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Nami first hears of his existence when she stumbles into a confession.
She saw the familiar green hair before she catches the pair, facing one another under a maple tree. The girl is someone from her year, she recognizes—Zoro's underclassman who takes the same major. Her eyes are downcast, her face redder than the leaves of the tree; Zoro’s expression, in contrast, looks absolutely uncomfortable in a half-panicked, half-constipated state.
Nami does not snoop, but this is a public park, and she is a member of the public.
“I like you, Roronoa Zoro,” the girl says, voice low and soft, “will you go out with me?”
Nami pities the poor, poor girl. As Zoro’s childhood friend, she knows this old song and dance better than most: Zoro is going to start talking about his dream in a pathetically vague attempt to reject her—how he has a promise to fulfill and a goal to chase, and therefore no time to get into a romantic relationship with anyone. This girl—like the other girls that came before her—is going to insist she understands, even when she clearly doesn’t. She will say she still wants to try anyway. Zoro will look like he'd rather swallow all three of his swords at the same time.
This back and forth will go on for upwards to ten awkward minutes.
She isn’t the first, and she won’t be the last.
Except the song never comes, and Zoro seems to have learned a new dance.
“I’m sorry,” he replies, voice firm and sure. A clear-cut rejection. “I already have a boyfriend.”
“So,” she walks up to him, just as the girl tearfully disappears into a corner. “A boyfriend.”
One day she’ll get tired of the way Zoro jumps like a frightened cat whenever he hears her voice, but today is not that day. It is always good to be reminded that she still sits at the apex of their campus social pyramid.
“What is it to you?” Zoro grumbles, curt but not unkind, and he lets her fall into step with him.
“Come on, really?” She nudges him with an elbow, probably harder than necessary. “Since when? You never hung out with anyone except us, and Luffy had to drag you out every single time. When you don’t go out, you sleep. Or you train.”
“Well, just so happens I met him while training,” Zoro answers indignantly as he tries to bat Nami’s elbow away. “At the gym, in fact. We kept accidentally picking the same time slots, and we hit it off.”
“Right,” she says flatly. Oblivious, brutish Zoro, with zero experience in romance, magically hitting it off with a random man. “How…convenient.”
“Dunno what you’re trying to say,” Zoro glares back. “It is what it is, Witch.”
“Okay,” she replies, in a tone that hopefully conveys how not okay it is.
Grand Line-U is by no means a small university, but news spreads fast still within its community—by the time weekend rolls around, everyone has already heard of Zoro’s new boyfriend.
And the campus rumor mill goes wild.
You see, much to Nami’s constant confusion, Zoro is popular. Like, campus sweetheart-popular. He’s aloof and rude, which somehow translate into being cool, and six months into the academic year he has received more confessions than college credits. He rejects them all, predictably, but his usual excuse of ‘being too busy for love’ somehow makes him even more dreamy and desirable.
But now the excuse shifts, and half of the campus’ female population is in an uproar. Who, they wonder, is this mysterious boyfriend? How does he look like? What kind of person is he?
He is tall, the rumors say. Almost as tall as Zoro, with only a centimeter height difference. His hair is blonde, golden-like, long enough to flow in the wind, but not too long to tangle. He has soft, smooth jaws and bright, blue eyes. He’s a fantastic chef, in line to inherit a two-Michelin Star restaurant in East Blue. He’s—
“—not real, right?”
They’re sitting at an outdoor table behind Hatchan’s takoyaki stall. Zoro just left to go to the toilet, and since nobody is accompanying him to show him the way, they’d have at least thirty solid minutes to discuss this.
“Thank fucking god, Usopp,” Nami cries, head flopping into her arms on the table. “I thought I was the only one losing my mind. Tall, blonde, handsome. Textbook Hallmark Movies love interest. What’s next? He’s a long lost prince from North Blue?”
“Who’s the long lost prince from North Blue?” Vivi asks as she takes a seat beside her girlfriend.
“Zoro’s totally fake boyfriend,” Nami sighs.
A somber look flashes in Vivi’s eyes at that. “Oh, he kind of is, isn’t he?” She asks, one hand covering her mouth in a sad display of pity. “Does anyone even know his name? Has Zoro mentioned it even once?”
“I think it was… Sanji,” Usopp says, hesitantly, the word unfamiliar on his tongue. “Or something,” he quickly backtracks.
“All right, Sanji, that’s a start,” Nami pulls up Instagram on her phone and types the name onto the search bar, before looking up again. “What’s his last name?”
“Uh, just Sanji, I think,” Usopp shrugs. “Heard he had some bad blood with his birth family, ran away from home when he was eight and never goes by their name again.”
“Oh, I’ve heard that one too,” Vivi chimes in. “They say the family is old money—royalty somewhere in their family tree, conquerors and warmongers. Nowadays, they still control at least forty-five percent of our country’s military industry.”
They stare at each other as the information gradually sinks in.
“He’s so totally not real,” Nami groans.
In all the ten years of Nami knowing him, Zoro has always been a bad liar—he never sees the point in even the whitest of lies, preferring swordfights to diplomacy. But this time he must have been so desperate, because instead of backtracking, they’re hearing a lot more about Fake Boyfriend Sanji, and Nami swears every new information sounds more fake than the last.
“He sometimes stays over in my apartment,” Zoro tells them one time during lunch, in between mouthfuls of rice. “He’s been making me lunch whenever he does. Like this one.”
Nami stares at the lunchbox in Zoro’s hand. The rice looks pearly white and fluffy, the vegetables perfectly boiled and seasoned, and she is pretty sure the meat was arranged to form an elaborately crafted smiley when Zoro first opened the lid. There’s no way something that perfect could be homemade.
“Right,” she says, mentally noting to check which convenience store is selling this particular brand of lunchbox.
“He said he’ll be busy with work, sorry,” Zoro says another time, when Robin tries to invite Sanji out for dinner. He flashes them a proud smile as he cheekily says, “there’s this restaurant he’s got to run. He’s the Sous Chef, y’know.”
At our age? Nami doesn’t ask, but she gives Zoro an accusatory look just as Usopp proposes, “should we visit his restaurant then?”
Zoro waves his hand dismissively. “It’s all fancy and shit, you guys wouldn’t like it.”
“Perhaps it would not be too much for Robin and me,” Brook encourages, but the discussion is instantly cut off by Luffy’s whine of, don’t eat without me, and that’s that on the dinner plans.
“Got it yesterday, during our sparring session,” Zoro grins as soon as someone asks about the new bruise blooming under his collarbone, “Cook managed to pin me down.”
“He managed to pin you down,” Nami repeats, incredulous. “He pinned you down. Three-time All Grand Line Kendo Championship winner and Aikido black belt holder Roronoa Zoro.”
“I know, it was awesome,” Zoro says excitedly, oblivious to Nami’s suspicion. “I mean, yeah, kinda pissed me off that I lost, but it was kinda hot, too.”
Nami did not need to hear that last part, but more importantly—“Didn’t you say he was a chef?”
Zoro pauses at that. He frowns. “What does that have to do with anything?” He asks, like an ass-kicking chef is someone you would happen to encounter every day.
Nami pats him in the head and pities his overworking one brain cell.
Zoro’s lies—as clumsy and ridiculous as they are—apparently work. Nami watches as fewer and fewer girls stop him in his track to confess their undying love, and when Nami enters her second year—Zoro’s third—most of Grand Line’s female population has turned their eyes on the next brooding upperclassman by the name of Trafalgar Law.
This would, naturally, mean that Zoro will finally shut up about this fake, non-existent, imaginary boyfriend, right?
Wrong.
“Cook would’ve been so scared,” Zoro brings up one day as Luffy and Usopp run around the courtyard, each with a grasshopper in hand. Nami shudders at the sight—she’s always hated bugs—but tries to focus on this brand new information on Sanji that continues to feel like random facts pulled out of a magician’s hat.
“Didn’t you say Sanji was a martial artist?” Chopper points out. It’s summer break for Chopper’s high school, so he’s visiting their campus more often than not these days, and Nami loves his brilliant, observant input.
Zoro laughs, unbothered by the apparent contradiction. “Yeah, but he’s stupid when it comes to insects. One time he found this cockroach in our kitchen, and he screamed so loud the neighbor called the cops.”
“So he could beat up twenty grown men in one go,” Nami slowly says, “but he would scream and climb the countertops at the sight of a tiny cockroach.”
“Yeah, it was so fucking funny,” Zoro agrees.
Nami turns to face him, a scolding at the tip of her tongue, but the sight she finds renders her speechless.
There is a small smile on Zoro’s face. She’s never seen it on his face, not like this—soft and golden-warm, sweeter than she has ever thought he was capable of. There’s affection there—real, genuine affection, like he is actually reminiscing a fond memory, and—
This has gone on too far.
“Have we gone too far?” Usopp asks from across the sofa.
“What? No,” Nami says. She takes in the room again—all of their friends huddled up around Zoro’s sofa, watching the door with various level of anxiety. “Okay, so maybe going into his apartment while he’s away is a little bit extreme, but consider this: he did give us his keys.”
“For emergencies,” Jinbe rationally points out.
“I’m hungry,” Luffy says, because the kid has never learned to read the room.
“This is an emergency,” she insists, ignoring Luffy. “He’s clearly believed his own lies too much and we, as his closest and perhaps only friends, need to stage an intervention—oh, he’s coming home, this is it!”
The apartment door swings open as Nami stands up to greet Zoro, and—
A blonde man walks in instead.
Nami stops in her track.
It doesn’t take long for the blonde to notice the literal crowd in the living room and, after a moment of confused silence, he ends up nodding politely. “Oh. Um. Hi. Mosshead didn’t tell me his friends were coming over.”
“We weren’t,” Usopp blurts out, always the quickest with an explanation or an excuse. “Well, we are his friends, we’re not, like, robbers or anything, don’t worry—but he didn’t know we were coming over, cause he was—we were—this is an intervention.”
“Oh. All right.” Another pause. A concerned frown. “For Zoro? What for?”
“For having an imaginary boyfriend,” Nami says. “I’m sorry, you are…?”
“Zoro’s boyfriend.”
“Oh.”
There’s another, longer awkward pause, and Nami slowly observes the man before her—blonde hair, blue eyes. Almost as tall as Zoro. He’s wearing a white double-breasted jacket—recognizably a chef uniform—and the clothes are tight around his arms and chest, outlining a solid cluster of muscles underneath.
Tall, blonde and handsome. A chef and a martial artist.
“Holy shit,” the words fall out of her mouth before she could stop herself. “You’re real.”
Like flipping a light switch, the whole room erupts in excitement as everyone immediately flocks towards Sanji, asking him various questions, loudest of which is Luffy’s, you’re a cook, right? Can you make me food?
Sanji, to his credit, handles the situation pretty well, answering Luffy with a quick, yeah, yeah, and fields the rest of the questions one by one as he walks over to the kitchen. He doesn’t seem to be overwhelmed, already fitting seamlessly into their friend group, and holy fuck, what kind of sacrifices has Zoro made to a pagan god to land himself the perfect boyfriend?
As if on cue, Zoro walks in with a loud, “oi, oi, what the hell is going on here?”
“Sanji is making me food,” Luffy shouts excitedly from the kitchen.
Sanji laughs at that as he hands Luffy what looks like steamed dumpling for snack—how does he manage to figure out how to handle the kid so quickly, Nami wonders—and smirks at Zoro. “Well, your friends are staging an intervention," he gestures at the people around him, "because apparently you are cheating on me with an imaginary boyfriend.”
Zoro blinks. “Huh?”
“We apologize for the misunderstanding,” Robin intervenes, “we thought Zoro had simply made up an imaginary boyfriend as an excuse to reject potential suitors in our campus.”
“You just sounded too perfect, Sanji-bro,” Franky adds. “Zoro-bro wouldn’t shut up about how hot and cool and awesome you are. The best chef and best martial artist in the city, the whole package.”
“Aaw,” Sanji coos overdramatically, “did Mosshead really say that about me?”
“Shut up, all of you,” Zoro growls, trying to push everyone out of the kitchen. He’s clearly flustered, a deep red blush blooming across his face, but he still mumbles, “didn’t say anything that was untrue.”
It is Sanji’s turn to blush. “Stop being embarrassing, asshole,” he grumbles, ducking to cut some gingers on the countertop, but Nami could see the tips of his ears turning red.
“Wait,” Nami says, ignoring the commotion as Zoro manages to push everyone else out back towards the living room, because she still has so many questions. “Zoro asked me to find a phone number in his contacts before, and I didn’t see a Sanji there.”
Sanji scoffs at that. “Of course,” he says, not even bothering to look up from the pot he’s stirring, “he probably put me in as ‘eyebrows’ or something.”
“It’s pretty eyebrows, actually,” Zoro calls out from the living room.
“Because that’s so much better—”
“I called you pretty!”
“Dumbass,” Sanji yells, but the word is pushed through a smile, and it hits Nami all over again that they are flirting. Zoro is flirting. Dumbass, oblivious Zoro, who wouldn’t know romance if it clocked him in the head, is actually flirting right now.
With his very real boyfriend.
She leaves Sanji to do his magic. The rest of the group has made themselves comfortable around the house, like they often do, with Usopp and Luffy fighting for the remote. She finds Zoro lounging at the couch with a can of beer in his hand—not part of the commotion, but comfortable within it.
Nami still has so many questions, but there’s probably only one important enough to ask now. “He made you happy, yeah?”
There is the smile again—soft and slow-starting, in ways she didn’t think were possible. Zoro’s eyes flit towards the kitchen, probably unwittingly, and when he speaks, affection fills out his tone and warms it up. “Yeah, Nami. I am.”
“Good,” she says. She thinks of the way Sanji fills in the space of Zoro’s apartment, like he was made to be there. She laughs. “God, he’s so unreal.”
“I know,” Zoro grins, and they sit in comfortable silence until Sanji calls them over for dinner.