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Midnight slipped past, light fuzzes out under the kitchen door. Zoro idles in the corridor in the dark, a hand shoved down his sleeping shorts, yawning. Along his side, the windows show flat circles of grey clouded skies, no moon or stars in sight. He's up at his bladder's insistence, as he is more and more these days, some dog-like response he's developed in himself. Rediverted by this light creeping out to his feet. Down the hallway, the boys’ bunk promises more sleep. Through the kitchen door — something else.
Inside, the room is dark but for one small stretch of a candle's lemon-light. In it, Sanji hunches writing at the table. He’s in soft-looking pyjama bottoms and a white-knitted jumper two sizes too big, ankles and wrists poking out bony where they cross under the table, rest on its wood. There’s a stain on the rolled-up cuff and a patch at the elbow Usopp sewed up last week. The ink has spilled out of his pen where he’s been chewing it and his knuckles are bled blue, a surprise blur of colour in this black room.
They’re a week out from Drum. The neck of Sanji’s jumper is worn loose and Zoro can see the snug of bandages around his chest. In the dim light of the candle, Zoro thinks that Sanji looks very small, small in a way he never does in the daylight. Not quite awake, there is time for Zoro to look at the cook there, slouched at the table, cigarettes piled in an ashtray at his elbow, in his tiny halo of candle-light in the otherwise pitch room. Drum's cold still clings to the air and, in the thin light, Zoro can just see the pink of his nose.
A beat, then Sanji looks up, blinks half-asleep at Zoro behind his reading glasses, a moment of slowness before the show starts, before he remembers the roles he’s assigned them. Nearly three in the morning, and for a second his face is soft and open as he slips eyes onto Zoro, a child in the middle of a dream he doesn't quite understand. There's another pen tucked behind an ear.
Then Sanji’s brain churns and he gives Zoro a boyish scowl, drops his chin in his hand. “What d’you want, shithead?” he mumbles into his palm, voice low with sleep.
Zoro doesn’t respond, slumps down into the opposite seat. Enjoys that way Sanji’s scowl deepens at this, how he purposefully isn’t looking back up at Zoro, his scribbling getting faster and his grip on the pen tighter. More ink seeps blue onto his fingers.
“Just here t’piss me off?”
Zoro stays quiet again and Sanji goes on, muttering drowsy irritation into his hand, mouth barely moving and shoulders getting higher. Zoro knows this routine well and lets him grumble, working whatever dark thing has brought him to the kitchen at this time out of his system. As he talks, Zoro looks at the coffee-stained paper under his hand. The letters are rough-scratched slants, ingredients and measurements and how long they’ll last. Stock-taking. Sanji up in the middle of the night, planning for disaster.
This is the routine they've built up. A night a week, at least, where something tumbles Sanji from his hammock. Nightmares or something else, some drive to squat in front of the oven when the moon is high, face pink with its heat, frowning in concentration at whatever snack Usopp had mentioned offhand that day. The biscuits he’s sure will win Nami over, the tomatoes he needs to double check are in date, the recipe for Chopper he needs to re-tweak. Kneading bread in the dark to offer up to their crew like a supplication once dawn comes. Measuring out thick golden olive oil in case he should wake up, suddenly, to a morning where they have none.
Zoro sleeps day and night. On the deck, in the corridors, once or twice in battle. He doesn’t know what it means to have this restlessness that the cook does. Each night in the boys’ room, all Zoro has is a vision of himself, staring up at a different ceiling, entirely the same person and the greatest in the world, a future so certain it is like a lullaby. Each night, he breathes deep in his hammock, surrounded by his crew, and is patient at this future’s approach. He lets it send him to sleep.
When he wakes up in the slit of the night, it is for his bladder. And, now, for this. He’ll pad sock-footed to the kitchen, where he knows the cook will be, scratching at his belly as he goes. More and more as their journey lugs on, he finds himself waking up and coming to this place, to listen to Sanji’s sleep-soaked mumbles. To be here for whatever possibilities sigh in the night, to glimpse the things that scurry Sanji away from sleep. The hypotheticals that he writes and re-writes out in his notebooks in grams of flour and ounces of milk.
Across from Zoro, Sanji’s sleep-slow rant has led to him talking himself into shuffling to the booze cupboard to fetch Zoro sake, despite Zoro still having said nothing, just the cook's fate-ingrained impulse to serve. Sanji winces as he bends for the bottle, tries to play it off. Zoro watches, thinks of Sanji hanging like a kitten from their captain’s teeth all the way up the mountain and how he’d lain like a dead doll in their sled all the way down. Sanji winces again as he rights himself, there by the counter crowded with marinating meats. He's fed Luffy nothing but his favourites the whole week.
Zoro stands, takes the sake from Sanji’s hands. “Just finish your list,” he says. That catches Sanji, still blinking sleepily behind his glasses, a little boy there barefoot in his pyjamas, hand still held suspended between them even with nothing in it anymore. Zoro gives a little push with one palm and down he slumps into his chair again. No fight at all. Zoro imagines leaving his hand there on Sanji's shoulder, but doesn't. Imagines sitting next to Sanji, but doesn't.
“Ungrateful marimo,” Sanji huffs, looking at Zoro sleepy and strange. But he doesn't start his mutterings again. His hand goes back to his pen, the other to his hair, as he starts slowly re-reading over his list, stopping to rub at his eyes under his glasses. Tick marks over tick marks. Eggs, trout, spring onions. He went over it the night before, too, while the rest of the crew slept. It's been worse since their departure from Drum and Zoro expects he will find the cook here tomorrow night as well, going over these lists that will not end, recipes he cannot finish, tasks never completed.
Indefinable time and Sanji glances up to see Zoro staring at him. There's no heat in his glare at all, his night-thick voice. Zoro can barely hear him. “What? Some of us have actual job to do, y'know, some of us —”
Before he can get himself worked up, Zoro leans over and plucks the pen from behind Sanji’s ear, uses the quiet moment of surprise to swap it with the leaking one in his hand. He nods at Sanji’s blue-tipped fingers — like frostbite, like fingers that have clawed up a mountain. Sanji swears under his breath at the sight of them, then slumps back into his chair, pushes his glasses up to dig at his eyes with the heels of his hands. Stays there for a moment breathing heavy. When he pulls his hands away from his face, there’s blue like burst berries under his blue eyes.
He looks at Zoro and Zoro looks back. The sway of the ship moves the candle's shadows across his face this way and that way, disembodying his features, a tired bruised-looking eye there, now a mouth parted around a cigarette, now the milk slope of his cheek. It’s difficult for Zoro, sometimes, to keep looking at him, but Zoro has always loved difficult things. And Sanji is the most difficult person Zoro’s ever met.
But in the night, in their nights, Sanji is something else, something weathered and barely awake. And if Zoro cannot do anything about what drives the cook from bed, he can sit here and be something for Sanji to rail against until some of that blackness has sept out and his shoulders unhunch, can be awake with him, can wait, endlessly wait, until Sanji can sleep once more. His hand around the sake cup is inches from Sanji’s, but it is Sanji whose fingers shift there. Both of their hands are stained blue now.
“Y’gonna be here every night?” Sanji asks finally, almost under his breath. In a few months time, maybe, he'll mean something by that. But for now, Zoro just tips back the remainder of his sake in answer, keeps his eyes on him, waits to see if anything shifts to recognition there and knows that it won't. And after a moment, Sanji looks away, sighing like he always does in the dark, and hunches back over his list with his new pen.
One day, Zoro will take this pen away from Sanji, too, will close those notebooks, turn off the oven. One day, Sanji will let Zoro guide him back to the bunk, pliable and yawning, let himself be folded back into his hammock, eyes already closed, dreamless. But for tonight, this grey clouded night, Sanji resumes his endless work, shoulders still tight in their bandages, but grip looser than when Zoro walked in. He doesn't say anything more and neither does Zoro.
Candle light swaying, Zoro dozes, head full of victories, the scratching of Sanji’s pen growing quiet. He has a vision of them, on another night in another place, where Sanji will finally be calm enough to sleep, where Zoro will press his forehead to the back of Sanji’s neck and feel all the quiet life murmuring there, breathing breath in sync, in a bed that is theirs, under a sky heavy with the moon. He is patient at its approach.
When he finally blinks back into clarity, the candle has gone out. In the new thick dark, Zoro can make out Sanji slumped forward onto folded arms, asleep. Zoro cracks a yawn, rolls his neck. There’s a woollen blanket in the pantry, ostensibly for when Chopper falls asleep mid-way through dinner, but more often than not now used for this. Zoro fetches it soundlessly and tucks it around Sanji’s sleeping shoulders, takes the glasses off his face, folds them up next to him.
He pauses there, bent over Sanji asleep and slack at his table, cheek pushed into his arm, mouth open. He can barely see the cook's face, close there in the static of the dark. He reaches out, his hand hovering over Sanji’s cheek, all the touch gone from his fingers. It’s the night, he thinks, it’s what it does to you. But this is something for the daylight, so he pulls away, settles silently back into the chair across the table. There'll be time for that later, he knows, knows it as brilliantly as he knows his captain, his swords. Later, later. I can wait. Let him sleep.
Zoro shifts to get comfortable, crosses his arms, closes his eyes. Under the blanket, across the table, Sanji breathes slow and regular. It sounds like the sea.
Sleep comes gentle.