Chapter Text
Wherever the Pirate King goes, trouble follows. That’s been true since before Luffy ever even took the title, of course, and it’s only become yet more apparent in the year that’s passed since they finally found the one piece. In fact it sometimes feels like they can’t pass five minutes, now, without some arsehole deciding to make an absolute tit of themselves trying to take on the Straw Hat pirates, whether for the bounty or the treasure or the crown, for some grudge or just the sheer fucking glory of having made the attempt. And mostly it’s easy enough to deal with – there’s really no one else on their level any more, no matter how some might brag and posture. It’s even occasionally amusing, and at least it stops things from getting too dull now that their original mission’s completed and they’ve nothing better to do than fuck around the Grand Line chasing whatever hare-brained adventure their captain latches on to at any given moment.
But tonight, when the familiar prickle of danger hits the back of Sanji’s neck to alert him that something’s up, it only makes his jaw clench up in a weary sort of resigned annoyance.
The Thousand Sunny had pulled into the deep harbour of Tuilerie, a summer island known for its rich soil and the abundance of flowers that grow in it, in the early hours of this morning, and since then the crew have spent the day taking in the sights of one of the most beautiful tourist destinations on the Grand Line. Sunshine and flowers, what’s not to like? And then, in the late afternoon, when the warm sun was easing into its slow descent towards the waiting horizon, a park keeper in the central flower garden had mentioned the famous botanical wines produced from Tuilerie's flowers, and Sanji had immediately decided he needed to sample them before leaving the island. The rest of the crew hadn’t taken much convincing.
So on the advice of said park keeper they’d made their way to the largest and best known inn in the island’s principal city for their wine sampling mission, and as soon as they arrived they were shown through the main building to a cluster of tables in an ornate inner courtyard that was open to the slowly setting sun and newly visible stars.
And that’s when some small instinct at the back of Sanji’s mind had started to whisper danger.
He looks around, and can’t immediately spot any reason for it.
It’s a warm night and the space is busy with other people, customers eating and drinking, tourists, waiters and waitresses hurrying back and forth with food and drink. The air is perfumed with the sickly-sweet fragrance of a dozen species of colourful flowers that spill from large pots and containers dotted throughout the well kept courtyard, from baskets and buckets hanging from the walls and balconies of the building that wraps around it, and from vases on every table.
Those balconies and small terraces are also full of people sitting around tables, enjoying the food and the wine and the warm night air, so he supposes there’s no shortage of potential troublemakers. Some of them glance at the Straw Hats curiously from the corner of their eyes, and a few mouths drop open in recognition – it seems they can’t go anywhere, now, without being recognised – but generally everyone seems pretty harmless, even when Sanji extends his awareness outwards, letting his haki feel for weapons, sudden movements, any trace of ill intent. But the sense of quiet foreboding doesn’t dissipate.
Luffy has already told the waiter to bring him as much meat as they can cook, and Sanji watches Nami grab the guy’s sleeve before he can hurry off and say something to him that he hopes, from the way Zoro is grinning beside her, is a drinks order. On the far side of the table Brook begins tuning his fiddle, and Chopper’s eyes sparkle with delight at the prospect of a song. It’s a good evening, warm and hazy and flower-scented, and there is nowhere in the world Sanji would rather be than here, sprawled low on this uncomfortable garden seat surrounded by the people he loves like family, waiting to taste a rare delicacy that he would never have encountered had he stayed in the East Blue all his life.
But his neck prickles again, that sixth sense for trouble, and he knows he can’t ignore it. Reluctantly, he rises to his feet.
“Sanji?” Chopper asks, with just a little bit of worry in his voice.
Sanji gives him a reassuring smile and a wink. “Just gonna stretch my legs a bit, take a look around.” He reaches into his inner pocket to pull out a cigarette. “I won’t be long.”
“We’ll be sure to keep some wine back for you,” Robin tells him, because she is an angel and a goddess.
“My thoughtful queen!” Sanji clutches exaggeratedly at his heart, and she laughs that rich, melodic laugh of hers that’s sweeter than the all flowers in the courtyard.
Sanji laughs, too, easy and self-deprecating, and gives her a little flourish of a bow before he strolls off, disappearing into the crowd.
He wanders off like this often enough that the rest of them don't bat an eye at it. Sometimes he gets an itch, this weird restless feeling that tells him he'd do well to take a quiet look around behind the scenes and see what he can stumble across. He's always been like this, even before his observation haki was properly trained, and the instinct has served him well enough in the past that he's learned to trust it. Let the others face the problem head on while he creeps up behind it and kicks it in the balls.
He meanders past the veranda, where a climbing plant with small, strange blossoms that smell like honey twines its way up the stone columns supporting the upper balcony, and into the main building of the inn. It's even warmer in here; too warm, really, with the press of bodies and the roar of laughter and chatter all around him, and the off-key jangling of a piano coming from somewhere Sanji can’t quite see.
He slips through the crowd as best he can, smiling widely at the happy patrons as he passes, making himself affable and unremarkable, just another guy out for a drink on a balmy night.
When he reaches the bar he buys a beer – not his favourite, but it'll have a lower alcohol content than most of the other drinks available and he wants to keep his wits about him, and, besides, he knows what people expect men to drink and it's very much not a colourful and dainty glass of something that tastes like flowers – and flashes the barmaid his most charming smile. “You must be rushed off your feet, my dear,” he tells her, with the genuine empathy of someone who has spent many years working in hospitality. “Is it always this busy?”
She laughs, and leans over the bar top to hand him his beer. She’s a little older than him and deliciously plump, her ample bosom threatening to spill out of her white blouse when she reaches forward to slide the tall glass over, a few stray sandy-coloured curls coming loose from behind her ears. “On a Friday night? You bet.”
“I hope they’re not working you too hard.”
She laughs again, and shrugs her pretty, bare shoulders. “Better too busy than too quiet. At least the tips are good.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Sanji takes the hint, and slides some extra berry over the bar in gratitude.
“Thanks, love,” she says, all dimples, and Sanji wants to swoon. “Is that all, or can I get you anything else?”
“There was one thing. You’ve not had any troublemakers in tonight, have you? Anyone acting strange, anything else out of the ordinary?”
“Hmm, nothing that particularly stands out. Why you asking?” She looks a bit more suspicious, now. “Expecting trouble?”
“Hoping to avoid it,” Sanji reassures her, quite truthfully. “Big crowd like this, plenty of alcohol going round – in my experience things can turn nasty quick.” He’s skinny, he knows. People don't expect him to be as strong as he is, and he knows how to play that up, how to seem vulnerable, concerned for his own safety.
“Don’t you worry yourself about it,” she tells him, patting his hand in a motherly way where it lies on the bartop, and she nods her head in the direction of the crowded entryway. “If anything kicks off, security’ll handle it.”
Sanji follows her nod, eyes falling on two people he presumes are bouncers standing on either side of the double doors. They do look pretty big, granted, but Sanji’s seen bigger men than that get swatted down like flies. And in any case, there’s no reason to believe that an inn’s private security staff would give much of a shit about defending a group of pirates from whoever might be coming after them, especially if it turns out to be the marines.
Still. “That’s very good to know, thank you, my dear,” he says. He gives her a final smile and raises his glass before leaving her to the rest of the customers crowding the bar.
He drinks the beer and leaves the empty glass on a random table he passes on the way to one of the stairwells and makes his way upstairs. He's still not seen anything to particularly worry about, so he takes a quick tour of the place, working out the general layout and checking out as much of it as he can without drawing too much attention to himself.
Like on many of the islands they visit, the buildings he's seen in Tuilerie's capital city tend to be multistoried, making use of the vertical space where ground space is at a premium. There are four levels to this inn, though the top one is marked as out of bounds, probably accommodation for the owner's family. There are well stocked bars on every other level with busy waitstaff bustling from table to table with food that they carry on large platters from the serving hatches connecting each floor to the kitchen. Sanji doesn’t think he's ever seen such a large inn before. It almost reminds him of Crocodile's casino, back at Alabasta – the scale of it, and the headache-inducing bustle of so many people having fun in one place all at once. The building stretches all the way around the central courtyard in a rectangle, too, though the back section of the lower level is marked staff-only. Sanji figures that's where the kitchens must be located, and feels a spark of professional curiosity about their set up.
He doesn’t want to draw attention to himself by trying to sneak in and check it out, though – and he knows how hectic a kitchen can get at busy times like this. So instead he wanders between balconies, taking in the view. From up here he can see the sprawl of his crew at their tables in the courtyard; Luffy’s hat and loud laughter, Frankie's sheer bulk making him stand out against the much smaller figures around him, and Jinbei's distinctive silhouette. He can’t spot the marimo's particular shade of green, though, so he figures he’s either gotten himself lost or already drunk himself under the table. Typical.
Heat rises through the building, making the upper floors stuffy and uncomfortable. Sanji fishes another cigarette out of his inner pocket and then shrugs his suit jacket off his shoulders, holding it folded over one arm while he rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to mitigate some of that heat. He's still really picked up on anything untoward, but the unsettled feeling at the back of his neck hasn't gone away either; in fact, it’s rising steadily as time goes on.
With a small sigh, he heads back down the stairs to the ground level and makes for the exit, figuring he might as well step outside for a smoke and some hopefully cooler air.
When he gets close, one of the bouncers holds the door open for him to step outside, polite as you please. He's an older guy, big, with fair hair that's even longer than Sanji’s running down his back in a single neat braid.
Sanji started growing his hair a few years back, after the fiasco that was Whole Cake Island, and it's long enough, now, that he usually wears it mostly tied back in a low tail, with only a few shorter strands and wisps hanging loose around his face, swept to one side to artfully conceal one curled eyebrow.
He's not really considered braiding it before. He considers it now, admiring the way it looks on the bouncer, tidy and elegant, somehow more masculine than he would've expected.
This guy’s not one of the two that were stationed here earlier, Sanji thinks, back when the buxom barmaid had pointed them out. He's pretty sure he would've remembered this fella – he’s striking, handsome in a very different way to Sanji, big and rough and broad where Sanji is slender and refined, his jawline square and stubbled, his blonde hair streaked through with strands of silvery grey. His shirt is unbuttoned, like the idiot moss head, open to the waist and showing off an abundant quantity of fair hair on his chiseled chest beneath.
Sanji’s about to head through the door when he glances up and catches the guy’s eyes running over him appreciatively, quick as water, taking in the neat lines of his burgundy suit, the jacket hung over his arm, the way the trousers hug his slim waist and the black shirt is unbuttoned daringly low in deference to the warmth.
Interesting.
A quick recalculation and Sanji swiftly changes course, coming to a stop in front of the guy instead.
“Don’t suppose you’ve got a light,” he says, lifting up the unlit cigarette he’s still holding between his fingers.
“Sure,” the guy replies, easily, reaching into a pocket to pull out a lighter.
The flame catches with a quiet snick and a small whoosh of heat, and Sanji leans in close, cupping a hand around the guy’s thick fingers and the flame they’re holding to meet the tip of his cigarette.
“Thanks,” Sanji tells him, around a mouthful of smoke, and he makes no move to step away again. Like this they’re standing close enough that he has to look up at the guy to meet his eyes. “Slow night?”
“Ha. I wish.”
Sanji makes a soft, inquisitive noise, leaning in even further and tilting his head up at the man sympathetically. “That doesn’t sound good.”
It’s easy to flirt like this. Reflexive, even. Flirting is so much a part of how he communicates that sometimes he’s not even sure if he could stop himself from doing it – and, contrary to what he knows some people might think, it’s been a long time since he limited himself to only doing it with women.
The man chuckles like they’re sharing a joke, his big shoulders curling in towards Sanji like he can’t help wanting to be closer. “It’s work. When’s it ever good?”
Sanji deliberately flutters his long eyelashes. Pretty as a girl, Nami told him, once, rum-wistful and leaning her chin on one hand to stare at him. Pity you're not one. Might make the flirting actually bearable. “Nice place like this? I can’t imagine there’s much for you to do except stand around looking big and strong.”
The guy gives him another appreciative up-and-down look, warm and lingering, the sort of look you can feel like fingers on your skin, and Sanji lets a corner of his mouth curl up, sleazy and suggestive. “Oh, I can do strong,” the guy says, low and flirtatious, “if that’s what you like.”
“I bet you can.”
“You’ve gotta be, in this job.”
Sanji's lips shift against the slim filter of his cigarette. He watches the man's eyes flick down to them, then back up again. “You get many unsavoury sorts making trouble, then?”
“You've got no idea,” the guy chuckles. He ducks his head lower – fuck he’s tall – and murmurs right against Sanji’s ear through the long, soft waves of his hair, “we’ve even got the pirate king himself drinking in here tonight, with a whole bunch of his crew and all.”
Sanji momentarily shakes with repressed laughter. He hopes the big guy will interpret it as a shiver. “You don’t say,” he manages. “You think they’ll cause you any trouble?”
“Eh, hard to say. My cousin lives out at Dressrosa, and she swears they’re a bunch of damn heroes. But we all saw the state of the place in the newspapers after they were done liberating it from the Warlord, am I right? A fucking mess.”
“It was, true enough,” Sanji agrees. He hadn’t actually been there for the grand finale that time, but he’d seen enough of the build up to know how things were going, and he knows his captain's propensity to punch first and worry about tidying up… never. He knows Donquixote-fuckface-Flamingo, too, well enough to know he’d sooner have seen the place reduced to rubble than let it go voluntarily.
“If you ask me,” the guy says, “they’re more trouble than they’re worth, the lot of them. But no one ever asks me, do they?”
“How scary, knowing such dangerous pirates are nearby,” Sanji says, and he makes his voice all faux-breathy and concerned. “You’ll protect me if anything happens, though, right?”
The guy chuckles again, and one of his big hands cups Sanji’s waist and squeezes it in a way Sanji thinks is meant to be reassuring. His eyes glint, dark and hungry. “Course I will, course I will. You can trust old Rusi here to put ‘em in their place if they try anything.” He smiles, and Sanji feels a shiver in his spine; prickly and uncomfortable. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it,” he says, through that wide smile. “I already tossed out a bunch of troublemakers earlier tonight, and one of them was a devil fruit eater.” The guy, Rusi, flexes a bit, like he thinks this is a very impressive accomplishment indeed.
Sanji, who has faced down more devil fruit users than this guy’s had hot dinners, lays a hand on Rusi’s chest muscles and pretends to be very impressed. “Wow, a devil fruit eater. You really must be strong.” He reaches his other hand out of the door to tap the ash off the end of his cigarette onto the street rather than the floor of the inn. “When did that happen? I didn't hear anything.”
“Can’t be more than half an hour. They went without much fuss once they saw they were outclassed.” He preens a bit again, and Sanji tries to look impressed, but his heart is increasingly not in it. “The boss’s got me on door duty now in case they show up again.”
“Ah,” Sanji says, putting a bit of regret into his voice. “So… there’s probably no chance of you getting off early, then?” He runs a fingertip along the guy's open shirt front, feeling the bulging pectoral beneath twitch at his touch.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” the guy says, and he does sound genuinely put out. He squeezes one more time at Sanji’s waist. “Boss’d have my guts for garters.”
“Pity,” Sanji sighs, and draws his hand away. “I suppose I’ll just have to come back later, then.”
“I’d like that. In fact,” Rusi glances around, and then, seemingly satisfied that no one’s paying attention, leans in again to murmur, “If you’re still here at closing I could take you up to the boss’s private roof terrace. It’s got a hell of a view.” His gaze dips, slow and warm as caramel, down to the vee of bare skin where Sanji’s shirt is unbuttoned at the base of his throat.
“And your boss won’t mind that?”
“What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” Rusi says, dismissively.” She never uses it, so it’s nice and private.” He puts a bit of weight on the word private, a bit of an insinuation. Sanji feels a flush rising on his cheeks. “And I’ve got a set of master keys for security reasons, don’t I?”
“Security reasons, eh?” Sanji pulls back, slow, and flashes him a smile. Rusi licks his lips. Sanji’s eyes follow it; he’ll always recognise a subconscious sign of hunger when he sees one. “I’ll bear that in mind.”
“I’ll look forward to it, then,” Rusi says, and he grudgingly lets go of Sanji’s waist.
Sanji gives him a last wink and slips out onto the street, the door finally closing behind him.
It’s a relief.
It’s cooler out here, away from the press of bodies, and significantly quieter. The street isn't exactly deserted – apparently many of Tuilerie's businesses don't limit themselves to daylight hours, at least here in the city centre, and there are plenty of folks out and about for either work or pleasure – but the people are fewer than inside the inn, and more spread out. Sanji takes a deep drag from his cigarette. He tips his head back and lets it out again slow, the smoke vanishing into the night air above him, stars only just visible over the light of the street lamps, and feels his shoulders finally start to relax again.
He’s got no intention of coming back to meet up with Rusi the handsome bouncer later, though he is interested in who those troublemakers with the devil fruit were, and what exactly they were doing here. It could just be a coincidence – there are plenty of devil fruit users on the Grand Line, after all – but the uneasiness he’s been feeling all night is whispering more insistently than ever at the back of his mind.
It’s a pity the pretty barmaid hadn’t seemed as interested as the bouncer, he thinks. And a pity, too, to leave the guy hanging, as he plans to. Almost feels like a waste. Perhaps he can nudge Zoro in the guy’s direction later. He thinks he might be Zoro’s type – strong and forthright, someone who knows what he wants and goes for it.
The marimo would probably have a fucking heart attack if Sanji actually suggested it, though. Despite the fact that their friendship has progressed from the days when they’d regularly beat the shit out of each other just for breathing wrong to the point where, now, there’s probably not anyone in the entire fucking world Sanji’s closer to or trusts more, there’s still a lot of things they don’t ever talk about openly, and Zoro’s taste in dick is decidedly one of them.
Sanji finishes his cigarette and decides to make his way around the outside of the place to see if there’s anything out of the ordinary, or that seems like it might be worth a closer look. Casually, he strolls into the narrow alley that leads from the main road along one short side of the rectangular building. It's darker down here, away from the ornate wrought iron street lamps with their hanging baskets of flowers, and the two buildings on either side are tall enough that they block out what little moonlight might otherwise have helped light the way.
Sanji follows the alley around to a wider space at the back of the inn that he thinks probably leads into the kitchens. It’s virtually empty at this time of night. There are a couple of employees smoking by the back door – they glance up at Sanji as he passes but don’t seem too bothered by his presence. He's not sure whether it’s worth trying to talk to them, to see if there’s anything they know that the front of house staff he’s already spoken to might not.
He briefly considers the possibility that someone might’ve tried to put something in the food. Luffy’s abnormal immunity to poison hasn’t become widespread knowledge yet, so people do sometimes try it. But it's unlikely overall, given how much planning and careful execution a good poisoning attempt takes, and considering that no one would've had any way of knowing that they were coming here tonight.
In the end Sanji simply nods amiably at the smokers and carries on to the other alley on the far side of the space, leading back round to the main street again.
Just as he’s turning the corner, something shifts up above him, way up on the tall rooftops many storeys above; a movement so small and distant that it would've been unnoticeable to anyone without a good grasp of observation.
He squints up in the darkness, but can't make anything else out.
Unlike the front and back of the inn, the side walls have no windows in them – all windows and balconies must be facing inwards, to the courtyard. Sanji considers a moment, judging the height, the distance between the two buildings, the possible number of people above and who they might be, what they might be doing.
There’s only one way to find out, he supposes. He rubs the toe of a dress shoe on the back of his trousers, and with one elegant kick launches himself up into the air. He uses the high, close brick walls of the inn and the building next door for subsequent kicks, propelling himself up to the roof in a series of easy, economical movements.
He comes to a stop on the very edge of the gently sloping tiles that lead to a well kept rooftop terrace ringed round by a low iron railing.
Of course, he thinks. The boss’s terrace, that Rusi the gay bouncer had spoken about.
There are yet more flowers up here, of course. In fact it almost has the feel of a garden; there are small, ornamental trees growing from what look like large, halved wine barrels, and trellises with climbing plants that form archways over a path that leads all the way around the rooftop in a circuit. Periodically on either side of the path are low benches, some of them with covered awnings over them to give shade, or maybe protect from any rain. Those benches under the awnings are low and cushion-covered, and wide enough for multiple people to sprawl on side by side. Clearly meant for entertaining.
The view, Sanji notes, is every bit as gorgeous as promised, stretching out over the city down the slope to the bay where, too far away to make out from here, the Thousand Sunny is moored.
Sanji hops up onto the railing and perches there like a sparrow about to take flight, cocking his head at the three men huddled on the far side of the roof.
One of them seems familiar, in a way Sanji can’t quite place. The other two he doesn’t recognise at all. None of them have noticed him yet – they’re all gathered round a weapon of some kind that looks like a cross between a gun and a cannon, fussing over it. It’s got a wide barrel, about as wide as Sanji’s hands if he made a circle with his fingers, and it sits on a sturdy wooden stand, pointing straight down into the courtyard below.
“Gentlemen,” Sanji says, in a voice full of stern disappointment, “surely you aren’t foolish enough to be pointing a gun at the Straw Hat pirates?”
A few things happen in quick succession.
The three men jump, two of them startling backwards from the mounted gun and one stumbling forwards, into the weapon. His weight manages to knock one of the front supports out from under it. One of the other men lets out a cry and grabs for the cannon, probably in an attempt to steady it, and instead sets off the firing mechanism.
The third man yelps in distress as the gun, now pointing directly down at the decoratively tiled flooring of the roof terrace, lets loose an unimaginably large quantity of a clear, viscous liquid, which instantly floods this entire section of roof, swamping the three men – who, by this point, are variously yelling, swearing, and struggling desperately to get out of the mess they’ve suddenly found themselves in – and sticking them in place.
The men’s escape efforts very quickly prove futile. The clear substance must be some sort of glue; it hardens in moments, trapping all three of them while Sanji looks on from the safety of the railing above in open amusement.
“Black Leg Sanji,” one of the idiots snarls, confirming to Sanji that they must, indeed, be here for the Straw Hat pirates.
“At your service,” Sanji says, grinning deeply, hands shoved into his pockets. “But I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage, gentlemen. Maybe you could let me know whose arses I’m about to be kicking, before we get started?” He stretches his neck to one side then the other, and rolls his shoulders a bit.
The men’s eyes widen in apprehension, and their struggles against the glue increase.
“We’re not telling you nothing!” one of them shouts, in a fit of daring. It’s the one Sanji recognises from somewhere. He’s still not sure where.
Sanji laughs at him, nonetheless. “Have it your own way. I don’t suppose it matters.” He reaches down with the point of one toe to test the firmness of the dried fluid, and finds it solid beneath his foot. “This stuff’s crazy. How’d you get it to come out of that cannon?”
“It’s not a cannon, it’s a glue gun,” says the second guy, with enough pride in his voice that it’s immediately clear he’s the one who engineered the damn thing.
The guy on the right hits his mate on top of the head with a heavy fist. “I just said we weren’t gonna tell him nothing, dummy!”
“Ow!”
“There’s so much of it,” Sanji comments. He decides that it’s already solid enough to walk on, and jumps down. It’s deep enough that it encases the three guys nearly up to their kneecaps. “How’d you fit so much of it in the gun?” He tilts his head. The gun’s stand is encased in the glue, though the barrel of it has managed to escape the worst of it. There’s no tank or hose or anything else he can see attached that would be able to hold such a quantity of fluid.
The second guy starts to explain, “Well, see, the weapon itself actually produces–”
“Shut up!” The guy on the right clocks his pal on top of the head again.
The glue had reached the edges of the roof on either side of them pretty quickly, and hardened as it dripped down to form strange, lumpy stalactites, but none of them reach the ground, or even the upper balconies, so the people below are all blissfully unaware of the situation.
Sanji takes another step across the hardened glue-like substance, and has a brief pang of nostalgia remembering Mr 3 and his wax fruit, all the way back in Little Garden. “Is this a devil fruit thing?” he asks. He thinks about what Rusi the bouncer had said about a devil fruit eater causing a disturbance earlier on. Whenever they encounter weird shit like this there always seems to be a devil fruit behind it.
But the guy who’d been so chatty up to now seems to have finally learned his lesson. He just rubs his sore head and scowls, and doesn’t answer.
Sanji sighs. “It was a stupid plan anyway,” he tells them, frankly. “I’m guessing you were gonna flood the courtyard with it, right? Hate to break it to you, gents, but our swordsman would’ve cut through this stuff in no time. And it’d barely slow Luffy down; he’s just too strong.”
“But it would slow him down, a bit. Just for a while.” It’s the third man who speaks, this time. The one who’d been down on his hands and knees when the glue gun misfired, and was now unfortunately stuck like that – elbows deep in solid glue, his face turned upwards to keep it above the surface. He’s glaring at Sanji, which is unfortunately less intimidating than he’d probably like it to be from this position. Especially as his glasses are currently slipping down his nose and he has no way to push them back up into place. “And that’s all that matters.”
Sanji frowns. “Why would you want to–” Ah, he thinks, as it clicks in his brain like the flicking-on of a light switch. This isn’t how they’d planned to take down the Straw Hats at all. This is just… “A distraction,” he says, grimly. “You were just trying to distract us, hold us up for a while. But why?” His brain races through possibilities. Were they trying to make a move on some ally of the Straw Hats? No, none of their allies are here on Tuilerie with them, none of them are even anywhere close enough to make such a short distraction meaningful. Were they trying to rob them, maybe? Make an attempt on the Sunny? Surely not – Franky’s booby traps are no joke, and he’s rigged a set of proximity alarms so loud they’d be heard clear across this city. And even if these idiots managed to steal the ship, or some of the impressive stash of loot Nami keeps under lock and key onboard, what exactly are they gonna do with it? Luffy would catch and beat the shit out of them before they’d even sailed over the horizon.
He’s too busy thinking to notice the meaningful looks the three men are sending each other, until: “Now!” The first idiot yells, and the second idiot grabs at the glue gun.
Sanji, who had assumed the thing only had one shot in it – seriously, where is it storing all this fucking glue? – darts forward to stop him, but it’s too late. He’s already activated it, and the air fills with horrified yelps from below as a river of glue pours down into the courtyard.
The three men are unconscious before the flow begins to stop, one swift kick knocking out all three of the fuckers.
Sanji swings the gun around, catching the last few sputters on the roof edge, but it’s clearly too little too late.
“Sanji?” he hears, in a loud yell from below. “Is that you?”
“Yeah, captain. It’s me,” Sanji yells back. He leans over the railing to survey the damage.
It doesn’t look good. His crew mates, along with the civilians filling the little courtyard, are frozen up to their middles in already-solid glue.
“Is this a prank?” Luffy shouts. “It’s weird! You’re a weird guy, Sanji.”
“Fuck’s sake. No it’s not a prank!”
“Good,” Nami shouts, with a face like murder. Sanji swallows, and forces himself not to flinch at that tone in her beautiful voice. Even at this distance, it’s quite terrifying. “Because if you were the one responsible for getting glue in my hair, Sanji, I would cut off your dick with this cocktail umbrella.” She holds something up in her hand, too small for him to make out from here.
“Understood, my darling!” he says, and she flings the cocktail umbrella up at him like a dart. She may be four floors down, but she has a strong arm and a mean aim; Sanji ducks just in time for the tiny, deadly sharp bit of wood and colourful paper to hurtle past, centimetres from his face. “Don’t worry, my love, I already incapacitated the bastards responsible! They await their dick removal at your leisure!”
This seems to mollify her somewhat. “Good,” she says. He hears the familiar music of Robin’s laughter.
“Who are they?” Usopp calls. He’s working on pulling his kabuto out of the solid glue, without much success. “What is this stuff?”
“Not sure, on both counts. No marine uniforms, no pirate insignia, and I don’t recognise any of them from wanted posters. They’re probably bounty hunters.” There’s a small commotion as the inn’s security staff start appearing on balconies around the building. The customers who were previously on said balconies have been swarming into the inn proper since the glue deluge began; the sounds of general panic and mayhem can be heard spilling from the open windows, joining the distressed voices of the glue-stuck crowd in the courtyard who have started screaming and crying out for help. A woman appears on one of the far terraces and starts bellowing orders; Sanji figures she must be the boss, though she’s too far away for him to really see her properly. He raises his voice to be heard over her yelling. “Before I knocked them out these guys said something that made me think they’ve got more nonsense planned, and this was just a distraction. We should get out of here.”
“Good idea!” Luffy yells. “This stuff is weird, though. I can’t pull myself out. It kinda feels like… hmm. Like–”
“Sea stone,” Brook finishes. He’s carefully holding his violin up above his head, as if he thinks the glue level might be rising.
“Yeah! Like that!”
Shit, Sanji thinks. How would that even work? Was there ground up sea stone in the glue? That means it couldn’t have been made with a devil fruit, right? In fact, it would mean that the stuff was created specifically to target devil fruit users.
He starts anxiously counting off all members of the crew with a devil fruit, making sure they’re all safe and accounted for. Luffy is poking at the glue around his middle. Brook he’s already seen, he’s tall enough that he’s only in it up to his thigh bones. Robin is still sitting elegantly in her chair, looking for all the world as if there isn’t a small sea of glue holding her in place. That only leaves… “Where’s Chopper?” Sanji calls down, worry making the words wobble. “Is he okay?”
“I’m fine!” comes a muffled little voice from somewhere near Jinbei.
Sanji squints down, heart racing. He thinks he sees Chopper’s hat, but no sign of the doctor himself.
Jinbei reaches out a hand and picks the hat up from the bed of solid glue, revealing Chopper’s face beneath, his head just barely out of the glue lake that fills the courtyard. Chopper smiles. “I’m glad it wasn’t any deeper, though!” he says, cheerily.
Fucking hell. Sanji lets out the breath he was holding and gives the closest of the three unconscious idiots another kick for good measure.
“I don’t think it’s sea stone,” Jinbei says, the big rumble of his voice travelling up through the night air. He pats the hardened surface of the glue. “It feels more like the sea itself. I recognise the liquid pull of it.”
“Huh. Is that a fishman thing?” Franky wonders, and Sanji’s heard that tone before – the one that signifies he’s about to go full science-bro mode.
Jinbei nods. “The sea knows her children,” he says, mildly, which… sounds cryptic as fuck.
“Bro, that is super cool.”
“Thank you.”
“I suppose it could be made with salt water,” Usopp says, thoughtfully. “To make glue you need an adhesive agent and a solvent in the right ratio. Saline could work.”
“Focus!” Nami snaps. “Sanji, have you taken them all out or are there more?”
“I’ve taken out the three that were up here, but there could be more. And I don’t know what they were after.” It bugs him that he doesn’t know. What’s Sanji not seeing? He nudges the guy nearest to him over a bit, so he can get a good look at his face. It’s still familiar. Someone he’s seen recently, but where?
When it finally clicks, it feels obvious. Stupid. He remembers his thoughts from earlier – no one would’ve had any way of knowing we’d be here tonight. He raises his voice and shouts down to his friends, “I think one of them’s the park keeper from the city garden earlier, the one who suggested this place!”
“What?” Nami retorts, sharply. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
Usopp looks between the two of them, Sanji up aloft and Nami stuck on the ground, close enough to the side of the building where the glue came from that a significant quantity had spattered down her back and stuck to her clothes and hair. “That can’t be good,” he says, warily.
“Hey Sanji,” Luffy interjects, not looking up from his glue-prodding, “is Zoro up there with you?”
Zoro? Sanji’s eyes scan the courtyard again. There’s no sign of the swordsman. Of course, hadn’t Sanji already noticed him missing earlier, from the balcony. His heart sinks. He’d not thought anything of it at the time, but could these fuckers have lured him away somehow? Done something to incapacitate him? It’s hard to imagine anything taking out Roronoa Zoro, especially a group of fucking idiots with a glue gun. Still… Still. It’s concerning. It nags at the back of Sanji’s mind, like an itch under the skin. “No,” he calls back to Luffy. “The last time I saw him he was with you.”
“Nah, he’s not been out here for a while.” Usopp and Nami exchange worried looks. Luffy picks at the top layer of glue, trying to peel it up, oblivious to the tense atmosphere that’s descended on the courtyard. “I wonder where he is?” he continues, blithely. “I bet he could cut this stuff up in no time.”
That’s right, Sanji thinks. He could. He doesn’t have a devil fruit, so he wouldn’t have been hampered by the seastone or saltwater or whatever it was in the glue. And these idiot bounty hunters had to have known that – everyone knows there’s nothing Zoro can’t cut.
“Shit.” If the plan was to temporarily incapacitate the devil fruit users, then perhaps… perhaps their target was one of the crew members they knew would be unaffected by it. Shit. He leans out over the railing and calls down, “Guys, what if they’re after Zoro?”
There’s a pause. Then: “Then they’re fools,” Jinbei replies, firmly. “And they deserve what’s coming to them.”
Logically, Sanji agrees. There’s no need to worry about Zoro. He’s very nearly the best swordsman in the world – he only doesn’t hold the title on a technicality, because he’s not had time in the last few years to go back and challenge his mentor for it. And because, Sanji privately thinks, his affection for the old guy has been making him reluctant to risk harming him.
“He could just be lost,” Nami tries. “You know how he is.”
Yeah, Sanji knows. He knows Zoro down to his blood and bone, the good and the bad and the fucking ridiculous of him. Knows that in all likelihood he’s simply gotten lost trying to find the damn bathroom, or the bar to buy more booze. He’s probably in a mop cupboard right now making grumpy faces and telling the bleach that the rooms have moved while he was walking around. Dick head.
But the thing is. The thing is… Sanji’s not willing to risk it.
What if there are more bounty hunters, or whoever the fuck these glue gun losers are? What if they’ve got some trick up their sleeve? What if some of them aren’t incompetent pieces of shit?
Fuck, Sanji won’t be held responsible for what he’ll do if that mossy bastard gets himself killed now, when things between them have finally mellowed from years of antagonistic dick measuring into something he doesn’t even have the words to name – beyond friendship or camaraderie, despite all their bickering. Something that makes them two sides of the same coin, inseparable and opposite.
They’re one being, he sometimes thinks, on days when they’ve fought together so smoothly it’s hard to tell where one of them stops and the other begins. One being with two faces. One beast with two pairs of hands but one snarl, one roar, one set of teeth.
“Okay,” he calls down, directing his words primarily to Nami, who he knows is more likely to get it than the rest of them. Her and Zoro are thick as fucking thieves, always have been. “You guys hold tight, I’m gonna go rescue his sorry arse. I’ll meet you back here when I’ve got him!”
Nami nods, so he turns to go.
“Sanji,” Luffy calls, and that one word has all the weight of the pirate king’s authority behind it, an authority Luffy seldom wields. Sanji pauses. Looks back down at his captain. “Zoro’s strong,” Luffy says, firmly. Like Sanji needs reminding – shit, he knows the guy’s strong, he fights beside him every single fucking day. He knows Zoro’s strength inside out, knows it like he knows the recipes Zeff taught him as a kid, would recognise it even if he were struck deaf and blind.
Luffy must see this in his face, somehow, despite the distance from the ground to the roof. He cracks a broad, stretchy grin. “Go get him,” he says, and Sanji doesn’t need the order repeated.
He nods, once. “Yes, captain,” he says.
Then he’s off.
*
He hears them before he sees them.
He’s been tearing frantically from floor to floor through the inn, fighting his way upstream through crowds that are trying to spill, panicked, down the stairs to the ground floor exit, grabbing people at random and asking if they’ve seen a green haired guy with one eye, a big guy, grumpy, with an unnecessary number of swords and an inability to walk in a straight line even when sober.
Most people are too panicked to even answer, and of those that do, none of them have seen him.
It isn’t until Sanji reaches the stairwell that leads up to the private quarters on the very top floor that he hears it. A sound from overhead – the distinctive ring of steel blades meeting.
He’d know that sound fucking anywhere; he’d know it in his sleep, hell, he thinks he could even identify which of Zoro’s swords he was using at any given moment by the particular tone it made when clashing with another blade.
The heavy wooden door leading to the entry hall of the private quarters is locked, and marked with a sign designating the entire upper floor as off-limits. Without so much as pausing, Sanji kicks it the fuck in and strolls through.
He finds himself in an entry hall. Lamps are lit in the rooms ahead, though not in the entry hall itself; the light of them spills in from the far end of the hall through an open archway, casting everything in a muffled, reflected sort of glow.
If Sanji had been able to pay attention to anything but the sound of fighting from the room ahead, he might have thought to himself that the apartment was a nice one, high ceilinged and well appointed, kind of traditional-looking, with lots of exposed wood and high ceilings, higher than on the lower levels. There are large potted ferns and succulents standing at intervals down the hallway along either side of a long, richly patterned rug, their ornate leaves casting strange, irregular shadows onto the walls and giving the impression of walking through a shadowy jungle glade, cool and shaded by foliage, the bright sun hidden away above some distant canopy.
As it is, though, his entire attention is occupied by the situation beyond the archway. Metal on metal, heavy footsteps, soft grunts of exertion in a familiar voice, and a low, mean laugh responding.
Sanji doesn’t know how many assailants might be waiting around the corner or how in control of the situation his crew mate is likely to be, so he carefully sticks to the shadows close against the near wall when he cautiously peers around the corner.
Fortunately there are only two people in the room beyond.
Zoro and a man with long, silver-streaked blonde hair in a single braid. A tall man, broad, even taller and broader than Zoro, which Sanji spares a moment to be impressed by. The two of them don’t notice him, at first, too caught up in their fight, so he waits on the periphery, still mostly hidden from view by the entryway. After a moment the big man turns so that his face is visible from Sanji’s position. He’s grinning at Zoro, eyes gleaming, white teeth visible in the open snarl of his mouth as they circle each other, and Sanji nearly breaks his cover when he realises he recognises this motherfucker.
It’s Rusi, the gay fucking bouncer from downstairs.
What the fuck is he doing up here, fighting Zoro?
For a moment Sanji’s mind races. Maybe Rusi ran into Zoro wandering about up here and assumed he was part of the group attacking the inn? It’s plausible, especially given Zoro’s predilection for getting totally fucking lost at the drop of a hat.
But some part of him knows already that that’s not true. That part of him that’s so attuned to Zoro when they fight that he knows where to be, what to do, who to attack and who to leave to Zoro’s swords, without having to exchange a single word with him.
Before he can step forward, Rusi speaks. His voice is as cold and mean as his laughter, with none of the heat that’d been in it when he was flirting with Sanji earlier.
“Roronoa Zoro,” he sneers, and tosses the long, blond braid of his hair over his shoulder. “You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this.”
Sanji’s stomach drops. He gets the impression that this is something personal for Rusi – if that’s even his real name. And personal vendettas are always the fucking worst to deal with.
“You’re right,” Zoro replies, casually, like he’s already bored. “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
Sanji knows him too well, though. Well enough to hear it in his voice that underneath the careful nonchalance, Zoro’s worried about something.
He doesn’t know how long they’ve been fighting, but the room’s already a wreck. These days most of Zoro’s one-on-one duels are quick affairs, finished in a few moves unless he’s in the mood to draw it out and toy with his opponent for a while. Sanji’s not sure what’s different here. He feels like he’s missing something.
In his hands Rusi’s twirling a nasty looking mace – huge and blunt, a heavy looking mother fucker with two metal balls hanging from thick chains at one end. Sanji presumes that it’s the cause of the smashed up shit around the room, which looks to be a sort of fancy parlour; there’s the ruined fragments of a rosewood table lying in pieces on the floor, a scatter of chairs, most of which have been up-ended, and the broken shards of a decorative ceramic vase that must’ve been almost as tall as Sanji before finding itself smashed to smithereens. On the walls, entire sections of the fine wallpaper have been cut to ribbons, and now hang in tatters.
The two men start forward and fall back a few times, towards and away from each other, like they’re testing the waters.
Zoro’s fighting more cautiously than Sanji’s ever seen before. Hanging back, watchful and wary, none of his swords out, though his hand rests protectively on Wado’s hilt. It’s like he’s waiting for Rusi to move first before he strikes. It’s weird. Usually he’d fell a guy like this in one move without even having to think about it, one powerful downwards slash with Enma to spill the guy’s soft guts from the thick trunk of his body.
Why’s he holding back?
Rusi swings the mace at him, and Zoro evades rather than directly blocking. Sanji can’t even remember the last time that happened. It’s like he’s trying to avoid being touched, he realises. Even indirectly, via his swords.
Rusi laughs, manic and cold. “What’s the matter, demon? Don’t want to risk your precious blades?” He swings the mace forward again, arm raised, muscles rippling. Again, Zoro dodges rather than counter attacking. “You can’t escape me forever.”
“I don’t have to,” Zoro says, with more confidence than Sanji feels in this moment.
“Ha! You think your friends will help you? I’m afraid they’re a little caught up at the moment. My associates have made sure they’ll be occupied for quite some time.”
Zoro’s mouth twitches. He spins, quicker on his feet than you’d think a man his size could be, and drops down low, below the trajectory of the swinging mace, and grabs two fistfuls of the rug Rusi’s feet are planted on, pulling hard and quick so that it jerks along the floor, overbalancing the man standing on it.
Rusi lets out a frustrated cry as he stumbles, arms wheeling to try to find his balance again, the two balls of the mace veering dangerously close to his own body. For a moment Sanji thinks he’s sure to go down – but the moment passes, and he rights himself. And as soon as he’s stable he twirls the nasty looking weapon back around his body to build up momentum, then brings it down sharply towards where Zoro had ducked – but he’s already rolling away, back out of reach, and it crashes down on nothing but the polished wooden floorboards, which it promptly gauges an ugly hole into.
Rusi tugs at it, but one of the chains is caught on the fractured wood.
It’s the chance Zoro’s been waiting for, surely. Sanji holds his breath, watching for the moment when Zoro will take advantage of his opponent’s distraction and finally make his attack. Though he’d never admit it to the man’s face, he can privately acknowledge that Zoro is magnificent in battle with those swords. He’s like a hurricane, a force of fucking nature. Horrifying. Beautiful. Violently destructive, something you can’t bring yourself to look away from.
Normally Sanji’s too involved in the fight himself to stop and properly appreciate it, but now…
He watches in horror as Zoro hesitates. He leaves both Kitetsu and Enma sheathed, withdrawing Wado instead and holding her in a too-tight grip, but then his resolve seems to falter. His mouth sets in a grim line, and he snatches up a long, nasty-looking shard of broken pottery from the floor instead.
What the fuck’s going on?
Zoro lets the shard fly towards Rusi’s throat in a straight, deadly line.
Instead of blocking it, Rusi only reaches out a hand towards the incoming projectile, as if it isn’t sharp and jagged enough to go right through his hand like a knife through butter at this speed. Sanji grimaces at the thought, he can hardly make himself watch – but as soon as the ceramic shard touches his skin, something happens.
The air shifts, gets an ozone shimmer Sanji recognises all too well.
A devil fruit. This guy’s got a fucking devil fruit. All that bullshit about clearing out a group of troublemakers who had a devil fruit user with them… was he was talking about his damn self the whole time?
The pottery shard changes the moment it touches him, jagged edges smoothing down as if instantly sanded to perfect smoothness, spiked front edge rounding off to something that’s no longer sharp at all, but… but…
“The blunt-blunt fruit,” Rusi says, with a smile so smug Sanji instantly itches to kick it off his smarmy fucking face. Rusi tosses the now-harmless pottery shard aside dismissively. “As I told you, it will irreversibly blunt any inanimate object used as a weapon against me. Did you not believe it?” He laughs, and Sanji sees a murderous light gleaming in Zoro’s good eye. “Or did you merely want a demonstration? I can give you another, if you like.” Sanji watches while, as if in slow motion, he stretches out his hand across the space between them towards the gleaming blade of Wado Ichimonji, its hilt still gripped tight in Zoro’s fist.
Sanji sees red. Blood red, dark and instantaneous.
It’s temporarily staggering, the force of his fury. He can’t even remember the last time he was this fucking angry; it’s pouring out of him like smoke, black and cloying.
How dare this bastard even attempt to set a finger on Zoro’s swords? On Wado, his companion since childhood, the sword that once belonged to his childhood friend? How dare he threaten something that means so much to such an honourable man, the man who will be the greatest swordsman in the godforsaken world? That sword’s worth more than Rusi’s entire pathetic fucking life.
Across the room he sees Zoro’s back straighten suddenly, his head cocking ever so slightly towards the archway as if, even with his back turned, he can sense Sanji’s rage. As if he can hear it, like a dog called to attention by a whistle in a frequency no human ear could detect.
Sanji watches the corner of his mouth – all he can see of it from this angle – curl up in a vicious smile.
Then he speaks. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he tells Rusi, in the same deceptively casual tone from earlier.
Only this time he means it, Sanji knows. There’s no fear in him now, no doubt. Those have all fucked off, leaving behind only the certainty of victory.
It’s a certainty so absolute that Rusi hesitates in the face of it. Pauses, one hand still outstretched. “Why not?” he asks, drawing all his cocky bravado back around himself like an unfashionable coat. His eyes burn with a cold fire. “Since my brother’s humiliation at your hands, I have made it my life’s mission to bring about your downfall. If this is a plea for mercy it will be met by deaf ears.”
Zoro smirks. Sanji thinks he hears Wado sing in his hand. “You have a brother?”
At the word brother from Zoro’s mouth, Rusi glowers with barely-repressed hatred. “I am Remirusi Morgan,” he announces, in the grand tone of someone who expects his words to have a big impact. He takes a menacing step towards Zoro. “Second son of the Morgan family. Brother to the Axe-Hand.” He waits, tall and menacing, for the full force of his revelation to sink in.
Zoro shrugs. “Sorry, doesn’t ring a bell.”
It’s objectively funny, how offended Rusi is by this pronouncement. Sanji knows Zoro’s telling the truth, too – whoever this guy’s brother is, or was, he clearly didn’t make enough of an impression to be memorable.
Morgan, Sanji thinks. He can’t place it either, no matter how much he wracks his brain trying to remember everyone they’ve had dealings with since entering the Grand Line. Axe-Hand? Is that someone with a literal axe for a hand? Or is it a kind of fishman, like a hammerhead shark? He can’t think of anyone they’ve met who might fit the bill, either way.
Rusi’s face has started turning a vivid and unattractive red with rage.
“No offence,” Zoro tells him. “I meet a lot of people.”
“You,” Rusi sputters, spittle flying from his mouth. “You were the root cause of all of it! My brother’s disgrace, his downfall, our family’s ignominy. And now you insult me by pretending to not even remember his name!” He yanks at the mace, rage giving him the strength to pull it free of the damaged floor in one tug. He starts to swing it wildly above his head, uncontrolled and clumsy with emotion. “To avenge my brother’s name I tracked down the one devil fruit I knew would be able to deliver us our revenge against the man who would be the world’s greatest swordsman: the blunt-blunt fruit! And now, Roronoa Zoro, after years of waiting, that revenge is finally within my grasp. You will watch me destroy every one of your precious swords, powerless to prevent their ruin.”
The red starts to seep back into Sanji’s vision. He lets it build, stores the anger up inside himself like the force inside an impact dial. The cruelty of what Rusi’s threatening, the sheer fucking waste of it – Enma, Wado, the beautiful, cursed Sandai Kitetsu – Sanji knows those swords like he knows his own name. They’ve saved his life a hundred times over. He’s felt their familiar, reassuring presence at his back in every serious fight he’s ever been in, and this bastard will take them from Zoro’s hands over his dead fucking body.
Rusi’s voice rises to a fever pitch as he spits, “And when I’m done and their blades are forever blunted, I will make you beg for death!”
Zoro looks him up and down, considering. “I doubt it,” he says, simply.
“Ha!” Rusi exclaims, manic-eyed and still quite violently purple. He advances another step. “What can possibly stop me now?”
Zoro points to one side. “Him.”
Sanji doesn’t see Remirusi Morgan frown and turn his head to follow that pointing finger, because he’s already flying through the air towards the big motherfucker foot-first, powerful legs outstretched.
The moment his flaming foot connects with the big guy’s hateful fucking head, he crumples to the floor like a sack of wet shit.
Zoro’s smirk never falters.
Sanji stands with him over the guy’s unconscious body, rolling his shoulders, and feels something close to disappointment when the bastard doesn’t get back up again.
*
Sanji sips at his seventh… eighth? glass of botanical wine, and lets the perfumed rose-petal sweetness of it sit on his tongue. It’s ice cold. He touches his tongue to his soft palette, a shiver of flavour he can almost smell, and finally swallows. He lets his head drop to rest against the cushioned chair back behind him, and sighs dreamily. “Exquisite,” he mutters at the ceiling.
He might be a little drunk.
It had turned out, in the end, that the pretty barmaid he’d spoken to at the start of the night was actually the boss of the whole inn, and the owner of the private apartment he and Zoro had trashed during their fight with Rusi Morgan. Oops.
Fortunately she’d been so pissed off with Morgan for fucking up her inn and scaring away her customers that she’d also quite happily put the blame for her fucked up living room squarely on him, too, and when he and his associates were carted away in seastone handcuffs by the local magistrate she’d loudly vowed to instigate legal proceedings in order to take them for every berry they owned in recompense.
Nami had looked at her, then, like she’d hung the fucking moon, and declared her a “woman after my own heart.” The two of them had been walking round arm in arm ever since, directing the clean up efforts.
Her name turned out to be Rosalie Blüte, and she’d been so grateful to the Straw Hats for kicking Morgan’s arse and sorting out her little glue problem – apparently Franky had lasered himself out of the glue in no time while Usopp had melted the stuff immediately surrounding himself with some of his old tabasco stars, then together they’d whipped up a super-powered solvent that could be used to dissolve the rest of the seawater glue that was covering the courtyard – that she’d insisted on lavishing them with food and drink for the rest of the night by way of a thank you.
They'd happily taken her up on the offer, of course.
The inn remained open and some customers did slowly start to return, seemingly as much to gawk at the ruined courtyard and the infamous pirate crew at the centre of so much chaos, but it was markedly quieter and less crowded than it had been earlier in the night, so most of the Straw Hats had relocated indoors while Chopper, Franky and Usopp remained in the courtyard, Chopper to administer medical attention to any bumps or scrapes that had been sustained during the course of the evening's antics, the other two to finish glue clear up.
Apparently little could be done for the plants in their pots and raised beds that had been swamped by the glue, which seemed a pity to Sanji. They'd been so beautiful, and obviously prized and well tended.
“Don’t worry yourselves about it,” Rosalie Blüte had reassured them. “Flowers grow quick on Tuilerie. We'll plant more, and they’ll be delighting our customers again in no time.” Then she laughed. “In the meantime just the story alone of how they came to be ruined during a pitch battle between the legendary pirate king and his enemies will be enough to draw people in from miles around, mark my words. There’s nothing people love more than a good tale, and I am quite prepared to capitalise on that.”
Sanji thought he could actually see the hearts in Nami’s eyes. They looked a lot like berry signs. “Are you single, Ms Blüte?” she asked, somewhat breathlessly.
“Oh, please. Call me Rosalie.”
“Wait!” Usopp interrupted, and Nami glared at him so frighteningly he immediately dropped the basin of solvent he'd been carrying, which sloshed over the sides and soaked his boots. “Ah, damn. No, but wait – about the plants, I've got an idea.” And he'd pulled out a handful of brown paper seed packets from his bag, each one carefully labelled with his neat handwriting. “Ms–uh, Rosalie. How would you like to grow some plants that'll really turn heads?”
Rosalie had been intrigued.
And so they'd gotten to work planting a selection of some of Usopp's more decorative, less lethal seed varieties as Sanji left them to it and made his way inside to the others. The gasps and coos of delight as the plants immediately sprouted and started to grow could be heard even inside the inn's main building.
The night had grown cooler, and soon, in between all the cleaning and mending, some of the staff had busied round lighting candles and building up a small fire under one of the inn's central chimneys. The warm light made everything soft and inviting, as if trying to persuade those it fell on to sit and relax, perhaps indulge in a drink or two.
And when Sanji returned from the bathroom, where he'd been attempting to scrub the blood off his shoe and buff it back up to something like its customary polish, he’d found Zoro waiting for him with enough wine bottles that Sanji worried whether the table would bear the weight of them all.
“What’s this?” he'd asked.
Zoro shrugged, not quite meeting his eyes, and only said, “You wanted to try them.”
Feeling slightly as if he might have hit his head earlier and everything since had been some kind of concussion related dream, Sanji tipped the closest bottle backwards just enough to see the label. “Tuilerie Botanicals,” he read aloud, “Lavandula Angustifolia, twenty-two percent.” He glanced at Zoro again. “This is lavender wine.”
Zoro nodded at the selection, a mix of bottles in various shapes, colours and sizes, all with similar labels. “I told the Blüte woman to give us one of every kind she had. This is it.”
It was a surprisingly thoughtful gesture from a man with moss for brains. Sanji found himself oddly touched by it. “What’s brought this on?”
Zoro raised an eyebrow, as if to say are you kidding? “You saved my swords,” he said, like the rest was self-explanatory.
“And the four of you decided to team up and thank me with enough wine to kill a man?”
Zoro grinned, as if, in his opinion, that was in fact the ideal quantity of any alcoholic beverage.
“Careful,” Sanji warned him. “People might start thinking we're friends.”
And instead of arguing Zoro had only barked out a laugh, and asked him which bottle of fancy flower booze he wanted to start with.
There were many different varieties of fancy flower booze produced on Tuilerie, as it turned out. More, even, than the lovely Rosalie kept in the inn’s stores – though what was here was more than enough to be getting on with, even for Zoro’s liver capacity. Sanji browsed through them, noting the provenance of each in case any of them ended up being good enough to make it worth obtaining a quantity for the ship's stores, and in the end he'd selected a wine made with violets to try first. It was a very vivid purple. Sanji poured two glasses from the wide, bell-shaped bottle it came in.
Zoro eyed the glass Sanji handed him dubiously, but seemed happy enough to drink it once Sanji held his own, much more modestly-filled glass up in brief salute, and brought it to his mouth to taste.
It was a strange flavour, unlike anything he’d tried before. Pungent, almost medicinal. Not as sweet as he'd been expecting, with a powdery quality that remained on the tongue after swallowing. Strong, too, more potently alcoholic than the fruit wines Sanji was used to. It was, without question, a delicacy to be savoured.
Zoro poured his own serving down his throat in one short series of swallows, then pursed his lips and frowned at the empty glass like he was confused and slightly offended by its very existence.
Sanji had burst out into helpless giggles at the sight of that baffled expression on the man's ridiculous face. “You don’t like it,” he managed to get out, between tremors of laughter. He supposed he hadn't expected him to like it – no one would ever accuse Zoro’s palette of being refined.
“I didn't say that,” Zoro returned, defensively. He was still peering suspiciously at the dregs of wine that were left in his glass, though, like it was a complicated puzzle that he couldn't quite solve. His lower lip was already purple-stained. As Sanji watched, he darted his tongue out to swipe at it, absently. “I dunno if I like it,” he settled on. “It’s weird.”
“Hmm. You want some more, then, maybe?” Sanji tilted the open bottle at him in invitation.
And Zoro had shrugged. “Sure.” He swiped the bottle from Sanji’s hand, putting the neck of it to his mouth and downing about half without pause.
Sanji collapsed into giggles again. “Heathen,” he called him, soft and fond and chuckling in the firelight.
They’ve worked their way through a good two thirds of the different varieties now, though they’re not even attempting to finish each bottle. Zoro drinks more, of course, because he’s a monster with a liver made out of sword metal, but generally they’re going for range rather than thoroughness. A proper sampling.
“What’s this one?” Zoro asks, snatching the current bottle from Sanji’s loose grip.
“Rose,” Sanji happily informs him, still gazing up at the ceiling, its dark wooden beams and lofty rafters barely visible in the candlelight. “I think this one might be my favourite.” He doesn’t know if it’s the flavour itself, or just that he loves roses and always has. He doesn’t care if it’s obvious or boring – roses are romantic as fuck, okay, sometimes the hype exists for a reason. They’re the fairytale. The love story. Everyone deserves that, right?
There’s a moment’s pause, then, “Too sweet,” Zoro grunts like a neanderthal from somewhere close beside him.
Sanji giggles again, curling in on himself, the stem of the wine glass dangling dangerously from his fingertips for a moment before it’s caught and lifted carefully out of his grip by a warm, steady hand.
“You’re drunk,” Zoro tells him, setting the glass on the table. He doesn’t sound as judgey about it as he could be. Which is good, because it would be kind of incredibly fucking hypocritical of him.
“Mm,” Sanji hums in happy agreement.
A while ago the two of them had relocated their many wine bottles to a nook by one of the fireplaces, attracted by the comfortable-looking sofa in pride of place in front of the fire. The table in front of them is more of a coffee table, low and wide with a few magazines and an out of date newspaper stacked on one side of it, and now littered with half empty wine bottles. The wooden surface is a flat but irregular shape, like a piece of driftwood polished to smoothness. It’s nice, Sanji thinks. This whole place is nice. Cosy and intimate, lived in, like they’re in a living room rather than a big city inn.
He hears Luffy’s laughter mingling with Robin’s somewhere nearby, can see Jinbei and Brook squeezed side by side on another sofa in a matching nook on the far side of the room. They’re sharing a pot of tea. How the hell did they manage to find tea in a bar?
In front of them, in the centre of the room, he can see Nami perched on a bar stool, flirting with the pretty barmaid. Bar owner. Rosalie. Whatever.
He sighs, gaze lingering wistfully on the two women. “What does she have that I don’t?” he asks nobody in particular. He could be talking about either of them, he thinks.
“Tits,” Zoro replies, bluntly.
Sanji feels himself flush. “Would you watch your fucking mouth? Talking about a lady like that, fuck's sake.”
“You watch my fucking mouth,” he retorts, nonsensically, and Sanji’s eyes obey before his brain has caught up, darting to Zoro’s lips.
They’re more stained than earlier, but not quite as purple. The colours from the various strains of wine have mixed together, ending up a pinkish red that’s closer to his natural lip colour than the violet wine had been, but darker, flushed and wet and a bit mottled, like an uneven smear of lipstick.
Sanji looks away again, not quickly enough, and fails to think of a good comeback in time to not make it awkward and weird.
Which is funny, cos he’s been thinking all night about how things haven’t been like that between them – awkward and weird – for a long while. They argue, sure, but they argue like the act of arguing is a competitive sport they both enjoy, rather than anything with any real animosity behind it.
He snatches the still mostly-full glass of rose wine back up from where Zoro had carefully and safely placed it on the table and drinks it down in too much of a hurry, letting his eyes flutter closed in ecstasy at the taste as it pours down his gullet.
It chills him inside, leaves everything rose tinted when he blinks his eyes open again. The room is starting to sway, gently, like it’s dancing, and his hair has somehow come loose from the little leather thong he ties it back with, and is all messy waves around his face. “Fuck, that’s gorgeous,” he says, about the wine, and there’s a beat before he hears Zoro give a choked “yeah” of agreement.
Sanji giggles, and touches the cool, empty glass to his warm cheek as he looks over at him. “Thought it was too sweet for you.”
Zoro’s staring at him like he’s got something on his face. “So did I,” he says.
Sanji laughs so much his shoulders shake, the taste of rose petals on his tongue. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he informs Zoro, between giggles. He doesn’t think he’s laughed as much as he has tonight in ages. It feels good. Fuck, everything feels so good.
Zoro exhales slowly, like he’s counting down from ten in his head, but he’s not frowning any more. In fact he’s got one of those little half-smiles teasing at the corner of his mouth, like he’d had upstairs when he’d realised Sanji was there waiting to rescue his sorry arse from what’s-his-name the gay bouncer. Sanji feels smug about that in ways he’s not nearly sober enough to contemplate. He thinks Zoro sounds impossibly fond when he says “you’re gonna be a wreck tomorrow, curls.”
“I’m a wreck tonight,” Sanji tells him, quite truthfully. Cos when is he not? Ah, but he shouldn’t say that. It brings the mood down. Look, Zoro’s already frowning again, and that’s… that’s unacceptable. “No no no, don’t frown,” Sanji tells him, plaintively. “Look, everyone’s so happy. You’ve gotta be happy too, it’s the law.”
“I’m a pirate,” Zoro says. “A literal outlaw.”
“Shh,” Sanji tells him. He points at Luffy, who’s still laughing with Robin and Franky. “I’ll tell the captain you’re being a spoilsport.”
“Heaven forbid,” Zoro mutters.
Robin’s leaning against Franky, her slender body nestled against one bulky arm. They look good together, Sanji thinks, and somehow that thought – that he’s happy for them, that they fit each other, that they’re so natural together that it feels like they’ve always been a pair – muddles into something wistful in his gut.
“Why’s it always you and me, huh, moss?” he finds himself saying. “When all of us are…” He gestures around the room with a hand that’s too loose and boneless at the end of his wrist to make the movement anything but vague and clumsy. “It’s always you and me over here.” He waves his hand at the nook. “You know?”
Zoro’s still frowning, that bastard. “Not really,” he says. When his eyebrows furrow like that it pulls at the skin above his damaged eye socket, where the scar tissue is tight and knotted. Sanji’s fingers twitch with the unsettling urge to touch it, feel the texture under his fingertips. He wonders what it would be like.
He clears his throat, and tries to concentrate on whatever the fuck it is he’s trying to say. “It’s like. There’s all of us, right? The crew, I mean. You’re with me so far, yeah?” Zoro nods slowly. Good. Sanji sways a little closer to him, close enough to jab a finger into his stupid rock hard chest. “And then there’s you and me,” he says, a bit quieter, like a secret. “Kind of… inside that. And… also apart. Even when we’re all together.” A unit within a unit. A pair. Separate. Together. Alone. Ugh, Sanji doesn’t know how to put this into words, and the frustration of trying is killing him. “Fuck, I can’t explain it right.”
Zoro catches his wrist. Sanji expects him to push the finger away from his chest, but instead he just holds it there, his big hand around the delicate bones like the deadly gold cuffs Sanji wore back on Whole Cake Island.
He wonders why he’s remembering that now. He generally tries not to think about that place, that time, if he can help it. It’s not a good memory, and it had taken so long afterwards to regain the trust of the rest of the crew. Of Zoro in particular. Sanji still doesn’t know why the idiot took him leaving so fucking hard, but he knows he never wants to go through that again. The painstaking process of repairing what had broken between them, making it strong and whole again, getting back to a place where they could work together like they used to, almost supernaturally in synch, their awareness of each other in the heat of battle eclipsing anything else going on around them.
“It’s okay,” Zoro says, low and soothing, and his thumb rubs, once, over the pale skin of Sanji’s inner wrist. “I know what you mean.”
Sanji feels himself sag with relief. “You do?” He should’ve expected it, he thinks. Zoro always understands him. They understand each other. When they fight, they reach a point where even words are unnecessary, and this is just that same thing bleeding out from the battlefield into the rest of their lives. He supposes it was bound to happen sooner or later.
In fact, when he thinks about it, it’s probably been happening for a while, too gradually for either of them to notice.
“I do,” Zoro says. “I can’t tell you why, though.” He lets go of Sanji’s wrist.
With what little of his brain is still sober enough to think properly, Sanji considers the phrasing of that statement. Not I don’t know but I can’t tell you. It tickles at his brain. “You knew,” he murmurs, distractedly. “Earlier, upstairs, when you were fighting that dick head… you knew I was there before you saw me.”
Zoro doesn’t try to deny it. “My observation's not as good as yours,” he says, calmly. “But I'd know you anywhere, curly. You know that.”
There's something in his voice, in the words he's saying, that Sanji knows he should be paying attention to. But the wine has gone to his head, and he feels too fuzzy and sleepy and soft to work out exactly what. “I’m sorry the gay bouncer turned out to be a dick,” he says.
Zoro seems confused by this. “There’s… a gay bouncer?” he says, slowly.
Sanji shakes his head sadly. “Not any more, my friend.” He reaches out to comfortingly pat Zoro’s shoulder, misses, and accidentally smacks him in the face. “Oops.”
With the air of a man whose infinite patience is being sorely tested, Zoro removes the hand from his face and settles it back on Sanji’s own lap. “What the fuck are you talking about, cook?”
“I was going to set you up with him,” Sanji explains, still thinking about what’s-his-name. Rossi? Roofie? Rusi! “He was strong and he had good hair. That’s your type, right?”
“Since when do you know my type?”
Sanji laughs again, and casts his gaze around looking for the bottle of rose wine. He doesn’t need to try any other flavours, he decides – this is it. This is the one. When you know you know. Hell, even Zoro admitted he was coming round to it.
Ah, there it is.
“You think I don’t notice when you fuck around with men?” he says, slightly distracted with trying to summon the hand-eye coordination to not spill a drop of his new favourite drink in the world as he pours it into his glass. He bites his tongue in concentration, and manages to hold both bottle and glass steady.
He’s concentrating so hard that he misses the way Zoro’s gone silent beside him at first, until he finishes pouring and sets the bottle safely back down again with a little “ha!” of triumph. Then he looks up and sees one dark brown eye staring at him inscrutably, a tightly drawn mouth, shoulders a straight line of tension.
Sanji blinks. “Wait, did you really think I didn’t know?” There’s a moment of silence in response that seems to go on forever, stretching out and out and out like taffy. Sanji swallows, feeling suddenly a lot more sober. “Zoro–”
“How long do you think you’ve known?”
Sanji looks down at the glass of wine. He doesn’t feel quite so rose-tinted any more, for some reason. He feels guilty, and he doesn’t know why. “I dunno,” he says, quietly. “A while.”
“A while. Right. And you don’t have a problem with it?”
Sanji feels thrown by the tightness of Zoro’s voice, defensive, like they’re already squaring up for a fight. “You think I have a problem with queer men?” he says, and he can’t quite keep the hurt from showing.
“Yeah,” Zoro returns, unapologetic.
And the hurt grows. Makes him meaner. “You think you know me so well–”
“I know you,” Zoro cuts him off. It’s a brick wall of a statement. It doesn’t give an inch.
Sanji narrows his eyes, preparing to kick a hole through it anyway. “Honey, you've got no idea,” he says, his voice a dangerous purr. “Two years I spent on that fucking island, having my arse handed to me – by a bunch of drag queens, no less – and all my stupid, embarrassing dickhead hangups and preconceptions deconstructed brick by fucking brick. And I loved them for it.”
The worst years of his life. The best years of his life. Oh he's glad to be where he is now, to be who he is now: the left hand of the pirate king, the cook, an integral part of this insane, mismatched family that found him and kept him and wouldn’t fucking let him go even when he tried his damnedest to make them, fuck.
And he'd missed them all so much during those two years they’d all spent apart from each other. But he’d made friends on Momoiro, too. People he was intimate with in ways he'd never let himself be before with anyone who wasn't a lover. Friends who would hold his hand, or come up behind him while he was cooking to slip their arms around his waist, or run their fingers idly through his hair while they chatted. Friends who would bully him into a dress and heels and take him out drinking, dancing, and nudge him with their elbow to point out the way a man's jaw would drop at the sight of him. Friends whose laps he'd happily sit on, whose cheeks he'd kiss hello and goodbye, friends who'd hold him in the night when his annoying fucking nightmares were bothering him and never ask him to explain what he dreamt about.
He doesn’t know how to say any of this.
“You spent two years with drag queens?” Zoro’s staring at him like he’s grown another head.
“You spent two years with Dracule Mihawk,” Sanji retorts, sullenly, as if these things are in some way comparable. “Anyway. I didn’t go through an entire two year identity crisis just to have you accuse me of being a fucking bigot, thanks.”
Zoro’s mouth works soundlessly for a moment. And a part of Sanji – a part he’s not very proud of – feels a thrill of satisfaction at the idea that he’s managed to shock him.
“Cook,” he says, when he finally manages to get his brain-to-mouth communication working again. “Sanji.” And oh, that’s playing dirty, bringing out the big guns like that. “I don’t think you’re a bigot. That’s not what I meant to say.”
“Isn’t it?”
Zoro sighs. He holds up a finger in front of Sanji's face – the unspoken instruction: wait – plucks the glass from Sanji’s hand and downs the rest of his wine.
“Hey!”
“You’re drunk,” Zoro reminds him, depositing the empty glass on the fancy coffee table beside the equally empty bottle. “And I need you to not pass out before you can tell me about this island of drag queens you lived on for multiple years and then never fucking mentioned.”
Sanji crosses his arms. “It wasn’t just drag queens,” he informs Zoro, primly. “Momoiro is…” Fuck, how to explain it? Even if he were sober, he wouldn’t know how. “It’s mostly gay men, and a lot of them are queens; they don’t call it a queendom for nothing. But it’s also a haven for queer folk of all kinds. A sanctuary. And it's fucking terrifying. And it's beautiful.” He feels a wave of emotion rise up in his chest, nearly strong enough to choke him. Shit, is he really doing this? He strongly feels that Momoiro would fall under one of the categories of things that he and Zoro simply Do Not Discuss. He’s not sure how he’s supposed to go back to that, after tonight. He's not sure if he wants to. “There’s nowhere else like it, marimo, believe me.”
“I do,” Zoro says, and Sanji feels a rush of gratitude that threatens to sweep him right off his feet.
“I made friends there. I had… people I was close to. I learned shit. Became a fucking better person.” And a better chef, too; but Zoro already knows that much.
He stares at Sanji intently for a moment. “Did you fuck any of them?”
Sanji wants to pretend to be scandalised by the question, but he finds he’s too tired to be bothered. So instead he just gives a little self-deprecating shrug and says “nah.”
“Really.” Zoro sounds skeptical. His gaze drops, taking Sanji in from bottom to top. “You can’t tell me none of them were interested.”
Which. Alright, is enough of a compliment that Sanji feels something of his earlier good mood creeping back.
He smiles secretively to himself. Fuck, it’s been so long. Too long.
Two years of getting his arse kicked and his worldview rocked, and what Sanji had come to realise by the end of it was that while he didn't want to fuck men, he was perfectly capable of enjoying their attention.
That he'd never felt more powerful than he did in those moments when he'd feel the heat of a man's gaze on his long, strong legs as he strode into a room. That he was into it; their sexual interest. Their desire.
It was something he'd enjoyed on Momoiro plenty. A whole nation of queer men, and they'd looked at Sanji like a starving man might look at a banquet, and even at the start, when he was still embarrassing himself by pretending to be horrified by it, he'd felt the stroke to his ego.
“There was interest,” he tells Zoro, now, gazing off into the distance and smirking to himself at the memory.
Zoro raises his eyebrows. “And you liked that?” he asks, incredulously.
“Who doesn’t like to be admired? But they knew I wasn't interested in any more than that, and they never pushed it.”
“Sure they didn't.”
“Fuck you. Those are my friends.” They’d let Sanji flirt, clumsy and embarrassed, and figure his shit out, and none of them had ever pressured him to do anything about it, in the end, one way or the other. They were happy to simply let him enjoy the attention, if that’s what he wanted. They were fine if that was as far as he was ever comfortable with going. There was no judgement on Momoiro, no bullshit, and Sanji had quickly felt ashamed about his own stupid judgements, his idiotic preconceptions, the hangups that had always kept him from close relationships with other men that weren't bound up in pointless machismo. “Listen, I’d’ve killed for those guys. I did kill for them. Absolutely fucking slayed, and not just on the pole.”
“The… pole?”
Sanji frowns, brought up short. “What about it?”
Zoro looks like he might be about to start tearing his own hair out. Which is crazy, Sanji thinks. If he’s feeling that bad about it they can just dye it a less stupid colour.
“What pole?” Zoro says, slowly, like he’s talking to a toddler. “What are you talking about?”
Oh. “Oh, right. Yeah, they taught me pole dancing.”
Zoro looks like he might be having some kind of heart attack. Sanji warily looks around for Chopper, and spots him fast asleep on one of the empty tables. Hopefully close enough that he can perform some kind of medical miracle if any of Zoro’s organs decides to succumb to the inevitable alcohol poisoning.
“Why did they teach you pole dancing?” Zoro asks. He looks like he's not sure he wants to know the answer.
“Said I’d be good at it. Cos of the whole–” Sanji leans back deeper into the sofa cushions and extends a leg out in front of himself, straightening his knee, lifting it up nice and high in the air to show off the entire toned length of it. “The leg thing,” he laughs.
Zoro’s face is rapidly turning the same colour as the violet wine.
“No, not like that,” Sanji rushes to explain, letting his leg drop again. “It’s not… it's a fighting style, okay? A martial art. Pole Dancing Kenpo, they called it, and believe me it is lethal.” He grins at Zoro, knowing that he, of all people, can appreciate an interesting fighting technique. “They said it’d be good on ships, that I could use the shrouds for it. Fling myself about the rigging.” He smiles to himself, imagining it. The long vertical lines of the shrouds, their heavy, thick rope – he could use them like a pole, twist his flexible body around the rope and come down on an enemy from above, using his own weight and momentum like a weapon, quick and fierce and deadly. It would be so fucking sick, he thinks.
Back on Momoiro he’d immediately taken to Pole Dancing Kenpo like a duck to water, loving the range it gave him, the way it put his upper body strength to good use without involving his hands in the actual fighting. Fuck, it’d been glorious. He’d never felt so free. Like a wild animal, powerful and untamed.
“So why don’t you use it?” Zoro says, after a moment.
Sanji frowns. “What?”
“Well, I’ve never seen you use it. If it’s so good, why don’t you?”
That's a good question, and one Sanji is probably too tipsy to answer carefully enough right now, but once again he finds his mouth racing ahead of his brain. “I thought I would use it. But then we all met up again at Sabaody and it was…” Hmm. Sanji wants a cigarette. He gropes for the pocket he keeps them in, before remembering he’s still not wearing his jacket. He ends up patting his own torso absent-mindedly. Zoro’s still waiting patiently for him to continue – he’s always so fucking patient about everything, isn't he? Like he’s never rushed anywhere in his life, never been stressed by anything. How does he do that? Is it the meditation? Maybe Sanji should finally take him up on his offer to join him when he does it, if he ever has a moment to himself in between meal prep and…
“It was what?” Zoro says, gentle. Prompting.
“Fuck, I don’t know.” Without the cigarette Sanji’s fingers are restless. He fiddles with the edge of his waistcoat, rubbing the tip of his thumb back and forth over the ridge of the seam. “I couldn’t be that person around you guys, alright, it was too weird. Easier to just be the Sanji from before, like you were all expecting.”
He risks a glance up. Zoro’s face is doing something too complicated to parse. He says, “What, you don’t think we’d be cool about it?” And he sounds almost… offended by the implication.
“No, I know you would be. It’s not that.” It’s not like he’d be the first of the Straw Hats to push at the edges of gender or queerness, after all, and he'd known that even back then. Franky takes pride in being, as he puts it, “an equal opportunities pervert”, and Nami’s never hidden the fact that she's gay. Zoro hasn’t either, not really, though he’s never gone out of his way to let anyone see it either (and the queens of Kamabakka would have a fucking heart attack at what he considers an acceptable standard for personal grooming). Luffy is… harder to define, but whatever he's got going on with Trafalgar Law is a world away from heterosexual. And Nico Robin is, and always has been, a law unto herself.
Sanji knows they'd accept him. They’re his crew, his family.
It'd just been hard to let himself be that person around them, when he'd spent so long repressing it before.
And back then, before Whole Cake, before Pudding and his fucking birth family… he’d still been keeping so much of himself from them. Still holding them at arms length in case they got too close and caught a glimpse of all his fucked up baggage and decided he was too much hassle to bother with.
“When I was a kid,” he finds himself saying, “before Zeff, before I got out of Germa…” Zoro’s eyebrow twitches at that name, his face going soft and sad, and Sanji can’t look at it, he can’t, so he toes off his dress shoes instead and tucks his long legs up onto the sofa in front of him, hiding his face in his knees.
It’s darker. Quieter, everything muffled. It helps.
He continues, “I read a lot of books, back then. Fairytales, mostly, cos that’s what– what my mother used to like reading with me. She had a big book of them, you know the sort of thing; dragons and princesses and castles, all that bullshit. And I guess… part of me was still holding onto that, you know? Like if I could… Like. If I wanted to beat the dragon, right, I had to be the prince. That was the only way. So that’s what I was trying to be, all the damn time, because otherwise the people I–” He swallows, the words sticking in his throat. His hair is all around his shoulders like a veil, hiding his face from the room beyond. “I thought that was what I had to do to keep everyone safe,” he finishes.
He doesn’t look up but he can feel Zoro’s eyes on him, weighty and solemn. He doesn’t even need to use his observation to feel it, he thinks. It’s that heavy.
“Okay,” Zoro says, simply.
Sanji risks peeking over at him above his kneecaps. “Okay?” he checks, and tries to ignore how small his own voice is.
Zoro nods firmly. “Okay.” His gaze flicks around the room. Sanji follows it, helplessly – sees their friends all around them, surrounding them. A unit within a unit, he thinks. Together. Apart. Together.
There’s still glue in Nami’s hair, he can see the way the little drips of it catch the light when she laughs. Usopp is carefully lifting Chopper off the table, clearly trying not to wake him. Franky sips cola from a bottle with a cocktail umbrella in it, and Luffy laughs, and laughs, and laughs.
“When you're ready, though,” Zoro says, “we'll be right there with you. You know that, right?”
His swords are propped against the fancy coffee table between the two of them, close enough that Sanji’s sock-covered toe is touching Wado's sheath. He can still hear her singing. He wonders if Zoro hears it, too.
His mouth tastes of roses.
Before he can talk himself out of it, he leans against Zoro’s side. Lets his head fall onto a broad shoulder and breathes in the scent of him, musky with sweat and sweet with wine. God he's so warm, a hot night on a summer island. Familiar. Safe. Known.
Zoro stiffens at his touch, but it's okay, nothing shatters. Nothing loses its sharpness.
Sanji curls his fingers into a soft, worn shirt and feels the ghost of an answering touch brush its knuckles against the silky length of his hair. It's almost too gentle to feel. He thinks it takes a long time for Zoro to finally let out the breath he's holding, and when he does it comes out in quiet shivers, jagged at the edges, like something torn and never quite properly mended. Sanji doesn’t know what that means. He presses his face to the salt-sweat-skin of Zoro’s neck and stays there until they're both breathing steadily again.
It takes a long time, but that's okay. They can be patient, the two of them. They know how to wait.