Chapter Text
This is how it starts:
The fire flickers, sputters, dies out.
He curses and thumbs the striker again. “Damn lighter’s been acting up lately,” he mutters, annoyed. Maybe he should ask Franky to take a look. It had been an expensive purchase, one of the few indulgences he allowed himself, and he’s rather fond of it. It’s accompanied him all this time across the New World, after all.
Finally, the flame ignites and holds steady, and he brings it up to light his cigarette, cupping it with his other hand to shield it from any unexpected gusts of wind.
It’s no use. It goes out again.
“Here.” Someone leans in with a lit match. Zoro.
Maybe he should have realized it then, at that exact moment, because it’s an odd gesture, coming from the shitty swordsman of all people, but he doesn’t think to question it, only murmurs an acknowledgement and takes a much-needed pull from his cigarette. It feels like it’s been years since his last one.
Wait, he thinks suddenly. Why is that? Where is he? What was he just doing?
And then he’s abruptly, viscerally aware that he’s on the Sunny. The entire crew is around him. How did he get here?
The galley, he realizes, as more and more details filter through the haze. He’s sitting at the dining table. The mood is lively and merry, a pleasant golden sheen overlaying his vision, making everyone’s faces practically glow with happiness. He inhales through his nose, smelling a sharp tang permeating the room. It seems like he just finished cooking dinner, because the table is laden with platters and platters of food, fatty meats and steaming noodles and glistening fruits and delicate, airy desserts. He must be so, so drunk, because he can’t remember making any of that.
There’s an odd gurgling sound coming from somewhere. One of the water pipes is probably busted, he guesses. He should go check on that before it ends up flooding the kitchen, and maybe drag Franky along with him, but he can’t seem to move, too immersed in the sight in front of him.
Luffy is tussling with Usopp over the last slices of honey-glazed roast beef, Franky and Chopper laughing at their antics while Jinbe looks on with bemusement. Nami and Robin are conversing in hushed voices behind cupped hands, giggling every so often, and Brook’s humming a tune as he pours himself a cup of tea. Next to him, Zoro is downing yet another bottle of sake. His cheeks are flushed red.
It should be a perfect scene. It is a perfect scene.
Except—
There’s an uncomfortable churning in his gut, an uneasiness he can’t pin down the reason for. He swallows down bile, feeling faint and lightheaded, one hand flexing around his lighter and the other grabbing onto the edge of the table, the room lurching and swimming around him in a dizzying motion that has nothing to do with the swaying of the ship.
He’s maybe starting to hallucinate, too, because is it just him, or is Franky’s smile just a little too wide, on the edge of unnatural? Nami and Robin’s whispering has turned harsh, discordant in his ears. He can’t help but feel that their gazes are darting towards him every so often. Brook is still pouring his tea, not seeming to notice that the cup is already overflowing. Luffy isn’t laughing anymore.
The gurgling gets louder. That sharp smell gets stronger.
Zoro bumps his shoulder, grounding him back in the present. “Cook. What’s up with you?”
He shakes his head in an attempt to get rid of the low, persistent shrieking noise at the back of his mind, and then he blinks, hard.
Everybody seems to return to normal. So it was just his overactive imagination. He’s so out of it. What the hell has he been drinking? “I’m fine.”
Zoro frowns. Leans in so close that he can smell the alcohol on his breath, feel the heat radiating off his body. “You don’t look too good.”
His throat is hoarse. His cheeks feel damp. He can’t remember why. Has he been crying? He doesn’t think so, but then, why does he feel so scared, so full of dread and self-loathing and—and—guilt?
Well, he’s always been like that, hasn’t he, him and his stubborn guilt complex, stitched together with things like duty and responsibility and debt, constantly on the verge of bursting at the seams if not for his iron control, his compulsive need to hide away his vulnerabilities, his pain, even from the people he cares about. He can’t be weak, not that, never that, not when he needs to be useful instead. And so he’s become accustomed to that thread of anxiety humming away in the background. Though this is a bit beyond his baseline levels.
A hand lands on his back, heavy and warm, rubbing soothing circles. He can’t help but sigh and slump bonelessly against its owner. And, yeah, he’s definitely had way too much to drink, since he wouldn’t dare to do this if he was sober.
“Hey,” says Zoro, and he must be drunk, too, because he actually sounds concerned, shifting his arm so it’s laid in a comforting hold across his shoulders. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” he says, forcing a smile onto his face. He clicks the lid of his lighter open and shut in a rhythmic pattern. “Just really wasted.”
He basks in the warmth, pretending for just a moment that this is something he can have, that this is something that he can allow himself. This is nice. He’s wanted it for so long. He turns his head to look at Zoro, eyes falling on his lips. Zoro’s teeth are bloody, he notes. Then he processes that thought fully, and frowns. Shit, did he undercook the roast beef? That hasn’t happened since he was eleven and still learning.
The tangy scent in the air turns distinctly metallic.
Zoro asks again, “What’s wrong with you?” Only this time, he doesn’t sound concerned. He sounds angry, accusatory. The arm around him tightens uncomfortably, almost painfully.
He shifts away and jabs a knee into Zoro’s side. Knock it off, he means to say. But then Zoro’s ribs crunch disturbingly under his leg, and he stops, bewildered. The fuck? He hadn’t even applied that much force. Is the idiot hiding an injury again?
His eyes drag back up towards Zoro’s face, expecting some kind of pained grimace, or maybe an infuriated growl, and he immediately flinches back, because holy motherfucking shit.
He shoots to his feet, chair clattering to the floor, explosively loud in the sudden silence. Everyone’s staring at him, startled by the sudden movement. He can’t bring himself to care, still fixated on Zoro’s face.
Zoro’s face, which is bloodstained and charred, the skin burnt and corroded. His own sword is sticking straight through his slit throat. An endless stream of blood pours out of his mouth in fits and spurts.
The gurgling wasn’t coming from the water pipes, after all.
He’s frozen in horror, speechless. Zoro doesn’t seem to notice anything wrong, just crosses his arm and asks through the blood, “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“Aren’t you going to apologize?” Usopp says next without giving him a chance to respond. Both of his eyes are gone, scooped out, leaving nothing but empty, gruesome sockets.
“Look what you did to us.” Nami and Robin uncover their mouths as one, both of them revealing a burned, bubbling mass of skin in the shape of a footprint.
Chopper says tearfully, “You’re a monster.” There’s awful, ugly slashes across his face, and he’s missing an arm and a leg. Butchered meat.
“You don’t even feel bad, do you,” Franky says, with his limbs twisted and mangled and crushed.
“How could you?” Brook, the top half of his skull completely missing, obliterated into a pile of shards.
Disappointed, Jinbe shakes his head, a head which is not strictly connected to his shoulders anymore. “I should have known.”
Finally, Luffy, with a gaping, burning hole in his chest where his heart should be, says, damningly: “I trusted you.”
“What?” He manages to gasp out in a strangled wheeze, breath rattling around in his lungs. He takes a stumbling step back. “I didn’t—I wouldn’t—”
“Don’t lie. You did this. It’s your fault.” Zoro points a broken, gory finger condemningly. It’s snapped in multiple places. He can see straight to the bone. “Why else would you be holding that?”
He looks down. The lighter in his hand has transformed into a knife while he wasn’t paying attention. It’s his favorite kitchen knife, the one he brought with him when he left the Baratie. It fits comfortably in his hands, years of use almost embedding the shape of his fingers on the handle, and he wields it easily, like it belongs there, like an extension of himself, because it is. The blade, forged from carbon steel, is perfectly shiny and lethally sharp, honed on just one side to an exactly fifteen-degree angle—nothing unusual about that, he takes meticulous pains to keep it in top condition.
It’s also dripping—gushing, actually—with blood. It’s staining his hands, his feet, his shirt.
He knows, abruptly, that the wetness on his face isn’t from tears.
He tries to drop the knife but he can’t seem to get his fingers to unclench. He’s been holding it for too long, they’ve stiffened and petrified around the handle, the way a dead body does. Rigor mortis.
“Then again, maybe it wasn’t the knife at all,” Zoro continues. “You’ve never needed any weapons other than yourself.”
The knife finally disappears from his hand, but he wishes it hadn’t, because it’s immediately replaced by Zoro’s throat, his fingers automatically wrapping around his neck in an unforgiving chokehold and crushing his windpipe.
“It’s all your fault,” Zoro repeats, somehow able to speak. “This is who you are.” Blood still flows out of his mouth in a ghastly waterfall. He tilts his head to the side, and with a casual, genuine sort of curiosity, he asks, “Do you think I should kill you now, Sanji?”
He opens his mouth to scream, to cry, to plead, No no no, this wasn’t me, this isn’t me, I didn’t want this, please, you have to believe me—
The words twist and warp and splinter, smoke in his lungs, until he chokes on them, until the only thing that comes out of his mouth is laughter, in great heaving bursts, unhinged and hollow and broken. It almost feels natural. There are still no tears. There’s nothing but a numb emptiness now, a coldness spreading through him like ice, like drowning, like rotting.
Is this how it was always going to go for monsters like him?
He’s distantly aware that he sounds deranged. It doesn’t matter, though, because there isn’t anyone around to hear him anymore.
He’s alone.
Blackleg Sanji wakes.
See.
There’s this dream he keeps having. There’s this dream, a nightmare, really, but it feels more like a memory.
He forgets most of it by the time he wakes, but this, he knows.
It always starts the same way: The fire flickering, sputtering, dying out.
Sometimes, it’s the stove. Occasionally, it’s his leg. Most of the time, it’s the lighter.
That’s how it begins, see?
He can never remember it, but it always ends the same way, too.