanji settles against the headboard with a pained wince. 

The documentary starts, the French narration filling the room in a calm grave voice, making everything sound very important and very doomed. There are cliffs and an ocean spray and a lot of birds being unbearably idiotic about surviving said cliffs. Sanji, to his credit, lasts almost eight minutes of explanation about migration patterns before his head tips sideways against the wall and stays there. Zoro watches him for a minute, the way the blues and greys move over his face in slow tides, the way the hard edge of the blonde is finally gone, leaving behind the version Zoro almost never gets to see.

He finds the blanket shoved down the foot of the bed and pulls it over them both, freezing only slightly when Sanji folds a little bit deeper into it, like his body’s been waiting all night for permission to just — stop. Zoro stays there and watches the documentary until the French voice goes from words to background noise. He doesn’t move when Sanji’s breathing evens out completely, or when the credits roll. He just sits there in the weird light with Sanji asleep against his shoulder and the window still cracked open and the whole room feeling, for the first time in months, like his.

In the morning, Sanji wakes up mean. He squints around the unfamiliar room and drags the blanket up to his chin, voice croaky. “Man, that documentary sucked.”

Zoro snorts. “You lasted, like. Five minutes.”

“Longest five minutes of my life.” He sits up too fast and immediately regrets it, catching himself with a cuss that sounds half French and half made up.  He leaves half an hour later out the front door because there’s no way in hell he’s fit to climb down the tree. Besides, Koushirou’s already awake and there’s no point in trying to sneak past him. 

That night, Zoro sleeps in his own room again and he tells himself it’s because it’s late and he’s there already and the window’s half open and — and some stupid, treacherous part of him has already started listening for footsteps. 

Sanji doesn’t come, not that night or the night after, either. But four nights later there’s a knock at the window again and after that he starts appearing at least once a week. Bloodied, sometimes. Bruised often. Sometimes he climbs in half asleep and doesn’t say anything before passing out on top of the blankets but sometimes he’s wired and vicious and picks a fight. Sometimes he shows up clean and sharp tongued and only stays long enough to watch half of whichever awful French movie Zoro’s found at the video shop. Zoro never says that the first night in his room changed anything, but from then on Kuina’s room becomes where he reads or sits when the grief is too specific. Her bed still smells like her and her books are where she left them and he lets himself have that for the parts of missing her that feel too sharp to put anywhere else.

His own room, though, becomes where he sleeps again. 

x

By twelve, Zoro still misses Kuina with a force that can flatten a whole afternoon if it catches him wrong. He still wakes up some mornings with that old, immediate thought that she should be in the kitchen already and still goes into her room sometimes, the emptiness of it hitting differently everytime. He visits her grave every week, sometimes with a flower he’s picked somewhere or sometimes with whatever bad mood the week’s left on him, and sometimes with Wado pulled alongside him because god knows if he’s going to see her he’s not going unarmed.

When Koushirou finally lets him start using it properly at the dojo — carefully, under supervision — it changes something in him, the weight of it feeling like some kind of inheritance made physical. It’s like being trusted with something that survived her when she didn’t, and that thought makes him train harder and clearer. At twelve he gets better fast. The instructors start watching him differently and the older students stop treating him like that poor kid who lost someone and start treating him like someone who might actually be dangerous. 

Luffy’s with him for the start of high school, which helps in so many ways. Luffy’s chaos is nearly loud enough to drown out the static of being the new kids in a place full of people who already know how they belong. They meet Usopp and Nami almost immediately: Usopp talks so much and so fast that Zoro assumes on sight that he’s going to be insufferable, but he makes Luffy laugh so hard he drops dead on the seats. Nami arrives two days later in math class and spends the whole time correcting the teacher under her breath with such open contempt that Zoro loves her almost immediately. She doesn’t raise her hand. She just mutters corrections like she can’t help herself and Zoro can respect it enough that when she catches him staring he doesn’t look away.

Luffy, of course, adores the both of them whereas Zoro keeps the kind of reflexive irritation that of someone whose best friend collects people as easily as he breathes, and always expects Zoro to just adjust his internal ranking system to account for it. 

“They’re weird,” He tells Luffy after school on Thursday, like that means anything.

Luffy grins. “Yeah!”

That, annoyingly, is that. Within a month the four of them are walking to class together often enough that people start assuming they’ve been friends forever.

Zoro discovers that he’s good at school in a very specific way: sports comes easily once there are actual rules and room to move, and math continues to fit his brain with a cleanliness he almost resents. He likes solving things and proving himself right and, well. Proving other people wrong, especially teachers and other boys who look at him and think that scowls and swords means stupid. There’s a boy in algebra who smirks the first week when Zoro gets called on and mutters: “This should be good,” under his breath, but Zoro solves the thing in his head and makes a point of taking too long to write it down, just to watch the smirk die in real time. Nami, two rows over, snorts loudly. That becomes part of being twelve, too: the discovery that proving people wrong is almost as satisfying as winning an actual fight. 

He settles into a rhythm of waking, walking to class, lunch, coming home, going to the dojo, doing homework and watching Koushirou move quieter than he used to. The grief never leaves, exactly, but it starts keeping time instead of breaking it. He spends Sundays at her grave and weekdays in classrooms that smell like teenage angst and sweat and evenings on the streets or in the dojo until his shoulders burn. He keeps Wado at his hip when he can, as familiar as breathing. 

Sanji doesn’t start high school with them and at first Zoro assumes there’s some delay or some stupid rich kid scheduling thing or a better school he’ll be sneering about. But the term keeps moving and Sanji never shows up in uniform, never complains about teachers, never joins the morning flow of kids. Eventually Luffy squints at him. “Are you even at school?”

Sanji glares at both of them. “I’m being homeschooled.”

Luffy wrinkles his nose. “By who?”

Sanji’s mouth twists, exhaling through his nose like this whole conversation’s beneath him. “Family machine, who else. Whatever the hell they think is an education when they don’t want you contaminating the real world.” He says it with the same controlled voice he used when his brothers showed up that day, the voice that means he’s already decided how much of this he’s going to let them touch.

Zoro doesn’t really know what homeschooling entails but he does know that he hates the way Sanji’s absences feel less like a choice and more like something being done to him. He’s still there in the evenings, sometimes, and still climbs through the window when the night gets too heavy, mean and sharp and too tired to pretend he isn’t. But the daylight hours belong to something Zoro and Luffy can’t reach, something that keeps taking pieces of Sanji and giving back someone who moves like he’s already bracing for the next hit.

Zoro doesn’t know what the fuck the family machine is but hates it with the same, uncomplicated fury he used to reserve for the stairs. 

At twelve, Sanji is notably thinner. His face sharpens and his wrists are bony in ways that make Zoro angry whenever he notices. There are evenings when Sanji turns up with that tense energy he gets when he’s hungry and pretending not to be and Zoro catches himself staring long enough that even Sanji notices.  He mentions it to Koushirou once, in that tired hour between practice and dinner. Wado’s laid across Zoro’s knees because Koushirou finally lets him clean it himself now, under supervision and only if he manages it without acting like an idiot about it. The cloth in his hand’s gone still and he realises he’s been staring at the same section of the blade without really seeing it. “Oi.”

Kourishou pauses from where he’s slicing scallions at the bench. He doesn’t look over. “What is it?”

Zoro looks down at Wado’s tsuka and presses his lips together until it hurts. The thought’s been needling him all week and then some. “Sanji looks worse.”

The knife stops as Koushirou clearly considers this. “Worse how?”

Zoro scowls, scrubbing the cloth harder than necessary along the shinogi. He grits his teeth. “Just worse. He’s skinnier and he has those bruises and he’s home all the time now, which is weird and his brothers —” he cuts himself off, because even at twelve he doesn’t know how to explain the Vinsmokes without sounding like he’s just inventing cartoon villains or something. “They’re jerks.”

Koushirou sets the knife down and looks at the cutting board, at the neat pile of scallion, at his own hands braced on either side. The rice cooker clicks over into warm. Finally, he says: “Mind your own business.”

Zoro’s grip tightens. “What?”

Koushirou exhales and turns around, something unreadable on his face. “Mind your own business,” He repeats firmly, before adding: “Please.”

Zoro gets to his feet fast, Wado nearly slipping off his lap. “So you know.”

Koushirou’s mouth goes flat. “I know enough.”

“Then why don’t you do something?!”

The question hangs there, huge and childish and much too close to all the other questions he’s been carrying since Kuina died, all breaking down to what good are adults if they can see bad things happening and stand still? Koushirou looks at him for a long moment before he sighs. “Sometimes helping badly makes things worse.”

Zoro stares at him. He can understand the words, sure, but the sentence buries itself under his skin in a way that feels deeply, deeply infuriating. “That’s stupid. You’re stronger than them.”

Koushirou’s expression changes, just a fraction, into something almost sad. “That isn’t how this works.”

“Then how does it work?” 

Kourishou doesn’t answer straight away and when he does his voice has gone quieter, more considerate. He turns back to the cutting board. “Some families are dangerous in ways that can’t be fixed with fists.”

Zoro feels himself go hot all over, like the floor’s giving out under his feet one plank at a time because he knows, now, that he’s not wrong and that it’s bad, so bad even the adults won’t touch it. “So, what, you can’t stop it?”

Across from him, Koushirou is silent and the whole kitchen shrinks down around it. Zoro stands there with Wado in his hands and feels, with awful clarity, the shape of something breaking open inside of him. “That’s bullshit.”

He takes Wado and leaves before Koushirou can answer because if he stays one single second longer he’s going to shout what good are you, then? and they’d never recover from that, not fully. Outside, the evening’s cool and Luffy’s yelling about something and Zoro’s so fucking angry he wants to run his sword through the entire world. 

The knowledge sits with him for days; he trains harder and goes to bed later, snapping at Luffy for no good reason and then feeling worse when Luffy just blinks at him and drags him into a hug. Koushirou doesn’t bring the conversation up again, nor does he comment on finding Zoro’s knuckles raw from the bag. He keeps expecting someone to do something, but the only thing that changes is that Sanji’s shithead brothers start turning up more often now that they’re older. Ichiji and Yonji mostly keep to themselves and to each other, but they still have a way of appearing at the mouth of the park or outside the corner shop like they’re checking the perimeter or something. They don’t usually speak to the rest of them, they just look. Ichiji is loud when he wants to be, and Yonji is quieter, but Niji is something else together. Niji makes Sanji go still from across the other side of the street, which is impossible to ignore.

Reiju is different. Zoro doesn't see her often either — she keeps to the edges of town even more than the brothers do — but when she does appear she moves carefully. Once, outside the bottle shop, Zoro watches her cross the street without hurrying and fall into step on Sanji’s other side the second Niji’s voice carries from further up the block. She doesn’t touch him, but she stays close enough that Sanji would have to step around her to get past, until Sanji turns and speaks to her in French. Zoro wouldn’t say he loves or trusts any of the Vinsmoke siblings, but he minds Reiju the least — she doesn’t make the air feel like it’s waiting to break the way the other three do. She looks at Sanji like she’s waiting for something, and Zoro has no idea what that is but he knows it’s not the same way the brothers look at him and god knows that has to count for something.

Mostly, what he feels is the same useless heat. Sanji still shows up most days like nothing’s wrong and some days like something’s been removed from inside of him. He still splits food and trash talks Zoro’s form and still won’t let anyone get anywhere near his house, and Zoro wants to shake him until something helpful falls out. He wants Sanji to do the obvious thing and wants the adults to do the obvious thing, and neither of them will. 

He thinks about Kuina more when he’s walking home, all the small stupid memories still tucked away in his head. He thinks about the way she used to whip him with the dishwashing sponge when Koushirou wasn’t looking and the way she’d sneak into his room sometimes to read her trashy magazines under his blanket and the way she’d sit on the back step after training with Wado across her lap and listen while Zoro complained and complained, without ever telling him to shut up about even though she was clearly bored. She would have known what to do with all this, he thinks. She would have looked at Niji’s flat eyes and Yonji’s sneer and would have decided they needed to be crushed into oblivion, and then she would’ve done it way better than Zoro can manage. She would’ve told him whether hitting them was actually going to help or whether he was just going to make it worse and she would’ve expected him to listen. She’s not here to be right about it anymore, but some nights he catches himself turning towards anyway, like she’s still going to be there, oiling Wado and ready to call him slow on his left side.

When the fight finally does happen the afternoon is so damn normal Zoro doesn’t see it coming at all. They’re at the park with the bad basketball hoops because Luffy wants to see if Usopp’s new slingshot can actually hit the rim from the far side of the court, and Nami’s already told Usopp three times he’s going to put someone’s eye out. She’s sitting on the bench with a packet of chips, clearly unimpressed, and Sanji’s supposed to be there but hasn’t turned up.

Luffy frowns at the empty stretch of path. “Where is he, then?”

Usopp, sitting backwards on the park bench, shrugs from upside down. “Maybe his family chained him to the tree or something.”

Nami’s face goes flat. “Yeah, that stopped being funny weeks ago.” 

“Years ago,” Luffy corrects grimly and doesn’t sound like he’s joking at all. The silence afterwards is so big and ugly that Luffy starts bouncing on one leg like the quiet is something he can outrun. A car rolls past on the far side of the court and Zoro recognises it by sound alone, because god knows all the Vinsmoke cars have the same wrongness to them.. He picks up a rock before he’s finished deciding to, and tt at the fence, waiting for it to stop with his breath high in his throat. The car only pauses long enough for Niji and Yonji to get out, Niji with his sharp smile and eyes like he’s already halfway through an insult. Yonji is broader and louder, all appetite and casual violence, the kind of kid who looks like he enjoys putting his hands on others just because he can.

They’re both exactly as awful as ever, striding across the way to square up against Zoro. “You got a problem?”

Nami hisses, low and furious: “Sit down,” but Zoro does not sit down. Koushirou’s warning moves through his head for maybe half a second, but he’s already walking with the deliberate kind of stupid that, at twelve, is easy to mistake for courage. “What’d you do to him?”

Niji looks him up and down like he’s examining a stray dog. “Pet’s gotten mouthy.”

Zoro clenches his fists. “I said what’d you do to him?”

Yonji’s smile widens just enough. “Why, you miss her?”

Behind Zoro, he can feel the whole group go tight, can feel Luffy coming up beside him like he’s waiting for this to go so, so badly. Usopp says something Zoro can’t hear over the roaring in his ears. “I’m gonna break your face,” He spits and Yonji laughs so hard he actually bends at the waist. Niji does not laugh — he watches Zoro come closer with those cool, dead eyes, like this is already over. 

“Go on, then.”

The invitation is all Zoro needs: he swings and it’s not a bad punch, objectively. He’s got training in him now, muscle and balance and the beginnings of actual control and if Niji had been some random kid or even one of the older rascals around, it might’ve landed the way Zoro intended. But it’s Niji, who isn’t some random kid, who catches Zoro’s wrist and twists it violently with the kind of practiced cruelty that says someone older and worse taught him how to hurt smaller bodies. Zoro gets yanked off balance, pain shooting white hot up his arm before Yonji hits him hard enough to put him on the gravel path.

The world flashes with pain and sharp, stupid shock; he hears Luffy shout, sees him try to tackle Niji in his peripheral vision, before Yonji grabs a fistful of his shirt and hauls him halfway back up just to slam him against the basketball court fence. Zoro sees red — a hot sheet of it over the inside of his vision, grief and humiliation and the old Kuina-shaped fury in him collapsing into one urge: destroy it, destroy it, destroy it.

He drives his knee up, wild, catching Yonji enough to make him grunt and loosen his grip. Zoro tears loose and swings again, sloppier this time, not dojo clean at all. Niji gets clipped in the mouth this time and the scrap goes ugly immediately because there are no rules or weight classes and no fucking adults, and Zoro’s one body against two that have clearly done this before in their own polished monster house. Luffy’s a pinwheel of fists somewhere, but Yonji gets Zoro in the face and Niji sweeps Luffy’s ankle and puts him flat. Somebody’s yelling something somewhere and then Sanji hits like a knife. He launches himself at Yonji with the furious, dirty speed Zoro discovered years ago honed to actual emergency, until he’s pushed Yonji back with murder in his face. Zoro has never seen him look so angry and scared at the same time. He spits something in French and even at twelve Zoro knows it’s the wrong thing to say, because the whole centre of the fight changes, becoming about Sanji in a way his brothers enjoy too much. 

Luffy barrels in from behind to grab Zoro’s sleeve hard enough to pull him back. “Get out.”

Nami gets between Usopp and the fence with both hands out, which means it’s worse than Zoro thought because she never physically enters chaos unless all other options have failed. “Are you all insane?”

Zoro’s about to snap at her when Sanji shoves him back again. “Go home.”

“I was winning,” Zoro spits, which earns him a look from Sanji that’s so incandescently furious that even through the blood running into one eye Zoro has to admit that he maybe was, in fact, not winning. Then Yonji comes again and Sanji moves to meet him and Zoro’s body reacts before pride can: he goes with him, shoulder-to-shoulder for one ugly second, both of them swinging at boys they hate for different reasons.

Then someone’s mother on the basketball court starts yelling about calling the police, which is apparently enough to make the Vinsmoke brothers decide the scene’s become a little too risky for whatever image they pretend to care about. Niji spits blood into the grass and points at Sanji. “You’re dead when you get home.” 

Sanji’s face empties in a way that’ll haunt Zoro for years.  Then Yonji shoulders Niji back towards the direction of their house, both of them laughing by the time they disappear into the distance. The silence afterwards is enormous, with Usopp the first to break it by flopping down on the grass. “What the hell?”

Nami’s voice is trembling despite all her efforts. “That’s what I’ve been asking.”

Luffy lets go of Zoro’s sleeve only to round on him fully. “What’s wrong with you?”

Zoro opens his mouth but Sanji beats him to it, the sheer venom in his tone making everybody shut up. “He’s a fucking moron, that’s what.”

“At least I did something!” Zoro shoots back, and Sanji throws his hands up like he’s considering chucking Zoro back into the fence.

“Do you think that was helping?!”

“Yes!”

For one awful beat nobody moves, and then Sanji laughs, short and dead, nothing human in it at all. “You’re such an idiot.” 

Luffy cuts in between them the way he always has, when he can see they’re about to tip over into something unforgivable. He stands between Zoro and Sanji with his face set, between Zoro and whatever awful next thing would’ve happened if given room to finish forming. He looks disappointed. Hurt, maybe, and Zoro stops moving because yet again his anger’s run into the one person he can’t pour it into. 

Sanji looks at the two of them, says nothing and then just… leaves. Zoro takes one useless step in that direction but Luffy presses him back. “I need to —”

“You need to sit down, man,” Usopp says, which is maybe the sanest thing anybody’s ever heard him say. 

When Zoro shakes them loose and staggers to the end of the block, Sanji’s well and truly gone. That night he waits for a knock at the window that never comes and the next day he checks the usual places, just in case. The church lot, the weird little laneway behind the laundromat, the spot outside the Baratie, but there’s nothing.

The day after that there’s nothing either, and a whole week goes by without a peep. 

Then two.

Then almost a month and Zoro becomes unbearable. At school he gets into trouble twice — once for nearly breaking a desk during math and once for shoving a kid in the hallway. At the dojo Koushirou says focus in the flat voice that means he’s already said it more often than he’d like. He nearly bites Nami’s face off when she suggests, carefully, that maybe picking a fight with the Vinsmokes in public wasn’t some strategic masterstroke. She lets him have it for three full minutes before hissing: “Are you done being an idiot?”

Luffy takes the brunt of it, but god knows he keeps showing up anyway, dragging Zoro to Garp’s after school and saying he’ll come back with such uncomplicated certainty that Zoro wants to scream at him for making hope sound so fucking easy. 

By the time the knock comes, Zoro’s room is his again in every way and he snaps awake with the first scrape of the window, almost falling out of his bed in the hurry. Sanji’s thinner somehow, looking at him with that same expression as the first time, like this is a last resort for him.  Zoro doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He flexes them by his sides, alive with anger and relief in equal measure. The relief is worse, maybe. “You disappeared.”

“No shit.” 

“Where the hell were you?”

Sanji wipes at the healing split in his mouth with the back of one hand. “Busy.”

It should start a fight, but Zoro stands there breathing too hard in the dark and feeling, with perfect horrible clarity, that this month has taught him exactly what Koushirou meant and that sometimes helping wrong makes the damage bloom outwards in directions you can’t even see until someone disappears for weeks and comes back worse.

x

Thirteen hits Zoro like a fucking freight train. One day he’s more or less himself — angry, steady, good with a sword, appropriately suspicious of authority — and the next his voice cracks in the middle of telling Luffy to shut up and Luffy laughs so hard he falls off his bike has to lie there making choking noises into the grass.

Zoro wants to die. 

Nami, hearing the last horrible squeak of the sentence, has to put a hand over her mouth and turn away so fast her ponytail whips around. Usopp breaks down into screeching giggles, despite whatever the fuck’s been happening with his voice lately. 

“Cut it out,” Zoro snaps, which would have sounded suitably threatening if the final word hadn’t betrayed him in the middle and shot up half an octave. Luffy wheezes and Zoro spends the next ten minutes trying to kick them all into traffic, and the rest of the week in a stage of generalised outrage at his own throat. 

Kuina would’ve been insufferable about it, is what he keeps thinking. She would’ve laughed at him until he tried to tackle her and would’ve done a terrible imitation and said something awful and mean and he misses her hardest in stupid moments like that. 

Thirteen is full of that kind of ambush; it feels like his whole life is mutating around him. He gets taller, lankier first and then broader in places that make his old shirts useless to him, sleeves too short and shoulders pulling at seams. He’s good at sports in all the ways he already suspected he would be: running, sparring, anything with rules. He likes proving people wrong there just as much as he likes doing it in math, which remains his most humiliating secret skill. His friendship with Luffy stays easy in the way everything else refuses to.

They walk to school together every morning, sometimes in silence and sometimes with Luffy talking so much the route seems shorter. Sometimes Usopp joins them halfway and immediately starts talking about whatever late night movie he watched. Sometimes Nami appears at the last corner before the schoolgrounds, but often she’s busy with band. By thirteen, the four of them are settled enough that everyone else at school’s started assuming they came packaged that way and Zoro likes that, which is annoying. 

Sanji —

Sanji gets weirder. Or maybe more obvious? Or maybe Zoro’s just started looking at him wrong. He tells himself this isn’t true, and that Sanji’s just thirteen and alive and homeschooled into misery and so he has way too much restless energy everytime he actually manages to get out of the house. The girls are just where he puts it, because he starts flirting like it’s an event he’s training for or something. With every girl. Every single one. The cashier from the local corner store, the girl from the bakery, two cousins of someone from Usopp’s soccer team the one time they watch him play, a girl from three blocks over who drops her notebook in front of them and gets an instant hand-on-heart careful mademoiselle before she’s even picked it up.

Zoro hates it, immediately, which is stupid because he knows intellectually that Sanji’s always liked girls. Or said he did. Or acted like he did? He knows this shouldn’t be surprising and should be funny at most. Something to tease or make fun of, for Luffy and Usopp to start elaborate rumours about, which they do with a speed that’s terrifying, frankly. Usopp says there are at least six girlfriends, simultaneously. Luffy laughs and says: “No way, he gets tired too easily.”

Nami, practising notes on her flute, snorts. “Half of them are imaginary.”

Everybody cackles and Zoro stays mad and he has no idea why. It’s part of what makes thirteen so damn poisonous: the way everything just feels bigger. He spends half the year in a state of increasingly volatile irritation everytime Sanji turns the charm on around some girl with shiny hair and a pulse and because he can’t identify the feeling correctly he just keeps translating it into more familiar languages, like Sanji being annoying and Sanji showing off and Sanji acting like a desperate loser — and all of them are true, probably, but none of them feel like the actual problem. 

At Luffy’s birthday party he becomes unbearable. Luffy turns fourteen in the park with a cake supplied from Makino, way too many party pies and Ace allegedly ‘hosting’ which really just means he stands around telling bad jokes and trying to show everyone his Gameboy. The whole neighbourhood’s been invited, because Luffy would rather explode than celebrate anything on the downlow. The weather’s good and the soft drink is… well, warm and Usopp’s brought soccer balls and cards and a truly elaborate story about fighting three girls at the bowling alley. 

Sanji showing up is a surprise, because he almost never shows up to daytime events if he can avoid it. There are too many adults, probably — too much visibility. He’s got his hair combed but it’s already losing that battle, mouth meaner and prettier than should be on a kid Zoro’s known most of his life. He’s taller, annoyingly, which already sets Zoro off because last week Zoro had been winning by a stretch. And then Nami turns around and Sanji goes into some kind of catastrophe, apparently, which is ridiculous because he’s seen Nami enough times at this point to be used to her. Nami raises one eyebrow, neither impressed nor uninterested in seeing how stupid he’ll make himself in public. Sanji says something smooth and low that Zoro doesn’t catch because Luffy’s shouting about cake and Nami laughs and that’s it — Sanji spends the next hour trailing after her like some kind of lovesick peacock. He offers her drinks and carries a chair she didn’t ask him to carry and calls her beautiful and Zoro wants to throw himself into the damn lake.

Ace corners Zoro by the barbecue while Sanji’s busy rescuing sausages from Luffy’s attempts at ‘helping’ and grins, with way too much satisfaction. “That’s rough, huh?”

Zoro, already sour enough to kill, glares at him. “What?”

Ace gestures towards the picnic table, where Sanji’s floated over to listen to Nami tell some story, one of her hands stealing Usopp’s chips. Luffy’s sprawled at their feet with rapt attention, and Zoro looks away too fast. Ace’s grin widens. “Wow.”

“Shut up.”

“Oh, no. It’s really bad, huh?”

“It’s not — go away.”

Ace laughs straight in his face. “Sure.”

Zoro scowls and stomps off because he doesn’t know how to explain that it’s not just Sanji’s shitty attempts at flirting with their friend, but that he’s happy while doing it. He’s animated and bright in that old, vivid way that still catches Zoro everytime because happiness on Sanji looks like it’s been stolen. It’s that Nami is laughing and clever and easy with him and that Zoro feels shut out of a moment he wasn’t even trying to join until it was already happening, and now can’t stop wanting to interrupt by sheer force. 

Later, when Sanji drifts too far from the group trying to impress Nami with some stupid French line, Zoro kicks his ankle. “Quit drooling on her shoes.”

Sanji doesn’t even look at him. “Die mad.”

It’s the hottest, most immediate spike of rage Zoro’s felt in months. Luffy, who is building a tower out of bottle lids, blinks at him. “You do sound mad.”

Usopp, with all the warmth of a friend absolutely about to make your life worse because it’s funny, smirks. “No, no, I get it. It’s like when someone steals your seat in class.”

The whole table laughs and Zoro spends the next ten minutes in a state of barely controlled homicide before he goes home, still thinking about Sanji’s face under the late sun. He keeps thinking about it — not just when he’s gone because that part is old, almost grief shaped by now, the missing and the worrying and the window waiting, but when Sanji’s present, also. When he’s laughing for real and being mean just to play instead of just defending himself, and when he’s soft with Luffy in those rare moments where he lets himself forget performance and ruffles Luffy’s hair. When he and Usopp gang up on Luffy and Nami during cards like a united front for exactly seven minutes before imploding. 

Sanji’s hard not to notice, is the problem. He notices the way Sanji speaks and the way his tone changes depending on who he’s talking to and the way he walks and the way he leans against the wall when he’s tired, which is always, and the way he hangs around the Baratie more, which bothers Zoro less than the girl thing but in a different way. He hates that noticing feels like another form of waiting, only this time the window’s inside his own chest and Sanji keeps climbing through it whether he means to or not. He notices that Sanji starts smoking, although that’s almost impossible not to notice with the way Sanji makes everybody notice. He starts carrying around packets of smokes that he’s gotten from gods knows where with infuriating casualness, flicking the lighter open one handed under trees and behind doors and on the back steps of the corner shop when Makino’s not looking. The smoke curls around his fingers like it belongs there and Zoro watches the way the cigarette sits between them sometimes, something awful and stupid twisting low in his stomach. 

Luffy hates the smoking, obviously, and tries to catch him out whenever possible. One evening they catch him in the laundromat laneway, where the light’s golden and Sanji’s hair’s sticking to his forehead and he looks tired, always. Luffy gasps like he’s found the blonde holding a gun. “Again?! That’s so gross, Sanji!”

Sanji takes a drag and exhales upwards. “Almost like that’s the point.”

Zoro knocks the cigarette away before he can think better of it, the motion of it a little too clumsy. Sanji blinks down at it and groans. “Why’d you —”

“You’re gonna die.”

“Not from one cigarette, seaweed-brain.”

“That’s exactly what they want you to think!” Luffy exclaims and Sanji boggles at him a bit before laughing, and Zoro’d be more pissed off if the laugh didn’t sound so damn real. If it didn’t make something in his chest loosen and tighten at the same time. He hates it and wants to be the reason for it and also wants to shove Sanji into the goddamn wall. He doesn’t know what else to do so he does the wrong thing on purpose, watching too closely and picking fights.

Around them, the rest of the neighbourhood keeps rearranging itself into smaller shapes. Luffy moves through the days with the easy certainty that the people he loves will stay in orbit if he just keeps reaching for them, but Zoro watches it happen and feels the distance between that and whatever the hell he and Sanji are doing widen until it has fangs. That’s the main problem with being fourteen — his body’s changing and his voice is betraying him and and the only person who would’ve known how to make fun of it is dead and the person who’s still here keeps smiling at girls like he’s practicing for something Zoro doesn’t understand but can’t stop watching anyway, and Zoro doesn’t understand a damn thing about it but he knows watching it happen makes him want to choke someone out.

The other problem with being fourteen is that he gets absurdly popular, mostly by accident. He hits a growth spurt and becomes even better at sports because he likes winning, likes moving, and apparently that’s enough for people to project their entire personalities onto him. Suddenly there are girls in the hallway asking him if he’s trying out for teams he didn’t know existed and boys from older grades wanting to sit with him at lunch. Teachers start saying things like promising when talking about his sprint times or wrestling outcomes.

There’s a girl from volleyball who corners him by the bike racks and asks, very directly: “D’you want to go to the movies sometime?”

Zoro stares at her. “Why?”

The girl actually laughs and that, in hindsight, should’ve been warning enough that maybe his social skills are deeply compromised. “I’m asking you out?”

“Oh.” He says it like he’s been handed a math problem in the wrong chapter. The girl eventually rescues herself from the conversation with way more grace than he probably deserves and he stands there with his backpack hanging off one shoulder and feels like maybe everybody else got some kinda manual he missed.

Nami hears about it by lunch and by the time he gets to their table she’s already smirking. “How’d the date go?”

Usopp falls sideways onto the bench laughing and Zoro scowls, dropping into his seat to glare at them. “Not funny.”

“It’s kinda funny.” Usopp grins. “That’s like, what, four girls now? It’s feeling targeted, man.”

Zoro grabs half of Luffy’s chips. “I’m busy.”

Nami narrows her eyes at him in the way she does when she’s about to say something perceptive and unwelcome. “Do you even like girls?”

Zoro nearly chokes to death. Luffy whacks his back a few times sympathetically, which does nothing to dislodge the humiliation or the chips wedged somewhere in his throat. He can feel his face go hot. “I don’t — yeah, I guess. Why wouldn’t I?”

Nami shrugs and steals some of Luffy’s chips back. “Just checking.”

At fourteen, Luffy keeps being Luffy, growing in all directions without apology, taller and louder and somehow more himself every month. He’s still Zoro’s best friend in that ancient sense: the first person Zoro looks for in a crowd, the first person he wants next to him when something turns into a challenge, the easiest body to orbit and the hardest to explain. Sanji still keeps trying to steal him, but that’s par for the course because over the years the triangle has shifted but never dissolved. They’re all older now, so the competition is less sit next to me and more whose jokes does Luffy laugh at first and whose ideas does he follow and whose side does he take when Zoro and Sanji are circling each other. Sanji, obviously, still wins too often for Zoro’s peace.

Worse: Sanji continues to flirt with Nami who doesn’t even mind; she enjoys attention when it’s well delivered and Sanji, annoyingly, is very good at delivery. He’s perfected the art of leaning on a wall like it owes him money and smiling at Nami like she personally invented the sun and it never fails to make something vicious twist behind Zoro’s ribs. Nami usually laughs it off, or rolls her eyes, but sometimes she lets him carry her bag and sometimes she accepts the homemade snacks he offers with a sweeter smile. Everytime he sees it Zoro feels something in him snarl but he can’t explain it in any words he’d survive saying aloud: all he knows is Sanji smiling at Nami like that makes his body go cruel and stupid. One afternoon Sanji’s peeled off towards the corner shop with Luffy because Luffy wants gummies and Zoro’s left on the corner with Nami and Usopp, all three watching the two idiots go.

Nami hums without looking at him. “You’re gonna pull a muscle if you keep making that face.”

Usopp lights up. “Oh, the jealous face!”

Zoro’s head snaps around. “I’m not jealous.”

Usopp nearly doubles over laughing and Zoro thinks about killing the both of them here and now. He could do it, probably, Wado or no Wado: Usopp’s a string bean on the best of days. Nami might give him a run for his money, but god knows it’d be worth it. 

Sanji only continues to get sharper with age, longer in the limbs and narrower in the face and waist, hair becoming almost unruly some days. His hands are always moving — smoking stolen cigarettes or gesturing when he talks too fast or cutting up fruit in somebody’s backyard with a pocketknife he absolutely should not have.

“You look kinda weird,” Luffy says one afternoon, tilting his head at how Sanji’s hunched forwards with his elbows on his knees.

“Thanks, doc.” It’s not his usual voice, face paler than usual, that slightly green look people get when they’re trying not to throw up in public. 

Zoro crouches down in front of him. “You look like shit.”

Nami comes closer too, eyes narrowing with actual concern. “Are you sick?”

Sanji shrugs one shoulder and then flinches so obviously all four of them see it. Luffy gasps. “Oh, wow. That looked painful.”

“No shit,” Sanji snaps and then seems to regret the energy it took, grinding his forehead into his knees. “S’none of your business.”

By now, Luffy’s crouched down as well, all open concern. “Did someone… hit you?” 

Sanji makes a strangled noise, somewhere between a laugh and an attempt not to scream. “Why are you all here?”

Nami, blessedly smarter than all of them, places a hand on his shoulder. “Do you need to go home?”

“No fucking way.” The answer is so fast and visceral that even Zoro knows it means something. He’s annoyed about it instantly, the fact that Sanji won’t explain and that he’s clearly hurting but being difficult about it and, worse, at himself for not knowing how to fix it in any way, shape or form. Nami takes control, hustling the lot of them back to her place because Belle-mere is working late. Sanji resists for exactly thirty seconds and then folds in on himself and lets Nami tug him along. At Nami’s place, he curls up on the couch with a face like someone’s trying to wring him out from the inside and a hot water bottle and sheer, murderous intent. Zoro sits on the floor glaring at the TV and then at Sanji and then at the bad tea Nami’s given him and seethes about how Sanji’s life continues to be a language he can’t read no matter how many nights Sanji sleeps in his bed or how many times he’s seen the other kid near death. It’s like locked door after locked door.

Sanji glares at him. “Can you fucking not?”

“You’re being weird.”

Sanji laughs once, exhausted and venomous. “Screw you.”

Nami smacks Zoro upside the head with a rolled up magazine. “Cut it out. Use your brain for once.”

Usopp, upside down in the armchair, taps his chin. “Maybe he can’t? Like, maybe he genuinely can’t.”

Zoro considers ending both friendships at once. Later, when Sanji looks less like he’s dying and more like he’d settle for murder, Luffy pulls him into a hug. “You should’ve just told us.”

“I’d rather eat glass.”

“Okay!” Luffy shrugs, easily. He presses a wet kiss to Sanji’s temple, jumping up on his tiptoes. “Next time tell Nami then.”

He looks better the next day, sprawled over the back steps of the Baratie, smoking while the bakery girl from a few doors down leans against the wall and laughs at everything he says. Zoro’s only there because he came looking for him — not that he’d ever phrase it like that. He came to see if Sanji was around for a spar, which is different obviously, and much less pathetic. He gets there just in time to hear Sanji say: “No, really, I’ll obviously marry some beautiful girl. Tragic for everyone, but these things happen.” 

The bakery girl laughs and Zeff starts yelling about a tray and how Sanji’s making everybody late. Sanji just blows smoke towards the door and smirks and Zoro — who’d spent the walk over in a perfectly neutral mood — feels his blood boil. “Bullshit. Who’d marry you?”

Sanji glances at him with a crooked little smile. “Ah, the jealous husband.”

Zoro nearly chokes on his own pulse. “I’m not jealous!” 

The bakery girl looks between them and grins, sharklike. Sanji taps ash into the empty passata jar. “Sure.”

“I’m not!” He’d very much like to knock the cigarette out of his mouth and then possibly throw the both of them into the bin, but instead he scowls.

“You say that to every single girl with a pulse.”

Sanji presses one hand to his chest. “And I mean it every single time.”

The bakery girl laughs again and Zeff yells again and Zoro stands there feeling like somebody’s lit a match under his skin and refusing to look at it too directly. Rivalry, he tells himself then and later and in every spare, restless second. 

It’d work better as an explanation if Sanji didn’t sleep in his bed at least once a week. Sometimes it’s more, depending on how bad things are at home and how many nights Sanji can manage to sneak out. It’s enough, though, that Zoro’s gotten used to the feeling of waking in the dark and finding another body already in his room. Enough that he knows which floorboards Sanji avoids by instinct and how long the bathroom tap runs when he’s trying to clean blood out of his clothes. The sleeps themselves are rarely soft: Sanji comes in bruised or furious in that way that means he’s trying to outpace whatever happened back home. They bicker and sometimes they fight in whispers. Sometimes they talk for an hour in circles that mean nothing and everything. Sometimes Sanji teaches him useless French just to laugh at the accent Zoro attempts, and sometimes they play MarioKart until Sanji falls asleep with the controller loose in one hand and Zoro has to pry it free.

One evening, Luffy and Usopp are fighting about whether homemade smoke bombs count as science as Nami trims Zoro’s hair while he glares at the street because Sanji’d said maybe he could hang out, and apparently maybe has become its own little act of violence.

“You look pathetic,” Nami tells him frankly. “I’d feel more sorry for you if you weren’t making it my problem.”

He hunches his shoulders, scrunching his nose at the fallen bits of hair that land on his shoulder and tickle his jaw. “Rack off.”

Usopp takes a break from trying to wrestle Luffy into oblivion to snort. “Aw, I think it’s cute,” and Zoro jerks so badly to peg his water bottle at the other boy that Nami shrieks and yanks him back by the hair. Zoro sits there with murderous humiliation lighting up every centimetre of his skin and grits his teeth against it all.

x

Three weeks out from his fifteenth birthday, Sanji comes through the window already half asleep, kicking off his shoes and muttering move with his eyes barely open. They don’t bother with the TV — Sanji just falls onto the bed in one graceless line, stealing half the blanket immediately. For a while, the only sound is breathing and the house settling into the night. There’s a siren in the distance, maybe, and Sanji grimaces as he shifts across in his sleep, flipping a few times before settling again, mouth pursed and hair a mess across his eyes.

Zoro frowns at him and before he can stop himself, before he can decide if this is a terrible idea, he reaches out and brushes the hair back. It’s a simple motion: just his fingertips at Sanji’s temple and the soft drag of hair away from his face, but something low and electric shoots through Zoro’s arm to land somewhere behind his ribs. Sanji’s hair is softer than it looks, sliding under his fingers too easily and Zoro’s stupid heart is suddenly too loud in his own ears. He can feel his pulse in his throat and in his fingertips at the same time. Sanji’s eyes open instantly and Zoro freezes, but he doesn’t pull away. Sanji blinks at him, sleep heavy and so close in the dark that Zoro can feel the warmth of his breath if he thinks about it too hard. There’s a faint bruise still fading along his face from whatever happened last week. 

Zoro can’t make himself move his fucking hand away, until Sanji pulls back to frown at him properly. “What?”

“Nothing.” 

The silence builds and stretches long enough that Zoro starts counting the beats of his own heart and wondering if this is the type of moment that can actually kill a person. His skin feels too tight. His mouth is too dry. He wants to say something to break the tension and also wants to reach out again and that second want is so much more terrifying than the first that he stays frozen. 

Sanji exhales slowly. “Cheveux.”

Zoro blinks. “What?”

Sanji’s mouth twitches like he’s trying not to smile. “Hair. In French.”

Zoro lets out the breath he hadn’t realised he was holding and scowls. “You’re so annoying.”

Sanji closes his eyes, unbearably smug. “Yeah, but you keep me around.”

For his fifteenth birthday, Zoro skips any and all suggestions from Nami and Usopp and arranges for Luffy’s uncle to take them to the lake. Shanks isn’t Luffy’s uncle in any formal sense, but he’s been in Luffy’s life for so long that the title’s stuck — he blows into town like a cyclone, loud and sunburned and kind of impossible, trading stories that probably aren’t true, about pirates and clowns and treasure. Luffy loves him with such wholehearted violence that everyone else has learned to surrender and enjoy the collateral fun.  Most importantly: Shanks has no sense of self preservation and thinks it’d be fun to let a bunch of teens roam around the lakeside for hours. Luffy’s ecstatic about it and has managed to rope Usopp into trying fishing, which is a disaster waiting to happen, really. Nami comes along with her homework because she’s left her essay too late, as usual. Zoro invites Sanji thinking he won’t be able to come, because he missed Nami’s and Luffy’s, but he gets dropped off in one of the Vinsmoke cars an hour after everyone else. He gets out in a pale summer dress with his mouth already set like a curse and growls: “Don’t even start.”

Shanks, to his immense credit, doesn’t ask a single question. He just says: “Cabin’s that way, kid,” and jerks a thumb towards it. 

Sanji disappears for a few minutes while Luffy and Usopp start arguing over which bait to use (which is pointless, really, because Zoro reckons they’ve got next to no chance of catching anything anyway) and comes out in shorts and a dark singlet with visible annoyance of someone shedding a skin too fast. There are tight, pale wraps crisscrossing under the singlet in a way Zoro’s never seen before, because usually Sanji layers so much or moves too fast or keeps too much distance in daylight. Here, under the lake sun, it’s visible enough to lodge like a hook and Zoro’s brain goes immediately to injury, to something the brothers did or something the house did or some damage being held together under all that skin. “What happened to your chest?”

Sanji freezes, just for a second, before he looks incredulous. “Are you fucking — ugh. Seriously?”

Zoro scowls and glares away, irritated at himself for asking and at Sanji for answering like that and at the whole stupid knot of noticing without understanding that seems to follow Sanji through every stage of life. They spend the rest of the day swimming and shouting and nearly drowning each other in the lake while Shanks drinks beer on the dock and offers commentary no kid should hear. Luffy climbs everything and Usopp screams and neither of them catch a fish. Nami threatens murder and gives up on her essay, edging into the water with a shiver. Sanji loosens enough to become almost himself, lean and viscous and bright in the sun, diving and calling Zoro names from the water with his hair slicked back and his eyes lit up. 

Zoro watches him too much, maybe. How easy he looks in the water, and how fast he smiles when Luffy does something and how much lighter he always seems the further the house gets behind him, even if it’s only for a day, even if the car will come take him away before dark. Zoro watches the way water runs down his neck to pool at his collarbones and the way he laughs when he surfaces and the way he looks at Zoro, sometimes, like he’s about to say something but doesn’t. 

Shanks throws a sausage sizzle and lets Luffy have a single sip of beer and puts on some godawful country music while they eat. Afterwards, Nami and Usopp start arguing over the city’s recycling program while Luffy listens to Shanks explain the difference between using a handreel and a rod. The water’s silvery blue under the sun and Usopp steals Zoro’s sunglasses at some point, showing off as he cartwheels with them across the grass.

After lunch, Zoro gathers up the rubbish because god knows somebody has to, shuffling them down the little slope of a hill away from the picnic table, where the ground’s uneven with old roots and flattened reeds. The edge of the lake glitters through the trees and he likes the brief quiet of it, the cooler shade. When he turns around, after dumping the rubbish, Sanji’s making his way down the slope with his hands in his pockets and a weird expression on his face. 

“Yeah?” Zoro prompts, thinking maybe the other boy’s got more rubbish or something, but Sanji just keeps coming, stopping oddly close. Zoro squints at him, wishing he had his sunnies. “You’re being weird.”

The trees shift overhead in the wind and, somewhere near the lake, Luffy starts howling with delight. Sanji glances back towards the hill and their friends, chewing down on his lip. “Just. Was gonna say happy birthday or whatever.”

“What?”

Sanji rolls his eyes, which is only reassuring in the sense that he hasn’t been replaced by some kind of pod person. “You heard me.”

Zoro snorts despite himself, because trust Sanji to be difficult for no damn reason, and he’s about to say something vaguely insulting when Sanji leans in and kisses his cheek. It’s just a quick, warm press of his mouth to the skin just below Zoro’s cheekbone, which he repeats on the other side while Zoro’s still trying to remember how to breathe. The whole world blurs at the edges around him, taking out the lake and the bins and the shouting from up the hill and anything that isn’t Sanji in front of him, hands in his pockets and face pinker than Zoro’s ever seen it.

“What?” He manages, horrified at how wrecked his voice sounds and how hard his heart’s beating in his chest, in his ears, in every inch of him. His face feels like it’s on fire. “What’d you — huh?”

“Happy birthday.” Sanji looks almost shy for one split second, before his expression snaps back into something flippant enough to hide in. “French custom.”

Zoro stares at him, body lit up from the inside out, mind racing a million miles an hour and perfectly blank, all the words crammed into his mouth with nowhere to go and no way for them to make any kind of sense, because anything he could say feels like too much or not enough and he doesn’t —

Sanji pivots and heads back up the hill towards the rest of them, fast enough to be casual but not fast enough to look like he’s fleeing and Zoro stands there and feels, with awful vivid certainty, that his whole universe has just shifted sideways. When he gets back to the group Usopp’s arguing with Luffy and Sanji’s talking to Nami like nothing happened and Zoro feels like he’s having a fucking panic attack under whatever fake calm he’s projecting, like his internal organs are trying to claw their way into daylight. He helps pack the car and pretends to listen when Luffy recounts the entire history of the lake’s fish population and lets Nami hand him dry clothes. 

He replays the kiss over and over on the drive back, so hard that by the time he gets home it almost stops feeling like a memory and starts feeling like some kind of second pulse. That night, lying in bed, he thinks about how Sanji looked in the water and the kiss and what would’ve happened if he’d just — turned his head, a little. If the kiss hand landed somewhere else, or lasted longer, or been — he rolls over and kicks the wall, hard. He lies there for hours in the dark with his new, too long limbs and his stupid, awful heart and traitorous brain that won’t stop replaying the expression Sanji had after the kiss and how Sanji’s hair felt to touch and tells himself, over and over, that none of this means anything. 

At fifteen, his body gets bigger and his attitude gets bigger and school gets bigger inside as well as outside. At fifteen, the four of them are inseparable in the school grounds, orbiting each other with the careless certainty of people who’ve already decided the rest of the world can go to hell if they don’t have each other. Usopp talks at a speed that should count as some kind of weapon but somehow becomes comforting. He lies constantly, sometimes for fun and sometimes because it’s easier to tell a story than the truth, and Zoro learns all the different textures of those lies without ever saying so. He learns to tell the difference between the comfortable ones and the defensive ones and the ones that are really just Usopp trying to make the world a little less brutal for a minute or two.

Nami, meanwhile, gets sharper all the time — sharper features, sharper wit, sharper awareness of every moving part in a room. She steals because she likes the game but also because she’s good at it, and Zoro learns quickly that the most dangerous thing about Nami isn’t the theft itself but how well she understands what people want… and how easily they’ll hand it over if she lets them think it was their idea. Sanji isn’t always around, but when he’s not with them he’s at the Baratie, which Zoro finds out mostly by accident. He’s meant to be meeting Luffy and Usopp when it starts raining, some little summer burst, and Zoro swears angrily. He ducks beneath the nearest thing, which happens to be the striped side awning of the restaurant. It’s the kind of restaurant that’s half a bar and all old wood and brass railings, the kind of place the neighbourhood uses for birthdays if they’ve saved enough and for first dates. Luffy loves it because sometimes the waiters give him free fries if he looks tragic enough. Zoro’s been there maybe a dozen times, usually in a group, usually with Luffy making everybody else’s night more difficult, but as he’s standing there dripping under the awning the back door bangs open and Sanji comes flying out like he’s being chased.

For one beat they just stare at each other. Sanji looks sweaty and flushed and furious in a way that has nothing to do with Zoro for once. There’s an apron around his waist. Zoro blinks at him. “What the hell?”

Sanji’s face goes bright red. “Oh, great! You stalking me now?”

“What the hell?” Zoro repeats. “Why’re you wearing that?”

Sanji glances down at himself like he, too, is surprised by the apron part. “I’m being oppressed.”

Zoro snorts. “Uh-huh. Real sad.”

“If you’re out there smoking again, brat, I’ll throw you into the sea!”

Sanji rolls his eyes, even as Zeff comes stomping to the doorway. Zoro’s never really seen Zeff up close, not like this: he’s the kind of old that looks hammered into shape, big through the shoulders and moustache thick. He glares at Sanji first, then Zoro, then back at Sanji. “This your mate?”

Zoro bristles on instinct. “I’m not —”

Sanji throws his hands up. “Can I go home yet or not?”

Zeff ignores him completely, looking back at Zoro with a considering sort of squint that makes Zoro feel like he’s being measured for something — to be kicked, probably. He shifts uneasily under the gaze. Then Zeff jerks his chin towards the restaurant. “Inside. Both of you, unless you want to drown.”

Zoro stares at him in abject horror. “Both of —”

“You heard me.” He kicks the door open gruffly, waiting there until Sanji storms back inside and Zoro, with no fucking idea what to do, follows through the back door and into a kitchen that smells like butter and garlic and onions and has about ten different people in it. 

It’s noisy and alive — knives on boards and pans hissing and orders being shouters and doors slamming and swearing in languages Zoro doesn’t know. Everything is in motion, everything connected, from heat to order to speed. Sanji changes shape the second he steps into it, the slouch coming off him instantly. The scowl stays, but it sharpens into concentration instead of defense and he stops at a table to start sorting potatoes with efficient hands. Zoro stands there with the rain dripping off his hair and his bag hanging off his shoulder and feels, weirdly, like he’s stumbled into a version of the world he wasn’t invited to, but maybe could have been if he’d just known the damn password.

Zeff points at a stool. “You. Sit.”

Zoro, because there’s a stool and a mystery and Sanji with his sleeves rolled up, sits and catches the paring knife that’s tossed to him. Sanji looks outraged. “No way. We should’ve left him in the rain.”

“He’s got hands,” Zeff grunts and Sanji snaps something in French that Zeff just kind of shrugs at. He leans one hip against the table and narrows his eyes at Zoro. “You know how to use that?”

Zoro snorts, insulted. “Obviously.”

“Good.” Zeff points at the potatoes. “Earn your stay.”

For the first five minutes, Sanji’s unbearable about it. He complains about every single potato Zoro peels, that the peel is too thick and then too thin, delivering a brutal flick to Zoro’s wrist that stings more than Zoro lets on. When he glances sideways, though, Sanji’s hands are moving faster than anybody should be able to manage. Zeff passes behind them every so often and barks corrections like too slow and thinner, brat and if you hold the knife again like that i’ll show you a proper sharp edge.

Zoro should hate every second of it, but he… kind of likes it? Everything here is immediate and material and useful: you cut and carry and stir and move and listen. More importantly, Sanji fits here in a way that almost hurts to see: he mouths off at Zeff every chance he gets and insults the soup stock when he tastes it and kicks Zoro in the shin at some point under the table when he laughs at Sanji getting scolded for over salting the potatoes. There’s something in him, here, that Zoro’s almost never seen anywhere else. Absorption, maybe. He’s here when he’s here, in his hands and in his eyes and in the tilt of his body as he watches a pan and the way he reaches for a knife. In how fast he learns when Zeff actually bothers to teach him instead of insulting. 

Zoro watches the afternoon unfold with growing fascination and, if he’s being honest, some kind of jealousy because he wants the version of Sanji that exists inside of this place, the one who isn’t performing or bracing or disappearing behind smoke and French and empty smiles for girls he probably doesn’t even want. The one who’s allowed to be angry and competent and hungry without it costing anything. 

It becomes a part of the world in the way everything else in Zoro’s life has — one day it’s just a random restaurant on the corner and the next it’s another axis everything turns around. Luffy still loves it for the fries, of course, but now Zoro knows that if Sanji vanishes after a bad day and the cul de sac can’t hold him then sometimes he comes here, instead. 

By midyear, school has been grinding at all of them for weeks straight, with a group project Nami’s personally carrying and Luffy getting detention yet again for climbing the rainwater tank. Zoro fails a history quiz he didn’t study for and by lunchtime one day even Usopp looks frayed, despite usually thriving in chaos. They loiter on the back steps to the aquarium after the last bell with their bags at their feet when Usopp groans and puts his face in his hands. “Movie night, man. No-one’s allowed to pick anything with a school in it. I even see a classroom and I’m out.”

Luffy agrees immediately and Nami agrees less immediately, on the condition that she can leave if it gets too gross. Zoro’s halfway through a shrug when Luffy suggests they invite Sanji, even though they all know it’s fifty-fifty on whether he’ll actually show up. 

Sanji’s never really explained the homeschooling thing in any way that sticks. He changes the subject or answers in French or says that it’s complicated in a tone that means stop asking. Zoro’s stopped asking, but it still sits shitty and wrong everytime the rest of them complain about a teacher and Sanji just huffs and rolls his eyes. The idea that he might actually come to Usopp’s for a social outing on a school night is so damn laughable that Zoro spends the walk over convincing himself it won’t happen, and then Sanji does end up coming after all. He nods at Luffy and Nami, ruffles Usopp’s hair and then immediately starts bossing them around.

“You came,” Zoro says stupidly, mouth always faster than his sense when the blonde’s involved.

Sanji raises his eyebrows, almost sneering. “No shit.” He doesn’t offer anything else, which is so typical of him that Zoro gets annoyed and stomps into the lounge room. Usopp argues loudly with his mum about snacks before producing an alarming amount of popcorn and lollies and it feels normal and lovely. The seating sorts itself the way it always does, with Luffy kicked to the floor because he always ends up rolling too much and Usopp with him, because he always ends up wrestling Luffy anyway. Nami takes the single recliner with glee and so, by the time the terrible romance movie starts, Zoro’s left on the couch Sanji and the popcorn between them. Honestly, Usopp’s lounge room has never successfully held all of them at once, but they keep trying anyway. 

The movie’s bad in exactly the way Usopp likes best, which is to say it has two unfairly attractive people who spend most of the runtime being needlessly cruel to each other and then kiss in the rain like that fixes all their problems. Sanji lasts until the first lingering eye contact shot. “Regarde ca,” He mutters, almost to himself. “The shadow’s completely wrong. She’s meant to be backlit and they’ve lit her from the side like they’re scared of her face.”

Zoro squints at the screen. “Sounds fake.”

“It is fake, idiot.” Sanji doesn't look over, but the corner of his mouth moves into a smirk. “You’re not even watching the lighting, seaweed-brain.”

“Regarde, the movie’s stupid,” Zoro says, flat on purpose, keeping his pronunciation awful because it makes Sanji laugh every single time before correcting him without any real bite to it. He goes back to dissecting the lead’s line delivery in a string of French that Zoro only catches the tone, but tries mimicking anyway. It comes out worse and Sanji elbows him for it, light and automatic; the contact stays a heartbeat longer than the joke requires and when Zoro glances sideways the tips of Sanji’s ears have gone pink. 

For a while it stays like that, easy and light. Sanji provides a running translation of his own complaints whenever Zoro makes a sound that might be a question, and Zoro keeps deliberately mangling the corrections just to watch Sanji’s mouth do that thing it does when he’s trying very hard not to smile. Their shoulders brush everytime Sanji leans forwards to point at another crime against cinematography and neither of them shifts away. At one point, Sanji says something short and rude about the male lead’s hair and then adds, in English: “You’d do the same thing if you had better taste,” and Zoro’s stomach does a small, stupid flip that he wants to kill straight away. He answers by reaching across Sanji for the popcorn, shoving him deliberately. On screen, the balcony argument finally collapses under the weight of the soundtrack. The music swells in the way that means everyone in the room is about to suffer for it: Luffy makes a noise like he’s been shot and Nami draws her knees up with a scoff, while Usopp looks absolutely thrilled and charmed, leaning closer as the two leads move in very close. One of them says a line about having always noticed and then they’re kissing, slowly and dramatically, and Zoro feels his face go hot.

He keeps his eyes on the TV because the alternative is worse. Beside him, Sanji’s gone quiet for once and this time, when their fingers bump in the popcorn bowl, the contact doesn’t break right away. This time, popcorn shifts and salt sticks and Zoro’s pulse is so loud he can almost hear it because he could pull back. He should pull back. Instead, he lets his hand stay where it is, knuckles against Sanji’s and then — because the movie is still kissing and the rising music is rising and his skin feels like it’s on fire and Sanji hasn’t moved away and Zoro’s brain has left the fucking building — he turns his wrist just enough for their palms to brush, for their hands to press together properly in the dark. Zoro can’t get a full breath; it feels enormous and also stupidly good, the kind of good that makes his chest ache. Sanji’s thumb shifts once against his skin, just barely, like he’s testing and Zoro stares straight ahead at the kiss on screen and tries to memorise the exact weight of it, the exact shape of the other boy’s fingers as they slip between his — and then Sanji pulls away so abruptly it sends the popcorn bowl to the floor and makes poor Luffy shriek.

“I have to go,” He says quickly, already on his feet, already stepping over Usopp’s sprawled legs. “Curfew.”

“It’s not even –” Usopp starts, pausing the movie.

“Tomorrow. Or — whatever. I have to go.” He doesn’t look at Zoro or anyone, doesn’t even pause before slipping out the door and leaving the room utterly silent save for the TV’s low hum and the sound of Luffy fishing popcorn out of the rug. 

“Did we do something?” Luffy asks, puzzled.

Nami sighs and steals the remote from Usopp. “He’s been off all week. Just finish it.”

Zoro stays pinned where he is, his hand empty and salty. The place where Sanji’s palm rested against his feels warm and the warmth is somehow worse now that he’s gone. On the screen, the couple keep kissing and Zoro stares at the dent Sanji made in the cushion with his heart beating wildly too fast, trying to fix his face into something that doesn’t show how badly he wants to get off the couch and follow, or how much that three seconds of contact are still rearranging things behind his ribs.

He doesn’t talk on the walk back. Luffy fills the silence anyway and, at home, Zoro runs the water too hot and stands there with his forehead against the tiles, replaying the night in pieces he can’t put down. He thinks about the French and Sanji’s laugh, the way his ears had turned pink and the seconds of their hands together, deliberate on Zoro’s side and allowed on Sanji’s. The thumb. He turns his head over under the spray like the feeling might still be on his skin and wants, badly, to know if Sanji’s somewhere doing the same thing. Maybe he’s standing in his own bathroom or lying on his own bed, turning the moment over and wondering what it means. He wants to know if the hand was nothing, or if it was the same stupid pull Zoro’s been failing to ignore for months now. He can’t ask. Asking would mean saying it aloud and watching Sanji’s face do whatever it does when Zoro’s being too obvious. It’d mean risking the answer being no or worse, the answer being a carefully polite version of no that lets them stay friends. Zoro presses his forehead harder against the tile, grinding it until it hurts a little because he knows Sanji looks at girls. Everybody knows that, god. He has never once looked at Zoro like that in any way Zoro can trust, except for that three seconds on the couch while a bad movie kissed. None of it makes sense. Why didn’t Sanji pull away the second Zoro’s fingers searched for his? Why did his thumb move like that? Why did he leave like staying would’ve been worse?

He shuts the shower off, the bathroom full of steam and his own pulse. He dries off and lies down on his bed in the dark, but the questions don’t settle. They just arrange themselves into new shapes as he stares at the ceiling, grimly aware that he has no idea what’s happening to him and the only ideas he does have are ones he doesn’t like. He spends most of the next few days failing at every distraction he tries. He runs the local trails until his form gets sloppy and his lungs burn, and then he does it again because stopping means the couch and the popcorn. He does kata until his arms feel like falling off and still can’t stop thinking about the way Sanji’s thumb had brushed over his skin. He doesn’t know if he wants the memory sharper or gone. 

By Saturday morning the dread has settled in properly. He keeps picturing the next time they’ll be in the same room and his stomach turns over at the thought of Sanji’s face having that flat suspicious look he gets sometimes. It sits inside him for hours, building behind his teeth until he very nearly asks Nami about it at the bakery. She’s by the freezer, flipping through a magazine with the bored focus of someone killing time while Luffy debates fillings. The question comes out before he can stop it. “Can I — can I ask you something?”

She doesn’t look up right away. “That depends on if you’re gonna make it my problem.”

“It’s not —” He stops. The version he has in his head, the one that starts with the movie and his hands and what it means when someone doesn’t pull away, collapses the second he tries to aim it at another person. His face goes hot. “Nevermind. It’s stupid.”

Nami turns a page. She doesn’t sigh or smirk, or do any of the things he’s braced for. When she finally does look over, her expression is steady and unsurprised, like she’s already sketched out the shape of whatever he isn’t saying. “Okay. You don’t have to.” She closes the magazine and pays for her drink, holding the door open on her way out without another word. The subject dies right where Zoro dropped it, but the relief is so sharp he feels faintly ill with it. 

For once, he’s almost grateful Sanji stays gone over the weekend, giving no chance to test whether the hand in the bowl or the door shutting is the part that’s going to stick with Zoro the most. It feels like borrowed time and Zoro doesn’t trust it, exactly, but he also doesn’t want it to end.

On Sunday afternoon Luffy insists on them attending Usopp’s soccer match and Zoro goes because the only other option is staying at home with Koushirou on the same damn loop. The field’s terrible, all patchy grass giving way to hard dirt in the mouths of the goals and the chalk lines redrawn so many damn times it’s criminal. The goals themselves lean like they’re embarrassed to be standing, but the sky’s bright and beautiful and the wind is warm, so. The game so far has consisted mostly of boys named Liam kicking dirt in dramatic arcs while one poor exhausted coach pinches the bridge of his nose. 

Luffy’s having the time of his life which has nothing to do with soccer itself and everything to do with Usopp being on the field — Luffy would be equally invested if Usopp were competing in some kind of national stapling competition. He’s here because it’s Usopp and god knows every social event in their lives picks up Luffy like static, loud and impossible to brush and somehow improving the whole thing by just. Existing. 

Zoro lies on the picnic blanket with one knee up and his awful sports drink turning warm beside him. He squints at the sun and pretends to understand the rules more than he actually does, but he catches the important parts at least: Usopp’s surprisingly not terrible, the goalie on the other team is clearly a dickhead and Nami’s wisely brought along several bags of chips and cut fruit.

Luffy nearly blows out his own throat screaming and then Zoro’s on his feet, too, yelling because Usopp’s face when he actually kicks the ball into the net is bright and shocked and violently, violently happy. Nami claps and cheers, spilling chips everywhere and Usopp points wildly at them, like they had anything to do with it. By the time the final whistle blows, everyone’s sweaty and loud and full of joy. Usopp comes jogging over, flushed dark and triumphant, hair sticking to his forehead, and sweeps Nami into a sweaty, sweaty kiss.

Zoro just fucking stares at them. Beside him, Luffy has paused midjump which just means that he falls to the grass with a loud oof!

“Oh,” Nami says after Usopp’s broken the kiss to spin around a few times on the spot. Her mouth is doing something big and awkward. “There’s something we should tell you?”

“You think?!” Luffy crows, grabbing at his own belly as he laughs, before grabbing at the both of them and pulling them into a rough hug. “I’m so happy for you!”

Zoro should feel surprised, maybe, but he doesn’t. He’s seen the way Usopp hovers whenever Nami goes quiet and the way Nami says his name differently when she’s tired, and the way they’ve always orbited each other like they already know where the other one is going to be.

“I knew it!” Luffy’s saying from where he’s squashed both of them into the rug. 

Nami laughs, trying to get them all back upright. “No, you didn’t!”

Zoro laughs hard enough that it surprises him. Luffy’s joy is infectious and the sunlight is hot on the back of his neck and Usopp looks like he might actually ascend out of his own skin at this rate. Luffy demands details and Nami refuses them on principle, before Usopp caves and offers two embarrassing fragments that seem to involve a lot of kissing, and then he gets kicked in the shin for his troubles anyway. The whole thing dissolves into the kind of warm, noisy aftermath that Zoro loves and misses in equal measure.

The whole way through, all Zoro can think about is how easy it looks — that transition, how they moved from sitting like friends and talking like friends and being friends into something else and more? How did it change? How did either of them know? How did one of them speak first and how did the world not split open around them?

By the time the sun starts dropping and everyone starts packing up chairs and wrappers, Zoro still can’t stop thinking about it. He sleeps at Luffy’s that night because Garp’s place is closer, technically, but also because being around Luffy is like being around a bonfire, reassuring in ways he can’t quite describe. They end up on the floor of Luffy’s room with one thin blanket and the window cracked open to the summer night outside, crickets and traffic and that dog that always barks three streets over. Garp’s snoring loudly and Ace and Sabo are still awake downstairs, voices drifting up now and then through the vents in bursts of laughter and sibling arguments. Luffy’s flat on his back with his arm thrown over his eyes while Zoro stares at the ceiling and lasts maybe thirteen minutes before the question rises on its own. “Do you ever think about girls?”

Luffy moves his arm. “Eh?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

Luffy, clearly not forgetting it, rolls onto his side to peer at him in the dark. “Why?”

There’s no good answer to that, is the problem. Definitely no answer that Zoro wants to give. He presses his mouth together. “Just asking.”

Luffy squints at him some more, like maybe with enough effort he can physically see the shape of whatever thought Zoro’s refusing to hand over. “Not really? I dunno. Not like that.”

It’s probably the least surprising thing Luffy’s ever said: he’s always seemed to move through the world in straight lines towards people without really caring what category they fall into. Hunger or fun or loyalty or affection… he loves hard enough to make his own categories sometimes, and never seems especially bothered by the labels other people try to pin to it afterwards.

Zoro grunts something noncommittal and is about to put the whole fucking thing to bed when Luffy kinds of sighs. “Do you?”

Zoro stares up at the ceiling again because the answer should be easy. He’s nearly sixteen and girls are constantly, apparently, part of the universe now. Usopp gets tongue-tied around Nami and Sanji flirts with every other girl on the planet like he gets points for each one. Half the boys at school talk about liking girls in a language Zoro can imitate, but not really feel. He should be able to say yes or no or something teenage and normal, but instead he thinks of Sanji at the lake with water dripping from his hair, saying something about French customs with that shy expression and Sanji’s mouth brushing his cheek, gone before Zoro could decide whether to flinch or lean into it. He thinks of Sanji teaching him swear words in French and in the dark of the corner store parking lot flirting with some girl, while Zoro stood a metre away and felt something hot and ugly rise in his throat. He thinks of how close they came to holding hands. 

He says, finally, into the dark: “Not really.”

Luffy hums and that should be the end of it, really, but the question Nami and Usopp lodged in him this afternoon keeps moving around under the skin, refusing to settle. He chews at his lip for a moment, contemplating putting his conversation to bed, but. 

But.

“How’d they know, do you reckon?”

Luffy blinks at him. “Who?”

“Nami and Usopp.”

“Oh.” Luffy grins at the ceiling, his teeth flashing minimally in the dim. “Because they like each other?”

Zoro waits and Luffy waits back, apparently believing he’s answered in full. Zoro huffs and turns his head on the pillow. “What, that’s it?”

“I guess so!”

“That’s not helpful.” He scowls at nothing, feeling silly all over again because hell, maybe Luffy’s right and maybe it is that simple for some people. Maybe some people really do just like somebody enough and long enough and obviously enough that eventually the whole thing tips into a new shape and everybody calls it dating and keeps going. He doesn’t know how to imagine that for himself — or rather he does know deep down and that’s the problem. 

Beside him, Luffy says softly: “You’re weird lately. Not bad weird, just… weird-weird. Is it because Sanji’s been weird, too?”

The question hits cleanly enough that Zoro kind of stills; Sanji always seems to be the answer even when Zoro doesn’t want him anywhere near the question. He frowns and picks at the hem of his shirt, knowing there’s no point in lying to Luffy. “Maybe.”

Luffy lies back down properly, humming again, apparently choosing not to dig. It’s one of the reasons Zoro loves him, probably: Luffy can be a battering ram when he wants something, but with other people’s secrets he often has this strange grace where he presses until he feels the real edge and then, if the person matters, he waits on the right side of it. 

They lie there a little longer in the dark, Zoro listening to the house breathe around them and thinking about Nami and Usopp and how they must’ve crossed over without him noticing the exact moment. He thinks about girls and how the answer in him keeps coming back blank, and about Sanji and wonders how normal any of this is and whether there’s a version of him everyone else got instructions for, that never arrived in the mail and whether wanting one specific person but refusing to name it counts as a phase or a problem or just. Being fifteen.

He watches Luffy fall asleep beside him with one hand flung halfway across the blanket between them and thinks about how, apparently, friendship can become something else if you keep standing close enough to the line. The thought follows him into sleep in a form he still refuses to say out loud, because if that’s true then what the hell does it mean that the only person he can picture on the other side is Sanji?

The next morning he has breakfast with Luffy’s family and learns absolutely nothing helpful. Well… he learns that Garp’s managed to burn the toast and Ace can make coffee strong enough to strip paint and that Sabo has a very strong opinion about local council funding for libraries that apparently cannot wait until after breakfast to be voiced at full volume. He learns that Luffy, who fell asleep in minutes, wakes up hungry enough to start a war. He sits there in one of Shanks’s old shirts with his hair sticking up in at least four directions and talks with delight about Nami and Usopp.

“They were sitting really close the whole time,” He says around a mouthful of eggs. “Like, knees touching! And Nami kept looking at him when she thought no-one was watching.”

Ace grimaces and knocks back an obscene amount of coffee. “That’s how dating works?”

“I know that!” Luffy says indignantly. “I’m saying I saw it with my own eyes.”

Zoro stares into his cereal, where the milk has turned everything into soggy brown mush. He should contribute, maybe, but he keeps turning the same thought over in different shapes, the way you worry at a loose tooth with your tongue even when you know it’s going to hurt. 

how do you know? how do you tell? what if it’s not normal? worse, what if it is? what if your entire body’s been rewired around one person and no-one warned you there’d be side effects, like the way your pulse jumps at the memory of a mouth touching your cheek or the way anger feels too close to something else when that person flirts with anyone who isn’t you?

At some point Sabo taps him. “You alright, man? You’re quiet this morning.”

Zoro nearly chokes on the damn cereal. “Fine.”

Luffy, traitor that he is, grins. “He was being weird last night, too. We were talking about girls and he got all –” He makes a vague, flapping gesture. Like he’s trying to mime an internal collapse. “Like that.”

Zoro kicks him under the table, hard, while Ace laughs into his coffee and says: “Oh, man. Still got it bad, huh?”

Zoro kicks him, too, and escapes as soon as breakfast is finished, muttering something about chores and Kuina, which is the only true thing he trusts himself to say. The day’s already warming up outside, the sun climbing through a thin haze that promises real heat by afternoon. Zoro starts biking to the cemetery on his usual route, his usual routine — it’s one of the few things in his life that feels clean and his, something he can actually do right without having to explain himself. The wind pushes against his face as he pedals and for a while the motion helps, the world drowned out by the chain clicking and the tyres humming over the path.

He stops by some random service station on the way because he forgot water and the day’s already making the back of his neck damp. His bike rattles against the rack while he goes inside, grimacing at the way the air conditioner hits him like a slap. He grabs a bottle from the fridge, condensation already beading on the plastic and that should be all he needs… until he sees the magazine rack. It’s a minefield of titles, but there in its glossy cursed glory is one of those awful magazines Nami pretends she doesn’t read, with the cover lines jumping out at him in every colour known to mankind and then some. They read awful things like IS IT LOVE… OR JUST LUST? And 10 SIGNS HE’S SECRETLY OBSESSED and SUMMER CRUSH QUIZ: ARE YOU IN TOO DEEP?

He stops dead in the aisle and stares at it. The magazine stares back, neon and merciless and it’s the stupidest idea he’s ever had, by a long shot, but god knows that’s never stopped him before. Before he can think too hard about it, he grabs it off the rack and carries it to the counter facedown under the bottle of water. The glossy cover sticks slightly to his palm. 

The cashier’s approximately nineteen and clearly done with life. She scans both items without looking up but Zoro hears himself blurt: “It’s for my sister,” anyway, like that matters. 

She doesn’t even look up. “Cool.”

He pays and leaves with the magazine shoved halfway into his backpack, knowing dead well this is the kind of thing Kuina would’ve mocked him for. She would’ve snatched it out of his hands and read the cover aloud in the most dramatic voice possible, and then held it over his head while he tried to get it back. Unhelpfully, this is exactly why he’s thinking of her too hard to breathe right for a second by the time he finally reaches her grave.

The cemetery’s quiet this early, birdsong threading through the trees. The rest of the city feels far enough away to be another planet and Zoro leaves his bike by the gate, walking the rest of the way with the bottle of water in one hand and the stupid magazine in the other. The grass is still damp from the shade and the dew, and Kuina’s grave sits in its usual patch of light and shadow, fresh weeds already sprouting around the base. He crouches down to pull them again, throwing them aside with a little cuss, before setting his things down. The sight of the magazine there against the stone is so fucking absurd and embarrassing that he laughs, short and startled. 

“Fuck, this is stupid.”

He talks to her the way he always does, relying on the routine of it. He tells her about the soccer game yesterday, how Usopp scored and Luffy had screamed like the world was ending in the best possible way. He tells her about school and how Luffy nearly died of joy when he found out about Usopp and Nami and about the teacher who still thinks Zoro can be bribed into better attendance with sport. He talks about Koushirou being quiet, which isn’t new at all but sucks everytime. Then he sits back on his heels and scowls at the magazine, flipping through it halfheartedly. The titles scream at him IS HE YOUR DREAM DATE OR JUST EYE CANDY? WHAT KIND OF ROMANTIC DISASTER ARE YOU? FLIRT ALERT: 12 SIGNS YOUR HEART’S IN TROUBLE! And then, like a glare gun directly at his dignity: SUMMER CRUSH QUIZ: ARE YOU IN TOO DEEP?

Zoro shuts the magazine. Opens it again. 

“This is bullshit,” He tells Kuina, so that she knows he doesn’t actually condone any of this. She remains, as ever, deeply unsympathetic so he looks around the cemetery once, like someone might leap out at him or something, before rolling onto his stomach and sighing despondently. He finds a stubby pencil in his backpack, along with about fifteen of Luffy’s rocks, and chews on it in between reading the questions which border on criminal, frankly. 

Do you think about them when you should be concentrating in class?

Yes, obviously — that’s not even evidence of anything, that's just being alive in school. Everyone thinks about things during class. It doesn’t mean anything. He circles it anyway, ears already warm, and scowls at the next question. 

Do little touches from them leave you flustered for hours?

Zoro stops reading for a full twelve seconds. The wind moves through the trees above him and a bird calls once, sharp and bright. His face gets hot so fast it’s actually insulting; he can feel it crawling up his neck and into his ears. The grass feels too prickly under his legs so he shifts and then shifts again, like maybe if he moves enough the question will change. 

“You’re kidding,” He mutters. He tosses his head towards Kuina’s gravestone. “I mean, that’s not — it’s not hours.”

He circles the answer anyway, gripping the pencil too hard. The magazine paper wrinkles underneath his thumb.

Do you get jealous when they flirt with other people? 

He glares at the page so hard the words blur and his jaw tightens. For a second, he can almost see the way Sanji leans against benches and walls and benches, smiling that stupidly pretty smile at some girl. 

“This quiz sucks,” He tells Kuina but he circles the bloody answer, faster this time, like the speed’ll make it less damning. 

Do you imagine kissing them?

He closes the magazine so fast it nearly folds in half. The cover crinkles violently under his fingers as his heart does something completely fucking terrible in his chest, like it’s trying to escape through his ribs. He hasn’t — he tries — he clears his throat and presses both hands flat over the cover, trying desperately not to think of the lake and Sanji’s mouth on his cheek and what it might’ve been like if – 

He almost stands up and walks away, almost shoves the magazine back into his backpack and bikes home and pretends this never fucking happened, because yes, obviously, because there’s no point in pretending to Kuina of all people. Half the reason he’s doing this cursed thing here at her grave is that if she were alive he’d have cracked and asked her by now if it’s normal to think about Sanji’s hands and mouth so damn often. She would’ve been merciless about it, probably made him take the same quiz while keeping score.

He opens the magazine and circles yes and doesn’t — can’t — voice that one aloud.

The rest of it is no better. 

Do you notice things about them no-one else seems to?

He thinks of the way Sanji’s voice changes when he’s actually tired versus when he’s pretending not to be and the exact shape of the scar hidden in his left eyebrow and the way he says Zoro’s name like it’s both a challenge and something he’s keeping for himself. 

Do you care too much what they think of you?

He circles yes so hard the pencil nearly tears the paper.

Would you rather spend time with them than almost anyone else?

This one makes him stop again, not because the answer’s difficult but because it lands weirdly soft for a second, in the middle of all this ridiculous humiliation. He circles it without letting himself think about it too long, and then immediately regrets it. 

When he gets to the end there’s a little scoring chart at the bottom in yellow stars.

Mostly As: You’ve got a harmless little crush!

Mostly Bs: Uh-oh, cupid! You’ve got it BAD!

Mostly Cs: Call the wedding planner, sweetheart!

Zoro stares at the pages, at where he has mostly Bs. Violently mostly Bs. The little result blurb under it reads: Yep! You’re crushing hard! Your friend is taking up way more room in your heart than they should. Face it: you’ve got butterflies, jealousy, daydreams and all the classic signs! Stop denying it and start figuring out what you want! 

He shuts the magazine with both hands, like he can suffocate the words before they spread, and sits there a moment staring at nothing. 

“Nope,” He mutters but Kuina, once again, declines to intervene. He looks at her name on the gravestone and feels, suddenly and sharply, twelve all over again. Or ten. Or every age he’s been since losing the one person who might’ve actually known how to call him on this without making him want to crawl out of his own skin. The wind shifts through the grass a bit, cool against the back of his sweaty neck. 

“I’m not –” He breaks off and starts again, quieter. “S’not true, obviously.”

It’s not only because Sanji’s kind of awful sometimes — it’s mostly because if he says it cleanly then the world changes shape around it and he’s fifteen and out of his depth and already walking around like his body’s betrayed him on the best of days. He knows if Kuina were here she’d be laughing so hard she’d fall over and then she’d sit up and say something like took you long enough and he’d have to fight her and also thank her and he doesn’t know how to do either of those things with a ghost. 

He picks at the edge of the magazine until it starts to peel a bit and then inhales so deeply it almost hurts. “What if this is weird?”

The only models he has for desire are boys at school who talk about girls they want to kiss and Sanji flirting with all the girls around and Usopp, finally and blessedly, taking the obvious route towards Nami. He’s got no frame of reference for wanting a friend and sure as hell no frame for wanting one specific boy and apparently no-one else, no frame for the way, do you think about girls? got him nowhere last night because the answer in him was just a blank page with Sanji’s face written across it. 

He leans back on his hands and looks up at the sky through the trees, the leaves moving in patterns that don’t mean anything. The sun’s higher now, warmer on his face and he talks to her properly, now, about kendo and how Luffy says he doesn’t really think about girls either and how he feels like everybody else got a map and he’s still standing at the damn trailhead with the paper upside down and also possibly on fire. He doesn’t say Sanji’s name because god knows the magazine’s already done enough damage. When he finally stands to go he folds the magazine up twice, tight, like he can make it smaller than it is, and shoves it deep into his backpack. 

At the gate he pauses and glances back towards the grave, where the stone’s tiny in the distance. “You’d be so annoying about this,” He sighs and the silence is fond enough in his memory to hurt.

When Zoro gets home from the cemetery he throws the magazine onto his bed like it's offended him which… to be fair, it has. He yanks his gi on too hard,the belt knotting wrong the first few times because his fingers are so clumsy with adrenaline. The quiz keeps flashing behind his eyes in yellow stars everytime he blinks. 

That afternoon he spars hard enough for one of the older students to ask if he’s preparing for some secret tournament and for Koushirou to watch him over the rim of his teacup with the kind of quiet attention that usually means criticism. He moves like the world’s against him, landing every strike a little too well and every block a little too sharp. Koushouirou doesn’t say anything until the end, when he hands Zoro the cleaning gear and points at the bokken. Apparently having a personal crisis doesn’t exempt anyone from wiping down floors or tidying practice swords or hauling gear to the storage room or fixing frayed flooring tape. By the time he finally bikes home his arms ache, right up into his neck, which usually helps. The sun’s dropping fast, turning the streets gold and then greyish blue. He eats leftovers at the kitchen bench with one foot on the rung of the stool and the radio humming low in the other room. It’s just cold rice and whatever Koushirou left in the fridge, which tastes like nothing. The house is quiet as he washes the plate, leaving it to dry in the rack, and lingering in the hallway for a moment to stare at the dark rectangle of the stairs. 

By the time he finally opens his bedroom door again it’s completely dark outside, the only light coming from the streetlight bleeding weakly through.That part’s fine. What isn’t fine is that Sanji’s in his room, sprawled over the bed, the magazine spread out under his hands.  Zoro stops breathing, just for a moment. There’s a second — or maybe less, maybe his whole fucking life — where he can only stand there in the doorway and feel pure, perfect terror slide down his spine. 

When Sanji glances up, the streetlight catches the bruise on his cheekbone and the cut on his nose, making him look both worse and somehow more alive at the same time. “Oh, you’re back.”

“That’s Luffy’s,” Zoro blurts, which is probably the silliest thing he’s ever said. His voice may or may not crack on the last syllable.

Sanji kind of blinks at him, then back at the magazine. It’s a one long, agonisingly assessing sweep. “Luffy. The same Luffy who thinks shampoo’s optional and reading’s a hate crime.”

Zoro hates everything ever. His ears are burning; he can feel it. “Maybe Makino got it for him.”

Sanji stares at him again, before he rolls his eyes and flips onto his back, holding the magazine up in front of him to continue reading. Zoro closes the door very carefully behind him and tries to find some sense of normalcy again. “What happened to your face?”

Sanji flips a page, faux casual. “Won a debate.”

“That’s not a debate injury.”

“Clearly you’ve never met my family.” 

Zoro scowls at that, because he has met Sanji’s family in point of fact, but it’s not worth the fight right now. Not while Sanji’s holding a bomb in his hands. He can’t tell what page Sanji’s on and the not knowing makes him feel physically ill, like his stomach’s trying to tie itself into knots because he wrote on that damn page. “You can put that down.”

Sanji doesn’t even look at him. “Wow, cheers.”

“It’s — trash.”

“Duh. That’s part of the charm.” He flips again and then snorts, edging up to sit against the headboard. “What kind of summer babe are you? Options include Beach Heartbreaker, Sunset Sweetie and Flirty Firecracker. I’m gonna assume you’re, like, Mysterious Lifeguard. Broody, unavailable. Probably has a tragic backstory involving a sword.”

Despite the panic still clawing alive under his ribs, a laugh jumps out of Zoro before he can stop it, short and startled. He drops his gi by the desk and comes over cautiously to find that Sanji’s got one ankle crossed over the other and is still kind of bleeding on Zoro’s sheets. He climbs into the bed anyway, cross-legged at first, then leaning in close enough to inspect the cut on Sanji’s nose. Sanji’s knee is warm where it brushes Zoro’s thigh and stays. “You should clean that.”

“Eventually.”

“Ugh, you’re so annoying.” He goes to get the mini first aid kid he stashes in his shirt drawer. When he returns, Sanji’s flipped to a different page; the bruise on his cheek looks worse up close, dark and tender at the edges. 

“Could You Survive A Summer Romance?” Sanji reads as Zoro sits beside him with the antiseptic wipes and bandaids. “Apparently the answer for you is no, because you have all the charm of a brick. But wait — there’s a bonus question: Would your love interest describe you as…” He squints at the page and then reads in a deliberately obnoxious voice: “Mysterious and intense or just emotionally constipated?”

Zoro huffs under his breath, barely a laugh, and tears the wipe open with his teeth, grimacing at the sharp chemical taste that escapes onto his tongue. Sanji hisses something in French when it touches the cut, and then starts translating chunks of the magazine into French, too. It’s obscene — he turns every idiotic line into something elegant or flirty or both and turns a quiz about whether you’d call your date back into a theatrical reading so exaggerated it should count as parody. At one point he reads a sidebar about Ten Ways To Know He’s Falling Hard with such grave seriousness that Zoro laughs hard enough to need to sit back.

By the time Sanji’s moved onto a quiz called What’s Your Dream Kiss Destination? and declared that Zoro’s would be some grimy cave somewhere, the room’s settled into one of those old, familiar shapes that used to save them both. Sanji lounges sideways by the pillows and reads, while Zoro ends up propped up against the headboard, laughing more than he should at things that don’t even deserve it, really. Every now and then Sanji shoves the magazine under his nose to force him to answer a question, eyes narrowed with the kind of mischief that usually ends with one of them getting dunked in a pool. 

“Your ideal date would include… a: moonlit dancing, b: a picnic under the stars, or c: kissing at a lake.”

Zoro chokes and for one awful, awful beat the joke knows too much, before Sanji smirks and says: “Made the last one up. You’re welcome.”

Zoro chucks a pillow at his head. They go through another quiz (Are You The Main Character Or Are You Just the Sidekick — Sanji decides Zoro’s the sidekick because he broods in the background and Zoro calls him an asshole in French) and later, when they hit a beauty quiz, Sanji reads a tip about using the right lighting that Zoro doesn’t hear because he’s too busy staring at the way the split on Sanji’s nose has gone pink. They’re both horizontal by the time Zoro finally kills the light, the magazine ending up folded on Sanji’s chest before he eventually shoves it off with a yawn. Their legs are close enough that Zoro can feel the warmth of Sanji’s calf through his pants and when Sanji turns his head on the pillow, his hair brushes Zoro’s shoulder. Zoro thinks stupidly — with no hope of stopping it — that this is the one of the best parts of his life.

Sanji yawns again, nuzzling into the pillow. His voice is a little slurred, already halfway into sleep. “Hope your summer crush works out, by the way.”

The sentence goes through Zoro like a fucking guillotine. Beside him, Sanji doesn’t laugh or elaborate or even open his eyes to look, like he hasn’t lobbed some kind of grenade into the room. He shifts onto his side with one arm tucked under the pillow, back a warm line that’s close enough that if Zoro moved, even a little, they’d be touching properly. Within minutes his breathing evens out, but Zoro lies awake for hours. 

hope your crush works out

Said lightly? Like it was a joke, like Sanij’s already known exactly which page the magazine was open to and has just been waiting for the right moment to drop it. 

hope your crush works out

Said kindly? Which would somehow be worse, like he’s offering some kind of distant well wishing because he’s already figured it out and doesn't want to make it weird. Being nice about Zoro's catastrophic inability to keep his feelings to himself, trying not to ruin anything.

hope your crush works out

Said cruelly? Like he’s been watching Zoro squirm for fun.

hope your crush works out 

Said like he means girls in general, like he’s got no idea there are no girls in this equation at all and couldn’t possibly imagine the answer has his own face.

Zoro stares at the ceiling until dawn comes creeping in, eyes gritty and chest hurting in a way that has nothing to do with sparring. Everytime he shifts the mattress moves and he becomes hyper aware of waking Sanji up, even though he knows Sanji sleeps like the fucking dead while he’s here. But if Sanji wakes up he’ll have to explain why he’s still awake and why the room feels like it’s full of smoke only he can see and why he can't stop thinking about the way Sanji’s skin had felt against his, if only for a few seconds. 

In the morning, the magazine’s still on the floor where Sanji’d pushed it and sunlight cuts across the room in thin, golden lines. Zoro wakes first to find that they’ve shifted during the night, legs tangled and Sanji pressed warm against his chest. The bruise has darkened overnight, but the cut looks a little better. When he shifts back with a sleepy sound, Zoro’s face goes so hot it’s embarrassing, staring at the back of Sanji’s neck and the way the sunlight’s catching on the finer hairs there. Sanji wakes up slowly, the way he does when he’s actually had a decent sleep for once, turning his head just enough to kind of squint at Zoro. “You’re still here.”

Zoro frowns, mouth dry. “It’s my bed.”

Sanji’s little huff vibrates through the both of them, but he doesn’t pull away. If anything, he settles more comfortably into the space Zoro’s body is making for him. “Your pillow smells like you.”

Zoro has no fucking idea what to do with that sentence, but he knows his ears are burning again. He clears his throat, wriggling free to swing his legs over the edge of the bed before he can do something truly stupid. “C’mon. You can make breakfast.”

x

If fifteen was a stupid age, sixteen is even worse. It creeps on him, almost: one morning the light feels a fraction warmer than it did the week before, and he realises his shoulders have filled out enough that the old gi Koushirou gave him last year now sits too tight across the back. People at school start treating him like he’s meant to have opinions on the future instead of just opinions and sword forms and lunch. The birthday itself comes and goes the way birthdays always do in their little circle, which is to say loudly and held together by sheer force of will. Luffy insists on a cake the size of a small country, showing up at seven in the morning with flour in his hair and a grin that suggests he hasn’t slept at all. The cake’s lopsided and violently chocolate and, frankly, borderline inedible. Usopp spends three days building some kind of elaborate surprise that falls apart halfway through, so he swaps out for a pair of nunchucks he got from god knows where. Ace shows up with beer he definitely isn’t meant to have and a lazy smirk that says he knows exactly how much trouble he’s causing and Does Not Care. Sanji comes late, carrying a paper bag that smells delicious and opens to reveal a bunch of croquettes, cooked to perfection. Zoro blinks at him and asks if he made them, which Sanji responds to so damn scornfully Zoro regrets asking. Zoro eats three of them standing still in the middle of the chaos while Luffy starts yelling something about second helpings and, for one perfect moment, the world feels exactly the right size. 

That night, Koushiro plays the radio low in the kitchen and makes some rice dish that Zoro’s always appreciated. He watches Zoro over his tea, before clearing his throat. “What do you want to do after graduation?”

Zoro stares into his rice like it might help him out with an answer or two. He should have an answer, he figures, because sixteen’s old enough to start thinking about these kinds of things. People at school are already talking about university applications and apprenticeships or whatever — Usopp’s been stress building increasingly elaborate inventions in the hopes it wins over his dream university while Nami has spreadsheets on spreadsheets. Even Sanji’s started muttering about culinary schools and the terrifying possibility of leaving the Baratie for something bigger. He makes a face. “I don’t know.”

Koushirou’s expression stays calm. “You should be thinking about it.”

“I am.”

“And?”

Zoro pushes rice around his bowl and feels a spike of resentment kick in, the way it always does when someone presses too hard about these kinds of things. It’s worse when it’s Koushirou, because the sudden interest in Zoro’s future is difficult to reconcile with the present, and the way Koushirou corrects Zoro’s form at the dojo and then disappears back into whatever quiet world he keeps behind his eyes. He scowls. “I don’t know.”

It’s not entirely true, is the problem. He doesn’t know what job he wants or what university would take him, or what a career might actually look like. In that way, the future is a wide blank page to him. But he does know — somehow — that every future that his mind accidentally builds always contains the same people: Luffy, loud and certain and dragging everyone else along, Usopp, dramatic but so, so brilliant, Nami, bossy and fond and already fifteen steps ahead of whatever plan they think they have and… he never quite lets himself finish that thought, because finishing it means acknowledging the future that has stupid hair and an awful mouth and hands that smell like smoke whenever he’s standing in Zoro’s bedroom. 

The silence between them stretches; Koushirou doesn’t try again. He just sits there with that same distant patience, like he’s waiting for Zoro to perform some internal kata that’ll magically produce the right answer. Zoro’s mouth moves before he can stop it. “What do you think Kuina would be doing?”

Across from him, Koushirou stills and Zoro feels something ugly and satisfied twist in his chest. He can’t even remember the last time Kuina’s name was spoken aloud here — they talk around her, sure, in the way sometimes Koushirou sometimes pauses in the middle of correcting Zoro’s stance, but they don’t say her name. It’s an unspoken rule of sorts, a wound they’ve both silently agreed to leave covered. Eventually, Koushirou sets his cup down and doesn't look at Zoro. He doesn’t answer the question. He just turns and walks out of the kitchen, his steps measured and even, the same way he walks through the dojo when he’s pretending nothing can touch him.  Zoro sits alone at the table with his half eaten rice and the low chatter of the radio, resentment and hope and grief all tangled together in his chest like a knot he’ll never be able to untie, and listens to the house settle around the silence they’ve both chosen. 

Something about growing into his body makes the world finally start making sense beneath his feet; his voice settles into something deeper than still surprises even him. His hands are bigger and his reach is longer, and the awkward length in his limbs settles into something that actually listens when he asks. It means he wins more, both at wrestling and kendo, often enough that the wrestling coach starts putting him in the higher weight class and the other schools send their best guys to test him. The crowd gets more and more excited for him and when he pins someone the slap of the referee’s hand feels like coming home. He always stands up afterwards with his mouth tinted with blood and thinks huh, okay, that worked. Usually, someone’s parent slaps him on the shoulder and says something like you’re really coming into your own, huh? like Zoro’s meant to know what that means.

The shinai feels lighter in his hands than it ever has, footwork flowing instead of stuttering. Koshirou watches from the sidelines of each match, regional and then national, nodding when Zoro wins like nothing particularly important just happened. 

His math teachers stop introducing him as promising and start introducing him as one to watch, and guidance counsellors pulling him aside between classes to ask if he’s thought about scholarships. His name starts appearing on lists he didn’t put himself on and adults who used to ruffle his hair now shake his hand instead and ask what universities he’s considering, like the answer’s something he should have already prepared. Even Zeff eyes him for a long moment one afternoon and says you’re getting tall, kid like it’s a compliment and a warning about something Zoro hasn’t figured out yet.

Koushirou starts leaving him alone with younger classes, even though the first time it happens Zoro doesn’t even really realise it. He finishes demonstrating a kata and turns around expecting the usual grim face, but instead the space where Koushirou had been standing is empty and six seven year olds are staring up at him with the kind of expectant expression that never fails to make his stomach drop. One little girl raises her hand. “Sensei?”

Zoro looks over his shoulder but there’s no-one behind him. He swallows. “Me?”

They’re terrible, in the best possible way: they trip over their own feet and swing the shinai like they’re trying to swat flies, asking questions like can i bring my cat to class? Zoro corrects their grip with the same patience Koushirou once showed him and feels something stupid and warm settle into his chest every single time one of them gets it right. When Koushirou finally comes back over he nods and says: “You handled them well.”

Zoro doesn’t really know what to do with the praise; it feels like it should mean more than it does, or maybe it means exactly as much as Koushirou is willing to give him, which is never enough to close the distance. Sure, he trusts him with kids now but he still won’t talk about his own, won’t answer a single question about the one person they both lost. It feels like being handed responsibility without being handed any real closeness, one hand held out while the other is kept firmly behind Koushirou’s back. 

Other boys at school and the dojo start asking him how he trains and what he eats and whether he’s doing extra sessions on the weekends. Some of them try to copy his footwork after matches and a couple even ask if he wants to spar outside of class, which he always says yes to because when doesn’t he want to spar? Girls ask him out to the point it’s become a running joke, every week without fail. They’re from different schools, sometimes, or just different classes, or friends of friends who’ve heard about him. Some are brave enough to ask him in person, but some send notes through classmates like they’re passing secret messages in some spy film. One even leaves a folded piece of paper in his locker, with a little heart drawn in the corner that Zoro stares at it suspiciously. 

He declines the offers everytime, obviously. He tries to stay polite about it, because for the most part most of the girls are, genuinely, so nice. Some are smart and funny, the kind of people who make others laugh easily and remember birthdays without being reminded and have a Plan for their future. 

One senior at a party puts a hand on his shoulder and says she likes mysterious guys and Zoro, who’s been thinking about whether Sanji’s somewhere in the crowd for the past twenty minutes, says: “That sounds annoying.” A girl from a neighbouring school lingers after a kendo match and tells him she’s been watching him compete for months and would he maybe like to get coffee sometime? Zoro stands there in his sweaty gi with his hair sticking to his forehead and his heart doing something complicated and manages: “Ah… thanks. That’s… really nice of you but I’m not… really doing that… right now?” like he’s explaining why he can’t adopt a puppy. She smiles, a little sad, and wishes him luck with the next tournament. He watches her go and feels like the world’s biggest asshole. A note gets passed to him during English class from a girl he’s barely spoken to, saying how she thinks he’s cool and quiet in a nice way and asking him if he wants to study together after school. Zoro reads it three times under his desk, ears burning, and spends the rest of the lesson trying to figure out how to say no without making her feel bad. He ends up writing something painfully stilted about being busy with training and hopes she has a good weekend, and after she reads it she doesn’t look at him again for the rest of the week.

Usopp develops an increasingly elaborate scoreboard on the back of his chemistry notebook, betting his lunch money on how many girls will ask Zoro out before Friday comes around. He reads his bets aloud at the park while Zoro groans and drops head onto the table, wishing the wood would swallow him whole.

Sanji, leaning against the fence a few metres away because Nami won’t let him smoke around them, grins. “They’re simply women of exceptionally poor judgement.”

“I’ll tell the next one that,” Zoro mutters into the table. 

The worst part is that Sanji sounds almost amused about it all, like it’s just entertaining background noise to his day and Zoro hates how much he wants to ask, right then and there, whether Sanji’s suffering the same fate. He wants to know so badly his teeth ache and the thought just won’t leave him alone — he thinks about the girl waiting outside the dojo and how she’d looked at him like he was worth waiting for, but it keeps crossing over into how Sanji flirts with every girl that comes near him like it’s a sport and how surely, at some point, one of them must’ve actually asked him out for real. Surely it’s happened. The question builds until he can’t keep it inside anymore, and then he’s blurting: “Do girls ever ask you out?”

Usopp’s pen stops moving on his page and even the wind seems to hesitate, for how still the world goes. Sanji lowers the cigarette from his mouth and stares at Zoro with an eyebrow raised, before his expression shifts into something colder. Zoro feels his face go hot — he wants to take the words back. He wants to shove them down his throat and walk off the nearest cliff, just for good measure. Sanji exhales smoke. “Why? You taking a survey?”

“No, I just — you flirt with everyone, so I figured…” He’s making it worse, he knows he’s making it worse. The words keep tumbling out and he can’t stop them for love or money, apparently.

Sanji’s eyes narrow with something hard and tired and a little nasty. “Sure, my family would love it if I brought a girl home. Wouldn’t go badly at-fucking-all.”

Usopp makes an uncomfortable noise and suddenly becomes very invested in trying to wrestle the iced bun from Luffy’s hands. Luffy, for his part, senses the shift in temperature and plays along while Zoro scowls at the table. “Right, sure. That was —”

“S’fine,” Sanji drawls, but he looks away now. “Algae rotted your brain at last.”

The thing is, if Zoro were being objective (and he is! He’s totally objective here!) he’d understand why girls would want to ask Sanji out, even with all his shitty cheesy flirting. At twelve Sanji was loud and dramatic and annoying but now, at sixteen, everything is different. He laughs with his shoulders, a full bodied thing that makes hair fall into his eyes and his chest shake. His hands have become rougher from kitchen work, callouses building on his palms and the pads of his fingers and his forearms are stronger, lean and corded. He flicks ash off his cigarette with two fingers every single time, precise and casual, and pushes his fringe back from his eyes when he’s concentrating and bites his lip when he’s thinking and has grown so fucking tall it should be illegal, actually, and always smells like smoke and butter. His voice has settled lower and he always stands too close and his jawline is carved and —

“Wow, it’s actually impressive how little effort you’re putting into hiding it these days,” Nami snickers, appearing next to where Zoro’s sprawled on the grass a few months later, her arms folded smugly. 

Zoro glares at her, which if nothing else forces him to stop watching the line of Sanji’s throat when he talks. “Shut up.”

She grins, fond but exasperated. “I’m just saying, if you’re going to be obvious, at least switch it up every now and then. The forearm thing’s getting old. You gotta branch out — maybe try staring at his mouth next time. Really commit.”

Zoro makes a strangled noise and lies back on the grass, covering his face with both hands. 

He still makes fun of Zoro every chance he can get and still fights dirty as hell, still laughs too hard at his own dirty jokes and shit talks Zoro’s attempts at French and steals food off of Zoro’s plate. Still falls asleep in impossible positions, climbing through Zoro’s window at least once a week while muttering about his brothers or work or homework, like nothing’s changed at all. It has changed, though — when they were younger, sharing a bed just meant another warm body. Now, though, Sanji crawls under the blankets and mumbles move over, mosshead and every point of contact burns, from the press of his shoulder to the brush of his knee when he shifts in his sleep, and Zoro lies awake for hours pretending it’s not all he can think about. When Sanji’s not in his bed Zoro dreams about it anyway, or the lake — the press of Sanji’s mouth against his cheek and the way his hands had been hovering midair, like he hadn’t known what to do with them. One night Zoro dreams of Sanji climbing through his window like always, but instead of rolling over he crawls under the blankets and presses in close, voice low and rough against his ear, hands warm as they slide under Zoro’s shirt. In the dream Sanji laughs — that big real laugh — and then kisses him properly, slow and deliberate, like he’s trying to prove something. 

Zoro wakes up from each stupid dream with his heart hammering, skin flushed and oversensitive, humiliated at how quickly his brain replays the dream on a loop. He starts running early in the morning, until his lungs burn and his legs shake and his brain’s too damn tired to picture Sanji straddling him, and he stops thinking about the exact cadence of the other boy’s laugh. 

It’s mortifying, how quickly his body starts responding to Sanji, independent of whatever his brain tries to control. What’s even more mortifying is how often he spends lying awake in his bed wondering if this is normal — he’s got no frame of reference here, no older brother or friend he can ask without spontaneously combusting on the spot. There’s no parental figure remotely suited to the question of whether it’s normal to want to grab your mean blonde friend by the face and kiss him until he finally shuts up, or whether the constant low grade ache in his chest whenever Sanji disappears for days is just regular worry or… something worse. Koushirou is many things, but a source of emotional guidance isn’t exactly one of them, and Zoro would rather tear his own fucking lungs out than ask Ace, so at lunch he cuts his losses and heads for the school library. He tells the others he’s got homework, which is a fucking weak cover considering he’s never approached the school library in his life, but neither of them say anything to object. 

It goes… badly, at first. The library has exactly two useful shelves for this kind of crisis and both are populated by books that look like they were written by aliens, maybe. The converse and bright and aggressively cheerful, titles well meaning but awful like Growing Into Yourself, Teen Questions / Real Answers! And one truly horrifying volume with a neon cover that promises to explain LOVE, SEX, YOUR BODY & YOU!!! 

He reads about crushes first, which is a mistake because every page is somehow too vague and also too specific. There are lists of symptoms to be checked off — he reads the word butterflies three times before he feels actual rage rise in his throat because what the hell does that even mean when what he feels is more like someone’s gone and replaced his ribs with barbed wire? He shuts that book so hard it kind of slaps the table and the librarian glares at him. 

The sexuality section is worse, almost, but also calm and straightforward in a way that the magazine quizzes and chirpy teen guides weren’t. Boys can like boys, fine. Some people know young and some people don’t and some people like more than one thing. Some people never do what everyone around them seems to accept. All of it should help, but it just makes him more aware of the gap between information and self knowledge, because fine, sure, boys liking boys is a thing that exists in the world and doesn’t cause the sky to split open. Great. Wonderful. That still doesn’t tell him what to fucking do with the fact that he seems like to exactly one boy in a way that’s eating through his concentration like acid and doesn’t explain why his body reacts the way it does whenever Sanji’s close or why the fucking cheek kiss has taken up permanent residence in his brain, let alone why he keeps having dreams that leave him waking up tense with shame and something much hotter.

He finds himself getting increasingly annoyed, first at the books and then at the authors and their smug little advice sections that say things like talk to a trusted adult like those things grow on trees. He gets angry at himself, most of all, for needing this at all. He stuffs the books into his bag anyway, because what the hell else can he do? He shuffles through the rest of the stacks on his way out, lingering in the self help section in case there’s a saviour in there somewhere — and freezes when he finds, two shelves down, a book about legal emancipation. It’s dense and ugly and adult in exactly the opposite way the crush books were, all law and process and state regulations and practical guidance in small, black type. He holds it in his hands for a minute or two, staring down at the language that makes it clear that this is serious and real and not a game, and to any other person on the planet it probably wouldn’t be comforting. To Zoro, suddenly, it looks like a weapon and a door where there’s only been the same circular furious helplessness for ten fucking years.

He reads the first chapter crouched in the back corner of the library, with his bag over his knees and his heart pounding like the school itself is going to come to arrest him. Some of it’s useless straight off the bat and a lot of it is obviously more complicated than just filling out a form to find freedom, but. 

But.

He tucks it under his shirt anyway, against his stomach where the cover presses into his skin hard enough to hurt. The walk to the exit feels endless, his palms sweating by his side but he keeps his head forward and his shoulders hunched, and tries to look like someone who belongs here instead of someone committing a crime for the first time in his life. 

By the time he finally shows Sanji the book, they’ve been playing MarioKart for nearly an hour. Sanji had come in through the window with some bitchy comment about Zoro’s room smelling like sweat and Zoro had answered in kind, before Sanji had stolen crackers from the desk drawer. Zoro had told him his face looked like shit and Sanji had grumbled something in French  but let Zoro dab at the cut on his cheek anyway, wincing but not pulling away. 

For the past hour, it’s almost been easy, in that quiet way they’ve built between them over the years. And then Zoro pulls the book out and Sanji goes so still it’d be comical on any other day. Zoro hands it over wordlessly anyway, mouth pressed tight because his stomach is knotted and his heart is rabbiting and there’s not a single way he knows how to have this conversation. For a moment he thinks Sanji’s going to push it away, based on his expression, but the blonde eventually takes it and flips the front cover open. His expression doesn’t change. “Did you… borrow this?”

“Stole, technically. Anyway, that’s not the point.”

Sanji flips another page. His expression hasn’t changed. “No? Because from where I’m sitting, it’s the most successful part of this plan.”

Zoro sits up straighter, licking his lips carefully. He twists the antiseptic wipe in his hand, shoving the controller away to face this head on. “It’s not a plan.”

Sanij does look up then, and there’s something flat and dangerous in his face. Zoro’s seen it a thousand times, but rarely directed at him. “Then what the fuck is it?”

Zoro inhales and chooses, quite frankly, one of the worst possible answers he could choose. “It’s me trying to help.”

The laugh he gets in response is short and vicious. “With this?”

Zoro leans forward anyway, frustration rising fast. He tries to throttle it down, to tell himself to tread carefully, to know this could go one of two ways. “It’s a way out. There’s judges and forms and —”

“Oh my god.” Sanji stands up so abruptly that the mattress rocks. “You stole a self help manual and, what, exactly? Thought you’d solved my life?”

“I didn’t say solved.”

“You’re acting like it.”

“I’m acting like maybe you don't have to just keep taking this!” 

Sanji goes white around the mouth and there’s a part of Zoro — the part that sounds suspiciously like Usopp — that says he should stop, should slow down, but he can’t. He points to the fresh cut on Sanji’s cheek, heat rising so fast it’s dizzying. “You keep showing up like this, like one of your asshole brothers got bored and used you for target practice again and you just — what? Shrug and joke and go back for more?”

Sanji throws the book; it hits the floor, hard, and skids under the desk. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Zoro’s voice pitches high, loud. “I’m talking about your brothers beating the shit out of you, which apparently everyone but you can see is happening!”

Sanji takes a step closer, eyes narrowed and voice cold. “You think this is my brothers?”

“What else is it!”

This time when Sanji laughs it’s ugly and mean, low and more like a growl. “Fucking hell.”

Zoro’s anger well and truly spikes now. “Don’t do that thing where you act like I’m the idiot here.”

“You are the idiot.”

That’s when Zoro stops trying to stay measured. His voice gets louder, more reckless, thin with how furious he is and how badly he wants to reach across the space and shake the other boy. “Then explain it to me! Explain why you keep going back! Explain why you won’t tell anyone, won’t fight back, won’t leave, won’t do anything except show up here bleeding and act like I’m insane for wanting it to stop!”

The words hang there, huge and ragged, and Sanji stares at him like Zoro’s said something in another language. For a moment he looks like he might just leave, but instead he comes in closer, until Zoro can see the exact tremor of his mouth. “My family is not a fucking game! My father has people, you idiot.”

“What, like lawyers?”

Sanji actually recoils, before he surges back in, shaking now. “No, not like lawyers, you fucking idiot, although yeah, sure, there’s probably lawyers too.” He jabs a finger towards the window. “Money. Security. Drivers. Men who owe him things. Men he owns. Half the cops in this country eat out of his hand and the other half look away when they’re told. You think everyone’s scared of him for fun? You think the way people cross the street when he drives by is fucking coincidence? You think nobody ever calls the cops on us because we’re just rich assholes? You’re so fucking thick! You’ve been walking past it for years and you never noticed a fucking thing. You think if I run, he doesn’t find me? You think a book and, what, your little sword is gonna hold against that?”

Zoro doesn’t even know what to say to that. His voice comes out hoarse as he says: “You never told me —”

Sanji’s face twists with pure disgust. “You think I should’ve sat you down and explained the family business like we were swapping cute little notes?”

“No, but maybe if your family’s not just a bunch of rich assholes —”

“They are rich assholes!” Sanji snaps, stepping right in until they’re nearly chest-to-chest. His voice is the worst Zoro’s ever heard, sharp and uneven and plainly furious. “They’re also worse than you’ve been imagining, which is impressive considering how much you already like imagining me as some pathetic little thing who only gets hurt because he won’t hit back hard enough.”

Zoro shoves him, instinctive and reactive, partly to open up space and partly because there’s too much emotion in him right now for sense, rage and fear and hurt layered over each other. Sanji stumbles back half a step and swings properly, a low kick that catches Zoro in the side of the thigh. The impact’s brutal and heavy, ringing up Zoro’s leg into his hip even as he lunges forward, grabbing the other boy by the front of the shirt and yanking him in. Sanji twists like a whip, driving his knee up hard into Zoro’s ribs until the breath punches clean out of him. He doesn’t get a chance to recover — Sanij spins on the ball of his foot, lashing out with another kick that smashes clean across Zoro’s chest and sends him flying into the desk. He’s coughing badly, wheezing to get his breath back when Sanji comes in fast, landing an elbow to the jaw that snaps Zoro’s head to the side and fills his mouth with blood.

Zoro snarls and grabs for him again, snaring Sanji by the arm to slam him sideways into the wall. The impact rattles the frame and Sanji’s breath does something awful, before he drives his heel straight into Zoro’s knee, buckling him instantly. Pain flares white hot up his thigh, down his calf, up his fucking spine but before he can straighten Sanji spins again and gets him across the stomach. It sends Zoro down to one knee, slamming hard onto the carpet and coughing red. Sanji stands over him with his chest heaving, the cut on his cheekbone bleeding down his face again. “You still think this is about my fucking brothers?” He spits. “You think this is some bullshit I can punch my way out of?”

He doesn’t wait for Zoro to finish getting up, sweeping his leg in an arc that Zoro barely manages to block with his forearm; the force of it still sends him stumbling sideways and when the next kick is blocked Sanji switches angles completely and delivers a sharp heel into the side of his calf. Zoro swears through his teeth, grabbing Sanji’s leg on the next kick to pull, hard, trying to balance but the blonde hops once, before twisting violently and kicking off with his free leg, snapping Zoro across the shoulder and sending them both crashing to the floor. They catch the desk on the way down, the lamp shattering under the weight as Sanji half-lands on it, driving his knee so hard into Zoro’s solar plexus he sees stars. Zoro bucks him off furiously, snapping his head back with an elbow that sends blood spraying across the carpet.

They scramble apart, both breathing like they’ve run miles. Sanji wipes his nose with the back of his hand and laughs, short and ugly and utterly breathless. “You think I’m weak because I didn’t fight back the way you wanted, you think I stayed because I was scared or stupid or pathetic — I stayed because fighting back the way you want gets people killed. Judge doesn’t lose, he doesn’t — and you, standing there with your stupid fucking book and your stupid fucking righteous bullshit —” His next kick is vicious, a spinning heel that Zoro cops across the side of the head, his vision whiting out for a beat. He staggers into the bedpost and tries to grab at him, but Sanji’s always been faster and the next kick sends pain exploding through his whole chest. Sanji grabs him by the hair and yanks him back up, voice still shaking. “You don’t get to show up now and act like you know what the fuck you’re looking at.”

Zoro shoves him off, properly this time, throwing a punch that has Sanji spitting blood. The room’s wrecked around them and for one long, terrible moment it feels like Sanji’s going to come at him again, but the door swings open and Koushirou blinks at them. He looks at the broken desk and the shattered lamp, the blood dripping from both of them and his voice is low and final. “You need to leave.”

Zoro snaps around. “Koushirou —”

“No.”

Sanji stands there for one more second, one hand pressed to his bleeding nose like he can possibly stem the flow. He looks young and furious and exhausted and suddenly, horribly, exactly as trapped as he’s been trying to tell Zoro all along. Zoro reaches out without thinking, but Sanji grabs his jacket and shoves the window back open, slipping back into the night before Zoro can get a word in. 

Koushirou inhales audibly, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You are grounded.”

Zoro stares at him, because what the fuck does that even mean in a room like this? As if the problem is that Zoro broke his desk and a lamp, or that he got into a fight, and not everything else stacked under that like fault lines. “You’re grounding me? For what?”

Koushirou’s gaze flicks over the mess, lingering a little on the blood. “You know better than to lose control.”

The phrase is so small and reasonable and so, so completely inadequate that Zoro almost doesn’t process it as language. His ears are buzzing, white hot with the rage still throttling through him. “No, shut up. Don’t stand there and act like the problem’s that I hit him or like I’m a kid who snuck out past curfew. You wanna ground me? Because I finally tried to do something about it? You should’ve done something years ago!”

Koushirou’s jaw tightens; the sight gives Zoro a mean little spike of satisfaction and he hates that almost as much as he hates this entire conversation. He fists his hands. “You don’t get to do this now, and pretend you’re some voice of reason after being gone since she died. You don’t get to act like you’re parenting me now that it’s convenient for you. You haven’t been here since –” He stops, the name sitting between them like a livewire. Koushirou’s eyebrows draw in, just slightly, but it’s enough. Zoro swallows. “Since Kuina.”

Koushirou steps back a bit, just enough for the space between them to feel sudden and real, not the man who taught Zoro form and discipline and how to swing a sword but the man who stopped reaching after his child died, and never found his way back before the child he still had turned old enough to resent him for it. Koushirou says, quietly: “You’re angry at more than tonight.”

Zoro laughs again, wrecked and furious and close enough to tears that anger’s the only thing keeping him upright. “Wow. Killer instinct.”

“Zoro —”

He grabs his shoes, shoving them on without socks because he can’t bear to stop moving. Koushirou says his name again, sharper this time, and Zoro rounds on him with every ounce of spite he’s got  left. “You grounded me, right? See how that works out for you.”

He climbs out through the window, wiping the blood from his mouth even as he shimmies down the tree, the night air damp. He doesn’t take his bike; he can’t trust himself to stay on it right now. He’s pretty sure he has some kind of concussion, the side of his head still ringing even as he makes his way down the block. His brain’s hot and full of static and Sanji and Judge and Kuina and Koushirou and the book and every single fucking bruise Sanji’s ever had. He tries to find Sanji, heading to the Vinsmoke house first, stupidly. He stands across the street, glaring at the lit windows and dead eyed symmetry of the place and feels nothing but animal hatred. There’s no sign of human life anywhere, so he goes to the Baratie alleyway and then the park. Then he goes to the laundromat laneway and the corner store, and the weird little side street that Sanji sometimes smokes in because he likes looking at the graffiti there.

He walks and walks until the anger burns down into something more exhausted, something that worms its way under his ribs and sits there, thick and clotting. Eventually, he ends up in front of Nami’s house with no explanation of the route that’s taken him there. Some distant part of him understands that Luffy’s house would be too much right now: Luffy would be all heart and questions and fury on Zoro’s behalf and on Sanji’s, and he’d probably try to kick the VInsmoke door down tonight. Zoro can’t do that, not right now, not with the fight so open inside of him and part of him so staggered by how much bigger than him this is. 

Nami’s lights are off downstairs except for the kitchen, so he throws rocks at her window until she shuffles to the door in one of Belle-mere’s shirts. She squints at him, clearly half asleep. “Why are you on my verandah at midnight?”

“Can I come in?” 

She stares at him a little, before scrubbing at her forehead and groaning. She leaves the door open behind her while she goes to put the kettle on and find their first aid kid. She makes him a warm Milo and chucks a few pieces of gauze at him, which he wets and dabs halfheartedly at his busted lip. He’s not even sure he’s going to tell her, until he opens his mouth and it all comes spilling out — the book and the right and Sanji saying it’s not his brothers and Judge having people and money and cops and all of it, all of it, while Nami stands barefoot by the sink with her arms folded and her expression tired.

When he finishes, she frowns. “Duh.”

“What?”

Nami pushes off the sink and comes fully into the kitchen light,  hair mussed badly from sleep. “I mean, obviously? Everyone knows they’re some, like, insane crime family. Zoro, you’ve literally fought the guy for years, you know Sanji can kick someone’s ass. And you thought he just, what… was losing all the time?”

His whole body goes rigid and hot. “And you didn’t want to mention this at any point?”

Nami’s mouth tightens. “Calm your farm. It’s not like we can do anything about it. But, yeah, I mean… Belle-mere told us to stay away from them when we were kids. Everyone says to stay away from them. She said they do business with bad people, and worse people do business with them. She doesn’t throw warnings around for fun, you know.”

Zoro lets his body drop down onto the chair, swallowing the wince that kicks up at the sheer pain that runs through him. He can already feel the bruises forming, knowing they’re going to be mottled messes come morning. He’s so tired, suddenly, all the way through — hearing it from Sanji was one thing, but hearing a version of it echoed back to him from Belle-mere makes the whole thing lock into an even uglier pattern. Nami watches him for a moment, her expression shifting into something like realisation. “You seriously didn’t know?”

He shakes his head, dabbing at his lip again just so that his hands have something to do other than shake. “I thought it was… I don’t know. The brothers, mostly.”

“Yeah, I gathered.”

“I was… I figured it’d help.”

Nami’s face does something complicated. She pats at his shoulder a little, then takes over cleaning his mouth. He grimaces at the sting of it, even though she’s clearly trying to be gentle. “I know.”

When she’s finished, she sits down across from him at the table and rubs her eyes with the heel of her hands, yawning. “C’mon, you can sleep on the couch.”

He follows her to the lounge room on feet that feel like they’ve run a marathon on iron spikes, watching her pull together a sheet from somewhere and a pillow nicked from Belle-mere’s room, silent and aching throughout his whole body. He nods at her when she’s finished, slumping onto the couch even though he’s convinced he’s not going to be able to sleep a wink after all that. 

He does, almost immediately. One moment he’s staring up at the ceiling and the next he’s waking up on his stomach, the sheet rucked up around his shoulders and Nojiko smirking at him while she eats her cereal, crosslegged on the floor. He blinks at her owlishly for a moment, before all the aches and pains from Sanji’s feet kick the fuck in. He declines breakfast and brushes his teeth with his finger in the bathroom, staring at his own reflection just long enough for the irritation to set in; he hasn’t had his ass kicked this badly in years. 

Outside, he walks the same route as he did last night, tracing all of Sanji’s usual haunts to no avail. It shouldn’t really surprise him — Sanji’s always vanished in intervals, for days at a time. Sometimes a week, sometimes more. He’s always gone back into the polished belly of that house and come out an unknown amount of time later, with new bruises and worse jokes and a shield already built before anyone can ask if he’s okay. Normally, Zoro knows the pattern well enough to survive the first few days on muscle memory: no taps at the window, no blonde head at the Baratie, no Sanji trailing after Luffy with insults in his mouth and careful love hidden in his hands. 

This time, though, Zoro is furious. He’s pissed at Sanji, which he knows is ugly and unfair and still can’t stop. He’s angry with the Vinsmokes, at Judge, and the whole shape of the thing he finally understands. He’s pissed at himself for being stupid enough to think a book could do what years of money and violence and silence have been designed to prevent.  By the fourth day, he’s gone past the Baratie twice and the VInsmoke house three times. He doesn’t go inside either place, just walks the perimeter like some kind of pathetic guard dog who doesn’t even know what it’s guarding anymore. By the sixth day, the searches have started to feel thin, even to him.

Koushiou asks: “Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“It’s late.”

“Didn’t ask.”

Koushirou looks tired. “You’re still grounded.”

“Good. Great to know you picked now to parent.” He spins around on his heel to glare, for all the good it does. “You want me to sit in my room and think about what I did? Fine, I thought about it. I figured out I was an idiot and that his family’s worse than I thought. I figured out everyone knew and nobody’s done anything, which is funny because you’re all so bloody wise when it comes to telling me what not to do.”

Koushirou frowns. “If you leave tonight, do not expect this conversation to end here.”

Zoro grabs his spare keys, the whole house sitting behind Koushirou like a grave he never learned how to leave. The kitchen light, the empty chairs, the old silence of Kuina everywhere and nowhere. He scowls. “Wasn’t much of a conversation.”

The Baratie’s in the middle of dinner service when he gets there, but he slips in through the back anyway because he knows better than to try the front when he looks like this. The kitchen’s all heat and noise and action, bodies moving around one another with violent precision. Steam rises in thick clouds as pans slam, someone swearing in approximately three languages at once. Zeff spots him immediately, gaze cutting over to land on Zoro with sheer disdain. “Out.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“I said out.”

Zoro steps further in, watching how several chefs immediately find urgent reasons to be somewhere else — survival instincts at the Baratie have always been excellent, to be fair. Zeff’s eyes narrow, but Zoro grits his teeth anyway. “What do you know about them?”

Zeff’s expression doesn’t change, even as he wipes his hands on a tea towel, slowly. He looks like he’s trying to decide whether or not he wants to strangle Zoro with it. “Back office.”

“I’m not –”

“Back. Office. Now. Before I decide throwing you out is less work than whatever fresh disaster you’re bringing to my door.” He jabs at the door with two fingers, the gesture hard enough to cut Zoro’s argument in half. 

Zoro huffs but goes, slinking into where the office is crammed and ugly and stinking of decades of smoke. Zeff shuts the door with enough force to make the wall rattle and keeps one hand on the knob, looking at Zoro like he’s trying to land on which version of this conversation will hurt them both less. Then he asks, flat: “What did you do?”

Zoro bristles instantly. “What did I do?”

“Don’t get cute with me, kid. You show up here looking like you went ten rounds with a brick wall and start asking about the Vinsmokes like you want to pick a fight with god. So I’ll ask again. What. Did. You. Do?”

Zoro looks away, fists clenching. He says through his teeth: “We fought. I — I thought he could be emancipated.”

Zeff closes his eyes long enough to be damning. “Christ on a cracker, you really are sixteen.”

The words hit so sharp Zoro steps forward without thinking, even though Zeff could flatten him without breaking a sweat. “Don’t talk down to me.”

“Then stop giving me a reason to,” Zeff snaps, rough and tired in a way that goes deeper than one bad night. He rubs a hand over his face, his earring catching on the weak office light. “You want to know about the Vinsmokes, huh? Well, I know enough to know you don’t swing blind at a wasp’s nest and expect to walk away without getting stung.”

Zoro’s laugh comes out wrong, strangled. “That it?”

“No, that’s the part your thick skull needs to understand first.” Zeff leans both his hands on the desk, the wood creaking under his weight. “They’re not just rich. They’re not just cruel. THey have legitimate fronts and illegitimate ones. They have people in business, in shipping, in security, in local politics, in medicine and genetic science. They have lawyers who can make paper say whatever they need and men who handle what paper can’t. Vinsmoke doesn’t just have money — he has leverage. Half the people who do business with him are terrified, and the other half are in too deep to get out.”

“Then why hasn’t anyone done anything?”

Zeff’s mouth twists into something ugly. “You think no-one’s tried?”

“Have you?” 

Zeff glares at him, looking just about furious enough to throw something. “You watch your mouth.”

“No.” He keeps going, because apparently there are some cliffs a person can only discover by sprinting over them. “You’ve known him for years, he comes here, he works for you. He trusts you more than anybody and you just — what? Let him go home every night to that shit like it’s normal?”

Zeff’s face is terrifying now and Zoro doesn’t even fucking care, because he’s sick to death of being the only one with his skin on fire. “You think I like it?” He snaps. “You think I enjoy watching that kid show up and pretend everything’s fine? You think caring about a kid gets you legal custody, huh? You think I can just snatch him out of that house and put him in my spare room and Vinsmoke sends a polite letter of concern? You think a hungry kid taking shifts in my kitchen’s the same as a kid ready to testify against his father in court?”

Zoro scowls. “You make it sound impossible.”

“No, I’m telling you it ain’t simple. There’s a difference, and it’s one you better learn before you get him killed trying to play hero.”

All the anger in Zoro suddenly has nowhere to go; he’s just standing there in a tiny restaurant office, sixteen and useless, with too much pressing in at him from every side. He wipes at his eye with the heel of his hand, frustrated by the wet heat building there. “So there are no options.”

Zeff’s jaw works for a moment, like he’s trying to figure out which order of words to lay the truth down in. He sighs, eventually, tugging at his moustache. “There are options. But none of ‘em are fast and none of ‘em are clean. Look, I’ve been watchin’ that kid longer than you have. I know what that house does to him. I know what Judge is. But you don’t fix something like that by deciding you’re gonna save him. He has to want out, he has to be ready. And even then, even if he is, it’s gonna be ugly and slow and dangerous. You wanna help him? Stop making it about what you can do and start listening to what he actually needs.”

Zoro glances at the door, the frustration curdled into something heavier. Zeff watches him for another beat, before he pulls out a cigarette and takes a long drag. “Get out of my office. And if you see that idiot before I do, tell him he better show up for his next shift.”

There’s no answer in the world that Zoro can give kindly. He nods once, jerky, and leaves. This time, no-one in the kitchen looks at him as he threads through, and when he gets out all he can do is lean against the wall and replay Zeff’s words over and over. 

He doesn’t go home that night — not properly, at least. He goes back to the house because his clothes are there and Wado is there and enough of his life’s still physically trapped in the room, but he packs as much as he can into the biggest bag he can find, including the little chef’s knife Sanji gave him two Christmases ago, even though he has no real reason to take it except that leaving it feels impossible.

Koushirou stands in the doorway and watches. He doesn’t shout or forbid him or ask where he’s going, which somehow hurts more than any of the rest. Finally, he says: “This is not a good choice.”

Zoro shoves another shirt into the bag. “Great. I’m full of those.”

“You’re angry.”

“No shit.”

Koushirou hums. “Leaving won’t fix that.”

Zoro glares at him a little, inching under his bed to grab his other shoes. “No, but staying here sure as hell isn’t helping.”

Across from him, Koushirou’s face goes still with disappointment and Zoro has to brace against it, almost. He’d expected it, but he still hates it and deserves it and also can’t survive it right now. He slings the bag over his shoulder and tries to breathe in, tries to breathe out. “I’ll be at Luffy’s.”

Garp’s house is exactly the wrong place and, therefore, somehow the only place. It’s too full and too alive and too loud, and Luffy throws the door open like he’s been expecting Zoro for years. “Oh! You’re living here now.”

Zoro shrugs, and that’s all it takes for Luffy to welcome him inside. Within twenty minutes his bag’s in Luffy’s room, his uniform’s hanging over the back of Luffy’s chair and Garp’s shouting from downstairs that he’s not running a hostel for delinquents.

“Yeah, you are!” Ace calls back.

“I heard that!”

“You were meant to!”

Sabo appears in the doorway with a book in one hand and eyebrows raised. “Oof, you look rough. Family crisis?”

Zoro, sitting on the floor beside Luffy’s bed and cleaning Wado because his hands don’t have anything else to do, grits his teeth. “Sanji.”

Sabo’s expression changes a little and Ace stops pretending not to listen from the hallway, padding in with a bag of chips. Luffy drops down beside Zoro so hard the floorboards creak. “Tell us.”

He does, mostly. He doesn’t mention the magazine or the crush or the window, or the parts of Sanji he still keeps clutched so hard inside his ribs they barely have names anymore. He talks about the book and the fight and Judge and Zeff, explaining the Vinsmokes as something bigger and worse than they’d let themselves fully know. By the end of it, Ace is pacing and Luffy’s sitting crosslegged with both hands curled into fists on his knees, face dark and focused in a way that makes him look older and younger all at once. “We’ll get him.”

The simplicity of it almost breaks Zoro because, god, it’s exactly what he wants to believe. He blinks, unsurprised but still annoyed to find his eyes damp. “Yeah.”

Sabo sits forward a little, tapping his fingertips along the spine of his book. “First, we need information.”

Ace snorts. “First, we need a brick through Judge’s window.”

“Emotionally satisfying, but strategically useless.”

Ace grins. “Not if the brick’s on fire.”

Luffy, fully serious, says: “We could kidnap him.”

“No,” Zoro snaps immediately, ignoring the way Ace cheers. 

Sabo rubs his temples, book forgotten. “We’re not kidnapping the victim of a crime empire from his crime empire family with no plan.”

“Plan one!” Luffy points up at the ceiling, emphatic and only half joking — there’s a grave set to his mouth that betrays his light tone. “We get him and hit anyone who follows.”

Ace considers this. “Well, it does have two steps —”

“It has no exit strategy,” Sabo huffs. “No money, no safe house and assumes the armed criminals respect teenage enthusiasm.”

“They won’t,” Zoro mutters, and then he tells them what Zeff said about documents and money and evidence and safe places and how if Sanji ever decides he wants out, he’d need adults willing to burn favours and maybe their lives, by the sounds of it. Sabo’s face goes harder with every word.

Ace sighs and flops back onto the bed, kicking the wall moodily. “So, everyone knows and they’re just waiting around.”

“They’re managing risk,” Sabo mutters, and then they spend the night making plans that get increasingly desperate and unrealistic the longer they talk. They talk about following Judge’s car and breaking into the house and getting Reiju to help. They talk about calling every newspaper in the city and the next, or sending anonymous tips. They talk about tracking his businesses and hiding Sanji interstate and forging permission slips and buying train tickets. They talk about moving him every two days and getting him out of the country, getting him anywhere. Every plan falls apart under the same weight: Judge has more money and more men and more time. Luffy, importantly, points out that Sanji’s not a parcel to be moved without his consent, no matter how badly all of them want to steal him away. Around midnight, Gap comes upstairs and sticks his head in the doorway right as Ace is pondering about fake passports. His face is thunderous. “What the hell are you idiots planning?”

Ace freezes. “Tax fraud?”

Garp steps fully into the room, clearly sensing a rat. “Try again.”

They tell him, badly and angrily and all at once, and Garp listens longer than Zoro expects which almost feels like a mercy. He doesn’t interrupt when Luffy talks about Sanji, or when Sabo explains what Belle-mere told Nami, or when Zoro says Judge has people, whatever that means, and no-one is fucking doing anything. 

Then Garp presses his lips together. “You need to trust the proper channels.”

The room erupts, literally: Ace throws his arms in the air and kicks Luffy’s pillow, which sends a cloud of feathers across the space. Luffy scowls. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” Garp explains. “You do not take on organised crime by making a list of felonies in a child’s bedroom.”

“We’re not children,” Ace snaps. “I’m nineteen.”

Sabo jerks to his feet, always the first to turn fury intellectual. Ace burns and Luffy crashes, but Sabo builds a case and then throws it like a grenade. “Proper channels. The same proper channels that let the Vinsmokes operate in this town for years?”

Garp’s jaw tightens. “You don’t know what investigations exist.”

“No,” Sabo snaps. “I know what consequences don’t. You tell us to trust the police but the police know who he is. The mayor knows who he is. Everyone knows enough to be afraid and not enough to move. That’s not justice, that’s corruption with a uniform standing politely beside it.”

Garp’s voice drops this time, expression shifting into one of genuine anger. “Careful.”

“You believe in institutions because they were built to recognise men like you,” He snarls. “Men who can afford to believe the system mostly works and who’ve never had to watch the law get rewritten around the people it was supposed to protect. But people like Judge don’t break the system — they own the parts that matter. They buy the police, they own the politicians. They make sure the paperwork looks clean enough that men like you can keep telling yourselves that patience and procedure are the same thing as morality.”

“You think I don’t know how the world works? I have spent my life putting men like Judge in cages.”

“And how many of them have stayed there?” Sabo shoots back, relentless. “How many walked because the paperwork was cleaner than the crime? How many are still walking because the people who were supposed to stop them decided it was easier to look the other way?”

“You think I haven’t seen good men broken by bad systems?”

Sabo snorts, folding his arms. “I think you’ve seen enough to know the system protects itself first, and I think you’re still choosing to stand inside it anyway."

The silence that follows is ugly: Garp looks at Sabo like he’s never quite seen him before, but Sabo only glares back, his eyes bright with something that isn’t just anger — it’s grief and certainty and the clarity of someone who’s already decided the world can’t be fixed from the inside. Garp exhales slowly and steadily. His voice comes out quieter, this time. “And what would you have me do?”

“Something that actually risks something.” 

The first week after the argument with Garp they treat it like a problem that can still be solved through sheer effort and volume. Luffy knocks on every door between the park and the Vinsmoke house until Makino tells him, gently, that people are starting to get nervous. Sabo makes lists and Ace drives loops in his shitty car, coming back with nothing but a tighter jaw. Zoro walks the long way home from school every single afternoon on the off chance Sanji will be on one of the old routes, or the fence behind the supermarket or the back of the Baratie. By the second week the searches go quieter. They still check — they just stop expecting the check to work. Luffy gets detention three times for leaving class early and Garp pretends not to notice. Zoro keeps walking the same routes, but he starts timing them so he gets back before Garp’s radio comes on, and he stops telling anyone when he’s gone. 

He still goes to the dojo three times a week, even though he hasn’t asked Koushirou to check his form since the day he carried his bag out of the house, and doesn’t plan to start. The younger kids’ class pays in cash if he shows up on time and keeps them from stabbing each other. Koushirou leaves the envelope on the low table by the door and Zoro takes it without looking at him. The first time he comes by, Koushirou says his name just once, the same way he used to call them in from the yard, and Zoro keeps walking. The second time he’s already in the doorway when Zoro arrives with his arms folded, and for a second it looks like he might actually block the path. He doesn’t, though. He watches Zoro line the kids up and, when the hour’s done, the envelope is in the same place. After that he stops appearing in the doorway at all and the silence between them grows weight, sitting in the empty space where Kuina’s practice sword used to lean against the wall in the fact that Zoro still knows, without having to check, which cabinet holds the spare wraps. He uses none of it. He takes the money and uses some of it to cover the things Garp keeps trying to pay for, like bus fares and the occasional shirt that isn’t Luffy’s, or the protein bars he eats between school and his shifts. The rest of it goes into an old pencil case he keeps at the bottom of Luffy’s drawer. He doesn’t count it often; he just needs it to be there, to cover a bus ticket that doesn’t go to the Vinsmokes and a room with a lock that doesn’t belong to Judge’s. Zoro doesn’t know what that will cost, but he knows he wants to have it before he has to ask anyone else for it.

It’s a month before he knows it, and his life at Garp’s no longer feels temporary. His toothbrush lives in the cup by the sink, his school uniform next to Luffy’s. He knows which floorboards creak on the way to the bathroom at night and which cabinet hides the good cereal. Most mornings he wakes up to the sound of Garp yelling at the radio and Ace stealing the last of the milk. 

Ace comes into the kitchen to do exactly that one Thursday afternoon with a red hoop in one ear and the kind of self satisfied expression that means he’s done something illegal or painful or both. Luffy notices immediately. “You got an earring!”

Ace opens the fridge, unbearably smug. “Wow, great detective work.”

Sabo, at the table with a book open, sighs. “He did it in the bathroom with a potato. Don’t encourage him.”

Zoro looks at the earring, the way it looks stupidly good on the other guy and says, before he can think better of it: “Do mine.”

Luffy lights up like a bonfire and Ace closes the door slowly, pointing to himself. “Me. You want me to pierce your ear.”

“Sure.”

Ace’s grin turns unholy. “Oh, this is — incredible, wow. I’ve been waiting for this day since you were twelve and too scared to get a haircut without supervision.”

“I was seven.”

Luffy’s already vibrating out of his chair, cereal abandoned. “Can I watch? Can I try? I’ve got steady hands.”

“No,” Sabo says as Ace says: “Sure.”

They trundle upstairs, the whole lot of them, using Garp’s bathroom because Ace reckons it has marginally better lighting. Ace ducks into his bedroom on the way, emerging with a needle and a lighter, which he lays out on the toilet tank with an absurd amount of seriousness. Zoro sits on the edge of the bathtub and tries to act like his heart’s not beating too fast over something this inconsequential. He watches Ace sterialise the needle over the lighter flame and then grumble when Sabo makes him wash his hands. 

“Still want it?” Ace marks the spot on his ear with a pen, tongue stuck between his teeth. “If you move I’ll tell everyone you screamed.”

Zoro grits his teeth and does his damndest to stay still, gripping the bathtub rim and glaring a hole in the wall. “Shut up and do it.”

Ace grins, but his hands are steady when he pushes the needle through. It hurts, obviously — a sharp, hot pinch — but it’s over fast enough that Zoro only really has time to hiss between his teeth. Ace kind of freezes with the needle still three quarters through, realising he’s got nothing to keep the hole open with before sending Luffy on a scavenger hunt through his bedroom to find his spare earrings. He puts one through, a small silver hoop, and steps back to admire his handiwork. 

When Zoro looks at the mirror the silver catches in his left ear, small and clean and perfect. Something opens in his chest a little, relief at first and then something more complicated, because one looks good. But. One looks like Ace, like a choice someone made for themselves and all he can think about is Luffy and the way Luffy says Sanji’s name like he expects him to walk through at any second. He thinks of the three of them as kids, sprawled through the neighbourhood, before everything got so much bigger and meaner. The thought arrives whole and humiliating.

“Do two more.”

Luffy nearly falls off the toilet with how excitedly he punches the air. “Yes!”

Ace studies him for a beat too long. “You sure?” 

Zoro shrugs, but it’s not remotely casual. All he can think about is how one feels thin and how if he’s going to mark himself for the people he loves, well. He might as well be honest about it. “I want three.”

Ace marks the second and third spots without saying anything else, though Sabo grumbles something about metaphors under his breath that Zoro stubbornly ignores. The second piercing hurts more, but Ace works quietly this time, giving him little instructions every now and then like breathe, bud. They can’t find matching hoops, so when Zoro finally checks the mirror he’s got a silver hoop, a stud and the other red hoop. It looks ridiculous, maybe, but he feels something loosen in him, like he can breathe again. He knows it won’t fix anything, but it feels like a small, stupid reminder that even when one of them is gone, the shape of them still exists.

Luffy beams. “You look so cool.”

Ace claps him on the shoulder, gentler than usual. “You look like trouble.”

Sabo glances at the mirror and smiles, even as he slips out of the bathroom. “They suit you. Just don’t let missing him be the only thing you do.”

Zoro’s ears burn again, but this time it feels different. Warmer, maybe. He touches one of the hoops carefully with his fingers and, that night, long after the bathroom’s been cleaned and the adrenaline’s worn off, he lies awake on Luffy’s floor and traces the path up his ear carefully.

His ear heals slowly and itches like hell for the first week or so. Ace, naturally, gives him terrible aftercare advice on purpose until Sabo gets involved, and Luffy keeps trying to touch them like they’re lucky charms. 

“Don’t,” Zoro warns for the ninth time in one morning. 

“I just wanna see!”

“You have eyes.” 

Ace grins from the stove where he’s burning eggs with some kind of deep, philosophical commitment and Zoro flips him off without looking up from his toast. 

Living at Garp’s has settled in around him whether he wanted it or not, some kind of life emerging under all the ruin. He wakes up most nights to Luffy stealing his blanket and Ace existing at truly criminal volumes before dawn. He learns exactly how much toast Sabo can eat while reading (a lot) and how long he can stay in the shower before Garp starts banging on the door. There’s always way too much noise and way too little privacy and some low grade crisis involving food or laundry or Sabo’s growing collection of seeds. There’s a relief in being in a house where silence isn’t the default punishment and where there’s always yelling or laughing or burning something, where he can come home from training with split knuckles and no-one will ask him to explain himself — they’ll just keep talking over him until the noise fills the space the ache usually occupies.

He thrives at the dojo, where he continues coaching the younger grades, and survives school the way he survives most things lately, which is to say by momentum and irritation. Teachers like him more now that he’s taller and apparently capable of looking serious on demand, and continue to talk to him after class like Zoro might be some kind of future investment instead of a teenager who occasionally forgets to bring the right textbook. 

Everything staggers along, until he sees Reiju on a Wednesday afternoon, outside the chemist with a paper bag in one hand and her sunglasses pushed into her hair. She’s dressed too nicely for the neighbourhood, half turned towards the road and clearly about to leave — for one stupid second, Zoro almost thinks he’s imagined her because god knows wanting information has started turning half the city into mirages. She smiles when she sees him, and Zoro’s across the street before he can stop himself. “Where is he?”

Reiju’s eyes dart to the kids loitering nearby with their distracted parents and presses her lips together, smile gone. “Nice to see you too, Zoro.”

“Where’s Sanji?”

She shifts the chemist bag to her other hand and, up close, she looks tired, too, which pisses him off further because apparently every Vinsmoke looks worn down now except the ones doing the damage. “Not here.”

“No shit. What happened to him?”

Reiju’s quiet for a moment, before she meets his eyes again. “He was sent away to somewhere they thought might be… corrective.”

Zoro feels the back of his neck go cold. “For what?”

There’s an exhausted sort of pity in her face that makes him want to break something. “For being difficult. They thought he was becoming… improper.”

The whole conversation kind of tilts, Zoro’s mind reaching for some kind of shape to shove it into, some way for it to make sense. He frowns, trying to figure out the best question to spear this open. “Because… is it because we fought?”

Reiju’s expression changes into something complicated and exasperated, which immediately makes him want to die. “Oh, sweetheart, no. You’re not the centre of every disaster in his life, no matter how dramatic you’d like to be. They’re just… trying to make him easier.”

The words lodge under his ribs beside all the other half truths and broken pictures and refuses to become language he understands. He scowls. “So can we see him?”

“No.”

“Can we know where he is?”

“No.”

“Reiju —”

“I’m not being cruel,” She says quietly and he believes her, the way he always has. “I’m being honest.” She looks at him properly, tracing his earrings and the set of his shoulders. “Try not to do anything stupid.” He laughs in her face and she laughs back, tired and furious all at once. “Yeah, I know. I heard myself, too.”

After she’s gone, he stands outside the chemist for a full minute and a half, with the afternoon traffic going by and the world still having the nerve to continue. There are more questions sitting on his tongue, but he doesn’t voice them — he doesn’t know how, really. Mostly, he wants to punch the brick wall until his hand breaks, but he doesn’t because Sabo would say broken bones are a bad strategy, but also because some part of him has started trying to deserve the trust of the people who tell him things, even when they don’t tell him enough. Instead, he goes back to Garp’s and messes up his homework and trains too hard and lies awake staring at the stickers on Luffy’s ceiling until his eyes give out. 

Over the next few weeks, he cycles through moods so fast they almost stop being separate emotions. Some days he’s pure rage at the whole invisible structure of the world that lets assholes take kids and call it correction, and some days he’s so lonely in such a quiet, stupid way that everything feels arranged around absence. It’s ridiculous, because he still has Luffy and Ace and Nami and Usopp and Sabo and everyone else in their lives, but then he’ll be halfway through math and suddenly remember the exact way Sanji says idiot in French and have to put his head down for a second, like he’s been shot.

Nights are the biggest problem, because there’s no distraction from his thoughts and nights are always when Sanji’s belonged most to him — in the dark, in the bed, in the private little world they built out of video games and jokes and bruises and shared silences and awful, terrible arthouse films. Sometimes the dreams are sad, Sanji standing far away and looking at him like Zoro’s missed something obvious and unforgivable, or Sanji in the Baratie kitchen with flour on his cheek and some stranger version of peace that Zoro can never reach. Sometimes, the dreams are less wholesome and he wakes up sticky and aching and furious with himself for the way his brain will take the memory of Sanji’s mouth and twist it into something hot and desperate and impossible to stop. 

Luffy, being Luffy, sleeps through almost everything, but one night he wakes up and mumbles: “Why’re you doing laundry?”

Zoro freezes with the sheets bundled under his arms. “Go back to sleep.”

Luffy blinks at him, slow. “Did you pee the bed?”

“What?! No, just — oh my god.”

“Okay.” Luffy yawns and rolls over, already tipping back into sleep. “Weird.”

Ace catches him the third time, standing there in the dark at 2:17am trying to figure out how much detergent is too much, leaning against the doorframe in boxers with his eyebrows raised. Zoro goes rigid. His first instinct is to chuck the detergent bottle at him. The second is to lie. The third is to walk straight into the ocean and never, ever come back, but Ace doesn’t wait for any of the options to eventuate. He just heaves himself up to balance on the washing machine, taking the detergent bottle from Zoro’s hands to measure it out for him. “So.”

Zoro stares at the washing machine like it might offer him some kind of escape route, while Ace pours the detergent in and turns the machine on. When he’s done, he sighs and leans back on his hands, watching Zoro from his perch. “It’ll get better, man. Bodies are assholes.”

Zoro makes a strangled noise and refuses to look at him. 

Ace grins anyway, shrugging a shoulder. “When I was sixteen, I had this boyfriend for like, three months. Real dramatic type. We used to fight like cats and dogs and then make up like it was the end of the world. Trust me, I did a lot of laundry. All I’m saying is, this won’t last forever.”

The word boyfriend echoes in Zoro’s head, even as he glances up in surprise. “You —” he stops, not even sure what he’s trying to clarify, here. He’s never heard another guy say boyfriend without it being a punchline or a warning or a rumour, and something in his chest shifts, just a little. Ace catches the look and his expression softens. 

“It’ll get better,” he says again. “It’s annoying as hell, but it’s also normal as hell, unfortunately. If you ever… look, I don’t know. Come find me if you need to talk. Or throw something at my head. I’m usually awake, anyway.”

Zoro just nods; he doesn’t trust his voice right now. Ace claps him on the shoulder, rough and brotherly and grounding, and leaves without further ado. Zoro stands there for a long time after he’s gone, staring down at the washing machine and thinking about the easy way Ace had said it and the easy way he lives in his own skin and thinks that maybe this isn’t the worst night of his life, after all. 

Sanji’s been gone fifty-three days when Usopp turns sixteen, which means that Zoro’s in a foul mood before the birthday party even begins. It’s unfair to Usopp, maybe, who’s been dramatic about turning sixteen for weeks now and probably deserves this party to be treated with appropriate seriousness — he’s invited half their damn school to the park after dark, along with a host of stolen blankets and chips and pilfered beer. Nami somehow manages to get her hands on a three tier cake because she is, objectively, the best girlfriend in the world. She’s also acquired candles, paper plates, a picnic knife, rubbish bags and enough snacks to feed Luffy for about eight minutes, if carefully rationed. Most importantly, she’s arranged a crown for Usopp, fashioned from cardboard, that he wears with almost unbearable delight. 

“I look powerful!”

“You look flammable,” Nami mutters, adjusting it on his head anyway. 

Usopp snorts. “Can’t a man contain multitudes?”

Luffy’s already barefoot in the grass, talking to Barto and Cav, utterly oblivious to the way they’re three seconds from strangling each other right there and then. Someone’s dancing badly near the CD player, blasting what sounds like a very enthusiastic violin cover of Christmas songs, and Zoro does what he’s meant to. He talks when he’s spoken to and laughs once, when Ace trips Luffy into a bush. He helps Nami relight the candles after the wind kills them and lets Usopp drag him into a deeply unnecessary argument about trading cards. For maybe two hours, he forgets how to be miserable. A girl from the year above comes over with her two friends and asks if he wants to walk with them to the service station and he looks at her with nothing inside but dread. “I’m good.”

Her smile wobbles. Oh. You sure?”

He nods and they leave, Usopp draping himself over Zoro’s shoulders with a smirk. “Wow. What’s the count, now?”

Nami flicks him on the ear. “Leave him alone.”

“It’s my birthday.”

“And yet somehow still not a license to be obnoxious.”

“Hey now,” Usopp grins. “It’s at least a provisional license.”

Nami rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling when she leans into his side, and Usopp forgets whatever he was doing to gaze at her like she hung the moon. Zoro rolls his eyes and looks away, knowing where this is going. It’s almost hard to believe that he would’ve found the concept of Nami-and-Usopp baffling, but now he gets it. He’s seen the way they fit together, uplifting and strengthening each other day after day.

He takes a sip from his can, grimacing at how warm it is while someone finds a new CD and the music jumps louder. Luffy nearly starts a fight over the last sausage roll and then forgets it anyway, because Marco challenges him to race. Ace and Sabo get into an argument with two other boys about whether someone could theoretically jump from the toilet block and land on their feet, and Nami shuts that down without even turning around.

The park lights hum overhead and Zoro thinks about going home and going the fuck to bed, and then Luffy’s shouting: “Sanji!” and the whole world tips upside down. His head jerks to follow Luffy’s voice, watching the way Luffy launches himself at Sanji with absolute feral abandon. Sanji catches him badly, the momentum sending both of them crashing to the ground and Luffy peels off shrieking with laughter, like this is the best day of his life. “You’re back! You missed Usopp becoming king!”

“Have you gotten heavier?” Sanji gets back to his feet and brushes himself off, all dark clothes and too many layers, hair shorter than Zoro’s ever seen it, blunter at the edges, no longer in his eyes. He looks past Luffy to where Usopp stands in his cardboard crown, eyes wide and mouth open. “Ah, tragic. The monarchy.”

Usopp makes a choked noise, before charging him as well. Nami stops in front of him and looks over him with one merciless sweep that probably misses absolutely nothing. “You’re late.”

Sanji’s smile softens a little, turning true. “Yeah, well. Didn’t want Usopp thinking the night was about him.”

Through all of it, Zoro stays rooted to the spot, utterly frozen, body so locked it feels almost separate from him. It’s not until Usopp and Nami step back from their joint hug that Sanji looks at him, like he’s been saving the last and worst part for exactly this moment. “Moss.”

Zoro’s throat doesn’t work. For fifty three days he’s imagined seeing Sanji again, in a hundred different ways — angry or hurt or silent or running or begging. Dead, sometimes, in the worst minutes before sleep when his mind turned traitor and showed him things he couldn’t fight. In none of them did Sanji come back like this, strolling up to a birthday party like the last two months have been nothing at all.

Luffy laughs with open, desperate relief as Sanji rummages around his jacket pockets to find a little parcel, which he hands to Usopp with a bow. It turns out to contain a little mechanical pencil set, expensive looking and gorgeous. Usopp goes quiet when he sees it. “This is… extremely useful to my kingdom.”

“You’re back,” Luffy trills, like repeating it might make it more solid.

Sanji ruffles his hair. “Ah, don’t sound so tragic. I was busy.”

That gets Zoro’s mouth moving. “Where?”

Sanji turns his head a little, eyes narrowed but expression casual. “Around.”

“You call two months around?”

“Counting?” Sanji grins. “Cute.”

Something hot and awful goes through Zoro before he can wrestle it back, something that feels a lot like anger and embarrassment and affection had a baby. “Not funny. Where were you?”

Sanji rolls his eyes and steals Usopp’s birthday crown off his head, dunking it on Luffy instead. “Secret family business. Boring, repetitive. Wouldn’t recommend.”

Zoro can barely hear it over the rush of blood in his ears. He doesn’t even realise he’s fisted his hands until he feels his nails bite through. “That’s not —”

“Anyway!” Sanji claps his hands. “Is this a birthday party or an intervention?”

Ace, from the bench, drawls: “Could be both.”

Sanji flips him off. “Don’t start, freckles.”

Nami drags Sanji towards the blankets, pushing food into his hands while Usopp reclaims his crown and demands Sanji retell whatever prevented him from arriving on time, which Sanji answers with a story so obviously fabricated it involves a cursed train, three nuns and a water named Maurice. People laugh and he embellishes further, because he’s always been funny. Even hollowed out and pale and wrong, he can still hold a group in the palm of his hand and make them grateful for the privilege. Zoro hates him for it but is so fucking relieved to see it that he could be sick.

The party keeps going with more dancing and worse dancing and screaming and laughing, and throughout it all Zoro watches Sanji’s hands move, trying to figure out if they look thinner or if he’s just looking for proof where none exists, reading the line of knuckles and the shadows under his sleeves and the way he keeps one wrist angled carefully out of sight. Usopp keeps his crown on a tilt, laughing at the way Vivi’s pulled Pedro into some kind of awkward shuffle. 

Zoro keeps trying to get Sanji alone, but it doesn’t work: everytime he gets within a few metres someone intercepts, or Sanji starts flirting with a girl, or looks everywhere and it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that he’s avoiding him. He’s always one conversation away or one circle over or turning when Zoro gets close, letting some other person take up space between them. He laughs and flirts and smokes like a fucking chimney, so Zoro gets pissed off and accepts more of the shitty beer, enough to feel the buzz in his head and behind his eyes and for the ache in his chest to dull. A girl from school asks if he wants to dance and he has to think for a second before remembering he’d really like to say no. 

“You look mad,” Luffy says cheerfully, dropping onto the grass beside him. He glances over towards Sanji, who’s leaning against the park bench with a cigarette and three different people, and sighs. “You’re doing your Sanji face.”

Before Zoro can decide whether to strangle him or just. Flee, Usopp cups his hands around his mouth from the centre of the blankets. “Spin the bottle!”

A chorus goes up at once, half the park apparently thinking this is the best idea anyone’s ever had. Nami mutters something rude and Ace, shaking his head, says: “This is gonna end in tears.”

Zoro should leave, he knows. He’s tired and tipsy and one bad look from Sanji away from saying something mortifyingly honest or dragging him into a brawl. It should be an easy choice, but Sanji’s here and leaving feels impossible when there’s still even a chance of cornering him, so. When someone grabs his wrist and pulls him towards the blankets, he lets it happen and the group forms in a loose, uneven circle. Someone finds an empty beer bottle and wipes the back of it with the hem of a shirt, Luffy volunteering to go first because that’s just how he rolls, really. The game begins in the usual way, with shrieking and dares and people trying to cheat on purpose, someone refusing to kiss someone else and getting booed off the blankets for all of ten seconds. 

Zoro hates it, but he hunkers down further and drinks his beer slower, watching the bottle spin and trying not to look at where Sanji’s sitting, with an elbow on his knee, sliding around the realness of his own return on grace and sarcasm alone. He calls the girl next to him princesse and gets a delighted smack on the shoulder for it, before she blushes. Zoro wants to drag him out of the park and shake the answers out of him and also wants to stare at his mouth until he dies, neither of which is helpful. At some point, the bottle lands on Sanji as bottles are wont to do, and the girl to his right gasps and immediately leans in like she’s won something. 

Sanji laughs and meets her halfway — the kiss is brief, over in a second, but the scene hits Zoro in some ugly, private place that still hasn’t adjusted to Sanji being back. He looks away too late, pressing his fingernail into his thumb, something concrete to keep him anchored. The girl grins like she’s going to live off this for a month and Sanji grins back, easy and polished, before spinning the bottle himself. It flashes under the park lights, the whole circle of people leaning in with drunken anticipation. Zoro doesn’t even realise he’s ceased breathing until it finally slows, further and further, before stopping with the neck pointed straight at him.

For one heartbeat, nothing happens. Then, the whole group erupts, Usopp making a noise like a kettle and Luffy whooping. Zoro’s frozen, watching the way Sanji’s whole body has stilled, his expression uncharacteristically flat. Zoro can feel his own pulse in his throat, hot and ridiculous and impossible to hide; he hates that he wants this kiss so badly that his hands are almost shaking from the effort of not showing it. 

Sanji clears his throat. “I forfeit.”

Zoro doesn’t understand the words, at first, and apparently neither does half the group. Then the noise all comes back at once, all arguments and explanations, and Usopp practically crawling over the blankets in protest. “You can’t forfeit! That destroys the spirit of the game!”

Sanji shrugs, taking a drink of beer. “Pretty fragile spirit.”

The group boos, but Sanji just grins and Zoro feels like he’s been hollowed out. It’s fucking absurd how hard it hits because he knows, rationally, that Sanji’s reaction shouldn’t be a surprise. The hurt arrives mean and immediate and humiliating anyway, like the skin’s been stripped off his ribs. He doesn’t bother trying to play nice; he jerks away from the group back towards the path, with his hands shoved into his pockets so no-one can see how white his knuckles are.

He makes it down through the trees and past the barbecues before footsteps crunch after him, fast. He considers ignoring Sanji completely, but turns to find the blonde close enough that the night’s taken some of the colour from his face. Zoro grits his teeth. “What?”

Sanji’s breathing is a little quick. “You’re being dramatic.”

The laugh that bursts out is incredulous and brittle, borderline furious. “I’m being dramatic? Are you fucking serious?”

“You got up like someone shot your dog.”

Zoro wants to kick him. He settles for scowling, that awful hot feeling still running rampant in him, right down to the marrow of his bones. “What are you — maybe I’m just sick of watching you fake charm half the school.”

Sanji’s eyes narrow. “That was this is about?”

“No,” Zoro snaps. “It’s about you disappearing for two fucking months after you nearly took my head off and then pulling this crap. You want to do this now? You want to get into it here?”

“Where else?” Sanji shoots back, eyes flashing. “Your room? Went so well last time.”

Zoro’s heart is still beating too hard. He can feel the shape of the forfeit in him like a bruise and the absolute agony of the past fifty-three days like something worse. He realises, abruptly, that he’s going to cry; his eyes spark hot and sharp, and he wipes at them angrily, before Sanji can see. “I’m going home.”

Sanji stares at him, poleaxed, before closing the gap between them so fast Zoro doesn’t see it coming; one hand catches in the front of Zoro’s shirt to drag him in, and then Sanji’s kissing him. Zoro makes a startled sound into his mouth, the shock of it cold and hot all at the same time, and then he’s kissing back before his brain’s even finished catching up. His hands grab at Sanji’s waist on instinct, gripping into the fabric of his shirt like he might disappear if Zoro doesn’t hold on. For one suspended second Zoro’s whole world narrows to the press of Sanji’s mouth against his, heart hammering so loudly he’s half convinced Sanji can hear it. Sanji makes a small sound and cups the side of Zoro’s face, thumb brushing over the earrings so carefully it makes something in Zoro’s chest crack wide open. He leans into it without thinking, chasing the warmth of Sanji’s palm and Sanji kisses him again, slower this time.

Zoro makes another small, helpless sound and tilts his head into it, bumping their noses accidentally, trying to pour everything he can’t say into this moment — the relief, the anger, the counting, the fear that Sanji might never come back, the stupid stubborn hope that’s been keeping him upright.

They break apart for air, foreheads almost touching, Sanji’s eyes dark and wide and a little wild. Zoro can still feel the ghost of his mouth and he wants to say something, wants to ask, wants to kiss him again but they jerk apart at the sound of footsteps. Sanji swears under his breath as Barto and Cav come down the path, freezing in their tracks when they spot Zoro and Sanji.

For one horrible, humiliating second, all four of them just stare at each other. Then they both start talking at once. Barto near shouts: “We were, uh, looking for –”

“The path!” Cav cuts in, face beet red even under all his dishevelled hair. “We were taking the scenic route back —”

“Scenic!” Barto nods vigorously. “Very scenic!”

Zoro flushes, annoyed with them for interrupting and annoyed with himself for how flustered he feels. “We were just talking —”

Sanji overlaps him immediately. “Fresh air. Needed fresh air. Very important for —”

“Fresh air!” Barto cries, nodding even harder somehow. “Fresh air is great! We love fresh air!”

The four of them stand there in the middle of the path, all of them red faced and babbling over each other like complete idiots. It’d almost be funny, if Zoro’s heart wasn’t still trying to beat its way out of his chest. Sanji’s eyes flick to him, still a little wide and dazed, before he smooths his expression into something almost normal. “I… later?”

Before Zoro can say no or wait or can we just have five fucking minutes to talk the blonde’s slipped down the path, shoulders tight. He doesn’t look back, leaving Zoro there with his useless thudding pulse and his too warm face, before Cav blinks. “We should… back to the party! Great idea!”

They amble back, Zoro giving himself a minute to catch his damn breath and try to slow down his heart before following.

x

Later that night, Luffy’s half asleep with his leg kicked from under the blanket while Zoro stares up at the ceiling and tries to stop thinking about Sanji’s mouth. Everytime he closes his eyes the kiss comes back in pieces, sharp and overwhelming and so fucking real that his chest feels too small for his ribs. He thinks about Sanji’s hand in his shirt and the way their noses had bumped because Zoro had no idea what he was doing and the soft little sound Sanji had made when Zoro kissed him back. 

He feels like he swallowed the sun. He also feels like he might throw it back up. 

There’s a part of him that’s already thinking about later, about tomorrow and whatever it brings — or doesn’t. There’s a part of him that’s sure he’s going to wake up and Sanji will be gone again, just like that. There’s a darker part of him that’s sure he’s going to wake up and Sanji’s going to laugh it off, or claim it was just a stupid game and nothing more, and that thought makes his stomach twist so hard he has to press a hand flat against it under the blanket.

“I’m glad he’s back,” Luffy mumbles into the dark, voice already heavy.

Zoro exhales. “Yeah.”

Luffy shuffles around in his blankets to peer up at the ceiling, too, voice gone sleepier by the second. “He looked bad, but… I’m glad he came anyway. For him and for you.”

Zoro frowns into the dark, heart suddenly beating too fast. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Luffy’s quiet, mulling it over, apparently. “You laugh more. And you’re less mean.”

“I’m not — I’m just regular mean.”

Luffy hums. “Fine. You’re less regular mean.”

That almost gets a laugh out of him, but it’s overtaken by the heat climbing up his neck because this is Luffy. This is his best friend in the whole damn world, saying these like they’re obvious. Like he’s been watching them for years.

“He’s better when you’re around, too. He laughs more, too.”

Zoro turns his head to peer up at the bed, heart doing something complicated in his chest. He knows exactly which laugh Luffy means — the real one, the one that starts in Sanji’s chest and seems to surprise him every single time it gets out. “Oh.”

“And he talks more.” Luffy rolls onto his stomach, voice coming muffled from where he’s buried it in the pillow. “Like… actual talking, you know? Not just about food or girls or making things up. You’ll be good together.”

The room seems to tighten around the sentence as Zoro’s breath just goes and dies. He sits up halfway on one elbow. “What? What do you — we're not —”

“Okay.”

“Luffy, you can’t just…” He doesn’t know how to say that if Luffy says it it becomes real. If Luffy thinks that they fit, well. That has to mean something, right? He flops back down and drags his hands over his face, the room too small and hot and aware of him.

Luffy’s sleepy voice drifts across, softer now. “You always pick each other.”

Zoro stills, knowing he’s right. They do, over and over, in fights and jokes and windows and absences. He stares up and thinks of Sanji coming to the park tonight and looking at him last, like he almost couldn’t bear to. He thinks of Sanji following him and the kiss on the path, desperate and relieved and scared all at once. “Yeah.”

“I like it when he’s here.” Luffy shifts under the blanket, mostly gone now. “He’s safe. But mostly I’m glad because you’re both less sad.”

Zoro lies there stunned and embarrassed and, somewhere all that, secretly relieved in a way he doesn’t even have words for, until sleep takes him at last. He wakes up the moment Ace kicks at his foot, which is unfortunate for Ace who barely dodges the swing Zoro throws. 

“Bloody hell,” Ace clenches his toast harder between his teeth. “What do they teach you at that dojo?”

Zoro blinks up at him, the room coming back in pieces, all early morning light through Luffy’s curtains and blankets twisted badly around him. Luffy’s breathing heavily from the mattress above, still asleep despite the attempted murder that just happened.

Ace shakes his head, hair a disaster. He looks way too pleased with himself. “Anyway, your boyfriend’s here.”

“What?” He chokes, maybe, but Ace just shrugs and keeps eating his toast. 

“Y’know the one. Tall. Blonde. Skinny. Drinking our coffee like he’s paying rent here.”

Zoro’s body catches up and moves all at once, throwing the blanket off so quickly he gets a foot tangled in it and nearly drives his shoulder into the damn bedside table, catching himself on the wall while Ace watches with naked delight. “Wow, excited hey?”

“Shut up.” He finds his jeans on the floor and yanks them on badly, pulse already climbing. His hands don’t quite work; the button slips twice before he gives up on it completely, dragging his shirt straight and running a hand through his hair before realising it’s only made the mess worse.  

Ace leans against the doorframe. “You look really calm and normal.”

“I’ll kill you.”

“After or before you have a panic attack?” 

Zoro shoulders past him and the walk downstairs takes ten seconds, mauve, but in Zoro’s head it takes years because by the time he’s reached the kitchen he’s imagined at least six different disasters and one impossible hope: that Sanji’s come to tell him it meant nothing, Sanji’s come to explain that he was just tipsy, that Sanji’s come because something happened at home, that Sanji’s come to say they should forget it, that Sanji’s come to ask him not to tell anyone, or that Sanji’s come to say how badly he regrets it. Underneath all those possibilities sits the idea that Sanji’s come to kiss him again, which feels almost too fragile to expose to daylight so Zoro crushes that one immediately.

Hope’s made an idiot of him before — he’s not letting it get too far ahead this time. 

In the kitchen, Sanji’s standing at the bench with both hands wrapped around a cup. He’s still wearing the jacket from last night and his hair’s been pushed around by wind or sleepless hands, the short, uneven ends falling over his forehead in a way that makes him look younger than he did last night. There’s a strained precision to the way he’s holding himself, like every limb’s been arranged manually and might just. Spring loose, if he stops concentrating.

When Zoro steps in, something moves across his face too quickly to name — relief, maybe. Fear, definitely, and a softness so brief Zoro could convince himself he’s imagined it. 

“You’re here,” Zoro says stupidly, but he’s never been that good at language when the world feels this big and unknown. 

Sanji glances down at the cup in his hands. “Apparently.”

Zoro hesitates before closing some of the distance between them, well aware that his body’s already turned traitor with the memory — the pull of Sanji’s fist in his shirt and the warmth of his mouth, and lying awake afterwards to let himself believe, for the first time, that this might not live in him alone. Now, Sanji looks like he wants to crawl out of his own skin and that hope in Zoro immediately begins folding itself smaller.

Sanji’s fingers tighten around the cup. “So. I… I figured you’d be breaking down my door in the next few hours either way, so I…” He gives a quick, nervous shrug that looks wrong on him; Sanji can usually lie while balancing three plates and lighting a cigarette, so seeing him trip over a sentence is its own kind of alarm. “We might as well just… get this over and done with.”

The words hit Zoro dead in the chest, ringing a little, absurdly and horrifically aware that Sanji’s making it sound like he’s come early because he knows Zoro would chase him otherwise, and he clearly wants to put the mistake down before Zoro can make it into something bigger. The hope that Zoro spent all night trying not to trust turns heavy and sick inside of him. “Over and done with.”

Sanji’s head comes up; he winces. “No. Shit, that sounded —”

“Pretty clear.”

“That’s not what I meant.” He puts the cup down quickly enough that coffee jumps across the rim and, across from him, Zoro folds his arms because if he leaves them loose at his sides, Sanji might see how his hands have started to curl. “I meant the conversation. We should… have the conversation. Before you do something insane.”

“Right.”

“Not…” He drags a hand through his hair. “Not get us over with. There isn’t even an us to get over. Not — fucking hell. This is going great.”

Zoro’s stomach drops further. Under any circumstances, maybe he’d laugh at the distraught expression on Sanji’s face, but all he can hear is there isn’t even an us and that phrase has already found the softest place available and lodged there. He wants to ask did you mean it? and was it pity? and, worst of all, wants to ask do you want me? but god knows he can’t imagine asking that without offering the other boy a weapon. He reaches for the cleanest line he has, the safest one, the one that doesn’t reveal how much is at stake on his end. “Thought you only kissed girls.”

Sanji’s face changes abruptly, eyes dropping to the table. He bites at the inside of his lip, one foot shifting restlessly against the tiles. “I don’t really kiss — yeah, fine, I guess that’s fair. It’s just… it’s not that easy.”

Zoro has no fucking idea what to make of that. Sanji’s been making it look easy, leaning in close and making girls laugh and knowing how to touch their hair in a way that’s sent something ugly eating steadily through Zoro for years now. He tries to keep his breathing even and wants, so badly to ask do you think about me the way i think about you? The question presses against his teeth but he can’t force it out. “Right.”

Sanji must see whatever he’s failing to hide on his face, because he looks even more alarmed. “I mean — fuck, this is not where I thought we’d start.”

“Where did you think it’d start?”

Sanji laughs, once, small and brittle. He tugs at the ends of his hair. “I dunno. I had a whole version of this in my head on the walk over.”

Zoro kicks at the floor a little, petulant and scared and just. Wanting this to be over, whichever way it’s going to land. “Was it better?”

“So much better.” His gaze goes distant again, fixed somewhere just over Zoro’s shoulder. He takes a breath so deep Zoro can hear it the whole way through. “I, uh. They sent me to a camp. That’s where I’ve been.”

“Yeah, Reiju… a camp?”

Sanji shrugs a little. “Not tents and canoeing, before your face does whatever it’s about to. It was a little more corrective than that.”

Zoro’s hurt has nowhere to go before anger surges over it, immediate and hot and familiar enough to stand on at last, even as his brain does the math: Sanji gone for nearly two months only to come back thinner and paler, hair cut wrong, body held together carefully. The kiss last night. Reiju’s words. Sanji now. He frowns. “Because you… because of the boy thing?”

Sanji stares at him. “Obviously because of the boy — wait, what do you mean?”

Heat climbs Zoro’s neck; the question’s humiliating, but the anger pushes him through it because if this is the reason — if Judge sent Sanji away because Sanji doesn’t seem to hate kissing boys — then Zoro needs to know, needs somewhere to aim this. Needs to know whether the kiss was connected to the punishment and whether Sanji’s standing here terrified because wanting Zoro’s already cost him something. “Is that why? Because you’re…” He stops with no fucking clue how to proceed or which word to choose. Gay feels too certain and bi is a word he’s only recently learned how to use without feeling like he went and stole it from a library book, which he did. Neither feels like the something he has the right to assign Sanji while the blonde’s standing there looking hunted. He finishes badly: “Because the kiss. Boys. Or…” he gestures between them.

Genuine confusion cuts through the concern on Sanji’s face. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Zoro’s stomach turns, the rejection sharpening, feeling like he’s gone and made himself the centre of something that has nothing to with him, building too much meaning out of one kiss and making the mistake he always makes with Sanji — wanting to matter so badly he starts mistaking his own desperation for evidence.

“I don’t know,” He says honestly, hating how rough his voice sounds. “Last night was — and now you’re telling me they sent you to some camp so I thought –”

“That it was because of you?” Sanji sounds incredulous. 

Zoro scowls and glares at the window. “Forget it.”

“No,” Sanji’s answer comes too quickly. His face is flushed; he looks frustrated. His voice is uneven in a way Zoro rarely hears. “They don’t give a fuck if I kiss boys, Moss. Fuck, they’d prefer it, actually. The right kind of boy, right? The right family or whatever. The right wedding. They don’t… they don’t care if I kiss boys, they’d just prefer I did it as their daughter.”

The world kind of stops, daughter entering Zoro to open every locked door at once, memories dropping into a new arrangement so suddenly it makes him dizzy. Sanji’s brothers throwing pronouns like knives and the clothes he’s shown up in and the way he keeps his body locked tight, under layer after layer. His pulse kicks. “Oh. Oh, you…” he doesn’t even fucking know how to finish that; he can’t. He just stares at the blonde helplessly.

Sanji takes a step back, face emptying. “Are you serious? You’ve known me for ten years, don’t tell me you never — oh my god.”

Zoro’s mouth opens but nothing comes out, despite how hard he’s fighting to get his fucking voice working. 

Sanji looks horrified past belief, stricken with it. “I thought you were being normal about it, but you just didn’t fucking know, I can’t —”

He manages: “Sanji.”

“All these years. You’ve heard them, you —”

“I thought they were just saying shit to hurt you, I didn’t know they meant —”

“What, exactly what they were saying?” Zoro flinches and Sanji looks away instantly, his jaw tightening. “Sorry, that was…”

“Fair. It was fair.” Zoro shakes his head, feeling stupid beyond measure. “I should’ve… I didn’t know.”

Sanji folds his arms across himself, voice quiet and toneless which is how Zoro knows it’s the real reason Sanji came. “Does it change anything?”

“No.” It’s instant and sure, but Sanji doesn’t look convinced. 

“You don’t have to answer that fast. If you need time to think or if you only liked me because you thought I was —”

“I like you because you’re you.” The sentence comes out before Zoro can stop it, dropping into the room and taking every damn defence he has with it. His whole face catches fire; he wants to die and he also means what he’s saying so completely that taking it back would be worse, somehow. “I mean, I care what you… are. Obviously. Because you care and it matters to you but it doesn’t change… I just like. Whoever you are.”

Sanji makes a small, strangled sound and covers his mouth, face flushed so dark it makes Zoro’s stomach drop. “You’re so — wow, okay.”

Zoro scowls at him, mostly because it’s the only way to keep from collapsing from sheer humiliation. “You asked.” 

The expression on Sanji’s face is shy enough to feel private: frightened, still, but laced with something warm and resigned and almost annoyed, like he can’t believe this is where he’s standing right now. The tips of his ears are pink. “Yeah, I did. I had to know after last night.”

There’s a universe in which Zoro is capable of asking this question gracefully, but this is not that universe. His pulse is suddenly everywhere again. “You said you forfeited.” 

Sanji chews at his lip again, even as it twitches into what looks a hell of a lot like a smile. “Yeah, not sorry for not wanting to kiss you in front of all your little school mates or whatever. Didn’t really want our first kiss to be because of some stupid game.”

It’s like the whole world tilts towards him; everything Zoro’s spent the night bracing against gives way at once, relief and hope moving through him so violently he feels winded. “And now?”

Something soft breaks open in Sanji’s face, even as he edges closer to Zoro, slow enough that Zoro could move away, if he wanted. Zoro’s heart beats louder and harder, everywhere all at once, watching the way Sanji’s mouth quirks more, fragile and mean and familiar. “And now.”

This time when they kiss, neither of them is testing or proving anything. It’s just Sanji’s hands catching the front of Zoro’s shirt and Zoro leaning in slowly enough to feel the exact moment Sanji chooses him back. He can feel Sanji smile into it and something his chest bursts so damn bright that he has to pull back just to look, just to take in the sight of Sanji nervous and flushed and smiling. Then Sanji pulls him back into it and Zoro almost laughs, startled about it; he can’t remember the last time a sound came out of him this easily, too soft for someone who’s spent the past two months furious enough to grind his teeth down.

“When’d you do these?” Sanji traces the mismatched earrings carefully.

“Do you hate them?”

Sanji looks surprised for a moment, before he snorts and kisses the side of Zoro’s face, just beneath his ear. “S’not about me. But no, unfortunately they suit you.”

“This is, like, so adorable,” Ace drawls from the doorway, making a big show of checking his absolutely bare wrist for a watch that doesn’t exist. “Garp’s gonna be up in, like, ten though.”

Zoro scowls at him, heat rising to his face instantly, but Sanji just rolls his eyes and pulls Zor out of the kitchen altogether, slipping past the older man to the stairs. They move as quietly as possible, which means Sanji’s silent and Zoro steps directly onto the floorboard that complains, which earns him a dirty look.

In the bedroom, Luffy’s hair’s flat on one side and his eyes are barely open, but he’s propped up on one elbow with an expression of pure, sleepy bewilderment. “Sanji? C’mere!” He pulls Sanji into him immediately, wrapping around him like a blanket or a particularly cuddly python, nestling his head into the crook of Sanji’s chest. “Missed you.”

Zoro watches Sanji’s face come apart, the tension leaving in one small part at a time as a hand settles into Luffy’s hair. “Yeah. Missed you, too.”

Luffy pulls him down too, eventually, until he’s pressed against the wall while Luffy makes a contended little noise between them. There’s no fucking space because the bed’s only built for one wiry teen, and Zoro knows all of them are probably uncomfortable as hell. Sanji’s legs are too damn long to fold up anywhere neat and Zoro’s shoulder is wedged at an awkward angle that’s going to kill him later, but it’s perfect. Luffy’s breathing evens out again while his face is still buried into Sanji, one hand twisted in the back of clothes like he’s making sure nobody disappears. Slowly, beneath the blanket, Zoro reaches out and finds Sanji's hand, lacing their fingers together until Sanji squeezes properly, eyes fluttering shut.

x

The first few weeks feel unreal to Zoro in a way fighting never has. Fighting’s simple, to him: a body moves and he answers and it’s easy done. This, though? This is Sanji just rocking up to Garp’s house on a Thursday night with a bag under his arm, even though Zoro knows he just pulled a double shift. This is Sanji baking him things and bringing leftover stew and throwing barbed comments about Zoro’s taste in clothes even as he leans over to kiss him. This is Sanji  pretending nothing’s changed while everything’s changed. He still insults him and still kicks him and still says moss like it tastes disappointing, but he comes to Garp’s whenever he can. Sometimes it’s after work, with the smell of cigarettes still clinging to his clothes, and sometimes it’s in those strange pale hours before dawn, slipping through the side gate without knocking because Garp’s place is never locked. 

He learns the floorboards and leaves food in the fridge with increasingly hostile labels and sneaks through Luffy’s window sometimes just to crawl onto Zoro’s mattress and lay there until they both fall asleep again. He meets Zoro in the little lane behind the Baratie more often than not, smoking while Zoro listens to him complain about customers and suppliers and Zeff and the quality of tomatoes this season. He doesn’t always understand why Sanji tells him these things, but he understands that he likes being told all the same. They kiss sometimes, pressed against the wall or in the dead of the night when Luffy’s snoring loudly, but most of the time they just… hang out and talk or bicker or don’t talk at all. Sometimes, all they do is stand or sit there with their legs thrown over each other or their hands loosely held.

It’s a surprise each and everytime, because Zoro had prepared for secrecy, maybe. Some part of him (a large part, if he’s honest) had assumed that Sanji would lock this away like everything else that frightens him and that whatever exists between them would only be allowed in the shadows; he’s always survived by controlling what other people are allowed to see, after all. Zoro expects to become one more hidden thing, but three weeks into whatever they are they end up in the park with Nami and Usopp at two in the morning and that unravels quickly.

They sit under the climbing frame with fries going cold between them and the town empty, Nami using Usopp’s legs as a pillow while he tries to throw fries into his own mouth. He nudges Sanji roughly. “Oi, chuck the sauce over.” Sanji doesn’t so much as move, too absorbed in the book he’s reading, and Usopp rolls his eyes. “Zoro, man, your boyfriend sucks.”

Zoro goes still, muscles locking around the word that’s been thrown out so casually. His mind gets there instantly, to Sanji scoffing and correcting him and saying don’t be stupid or turning it into a joke because jokes have always been doors to slam. He braces for it, even, heart taking a running leap into his throat. 

Sanji reaches across him, takes the sauce packet and pegs it directly at Usopp’s face. “The boyfriend can hear you, asshole.”

Nami snorts and Usopp collapses backwards in the most theatrical show of betrayal Zoro’s ever seen, but Zoro doesn’t give a single fuck because he’s staring at Sanji with his heart neatly flayed. Sanji glances up with a scowl, like he can sense the gaping happening. “What?”

There’s no safe way to explain it, to say i thought you’d deny it or even more honest and awful, i didn’t know i was allowed to have a name for this. He swallows down everything that comes up his throat, letting his fingers curl into the grass. He can feel Nami watching him. “Nothing.” 

Sanji studies him for another second, forehead crinkling in something that looks a little too close to understanding before he mutters: “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” and threads their hands together. Zoro’s chest goes hot, even as Sanji keeps sniping at Usopp, even as he himself stubbornly ignores the way Nami’s smirking at all of it.

After that, Usopp throws the term around like confetti. He tells Sanji your boyfriend’s being an idiot when Zoro refuses to admit he’s wrong and makes jokes about their future wedding (mostly about how intense Sanji will be about the menu and clothes and flower arrangements and — everything, actually) and every single time Zoro looks at Sanji, some part of him waiting for a correction that never comes. Sanji just insults them or brushes them off or joins in on the ribbing, but he never denies it. He holds his hand around their friends and rests his ankle over Zoro’s in the grass and leans into his side at Garp’s place until Sabo snickers. 

On the twenty sixth day, they argue in the lane behind the corner store because Zoro shows up bleeding from taking a bokken to the face from a particularly vicious asshole and Sanji tears him to pieces over setting appropriate boundaries. There’s a point where he snaps: “If you’re going to leave again then just go!” and Sanji’s face goes white so fast Zoro wishes he could reach out and grab the words from the air to shove them back down his throat.

It’s the old terror, the way every argument still contains the shape of Sanji’s disappearance, the part of Zoro that still believes every raised voice is a countdown. This time, though, Sanji puts out his cigarette and frowns. “Sit down. I’ll get a bandaid or whatever.”

The next times they argue, Sanji stays, too, and sometimes that looks like shouting until both of them are hoarse or Sanji stomping away for ten minutes only to return spitting French or sometimes they just stay angry for hours, pointing teenage hostility at each other until one of them folds.

By their fifth week together, Zoro’s learned the rhythm of Sanji’s affections, from a thumb dragged over a knuckle when Sanji thinks he’s not paying attention to food pushed towards him without comment to a hand at the base of his spine to Sanji calling Garp’s landline to make sure Zoro made it home after they’ve met up at some ungodly hour. Zoro stays amazed by it all, there when Sanji steals one of his shirts and wears it around and there when Sanji reaches for him first and there when their friends tease them only for Sanji to bite back without letting go of Zoro’s hand and there every morning Sanji appears again.

In the sixth week they find themselves back in the park, because it’s one of the few places Sanji’s family won’t go, and it’s late enough in the day that the others have started peeling away. Sanji sighs. “You do that a lot, you know. Look at me like I’m gonna evaporate or something.”

Zoro thinks about lying, just for a second. “Sometimes it feels like you might.”

Sanji’s shoulder presses into his, watching the way Nami’s threatening Luffy with violence because he knocked her little rock tower over. “I can’t promise you forever every five minutes, you know.”

“I didn’t ask for —”

“You’re always asking.” That lands a little too close to the truth, which Sanji clearly flags because he bumps Zoro’s shoulder again and presses his mouth against Zoro’s knuckles. “C’mon, let’s get these idiots home.”

Sometimes, Sanji helps him study which may or may not be a thinly veiled excuse for Sanji to boss him around. It’s Zoro’s own fault, really, because he’s somehow failing biology after being the idiot who specifically selected biology, but it’s happening all the same. They end up at the kitchen table after everyone’s gone to bed, with a stack of worksheets and too many lurid highlighters and even more diagrams Zoro would rather die than explore. 

“Twenty five minutes,” Sanji drawls. 

Zoro scowls at the timer. “I can study without that.”

“You’ve been staring at the same paragraph for eleven minutes. You drew swords on the pituitary gland.” He narrows his eyes, so Zoro narrows his right back which works on most people but Sanji’s not most people, so he just resets the timer with vicious smugness. He orbits around the kitchen with restless precious, muttering to himself in French and writing recipe ideas on scrap paper in between checking whether or not Zoro’s turned the page. When the timer goes off Zoro shoves the worksheet away and huffs, then grins when Sanji puts a plate in front of him with congee and eggs and chilli. “Eat.”

Zoro does, pretending he can’t see the way Sanji watches him for a bit too long before going back to his recipe notes. Zoro’s just starting to relax into it when Sanji hums. “What’re your plans after graduation?”

Zoro shrugs. “Why?”

Sanji stares at him, expression flattening. He drops his recipe notes onto the table so that he can lean closer, waving in an irritated little circle. “You graduate soon?”

Zoro grunts and pushes the egg around, mouth pursing at the comments that have piled up over the years. The not-so-subtle nudging his teachers have been doing. “I don’t… they talk to me about math, I guess. And science, sometimes.”

Sanji’s gaze sharpens. “Makes sense. You’re good at them.”

Zoro frowns down at his bowl. “Maybe? But I don’t know if I want to go. Seems like a long time and… everyone keeps talking about it like it’s obvious, like I’m wasting something if I don’t go. Like because I’m good at numbers I have to sit in another classroom for four years and learn how to be good at them properly or whatever. I’m not saying I won’t, ever. But.”

Sanji taps his pen against the table, expression gone thoughtful.”You could do sports science.”

“Huh?”

He shrugs. “You like training. You get bodies better than your biology grade’s suggesting. You’re disciplined when you’re not being a stubborn asshole. It could work. Physiotherapy, maybe. Coaching? Or, like, exercise something.”

“Those need uni.”

“Some do, some don’t. You could try mechanics or something. You’re good with your hands.” Zoro’s eyes drop to Sanji’s mouth reflexively and he gets a kick under the table for it. “Not like that, you animal.”

Zoro hides his smirk behind another spoonful of congee, while Sanji rolls his eyes with his ears nicely pink. “Listen, you’re good with machines when you bother. You fixed Garp’s mower, right? I dunno. Mechanics or fabrication or… engineering trades? Sparky? You’re good with numbers, you’re good with spatial things, you don’t panic when something breaks and you like doing useful things, right?”

He doesn’t talk about it like it’s the second best option, or like university’s the only real path and everything else is what happens if Zoro fails to deserve it. He’s just laying options in front of Zoro like he’d lay ingredients down, different uses and different outcomes that are all valid if they suit the dish. Zoro mulls that over, coming to the only possible conclusion. “You’ve thought about this.”

“Fuck knows someone has to.” It’s said scornfully, but it still settles somewhere warm and difficult behind Zoro’s ribs.  

He leans back on the chair. “What about you?”

Sanji’s pen stops tapping and Zoro feels the shift in the air before it happens, like pressure dropping before a storm as the blonde closes down by degrees. “What about me?”

“What’s your plan after school?” It feels insane that hasn’t come up in discussion before, but Sanji’s life is a safe locked inside a fortress locked inside another galaxy, and usually getting any information out of him is akin to pulling teeth. He waits for it to happen here, for Sanji to change the subject or mock him or vanish out the back door.

Sanji exhales through his teeth. “I already have a plan. It just isn’t mine.”

Zoro watches him carefully. “What do you want?”

He sets the thyme in his hands down, glancing towards the kitchen window and the dead strip of grass barely visible. “I’d cook.”

“You already –”

“Not like that.” His mouth twists a little. “I’d have my own place. Small, maybe. Nothing fancy at first. I’d change the menu when I’m bored and use real seafood, not the frozen slabs of bullshit they sell here.”

He sounds almost embarrassed by the tenderness in his own voice, but Zoro leans closer. Sanji keeps his eyes locked on the window. “When we go back to France, sometimes, there’s this place near the coast. Not where my family likes to stay — they prefer their shitty little houses with a thousand rooms nobody uses, but if you walk enough there’s this little port, I guess. I miss… that.”

The light catches the line of his cheek, the softness that only appears when he’s forgotten to defend himself, and Zoro swallows. “So go.”

“You say that I can just… jump on a plane and become someone else. That’s not… my family doesn’t let their things just waltz off.” 

Zoro feels the cold move through him, the way he knows pieces and hints and shapes, enough to hate it but never understand it. “What does your family even do?”

“Legally? Sanji’s voice is careful now, flat in a way that’s always meant the opposite of calm, for him. “I dunno, everything. A bunch of companies. Defence contracts, Yonji reckons. Shipping. Private security. Agricultural tech. Gene therapy.” 

Zoro pieces those together slowly, watching the way Sanji’s hands stay locked tight on the table, knuckles white. “And… illegally?”

Sanji snorts. “Fuck knows. Money that disappears and comes back through all kinds of shit. Human trials, probably. People.”

Zoro’s hands curl under the table. “Sanji –”

“I don’t know all of it. He hates me, he’s not exactly spilling the secrets to me over dinner. I don’t want to know all of it.”

The kitchen feels airless, maybe. All the cosy sounds from before seem distant now, the boy sitting across from Zoro somewhere unreachable. Zoro wants to say something helpful but he doesn’t know what: he’s pissed on Sanji’s behalf, and exhausted and worried all the damn time. He wants to let the anger take over but this is the first time Sanji’s shared anything about his home without throwing a kick or disappearing for weeks, so he says the first stupid thing that comes to him instead. “Sounds fishy.” 

Sanji just kind of freezes, before his face does something complicated and he laughs. Barely, but Zoro’ll count it. “Yeah, thanks.”

“You could do it,” Zoro says suddenly, because it needs to be verbalised. He needs to make it abundantly clear that he believes in some kind of future, here. “Open a… whatever. Restaurant. Near the sea. We could figure it out.”

Sanji’s face flushes immediately. “We?”

“You know,” Zoro splutters. “The — everyone. Luffy. Whoever. I’m just saying —”

“I know what you’re saying.” He folds his hands on the table, frowning, before he reaches across to take the biology textbook back. “C’mon. Let’s do ten more minutes.”

Something something more here

For the next two months Zoro learns how easy happiness can make a person stupid. He gets used to Sanji turning up at all hours and the particular way he kicks the door shut behind him before eviscerating Garp’s kitchen. He gets used to Sanji standing close in public and the way the blonde’s hand finds his underneath tables and on the long walks home when the streetlights turn everything gold. 

He gets used to the specific sound of Sanji’s lighter and the smell of smoke everywhere and falling asleep knowing Sanji’ll still be there in the morning, which is why he loses his damn shit when Sanji suddenly disappears for six days. At first, Zoro tells himself it’s because Sanji’s busy and the Baratie’s slammed and Zeff is shortstaffed or… family stuff. The usual excuses that worked when they were younger and Sanji disappearing for days at a time was just part of the routine. 

By the fourth night Zoro’s stuck at the front door with his shoes already on, Luffy blocking him firmly. “No.”

“I’m just going to check on him.”

“No.” Luffy’s already in his pyjamas and he doesn’t look serious, until he does, and then it’s like watching a door become a wall. “You can’t go.”

“He could be hurt. He could –”

“I know.” Luffy’s mouth goes flat and awful, the way it always does, tale as old as time. “You going alone would make it worse.”

Zoro’s anger flares hot and sudden and he steps forward with it, but Luffy just steps with him, bare feet silent, until they’re close enough that Zoro can see the fear in his friend’s eyes and that’s worse than the refusal, almost, because he knows Luffy’s afraid of whatever happens when people like the Vinsmoke are given one more person to use. 

He sleeps badly that night. And the next. And the one after that.

He wakes on his seventeenth birthday already sure that Sanji’s not coming, because it’s been nearly a week of radio silence. They’d planned one night out past the edge of town where the road turns to gravel and the bush thickens and the stars come out mean and bright overhead. Garp’s handed over an old tent for Zoro that smells like dirt and piss, frankly, and muttered something about not dying which is almost sentimental, by his standards.

By midday they reach the campsite, which is really just a cleared patch near the trees with a firepit and easy access to the creek. Ace and Sabo argue over where to set up while Luffy disappears for minutes at a time, returning with a new stick or rock that he insists is important. Zoro unpacks, because if he keeps his hands moving he won’t have to keep checking the road. 

Ace tosses him a bottle of water. “Don’t look so fuckin’ tragic, man.”

Zoro just grunts, but by two he’s furious. By four, he’s decided Sanji’s trapped somewhere in that house and no-one is doing anything about it. By five, he’s halfway through planning a route back towards town on foot when Luffy lifts his head suddenly, like a dog hearing a car before anyone else does, and there is a car, insanely. Zoro watches one of the Vinsmoke cars pull in near the trees, watches Sanji get out of the drivers’ seat with an esky in one hand and a backpack in the other, hair combed and shirt too neat for camping, sunnies pushed high on his head. Then Sanji sees him, and something in his face cracks open for half a second — relief and apology and something exhausted and soft — before he yanks the expression shut again. “Fucking hell, did you animals bring nothing but meat and bread?”

Luffy tackles him, practically. “You’re late! You missed Zoro being pissed off.”

“Oh, I doubt I missed it. It looks like it’s ongoing. Happy birthday.” The words are careful, too careful, and Zoro’s heart sinks at the tone. So this is where they are again: Sanji present in body, gone everywhere else. A door shut from the inside. A familiar cage rebuilt around him. 

“Thanks,” he mutters, and Sanji’s mouth tightens like he’s heard everything Zoro didn’t say. Then Ace appears, thankfully, and announces that if Sanji brought vegetables then he’s legally obligated to cook them because no-one else can be trusted and Sanji seizes the distraction with both hands. 

It works, for a while: the afternoon drags Sanji slowly back into himself as he complains about the blunt knives and reorganises the esky twice and tries to prevent Luffy from eating raw onion before giving up and goading him into it. By sunset, he’s barefoot near the fire with his hair falling messily while he turns skewers over the flames and threatens to kill anyone who touches them early.

Zoro sits on a log and watches him: Sanji looks better in firelight, he reckons. Orange light catches on his hair and wrist and on the smile he tries to hide when Luffy burns his tongue. He brings Zoro a paper plate and sits close enough that their knees touch, like a held breath finally released. The others are loud around them, arguing about ghost stories and if Ace can realistically punch a crocodile, sparks rising from the fire to vanish into the deepening sky. Sanji presses their shoulders together and Zoro lets himself believe, cautiously, that the worst of it has passed. 

A bit later, Sanji reaches into his bag to pull out a little parcel, wrapped terribly and tied with way too much string, and Zoro takes it with quiet surprise. There’s a compass inside, heavy and polished, with a needle trembling below the glass. Zoro stares down at it even as Sanji clears his throat. “It’s mostly a joke.”

“It’s not.” Zoro turns it over, to the engraving on the back that reads find your way back, idiot and feels his throat close.

Sanji rushes into speech, clearly embarrassed by the silence. “You get lost a lot, that’s all. And if I’m gonna keep having to retrieve you from whatever fuck-ass place you’ve somehow mistaken for a shortcut, I figured –”

Zoro catches his hand and pulls him into a kiss, nearly rolling his eyes at the way Ace’s voice gets aggressively louder as he begins dragging Luffy into an argument about crocodiles again, an easy cover. He presses his forehead to Sanji just for a second, before kissing his temple. “Thanks.”

Sanji flushes dark, but his face softens. He says: “Happy birthday,” again but this time it sounds real and, for a while, the night is good enough that Zoro can almost forget the six days of silence waiting underneath it. They eat too much and Luffy tells a ghost story with absolutely no beginning, three unrelated middle sections and an ending that frightens only himself. Sabo produces a pack of sparklers from nowhere and Sanji laughs when Ace uses them to draw dicks in the sky; Zoro watches his face in the sparks and thinks, helplessly, that this is all he ever wants. Sanji beside him, warm and sharp and alive, and Luffy orbiting around the both of them, always and forever. 

Later, when the fire burns low and they’ve run out of ways to trashtalk Cav, Ace makes an exaggerated speech about respecting boundaries and not wanting to hear teenage noises that gets him a thrown shoe from Sanji and a warning from Sabo that he’s the least qualified person to supervise anyone.  The tent isn’t awful, but it is small enough that the concept of privacy becomes nonexistent almost immediately. The battery lamp hanging from the centre pole throws yellow light over Zoro’s sleeping bag and the discomfort is nearly enough to dull the others’ voices in the background. 

Sanji goes quiet the moment the flap is zipped, like he’s gone from rolling his eyes at Ace to another planet completely, kneeling by his bag in the cramped space to reorganise things that don’t need reorganising at all. Zoro sits on the sleeping bag and tries to bring this up carefully. “So. Six days. And then you rock up looking like this is a funeral or something.” 

“Wow, romantic of you to compare yourself to a corpse, Mosshead.”

“Sanji.” The name does what it always does when Zoro says it like this, cutting under the performance. Sanji’s shoulders go rigid and Zoro thinks, honestly, that he’s going to snap or leave or tell Zoro to shut up and sleep because everything is fine, always fine, nothing’s ever been wrong in the history of Sanji’s life, didn’t you know?

Instead, he sits back on his heels and doesn’t look at Zoro. He keeps his head bowed, body so visibly tense that Zoro can imagine the glower on his face. “He asked to meet you.”

Zoro stares at him, the old fear in his chest stumbling a little in confusion. “What? Who?”

“He knows about this.”

It strikes Zoro who he is and something in him goes cold. He mulls it over, processing Sanji’s words and clear, abject …. Horror? Something about it all. “And he wants to meet me? That’s good, I guess?”

“No, not good.” Sanji’s head whips around, pale under the light. Sanji’s never really let himself be visibly panicked, but his hands are white knuckled around the shirt they’re meant to be folding. “He doesn’t ask things, Zoro. Not without a plan, not without a whole fucking — it’s not good. If he wants to make a point, he’ll —”

Zoro stiffens. “He’ll what?”

Sanji looks away. “It doesn’t matter. We have bigger fish to fry.”

“Is that why you’ve been gone? Because —”

“Because sometimes he gets so pissed at me he locks me up until I make better choices?” Sanji cuts in, eyes bright with stress. “Because he’s clearly planning something and he knows every single fucking thing about you and everyone you’ve ever known? Sure, both, pick your poison.”

Zoro hears the words and then hears them again and his mind goes white. “What the fuck? What do you mean locks you up?”

Sanji waves a hand, already retreating from what he’d said. “Nothing, s’not the point right now. The point is —”

“Yes it fucking is, what do you mean?” 

He looks trapped beneath a sky that can’t reach him. He drags a hand through his hair, grinding his teeth. “He wants to know what you are, don’t you get it? To me, to this. If you’re leverage or liability or rebellion or weakness or just a fucking phase. He wants to know if you’re something he can use before he kicks you out.”

Zoro’s anger has nowhere to go: it presses against his ribs until breathing hurts. “He can try.”

Sanji’s face crumples for a second before his own fury comes barking back up, face clouding. “Don’t even start with that heroic bullshit. This is serious, asshole. This is… ugh! I didn’t want to ruin your birthday with this. I should’ve just stayed —”

“No.” Zoro cuts him off quickly, grabbing the blonde’s hands out of midair where they’re gesturing wildly. His chest aches. He thinks of the compass in his pocket. “Look. Just. Let’s talk about it, yeah? What’d he say?”

“That he’d like to meet the boy occupying so much of my time.”

“Occupying?” Zoro repeats blankly, then tries a bad joke to lighten the mood. “Sounds like I’m invading enemy territory.”

Sanji rolls his eyes. “You are. Unfortunately for you, the territory’s just anxiety and unresolved trauma, so. Thrilling stuff.”

“I dunno,” Zoro mutters quietly, pressing Sanji’s hands together and watching the way the other boy lets him. It does something funky to his heart, sometimes, how much trust Sanji places in him, and how much he doesn’t. “I think it’s a pretty cool place.”

At first, Sanji just looks at him in bewilderment, before a crooked little smile breaks out, badly fought. “You’re so fucking stupid.”

Zoro takes the edge of Sanji’s sleeve between his fingers, then lets go and shakes his head properly. “Yeah. Look, we don’t have to decide anything –”

“There’s nothing to decide —”

“Anyway. We don’t have to decide anything tonight, right? We can figure it out or whatever. Maybe we can get someone’s advice, I don’t know. Sabo… knows shit, I guess. We can figure the rest out with them, if you’re that worried about it.” He’s got no joke for the rest of it, no sword or helpful violence. He only has his hand finding Sanji’s and the brutal, growing knowledge that some things just can’t be cut cleanly out of a person no matter how much you love them. 

Sanji leans forward, letting his forehead drop against Zoro’s shoulder, muttering a halfhearted happy birthday into the bone there. Zoro almost laughs, because this has probably been one of the worst birthdays he’s had so far, but it’s also the one Sanji came back, so. Both things sit together and he doesn’t know when that’ll stop but, god, he can’t wait.

They drag each other down to the sleeping bag, fumbling the light off until the tent plunges into darkness. Zoro can hear the creek moving outside and Ace yapping to Sabo and the fire crackling. He can hear the wind dragging through bush and canvas and can feel the way Sanji’s hand finds him again.

For the next week, Sanji’s perfect. He’s still rude and pointed and kicks Zoro’s ankles and threatens violence over supermarket bread, but. He’s there, constantly. He comes over the night after the camping trip, and the night after that, and the night after that. Sometimes he uses the door but most of the time he appears at Luffy’s window close to midnight,  hissing at Zoro to help him because the latch sticks and he refuses to die like this.

“You could use the door,” Zoro rolls his eyes, hauling him inside.

Sanji lands badly on the carpet, elbowing him in the ribs. “And rob you of the opportunity to actually be helpful for once?”

On Monday, Sanji turns up after school with two coffees and a pastry box balanced on top, despite claiming he’d only been passing by. Zoro takes the coffee and swallows the questions down, any uncertainty dying on his tongue because Sanji pulls him close and kisses him right there and then, until they both get so caught up in it that the pastry box crashes to the ground. 

On Tuesday, their friends sprawl across Garp’s lounge room floor to watch Usopp’s latest invention unfold while Nami triple checks their homework. Sanji holds Zoro’s hand and whispers jokes into his ear and crawls into his lap and kisses him like the world’s ending, scraping his teeth across Zoro’s jaw in a way that makes Zoro’s entire body light up. He stays the night afterwards, literally kicking Sabo away from the stove to cook. He lets Zoro help, this time, correcting his grip as the carrots are chopped.

“You’ll take off a thumb,” He mutters, pushing his fingers into Zoro’s wrist, which is insulting in about twenty different ways.

“I know how to use a knife, asshole.”

“Then prove it?” 

Zoro scowls and bumps him with his hip, but Sanji just bumps him back and then stays there, hip pressed to Zoro’s side while they work side-by-side. At some point, Sanji leans in and presses a kiss to the corner of Zoro’s mouth, quick and soft, and then immediately derides his knifework and returns to the onions like it never happened. Zoro stares at the pink dusting the other boy’s ears as the carrot rolls off the cutting board and thinks, helplessly, maybe we can do this.

On Thursday, Sanji brings him lunch at school which is so fucking bizarre that Zoro spends half a minute just staring at him from across the oval like he’s imagined it, but no — Sanji’s leaning against the fence with one hand in his pocket and the other holding a container, looking way too composed for someone loitering outside a school. He’s got a cigarette behind his ear and a sour expression, wrinkling his nose at the packs of teens wandering about.

Zoro walks over slowly enough to see Sanji’s face change when he sees him, open and relieved and hungry. “You… came here to bring me food?”

“I came here to prevent your death from shitty canteen food, sure.”

Zoro takes the container hesitantly. “What’s wrong?” 

Sanji rolls his eyes, looking horrifically out of place here. He’s too well dressed, too sharp and too tired, too much himself for the bland cement and schoolyard noise. He pulls Zoro in by the front of his shirt until their foreheads bump. “I wanted to see you.”

The honest slices something in Zoro open, a flush rising immediately on his cheeks. “Come over tonight.”

Something passes through Sanji’s expression and vanishes. “I’ll try.” He leaves before the bell even finishes ringing and Zoro watches him go with lunch warm in his hand and happiness sitting uneasily inside him, bright and heavy as swallowed gold. That night, Sanji does come over, later than usual. He climbs in badly, clearly too tired to be any shade of graceful, and manages to knock over every stack of books haphazardly piled around the room until Zoro catches his elbow with a hiss. “Quiet.”

Sanji scowls. “Tell that to the window, asshole.” He looks more tired than usual, worn thin around the mouth like every part of him’s been pulled tight and kept that way too long. Zoro helps him out of his shirt which is enough to wake Zoro up properly, because god knows Sanji can be half dead and still insult anyone who tries to help him, but tonight he stands quietly while Zoro chucks the jacket somewhere unknown. Then, Sanji steps forwards and wraps both arms around him and Zoro just kind of freezes altogether. Sanji’s cheek is pressed against his collarbone, hands spread flat over Zoro’s back, holding him like Zoro’s a source of warmth or something and Zoro’s heart damn near trips over itself. He gets it, maybe; he figures Sanji’s scared because of the whole Judge-wanting-to-meet-him thing and the future’s come and crawled too close. He figures Sanji’s freaking out because he’s finally letting himself need something and Zoro can be something. He can be steady. He can be here. He can be stupidly, impossibly happy about being needed.

Sanji kisses his cheek and then his jaw, and then his temple and Zoro’s face heats. “You’re being weird tonight.”

“You complaining?” 

“No?”

“Then shut up.” He pushes Zoro back down onto his mattress, folding himself against Zoro’s side with his head on the other boy’s chest and one leg hooked over his ankle. His breathing evens out slowly, helped along by Zoro’s hand resting between his shoulder blades. “You ever think about the sea?”

Zoro frowns, a little thrown. “What? I guess, I mean… sometimes?”

Sanji snorts. “You get lost in supermarkets, Moss. I don’t really trust your relationship to horizons. But when I was little… I dunno. I thought everyone could hear it.”

Zoro stays quiet because Sanji rarely talks like this — half dreaming and half confessing, as though the darkness has loosened something he’d never hand over in the light of day. “I’d hear it through windows, or… even when we were far away from it. Wind, maybe or roads. Reiju said it was pipes. But I dunno. I always thought it was the tide. I used to think if I followed it I’d just… get to somewhere else.”

Zoro’s hand stills on the blonde’s back. “You still want that?”

Sanji doesn’t answer for a long time, before he inhales slowly. “Yeah.”

“Then we’ll go. After school, or before. Doesn’t matter — we’ll go somewhere with the ocean.”

Sanji turns his face into Zoro’s shirt, sighing. “You make everything sound too easy. You say it like it’s just… doable.”

“I say it like I’ll do it,” Zoro corrects and Sanji’s breath catches enough that Zoro thinks he’s upset him somehow, but he pushes closer instead. 

By Friday, even Luffy has noticed Sanji’s clingy behaviour. He watches them with a coy little smile that doesn’t feel coy to Zoro at all. “You’re hugging Zoro a lot.”

Sanji, who is in fact standing behind Zoro’s chair with his arms draped loosely over his boyfriend, shrugs. “He’s cold blooded. Moss is damp, you know.”

Zoro mutters about horticulture defensively while Luffy laughs. Sanji kicks at Luffy’s chair in turn and makes a sound of utter outrage when Luffy steals his sandwich, and Zoro leans back and finds a ridiculous amount of comfort in the way Sanji doesn’t move away. The whole weekend is ridiculous, in fact. Sanji sits in his lap at Usopp’s house despite there being a whole couch free and calls him twice from the Baratie with nothing important to say other than complaints about customers. He comes to the dojo on Saturday afternoon and waits out on the little retaining wall with a French book, smoking and pretending not to watch while Zoro runs drills with the younger kids. It puts an obscene amount of pep in Zoro’s step and he ends the practice with something that feels suspiciously like joy ballooning up under his ribs, smiling all the way back out to Sanji, who complains loudly about having to wait but pulls him into a kiss all the same.

“You looked happy,” He says quietly, once they’ve parted. “You’re good with them.”

Zoro tries to make a joke of it, because he’s too damn happy right now to see the trouble brewing. “Eh, they’re short. Their standards are low.” Sanji’s expression doesn’t shift from its sad spectrum, and Zoro tugs on their joined hands. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Sanji’s face shuts down instantly and the fight almost happens right there on the street, on the footpath beneath the jacaranda tree dropping its flowers into the gutter. Zoro can feel all of it gathering, from his fear to Sanji’s evasion and the brittle old instinct to strike before being cornered. Then, Sanji exhales and presses his face into Zoro’s shoulder. “I’m trying, alright?”

Zoro’s anger collapses, just a little. “Okay.”

“I know that’s not an answer, or… I just don’t have a better one right now.”

He shuts his eyes; Sanji’s hair smells like smoke and shampoo, like coming home. “Okay.” 

That night, Sanji comes over earlier than usual, just after dinner and through the front door for once, carrying nothing but himself. He lingers in the doorway for a beat before coming through, the evening warm and gold around him. The cicadas are already going off, so loud Zoro almost doesn't hear his move over, moss. He stays for dinner, sitting beside Zoro at the table while Garp tells a story nobody asked for, Luffy stealing food from both their plates. He stays through the shitty movie Ace puts on and while Sabo argues furiously about the (many) plotholes. He says when everyone else goes quiet, and when Zoro leads him upstairs, and when the room goes dark.

In bed, he curls into Zoro with no pretence or complaint, head fitting under Zoro’s chin while his hand chases the other boy’s heartbeat. Zoro holds him back and thinks, with fragile relief, that maybe Sanji’s choosing this and that despite Judge — despite whatever waits for them — he’s choosing to stay close instead of pulling away.

His voice comes out of the dark, a little uneven. “Did you have a good birthday?”

“That was ages ago?” He frowns a bit, already half asleep. The camping trip rises in pieces in his brain, the fire and compass and Sanji’s face in the tent, fear turning the night cold. “But yeah, sure. What’s going on with you?”

Sanji snorts and tilts his face up just enough to kiss Zoro’s jaw. “Nothing tonight, dumbass. Go to sleep.” 

Zoro should push, maybe. He thinks about it — he thinks about sitting up and turning the light on, making Sanji look at him and say whatever’s been tearing him up all week, but. But Sanji’s warm against him and here, hand over his heart like he’s keeping count and Zoro’s seventeen and stupid, in love and dangerously unused to the miracle of being wanted back. He lets tonight be tonight, holding the other boy like someone holding the last handful of sun. “Okay.”

“Tu es impossible,” Sanji whispers. He’s looking at Zoro with an expression Zoro can’t read anyway, partly because he’s too tired and partly because Sanji’s too damn good at making his face into something else when it matters. “Tellement têtu. Mon pauvre cœur.”

Zoro closes his eyes, nosying the blonde’s neck. “Don’t call me poor.”

Sanji’s fingers find his hair and move through it slowly, fingernails raking against the scalp. “Sleep.”

The last thing Zoro feels is Sanji’s thumb at his temple before sleep drags him under.

x

Morning comes grey and overcast, and the fact that Sanji’s not in the bed with him means very little: Sanji always leaves early, to work or to maintain whatever lies he’s feeding his family, so Zoro just rolls over onto his back and lets his arm fling across the empty space next to him. He only really flags something is different when he finally sits up and catches on the shred of paper hanging out from under the pillow and feels the way his body locks up, always understanding before his mind does. 

Sanji’s handwriting is cramped and uneven across the lines, short and simple: this is my only chance. He reads it once and then again, and the second time is infinitely worse because the meaning has arrived now, vicious and clear. He’s out of the bed before he’s decided to stand, heart hammering so hard it feels like it’s trying to break out of him. Then he shakes Luffy’s shoulders, and Luffy sits up immediately upon seeing whatever expression is happening on Zoro’s face. The note is shaking in his hand, even as he holds it out, and the whole world tips over.

They search the town like some kind of violence. Zoro checks the Baratie alley before the restaurant’s even open and then the bus stop, the park and the shitty little cafe where Sanji once said the coffee tasted like dishwater. He checks the train station and the pedestrian bridge and the back road behind the abandoned petrol station, just in case. Nami and Usopp join them at some point and then Ace and Sabo, armed with water bottles and snacks that even Luffy can’t bring himself to touch.

The Baratie opens two hours later than usual which is how Zoro knows things are really wrong. Zeff would serve breakfast during an apocalypse and complain about the quality of the horsemen’s manners. Zoro slams through the front door hard enough that every customer turns, and Patty looks up from where he’s at the counter. 

“Where is he?” Zoro demands. He doesn’t know if he means Sanji or Zeff and it doesn’t matter either way: they’re both gone. 

Patty glances back towards the kitchen, to where Carne appears in the doorway with his expression grim. “Restaurant’s ours for now.”

“For now?”

His mouth tightens. “He didn’t say when he'd be back.”

Zoro hears the words from far away and grips the edge of the counter. “How long did — was he planning this?”

No-one answers, which is answer enough. Heat crawls up Zoro’s throat as he thinks of Sanji all week, pressing close and bringing lunch, holding his hand and asking about his birthday and how gentle he’s been. He thinks of Sanji twining their fingers together under the table last night and telling him to sleep, saying goodbye with every sweet thing and every careful touch. Every extra hour stolen from a life already packed and waiting. He lets go of the counter and is, for one terrifying moment, almost calm. He wants to drag Sanji back by force and never let go. He wants Sanji so far from Judge that no-one can ever touch him again. He wants these two opposite things with the same desperate, useless heart and there’s nowhere to put it all.

Patty’s voice is soft. “Kid, he had to go.”

Zoro whirls on his heel and walks out of the restaurant before he breaks something that doesn’t belong to him, the others spilling out after him but keeping their distance. In the alleyway, the wall still holds the faint scrape from the time Sanji kicked him into it at fourteen. There’s a burn mark near the bin from one of his countless cigarettes. Zoro sits down hard against the brick and Luffy crouches down next to him, Nami coming down with a sigh. None of them say anything helpful because there’s nothing helpful to say. 

“He’ll come back,” Luffy says eventually, quietly, and Zoro wants to believe it because Luffy says it so fucking plainly it almost feels like a promise, but — but he also knows coming back isn’t the same as never having left and that safe is not the same as here. He tips his head back against the brick and breathes through the awful, impossible mixture of relief and fury and love, the sheer awareness that Sanji has chosen himself, finally. Every road in town becomes two roads at once: the one Zoro wants Sanji to have taken and the one he prays still contains him close enough to reach.

He thinks good and thinks run further and thinks don’t come back and thinks please come back and can’t hold any of it. There’s nowhere for it to go.

x

After Sanji leaves, the year doesn’t end. The sun keeps coming up and school keeps happening. Teachers keep handing him worksheets and telling everyone that the next few months will define the rest of their lives, as though the rest of Zoro’s life hasn’t already opened beneath him and swallowed the only thing he wanted whole.

Garp’s house stays loud and busy. Luffy still eats too much cereal and Ace still shouts at the TV. Sabo still reads the news aloud each and every morning like he’s personally preparing to indict it and there are shoes littered throughout the hallway no matter how many times Garp tells them all to stack them properly.

Zoro corners Sabo on the third day in the kitchen, after everyone else’s gone upstairs. He’s at the sink working through the plates from dinner, the radio low enough that Zoro can’t make out the words. He plants both his hands on the bench and stays there until Sabo finally looks his way. “You know people, right? Dodgy people. People who could find someone.”

Sabo’s attention slides back to the plates and the grey soapy water. “Maybe.”

It’s like an opening; Zoro’s hands tighten on the bench. “Then do it.”

“No.”

“You could,” He snaps. “If you know people —”

“I know people who can disappear someone,” Sabi cuts in, nice and even as he reaches for the next plate. “That’s not the same as finding someone who chose to disappear, mate.”

Zoro’s voice drops. “He didn’t choose. They made him.”

“Zeff got him out, right?” Sabo’s hands keep moving, steady and methodical. “That was the job, for him. The rest of it isn’t ours to decide anymore.”

“We wouldn’t tell anyone.”

Finally, Sabo looks at him properly, face calm in the way that means he’s already decided. It’s the same expression he wears when he’s dismantling an argument he’s going to win. “You don’t know what people can make you tell. And you don’t know what they’d do to him once you told.”

The kitchen goes quiet save for the tap’s dripping, and Zoro feels the words settle somewhere ugly and true. “You just don’t give a shit.”

Sabo stills, just a little, and Zoro waits for him to turn or raise his voice, to give Zoro something he can hit back against at last. Instead, he sets the plate down carefully and dries his hands. “I care enough not to satisfy myself at his expense. You want him safe? Then let him be unfound.”

The sentence doesn’t leave any room for anything else. Sabo holds his gaze for another moment, immovable, the same way he stands when Garp’s shouting but he’s already chosen his ground — and then he turns back to the sink and starts the water again. Zoro stands there with his hands still braced and anger clouding his brain. He’s grateful for it, almost, because anger is infinitely easier than the other thing, than the sick, crawling relief that someone else has said the words he doesn’t want to hear. He wants to keep pushing and for Sabo to be wrong, but he stomps away and slams the door, walking until his legs ache and the streetlights blur. He’s furious with Sabo for hours and it sits high in his chest. Underneath that, he’s also relieved that Sabo won’t do it, and both sensations live in that same narrow space near his heart, like crossed swords. 

For the rest of the week he moves through school like some kind of body being piloted very, very badly. He answers late when people talk to him and is pulled aside by concerned teachers. His biology teacher tells him, gently, that grief and stress can impact performance, and Zoro stares at her so fucking blankly that she starts talking about extensions. He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t want extensions, he wants a map. He wants a direction and one damn person to tell him where Sanji is. The note stays in his wallet; he reads it too often the first day and then not at all, and then he starts skipping school.

He gets on the wrong bus and rides it to the station, buying a ticket with money he was meant to use for lunch. He sits by the window with his bag on  his knees while the town slides away behind him in dead grass and roads he’s walked a thousand times and never once hated enough, apparently.

It’s hours before the coast starts to appear, blue jumping out at him between buildings and bush and distant roofs. He gets off at a small station near a town he doesn’t know and walks until there’s sand under his shoes, the ocean enormous before him. He stands at the edge of it with the wind pushing at his shirt and salt already rough on his lips, and thinks, stupidly, so this is what he meant. The sea moves like something alive and uncaring, bluish-grey shifting muscle under the skin of light, the waves shouldering themselves towards the shore, again and again and again. 

He’s never trusted things without edges, but maybe this is exactly why Sanji wanted it. Maybe that’s why he had to go somewhere Zoro can’t simply follow with both fists clenched and no plan except refusal. He walks down the beach until there are fewer people and then further still, until he finds a rock he can sit on and stare from. For a while, he’s pissed off at the water which feels insane, frankly, but he’s angry that Sanji loved this more honestly than anything else and that he didn’t understand it sooner. He’s angry that somewhere, maybe, Sanji’s near another piece of this same impossible blue and breathing easier without him. 

He’s also unbearably relieved, and god knows he’s pissed off about that, too.

He stays until he can’t stand it anymore and then he takes the train back, chest full of all the things he can’t say and can’t find the words for. By the time he gets back Garp is waiting on the front steps, smoking. He looks Zoro over once in the moonlight and jerks his thumb inside. “Get inside. Get some food.”

Graduation arrives with brutal indifference — Zoro only goes because Nami threatens him with a fate worse than death. He stands in a line of people making plans around him, talking about university and scholarships, gap years and jobs. Moving or staying or whatever. Everyone talks like there’s some great branching path beneath their feet, every future waiting to be chosen, and Zoro still has no fucking idea what he wants. That used to annoy him, maybe, but now it feels a little too honest. His teachers still push between mathematics and sciences, mentioning engineering trades and sports. His biology teacher tells him he’s got a good mind when he bothers using it and Koushirou tells him discipline can become direction if he lets it. Garp tells him work is work and none of it matters if he can’t wake up and respect himself.

At graduation, Luffy cheers loud enough to get shushed by three different staff members and Sabo claps with controlled, murderous pride while muttering about capitalism and institutions. Zoro takes the certificate and walks off stage and doesn’t look for the crowd, not once. Afterwards, Usopp cries and insists it’s allergies. “I can’t believe we got here!”

Zoro lets Luffy hang off him, the whole afternoon too bright around them. Someone nearby starts crowing about next chapters and Zoro tunes them out before he decks someone.

The Vinsmokes move back to France in December, which Zoro only finds out because half the town won’t stop talking about it. Rich families don’t just leave, after all: they’re observed and discussed and resented, their movements becoming gossip disguised as some kind of civic awareness. The gates open for removal trucks and men in expensive looking coats stand at the end of the driveway speaking into walkie talkies. Zoro watches from across the road, just once, with Luffy beside him. One of Sanji’s awful brothers appears for a second, laughing at something another brother says. Judge comes through tall and immaculate, and Zoro’s hand curls into a fist. 

Luffy’s fingers close around his wrist. “He’s not worth it.”

Years of threat are reduced to tail lights and car exhaust as the convey leaves and the relief is so damn sharp Zoro almost sits down on the cement right there and then. He watches the cars go as the relief curdles into fury that Judge just gets to leave, gets to go without anyone dragging him into the street and making him answer for anything. 

“I hate him,” Luffy says quietly, and Zoro loves him so much in that moment he could cry.

Nami gets into a program she pretends not to be proud of and Usopp starts an apprenticeship that gets him so excited he talks too fast whenever anyone asks about it. Ace takes on more hours and insists he likes it, while Sabo becomes increasingly involved in things that make adults lower their voices and look at him warily. Luffy remains Luffy, mostly — he laughs just as loudly and eats just as much, flinging himself at the world with that same reckless faith that’s carried him through all these years. Sometimes, though, he looks at empty doorways and says Sanji’s name like he’s sharing a secret wound that still pains him. Zoro never tells him to stop, because as much as the name hurts the absence without the name hurts worse. 

At night, he keeps the compass next to him. Sometimes he lets the brass warm in his palm, watching the needle tremble itself steady and envying it, the way it gets to be a thing made to be lost yet still know where to lean. He never tries to use it. Where would he even go? North is just north and the sea is just the sea. Sanji is nowhere a needle can point. 

He doesn’t see Sanji again before the year ends, not at Christmas or New Year’s, not in autumn when the town starts to turn muddied. There’s no letter or message, nothing but the note and Zeff’s absence and the knowledge that the Vinsmokes have disappeared without him. Zoro becomes very good at living around that. He trains and he works; he helps Koushirou more at the dojo, accepting money now because he’s learned, angrily, that work has value even when grief makes everything else feel pointless. He moves out into a cheap, shitty unit with Usopp and considers mechanics and then sports sciences, then both and then neither. He fills out forms very badly and misses deadlines, getting yelled at by Nami until he fills them in again. He keeps moving because stopping feels too much like waiting, and waiting feels too much like admitting Sanji might not come back.

One evening, eight months after Sanji’s exit, he and Luffy sit on the rooftop of Garp’s house with their knees drawn up and a six-pack of warm beer, looking out over the town. The Vinsmoke house is dark in the distance, empty or for sale or abandoned, Zoro can never quite tell. 

Luffy leans his shoulder against Zoro’s with a hum. “He’ll come back.” He says it less often now, probably because he knows Zoro’s memorised the shape of it anyway.

Zoro looks at the dark street. “When?”

Luffy’s quiet for a beat. “When he can.” 

It’s both hope and a sentence, and Zoro doesn’t say anything to it because there’s just nothing to say at this point. That’s the shape the year leaves with him: a compass on his bedside table and a note folded soft in his wallet, and a grief that has learned to walk beside him without needing to be carried in both hands. And no Sanji, not that year, and not the next or the next after that. 

In the end, it’s four whole years before he sees Sanji again.