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She’d laugh every time they hit him. That’s what he remembers, later.
He also remembers her pouring antiseptic on his knuckles, her pressing plasters over his cuts. The birthday she’d come to his room, long after the others had already fallen asleep, with small presents she’d hidden for him. The cookbook she smuggled into their mansion when their mother fell sick, so he could bake for her. The backdoor key she copied for him in his teenage years, when he finally found friends, when he had something to sneak out for.
She’d laugh every time they hit him, but she’d stay afterwards, too. Lead him to her bedroom, hand in hand, hide him there for a brief respite. “You’re always winding them up,” she would say, sitting him down on her bed. His cheeks would be swollen with bruises and she would watch him, still as the surface of a lake.
Sometimes she would ignore him, sometimes she would let him talk. Sometimes, she would let him stay there the whole night, crossed-legged on her bed as she painted his nails with slow, even strokes. At night, he would curl up next to her and breathe her in.
He knows he will be alright, because she is there. And if he believes it hard enough, it will be true. And he does believe it. He does. Even when their dad starts locking him in his bedroom for days at a time, he believes it. Even when one of their brothers stomps so hard on his foot under the dinner table that his big toe breaks. When their mother gets weaker and paler and she starts staying in her bedroom all the time, just like he does, he still believes it.
She’s the one who finds him, wailing on the cold floor of the corridor, the day their mother finally dies. Their brothers are playing outside in the garden. He is crying so hard he’s gasping, big wet gulps of air that shake his small body, but he can still hear their whoops of joy out of the window.
She crouches down in front of him. Her face is flat. “I wish you’d shut up sometimes,” she says, but her hand is cool and gentle as it brushes tears from his overheated cheeks.
He runs away when he is eight. She helps him pack a small knapsack, stuffed with a jumper and a water bottle and the story book their mother had given him. They tiptoe down the grand staircase, hand in hand. At the back door, she pulls his yellow raincoat tight around him and kneels to help him pull on his wellies.
“Will you come with me?” he asks, can’t help asking.
Reiju gives him one of her smiles, the ones that don’t touch her eyes. “I can’t, little brother.”
“Why not?”
She stands and gives his raincoat one last tug into place. She tucks his hair behind his ear, Sanji thinking of their mother, the feeling tight in his throat.
“Run,” is all she says and opens the door. He does, but once he clambers gracelessly over their garden fence and lands in a puddle at the bottom, he looks back to wave to her once more. He only sees an empty doorway. She’s already gone back inside.
This is how he meets Zeff, homeless and hunched under a railway bridge. The old man calls him a brat and kicks him away a few times, but in the end accepts his new companion. Or at least stops objecting. Sanji is cold, shivering and hungry, but Zeff shares his food with him and listens while Sanji tells him about his previous attempts at cooking for his mother. On the cobbles under that bridge, it’s the best week he can remember having.
He fucks it all up when he shows Zeff the bruises on his ribs. Zeff takes him to a police station because he’s a grown up who understands the weight of these things, but also a grown up who hasn't heard of the influence of the Vinsmoke family. Sanji wails the whole way. Later, when his father’s goons come to collect him, Zeff stands rigid and white-faced with his hands in fists, staring at the social worker like they might buckle and change their minds from his rage alone.
His father locks him in his room for three weeks after that. It doesn’t matter. Now he knows — out there, finally, is someone to go to.
Reiju lets him out of his room when his three weeks are up. She’s eleven at this stage and she helps him to her ensuite, puts him in a hot bath and waves away the servants who try to step in. He was fed the whole time, but Sanji’s room is the only one without its own bathroom and he sinks gratefully into the suds. Under the warm water, he listens to his own heartbeat.
“What was it like?” she asks, kneeling beside the tub. “Out there?”
Sanji grins a little boy grin. “There’s so many people!” He scoops up bubbles with both hands and throws them into the air, Reiju shushing him so she can lather up his hair. “And so many mice.”
Afterwards, wrapping him in a towel, she sighs when she sees the old bruises up his ribs. “I don’t see why you can’t just keep your head down,” she says, but she lets him sleep in her bed that night, dressing him in her pyjamas like a doll, brushing a comb through his hair while he sits on the floor at her feet.
It takes another year before Sanji sees Zeff again. Reiju comes home with a poster advertising the grand opening of the Baratie downtown. Sanji all but runs there. Outside, Zeff is waiting for him like he always knew he would come. The old man has gained a restaurant but is missing a leg. Sanji isn’t sure how either happened, doesn’t want to ask, bent double and panting from the journey.
“Sorry it took a while, kid,” Zeff says, a hand heavy on Sanji’s head.
She is the one who covers for him when Zeff agrees he can have a job sweeping up at the Baratie. More than anything else, he remembers this. The sudden shock of joy at being a part of Zeff’s kitchen, its noise and heat and brusque intimacy. The sick fear it wouldn’t last.
For a while, things are good. His brothers go to the private school on the other side of town and he’s at the local state. He spends every night shift working, goes straight to the restaurant from school, avoids his family, learns to cook.
This is also around the time Luffy inserts himself into his life. He never tells his friends what goes on in his house. He doesn’t think he needs to. He has always felt too much, showed too much, in big, bold sweeps of emotion. He wears long sleeves in the summer and moves his fringe back and forth, eye to eye, as needed. He sees the looks they give him sometimes. They know, he thinks. They know.
Sometimes things are bad. One night, when he is fourteen, things are particularly bad. He doesn’t remember the details — which he supposes is a sign of how bad it actually was. He wakes up in the hospital, confused, but Zeff is there, and so he relaxes again, sleeps. The next time he wakes, Zeff is there still, sat by his bedside, a fist clenched in his sheets. He's in chef's whites, a face like he hasn't slept in days. When he looks at Sanji, Sanji feels very young and very small.
“Your sister called me,” Zeff says by way of an explanation. He looks sunken in. Sanji doesn’t know how his sister would have gotten Zeff’s number, but here is another thing for him to be grateful to her for. The feeling settles like a slug in his stomach.
Zeff helps Sanji sit up and drink water through a straw. His knee is fucked up, but the head injury has apparently healed remarkably well, the doctors say. He only needs a night of observation and then he can go home. His father has arranged for a car to pick him up.
“Has anyone else been?” Sanji asks, focusing hard on the cup of water.
A moment. “No, little aubergine.”
After that, he begins spending week nights at Zeff’s too, the nights his dad is away for work. His brothers are newly skittish around him and leave him be for a few short months. Zeff teaches him exercises to regain strength in his leg. When the exercises move onto martial arts, Sanji doubts Zeff's intentions. When his friends ask why he hasn’t been at school, he tells them that they’d all gone fishing together as a family.
A week after he’s discharged, Reiju appears at a table at the back of the Baratie. She’s already there when Sanji shows up for his shift, reading a book over a cup of tea, one leg crossed over the other. He tries not to limp as he goes over to her table, bypassing the kitchen, from where is Zeff watching them both darkly.
She puts her book down. “Hello, little brother.”
He stands over her and tries to feel menacing. His face is still bruised, he knows, although the cut on his lip has healed. Thin and fourteen, he doesn’t feel menacing at all. “What are you doing here?”
“What do you mean? It’s my job as your big sister to come see where you’re spending all these nights,” she says, a hint of amusement in her voice. “This part of town – you could get hurt.”
He clenches fists at his side, thinks: she’s the one who called him. He slumps into the chair opposite her, watches her carefully. Itches for a cigarette. Standing for prolonged periods aches anyway, he tells himself.
She takes a sip of her coffee and leans in. “They did a number on you, didn’t they,” she murmurs. Her voice has that strange flat quality it always has. “I’ll be eighteen soon, and then who will look after you?”
He is about to respond, probably to swear at her, but she reaches across the stained tablecloth and takes his hand, like she did when they were small, and his words won’t come. He stares at their hands together, at the tenderness. Not since his mother, he thinks.
She covers for him when he gets the job at the Baratie. But when their father gets suspicious at how many nights Sanji does not return to the family mansion, she gives him up easily too.
He goes to school the next day with a broken arm. On the cast, a pink spiral swirls out and out, pushes all the way to the plaster’s edges. When his friends sign the cast, they have to write over it – bright orange fruits, green swords, red hats that obliterate her marks below, like they’d never been there at all.
“You sure are clumsy,” Luffy says, not looking at Sanji, as he draws.
That night, he comes back after his night shift and she is gone. There is a new mobile phone tucked under his pillow with one number saved in it, but when he calls it, nobody answers. He’d never been allowed a phone, even years after his brothers got them, years after his friends all had, laughing in group chats he pretends to have no interest in.
He calls again. Nothing.
She is gone. His brothers, his father, remain.
The next time he sees her, she is sitting at that same empty table in the corner of the Baratie, chin in hand, eyes on him, poised like a cat watching a bird. He stumbles on his way to a party of four, but keeps the tray of food balanced, recovers. It’s been a year. A year of him catching glimpses of pink hair in crowds and lurching towards it, before pulling away again.
In the kitchen, scowling out at the tables, Zeff says, “I don’t like this, kid.”
Sanji ignores him, scooping up a plate of seafood pasta, her favourite, and a cup of coffee – black, the way she drinks it.
“So you’re still working here?” she asks as he approaches the table, as if she didn’t know, as if the whole family isn’t constantly – inexplicably – up to date on his whereabouts. His brothers wait outside sometimes, never doing anything, not while Zeff is around. Just watching. They find him at supermarkets and shopping centres, at cinemas and on his long, dark walk home.
He puts the food down. She catches his hand, turns it over in hers, pushes the sleeve of his waiter’s shirt up. Her thumb strokes, slowly, over a white scar at his elbow, then moves back down to his hand and the bandage wrapped around it. “What’s this?” she asks.
He tugs his hand back, jolted more by the touch than the question. Zeff was furious when he’d come in that evening, trying to hide the long cut across his palm, fist shoved down into his pocket to avoid the lecture. Hadn’t fooled Zeff for the moment. The old geezer shoved him down onto a stool in the back of the kitchen without a word and came back with the first aid kit, bandaged the wound in quick, short tugs of fabric. The lecture never came. Sanji almost wishes it had.
When Sanji scowls instead of answering, Reiju leans back in her seat. She twirls the spaghetti slowly, leisurely, around her fork. “Aren’t you going to join me?” she asks.
“Got to work,” he says. “Got to keep this shitty place running, don’t I?”
“Do you always work nights?”
“Yeah, after school.”
“Wonderful. I can come by after work sometimes then,” she says. This is news to Sanji: he has no idea what job she has. He imagines her as some terrifying lawyer or bank executive somewhere. “Mother would be very proud of how your cooking has come on.”
“Yeah, well, it would make up for all the shitty food I used to make for her,” Sanji says, kicking at the table leg, arms crossed and hunched in on himself. “Can’t believe she actually ate that crap.” He looks up and she’s stopped eating.
“Indeed.” Her voice is tight. It disquiets him, this ripple in her surface, and he finds a reason to leave. Back in the kitchen, Zeff puts him on food prep instead of serving. Sanji can’t decide if he’s grateful or not. And when she leaves without a goodbye, he can’t shake the feeling he’s misstepped somewhere, missed something crucial, and that he’ll never have the chance to find it again.
She comes every few weeks after that, only at night. They talk a little bit, her preferring to sit in that dim corner, sometimes flipping slowly through a book, sometimes watching him over the steam from her coffee as he serves tables, squabbles with Zeff. She’s always got that same smile on her face. Zeff never comes out to talk to her.
Eventually, he begins to sit with her. In moments of calm – infrequent as they are – he shares a coffee with her and tells her about his recipes, Zeff’s training, that brute Zoro at school. Like always, she reaches across the table to him. She rubs a gentle thumb over his black eye. She holds his hand, like it’s nothing, while he fights a blush. It’s fine, almost good, his sister out here and Zeff in the back. It’s a better than he ever got in their mansion.
One night, when he is seventeen, his friends come barrelling through the door, mid-conversation, jostling against each other, as he and his sister sit in their darkened corner of the room.
“Sanji!” Luffy is whooping. “We’ve come to pick you up!”
She’s never seen them before and he feels, suddenly, flustered. Like she’s intruding on something private — or they are. He’s conscious of where she’s chosen to sit, almost like she’s hiding, like she doesn’t want anyone to see them together. He tugs his hand from hers and moves towards his friends, impossible to not move towards Luffy, he just sucks everyone in through sheer force of personality.
“But first we can eat!” Luffy is announcing, an arm thrown around Usopp’s shoulders, Nami smacking him in the head, saying, “No, Luffy, we’ll be late!” Franky is yammering loudly at an increasingly harassed-looking Zeff, Robin next to him and waving at Sanji, Chopper giving a little jump of joy as he spots him. Zoro bangs a shoulder into Sanji’s as he passes and distracts him with the start of a fight.
It’s a few minutes before he remembers Reiju. When he turns back, she’s gone.
He officially moves in with Zeff the day he turns eighteen. His room is small and the furniture gives him splinters. He deposits a single bag of belongings onto the floor and flops onto the buckling bed, boneless, safe. He'd snuck out of the mansion at night, like he had when he was eight years old, only this time with no Reiju to see him off. He wonders if he'll ever talk to his father or his brother again.
She is the only Vinsmoke who comes to his graduation – the only one he invited. As always, Zeff is stiff and cold around her, never quite meeting her eyes. He ruffles Sanji’s hair until Sanji pushes him off, calls him a shitty brat in that strange, affectionate way of his, but only grunts when Reiju greets him.
“My little brother, a graduate,” she is saying, as if there weren’t three more of him, somewhere on the other side of town, in fancy clothes in some fancy hall with their father. But she is here, Sanji thinks. She takes his hand. “Who would have thought it?”
“Not many people, given the lad’s shitty attendance,” says Zeff. It’s the first remark that Sanji can remember him – sort of – addressing to Reiju. Now, he’d rather the old man had not said anything at all. It’s no secret why he’d missed so much school, and from Zeff’s flat look over the two siblings’ heads, that’s exactly what he meant by his comment.
Sanji writes this off as Zeff being Zeff, and later writes Zoro off for the same reason when he ignores Sanji’s attempt to introduce them. No manners. Nami and Robin must not have heard him, he tells himself. But by the time Luffy slides his eyes over her as if she isn’t there and Reiju makes her excuses to leave, he is worked up.
“Why was Luffy being so awkward?” he demands, leaning next to Nami at a bar later that night, a few drinks in and pink-cheeked.
Nami looks at him incredulously, sucking something fruity and strong through a straw in her mouth. He tries not to get distracted. “He wasn’t being awkward, Sanji-kun,” she says. “He just doesn’t like her. None of us do – why would we?”
It’s like cold water down his back, the closest any of his friends have come to talking about his family, about what they all know but ignore at his obvious, wordless request, at first too young and, later, entrusting him to Zeff.
Because he’s drunk, he says, “She – wasn’t like the others, you know, she wasn’t. She’s done a lot for me. She hasn’t even lived with us in years. She hasn’t even spoken to them in years. She got out.”
He’s spared from Nami’s answer, the pitying look in her eyes, as Zoro shouts some insult across the bar – perfect timing, too perfect timing – and Usopp tugs on his arm from his other side, voice loud in his ear, wanting to dance. He lets himself be dragged into a crowd, Luffy pressed warm against him, Franky doing something obscene nearby, Robin laughing into her hand.
He wakes up the next day, face down in his pillow, thick with a hangover.
On his twentieth birthday, she gives him a set of new ties and a framed photo of the two of them with their mother. He’s never seen it before. He's only a toddler, chubby-cheeked and wriggling in their mother's lap, Reiju grinning wide with her hand in their mother's, all three of them in the bed their mother would die in. He puts it on his bedside table, sits down on his bed, looks at it, then hides it away in the drawer. He’s breathing fast, but he doesn’t know why.
He takes it when he moves into a flat with Luffy, Usopp and Zoro. He decides not to tell anyone where it is, but his brothers find it anyway. He doesn’t know how. Sometimes he looks out the window and sees a flash of brightly coloured hair – maybe red. Maybe pink.
She still comes to the Baratie at night. They talk more than before, though him more than her. Zeff says Sanji can cut down on the night shifts now he’s left school – unlike many of his friends, he’s not bothering with university, no degrees needed to be a cook – but he finds himself refusing. Zeff is clearly unhappy with this, but says nothing, and Sanji is left feeling embarrassed, feeling watched.
“They’re doing well, you know,” she tells him one night across their corner table. “Father has acquired a business in the North. It looks like he’ll regain his market share after all. The boys are set to graduate University a year early and will join us.”
“Us?” Sanji repeats.
Reiju looks back at him with a blank smile. “At Germa Tech.”
Sick, sick. His tongue feels thick and his mouth dry as he asks: “How long have you worked there?”
She tilts her head to the side and says like it's nothing: “Since I graduated.”
He gets back to the flat that night twitchy and a pack of cigarettes down. When Luffy startles him with his customary pleas for Baratie leftovers, he jumps, drops his phone into the sink. He curses, considers kicking something, but Zoro’s hand shoots out to snatch the phone from Sanji’s shaking grasp and tosses it across the room with a call of, “Oi, Long-nose, fix this.”
Sanji stands over the sink, breathes. His hands are clenched too tight on the rim. He feels the scar on his palm hotly, as if it were new. Zoro stands nearby, wordlessly passing clean plates for Sanji to scoop leftovers onto, whenever he finally feels like he can. It takes some minutes, while Usopp taps away at his broken phone and, outside the kitchen window, Sanji's eyes dart around for hints of colour.
The rising nausea is just subsiding when Usopp calls over from the other end of the room, “Ugh, Sanji?” He glances across to see Usopp looking strangely pale and Luffy, next to him on the couch, strangely quiet. He can feel the warm line of Zoro’s body, close to his. “You, erm, know there’s a tracking app on this, right?”
His friends club in to buy him a new phone. They present it to him, all already set up, arms around his shoulders and happy voices in his ear. He sneaks to the bar’s bathroom, locks the door behind him, slides down onto the floor. Mechanically, he adds her number back in – the only number they’d left out.
His twenty-first birthday, Luffy bullies him into hosting a party at his and Zoro’s new flat. It’s cramped, bustled up with worn furniture, but involves significantly less of Luffy catapulting himself into their bedroom, so Sanji considers the move an upgrade. It reminds him of his room above the Baratie, still with a collection of his clothes, and an embarrassing eight-year-old drawing of him and Zeff that Zeff refuses to take down.
He delays inviting her for a week. Writes the text, deletes it. In the end, Nami gets sick of seeing him staring forlornly at his phone and says, “God, if it’s that much of an issue, then you clearly don’t want her there.” Zoro elbows her in this side for this, earning himself a whack to the head. Sanji, still staring down at his phone, misses the whole exchange.
Nami’s words have the opposite effect. She is his sister, Sanji thinks. He remembers the backdoor key, the antiseptic, the birthday presents. He remembers her holding his hand across their table in the Baratie, and, younger still, her painting his nails, cross-legged and safe on her bed. He invites her.
She arrives when the party is in mid-swing and Sanji is, predictably, drunk. He throws his arm around her, too buzzed not to, pulls her into the crowd. There’s a birthday crown on his head and his tie is loose. His friends remain shifty around her, but Sanji can’t bring himself to care, feeling a strange flush of warmth as he successfully integrates her into a conversation with their neighbour Conis and Luffy’s brother Ace. It feels like something’s clicked into place.
He can do this, he thinks. Friends and family and food. Face hot from a cocktail he’d spent all afternoon creating, he thinks he can have it all.
But when he goes to refill the punch bowl midway through the night, he hears two familiar voices in the kitchen and halts at the door. He listens, slow-turning nausea already in his stomach, and catches the tail end of Reiju’s voice, unintelligible. He knows what he’s going to hear. She sounds – he doesn’t know how she sounds. She sounds exactly as she always does.
“You helped him out, yeah,” Zoro is saying. “How long did you watch first?”
Sanji wheels away from the door in a sick jerk. Back in the crowd, Usopp catches his arm and laughs, calls him a lightweight. He takes the drink from Usopp’s hand and downs it. Usopp protests, but he shoves past him, towards where people are dancing, lets them drag him in. When Zoro returns, he roughly catches Sanji by the back of the head and pulls him in, Franky joking he must be drunk too. Sanji feels too hot, too close. He makes his excuses and spends the rest of the night smoking on the balcony.
Afterwards, when everyone else is either gone or passed out, Zoro slumps forward at their kitchen island and Sanji wobbles around, tidying up. Zoro gives every appearance of snoozing, except Sanji sees his clenched fist, the line of tension up his back. As Sanji is filling the sink, trying to be gentle with his favourite wine glasses despite his drunken state, Zoro grumbles into the crooks of his elbow, “I don’t know why you keep inviting her to these things.”
No question who he means. “She’s my sister,” Sanji says, lightly, too lightly, wishing his head would stop spinning. Zoro doesn’t reply, only tensing up further, so he tries again, drunkenly, a bit desperately, “She was only a kid, you know.”
Zoro pushes himself up off the counter and looks at him, hard. “So were you,” he says. He bustles off to their bedroom, leaves Sanji standing barefoot in the dim kitchen, red-stained wine glasses in his hands, birthday crown on his head, knot in his throat.
Another month and she’s back at the Baratie. It’s a busy night, so he leaves her drinking her coffee in the corner until closing. They share an umbrella on the way home, not speaking, not really looking at each other, until they’re outside his flat. He dawdles, snuffing a cigarette out under his shoes in the growing silence, until he finally caves and asks her upstairs for one more cup of coffee.
Zoro has already gone to bed. In their kitchen, she sits where he had the night of Sanji’s birthday party. Unlike Zoro, she is straight-backed and staring. She barely blinks, Sanji realises. She never looks away. What are you thinking, he wonders, a rising pitch. What are you thinking?
They are halfway through their coffees when he speaks, slowly, turning the words over in his mind carefully, examining them. “Dad’s the one who bought that phone, isn’t he?”
Reiju smiles over her cup. “Yes.” She offers no more, but Sanji supposes she doesn’t need to. He thinks about the backdoor key she gave him when he was thirteen, about how he’d always warbled on to her about his life and his friends while she painted his fingernails. How else was their father meant to keep tabs on him after she left?
“You left three years before me,” he tries this time. “You never told anyone. About anything.”
Reiju pauses, considering this. Sanji feels his heart thump. Their father would have disowned her, he knows. Her place at Germa Tech, a place he’d stupidly thought she too would never want, would have been lost. No one would have believed her. He expects her to say all these things, the narrative he’d always told himself, but instead, she says, “I thought – you were fifteen. It was only three more years.”
Only three more years. Sanji nods, swallowing hard. He stares down at his hands, turns them over to look at the thin scar across his left palm, the only blemish on either of them. Their brothers, the year after Reiju had left.
Only three more years, he thinks again. Three years ago, that would have been enough.
“I did my best,” she says to his silence, and she is still smiling that placid smile.
Ten minutes later, the front door clicks closed behind her. Sanji isn’t sure what they said in that in between time, if they spoke at all. He turns his phone over in his hands, once, twice, then scrolls through his contacts, pauses at her name, the number he’d had to add back in like a secret, hiding in a bathroom stall. On the left, call. On the right, delete.
She only came to him at night, he thinks, sleepovers as children and coffees on his late shift, her never talking much, her having spent the day with their family. She sees them every day, he thinks. Every day.
She’d laugh every time they hit him. That’s what he remembers. Not the antiseptic, not the birthday presents, not the backdoor key pressed into his palm. He remembers her laugh, that bright peel of sound as he’d curl up to protect his head. Her pink spiral swirling along his cast, a broken arm she’d never told anyone about, not a soul, her pen curling lazily up to his elbow, her bags already packed in the next room.
He presses the button. He gets up, tidies away their leftovers, washes her lipstick off the cup she’d used. He has work in the morning – a day shift – and plans with his friends in the evening. The lipstick comes off easy, a pink stain on his thumb, and then nothing at all.