Chapter Text
The morning after the storm, one of their new kitchen hands finds a body on the docks.
The sky is grey and fuzzy with the remains of the rain clouds, pale with pre-dawn light, but the air is fresh and crisp, cold on the inhale and little better on the exhale. The dampness doesn’t matter much here, on the open sea, but there’s a fine layer of moisture over everything, the planks slippery and wet, fat beads of water collecting in perspiration on ship hulls and dripping off the soaked-through sails and ropes. The horizon is a straight, calm line in the distance, brightening up with the slowly rising morning sun.
Sanji pushes away from the doorway, hands in the pockets of his trousers, with a cigarette caught between his lips, but not yet lit. At the edge of the walkway connecting the docks circularly around the Baratie, their staff is crowded around where the body was found, a tight space in between a small cabin cruiser and a larger sailboat.
He wedges himself between Bern and the poor schmuck who stumbled upon the scene when going for his morning piss, because he apparently can’t take a leak in the bathroom like all normal, cultured people. Sanji spares him a quick, disgusted, and reprimanding look before casting his eyes down. Zeff is crouched by the body with Carne and Patty on the other side. There’s a lot of blood. A deep, long slice carved into the man’s chest, from left shoulder to right hip, still leaks sluggishly. It’s watery, but it did its work of staining the wooden boards and the white t-shirt in various shades of red. There is a large smudge of it next to the body from before they turned him over, the blood loss evident in the pallor of the skin, even without the physical evidence. Who knows how long it took him to bleed out? Sanji asks himself, fiddling with the lighter in his pocket out of sympathy. While they were all sleeping, this guy was out here dying.
When he looks at his face, the guy doesn’t look any older than Sanji. His smooth face marred with shallow scratches from whatever incident he was in, features soft but sharpening with the marks of early adulthood. His hair is a bizarre shade of green, plastered wetly to his temples and forehead, sticking up wildly in other places, and his skin is dark, sort of bronze, but now dulled with cold and lack of circulation.
There are three scabbards at his right hip, tucked into the green, woven haramaki, but only the white one has a sword sheathed in it. The other two are empty.
Sanji’s looking at the cluster of his tear-shaped, golden earrings when Zeff curses, his fingers pressed to the man’s neck. “Oi!” He calls for attention, even though everyone is already looking at him expectantly. “Someone go fetch a doctor! The poor bastard’s still alive!”
“You’re kidding?” Sanji gets out around his cigarette, ignoring the brief scuffle as the group decides who’ll go find them a doctor to perform a miracle on this guy. Though, maybe the fact that he’s even still alive is a miracle in itself.
Zeff grunts in affirmation, rising up to his feet. “Carne, Patty, bring him up to the spare staff room, no doctor’s gonna do anythin’ out here.” He looks around at all of them and barks, “The hell are you all waiting for?! The prep won’t do itself!”
He’s the first to leave, his peg leg thumping against the boards, and the rest of the crew scrambles after him. Carne and Patty carry the injured man between them, his arms hanging limply and his head lolling against Carne’s stomach. His expression finally betrays his status – dead people generally don’t look that pained.
Sanji, alone now, finally takes out his lighter. The prep won’t do itself indeed, but he knows Zeff kicked everyone into gear just to keep their minds occupied. Now that they don’t have to figure out what to do with a shipwrecked, dead body, the best thing to do is go along with business as usual.
On the first drag, his eyes catch on something that was dismissed by everyone as unimportant when compared to a possibly-dead man. Close to where the body was found, there’s a bundle of fur. When Sanji comes closer, he finds that it looks like a coat—short, light grey fur with dark specks. And when he lifts it, it practically weighs a ton, generously dripping water from the rain and the sea. The man wasn’t wearing a jacket, just black trousers and black leather boots that almost went up to the middle of his calves, and his now ruined white shirt. Sanji can imagine him with a fur coat like this, though, eccentric enough to go with the three earrings and the scabbards at his hip.
Uninvited, his thoughts stray to childhood – the real one, with a different cooking crew, the other storm, starvation, and subsequent gratitude that followed. All that time spent in hospitals and with doctors while his body recovered, and all Sanji wanted was something familiar to clutch to.
In a split-second decision, he wrings out the coat as much as he can, the water sloshing and slapping against the already-wet boards, splashing the toes of his shoes, and starts for the Baratie’s side-entrance.
Sanji’s schedule is busy, so he has to do this now, when the routine is already broken for the day, or the coat will grow mold like that guy’s head and be destroyed. He washes it in clean, cold water, with just a few drops of his favorite, mild detergent, scrubbing gently with his hands. As far as Sanji’s knowledge goes, real fur coats are not supposed to be washed, but considering this one faced worse treatment last night, this won’t be what ruins it. The fur is both soft and a little bristly under his hands, slick from the water, and Sanji towels it dry to his best ability.
It’s still early enough for the guests to be sleeping (the Baratie offers lodgings, though not a lot, since Zeff is still adamant that they’re a restaurant, not a hotel with a snack bar, damnit!) so Sanji’s completely alone in his trek to his own room to retrieve a hanger and then up to the attic.
The ceiling is low, and the air is a little stale, but when Sanji cracks open the windows on each side of the small room, there’s a nice draft that sways the fur coat where he leaves it hanging on one of the horizontal support beams. Like this, the coat will hopefully dry with no damage to it.
He hears Zeff bellow his name, mourns that his morning, pre-work smoke time amounted to a single cigarette and a cleaning service, and leaves for the kitchen. He locks the attic door behind him.
✻✻✻
After the morning rush, Sanji follows Zeff to the empty staff room where they put the shipwrecked man. Although Sanji has to wonder, with an injury like that, if an accident on the sea was really what befell this guy. It’s just uncanny, that clean of a cut, and the fact that he was missing two of his swords. Not that Sanji could imagine what a man would need three swords for. Two, maybe, but three?
Perhaps one is a spare, seeing how he’s evidently not very good at holding onto them.
Zeff knocks on the door, a quick rap of his knuckles echoing through the corridor. He doesn’t wait for permission before opening it and stepping inside, Sanji on his heels, but a careful two steps behind, not to seem too eager.
The room smells like disinfectant and copper, and the laundry detergent they use for all of their linens. The curtains are pulled back to let in the sun, and it bathes the doctor in backlight, his silhouette falling over the man lying motionless in bed.
“Ah, perfect timing!” The doctor tells them with a smile. “I could use some help bandaging him up.”
The sheets beneath the man are stained, his shirt stuck under his back and hanging in tatters off the bed where it’s been cut from his chest.
Zeff elbows him sharply in the ribs, saying, “If you’re not gonna be useful, go back to work!”
Sanji moves forward with a hiss, “Stupid old man! If anyone here is useless, it’s you!” His fire leaves him once he’s at the bedside, observing the neat lines of fresh stitches with a restrained grimace, watching how the black threads pinch and pull at the butchered skin. That’s gonna hurt like a bitch. And scar like one too.
If the guy pulls through, it will be a new addition to the scars already running beneath his pecs, the two dark pink lines, shiny with healed scar tissue that almost connects at his sternum.
“What do you need me to do?” he asks the doctor.
“We need to sit him up for me to wind the dressing around his torso. The bleeding has mostly stopped for now, but with a wound this deep, it’s very likely there’s going to be some more once he wakes up and before the flesh starts mending,” the doctor explains, adjusting the cuffs of his gloves. They’re clean, a new pair free of blood. “So if you could hold him up while I do that, that would be fantastic.”
“Sure thing,” Sanji agrees.
While he’s gingerly sitting at the edge of the bed, mindful of the bloodied sheets and bracing one hand on the guy’s shoulder-blade with the other around his uninjured shoulder, Zeff asks, “So he’s gonna live?”
The doctor sighs. “To be frank with you, I’ve never seen someone survive this long with this type of damage done to them. But I reckon that shows his desire to live.”
“Or stubbornness,” Sanji pipes up.
The doctor gives him a wobbly smile. “Sometimes they’re the same thing,” he says. Then he turns to Zeff, “To answer your question, from what I’ve seen so far, I’m optimistic that he’ll live.”
Zeff grunts, satisfied even though it doesn’t show in his serious expression or the strict cross of his arms in front of his chest. “We appreciate your help,” he tells the man. “We and that kid are lucky you were here. I’m sure this is not what you wanted to do on your vacation, “ – because that’s the only reason a doctor would stay overnight at the Baratie – “so name your price and we’ll do our best to meet it. We insist.”
The doctor nods, says, “Then let me just finish up here, and we can talk about his recovery and everything else.”
When they do get to talking, Sanji kind of starts understanding pet owners. As the doctor tells them the cost of the surgery, Sanji can’t help but feel like he just shelled out half of his paycheck for a dog that ate a bunch of toy soldiers and got horribly constipated. And it’s not even his dog.
Zeff walks the doctor out of the room, their mismatched footsteps growing faint as the seconds pass, and Sanji stays at the bedside, throwing harsh glances at the heap of spare bandages and ointments, and antibiotic creams – for just in case – that sit on the nightstand. He’s putting them away in the drawers when the door opens again, this time bringing Carne and Patty.
“The doc’s gone?” Carne asks.
“Yep,” Sanji says. “You just missed him and the old man.”
Patty steps up to the foot of the bed, taking in the man tucked into clean sheets. He nods at him. “What’d he say about the wound?”
Because, of course, the Baratie’s staff is no ordinary hospitality workers. Ex-convicts and criminals know what an injury sustained in a fight looks like.
“Said it’s from a sword,” Sanji allows, putting a cigarette in his mouth. It’s not like the room can smell worse – blood, medical alcohol, and stale saltwater and sweat. Still, Carne cracks open the window, and Sanji takes the hint to lean against it, blowing the smoke out through the corner of his mouth.
Patty gives their patient (because it is their patient now, the doctor is leaving this evening) another considering look and shrugs. “Maybe he lost his crew. He could be a pirate.”
“Or maybe they’re looking for him,” Carne responds. “And maybe it won’t be good for us if they find him here.”
Sanji keeps quiet and smokes. He taps the ashes out the window. “Your old age turning you into a coward now?” he prods, just to get a rise out of Carne. Though that’s always been easier with Patty.
Carne looks at him, his dark glasses reflecting light and flashing. “What do you want to do with him?”
Sanji takes a drag and holds it as he mulls the question over in his head. Right now, lying limp and pale in the bed, the guy looks small and helpless. Sanji wonders what his deal is, and tries to put himself in his shoes. Then he tries harder to get out of them. Last night, the storm raged in a way that shook the whole vessel. Sanji woke up to thunder, the waves slapping against the ships and the ships knocking into one another and against the docks. Who knows where the hell the sea dragged him from. When he wakes up, he’ll be in pain and in an unfamiliar place.
His scabbards are leaning against the wall next to the bed, and the white one, the one that actually has a sword in it, looks well-cared for and clean.
Sanji exhales. “Wait for him to wake up and tell us what happened. And if he’s trouble, I’m gonna kick his ass right back into the sea.”
On his way out of the room, he takes the sword with him.
✻✻✻
Sanji checks on their patient that evening before going to sleep, on his way to his own room. There’s a satisfying sort of tiredness in him, the proof of another day of hard, honest work, of doing what he loves, and he finds himself gracious enough to crack the door open a sliver and peek inside.
No one pulled the curtains across the window again, and the moonlight doesn’t quite shine into the room, as the positions of the moon and this side of Baratie aren’t aligned right now, but it illuminates it in a faint light. It’s just enough that Sanji can see that the man hasn’t moved. He’s motionless on the bed, in the same position Sanji last saw him, but his chest rises and falls steadily.
Since he’s already here, Sanji slips inside and crosses the room in slow strides. He wants to shower, get in one last smoke of the day, change into his pajamas and go to sleep, but closing the curtains won’t take long.
Up close and in the unflattering dark, the shadows on the man’s cheeks and under his eyes are more prominent, deep dips in his collarbones where the covers are not pulled all the way up. Sanji knows that a part of it is blood loss, but he also knows what a hungry person looks like.
He draws the curtains across the window, buffering the moonlight’s glow, and follows the light from the doorway back to the lit hallway. He closes the door gently, even though he would bet that no amount of noise would wake this guy up so soon, and continues on with his night.
✻✻✻
There’s a seal in the kitchen.
Despite Sanji’s sometimes overactive imagination, his dreams rarely take on the fantastical quality that lets him know they’re not reality. Most often, they bring with them cold sweat and a frantic heartbeat, murky shadows and cruel laughter that echoes against his skull. Sometimes, he dreams about some kind of nonsense, the type of thing everyone dreams about at least once; riding a bicycle, his teeth falling out, being filthy rich and getting fed grapes by a lovely, dainty beauty like some sleazy monarch.
Less often, he dreams about his father, but his mind is unable to bring out the cold, heartless fury that’s the only thing that Sanji remembers about him nowadays. Those dreams always morph, castle walls melting away, shifting until the floor turns into wooden boards of a ship deck, the clack of Zeff’s peg leg echoing through the halls, even though he still had both legs when Sanji first met him.
But now. There’s a seal in the kitchen.
Sanji can feel the heft of a knife in his hand, the smooth, warm wood of the handle cradled in his palm, but he’s not chopping anything. He can’t see the counter or the prep station, just the space between the back door and the dishwashing sink. The door is swinging open and closed in some inane rhythm that Sanji can’t pin down, cold wind and rain sloshing inside with each swing, like blood pumping through heart valves.
The seal stands in the middle of his field of vision, ashy fur slick with seawater, dotted with darker specks in a random pattern. It’s got eyes like black holes, shiny and big like marbles, and aimed straight at Sanji.
The door keeps swinging like a heartbeat, the floorboards getting soaked, wet stains spreading beneath the kitchen appliances, reaching out to Sanji and the seal like a shadow.
“What the fuck,” Sanji says, remembering that the Baratie’s kitchen is tiled.
Lightning flashes, blinding.
✻✻✻
Like a joke, when Sanji gets up to go pee at some early morning hour, bleary-eyed and still half-asleep, there’s a loud thump down the hallway. He moves on instinct, cautious at first, and then faster, realizing what room the sound came from and what’s inside it.
He throws the door open in a stark contrast to how he closed it earlier that same night, abrupt and borderline violent, and halts at the doorstep, light from the hallway drawing a bright line around his own shadow and mingling with it on a shape writhing on the floor by the bed. The man’s upper body is sprawled across the ground, twisted on his belly, palms pressing into the floorboards; his legs have stayed on the bed, but just barely and are already slipping as well. It would be funny if the man wasn’t currently held together with thread and a prayer, and all Sanji can think about is the stupid bandages and antibiotic creams and the money they paid to get this idiot patched up. And now he’s gonna ruin it all.
Sanji thinks about it, gripping the doorframe while the man groans, and finally says, “What the fuck are you doing, you’re gonna pull your stitches!”
The man’s head tips up, as fast as possible with how disoriented he still seems, and his gaze pins onto Sanji with a visceral accusation that would freeze him on the spot if he knew he had anything to feel guilty for. As it is, Sanji ignores the dark, inky pupils that follow his every movement and approaches the bed and the idiot in three wide strides. He clicks his tongue, crouching down. “Where do you think you’re going in your state?” he asks and doesn’t wait for an answer before he starts detangling the man from the bedsheets. He can’t get him back into bed like this, so he lets the guy crawl fully onto the ground and prays that his stitches are not beyond salvation.
The man doesn’t return to bed, though, and Sanji watches with no small level of incredulity as he starts to get to his feet. “Hey,” he says, reaching out. “Hey, hey, stop that, you’re in no condition to walk! You shouldn’t even be awake yet!”
His hand closes around the bony wrist, feeling the tendons shift beneath the warm skin, and the guy stills just long enough to drop an insulted look at the place where they’re touching. What a fucking dick.
“I’m not diseased,” Sanji spits, climbing to his feet. “And you need to get back in bed.”
His fingers unlock, hand dropping back to his side, and he watches the guy struggle to his feet with no small amount of trepidation. Sanji would’ve helped him, but he thinks the gesture would’ve gone unappreciated.
“What’s your name?” he asks, because if their patient is conscious, he might as well tell them. There’s something uncomfortably detached about referring to someone as “that guy” when you’ve seen half of their innards spilling out. “I’m Sanji,” he offers when he gets no immediate response, and he itches for a cigarette to entertain himself with while the man pulls his feet under him like a newborn lamb.
In the faint moonlight and backlit with the light from the hallway, he’s both deathly pale and bathed in shadows that make him look gaunt and distraught. His hand reaches up to his throat, not touching, just hovering, and he opens his mouth on a word, his lips dry, pink with small cracks that threaten to break and well up with blood. No sound leaves him.
His hand drops, mouth closing with a clack of teeth gnashing together, swallowing down ire instead of words.
Sanji frowns. “Can you talk?”
His stomach drops at the glare that earns him. Vicious and a little wild around the edges, like he’s mad Sanji even dared to ask.
Of course, because why not complicate things further, he gets no verbal response.
They stand in tense silence for a long moment, Sanji at loss for both words and actions, and the guy with his muscles tightly coiled, like a spring ready to snap. He’s shaking, just barely, and Sanji can’t tell if it’s from exhaustion or his apparent horrible mood.
In the light from the hallway, his hair looks like wilted moss. Mosshead. Heh, that’ll do.
A loud grumble breaks the silence. They both startle, then the sound registers to Sanji, and he jolts, cursing. “Shit, yeah, I’m–I’m gonna make you some food,” he says. Only at the doorway does he remember to add, “Stay here, I’ll be right back. And for fuck’s sake, get back in bed.”
He walks through the dimly lit hallways with careful urgency, sliding into the staff kitchen to pry open a container of leftover rice. He sets out to shape onigiri filled with grilled salmon flakes on muscle memory, wrapping them up without a second thought. It’s easy and quick, and it proves to be perfect to catch their unwilling guest at the top of the stairwell leading down to the main kitchen and the storage, leaning against the wall like something half-dead.
In a fit of hot irritation, Sanji grabs him by the scruff of his neck like a cat, keeping him from pitching forward down the stairs and into his demise via broken neck, and hisses, “I fucking told you to stay put! This is not the bed!”
Mosshead makes his first noise then, something garbled from his throat that sounds like it hurts, and turns his head to snap his teeth at Sanji like a feral animal. Sanji nearly drops him. Instead, his grip tightens, and he asks incredulously, “Are you a fucking dog?”
Chastised, but not apologetic, the swordsman drops his gaze in shame and scowls at the ground. Sanji can see his skin turn white where Sanji’s fingers are dug into the flesh, and feels guilt twinge in his chest. He loosens his hold, then removes it completely in favor of sliding a shoulder under the guy’s uninjured arm. “Come on, let’s get you back to bed.” And then, because he can’t help himself, “Maybe you’ll be nicer once you eat something.”
Mosshead’s lips peel back, showing his teeth in a sneer, but at least he doesn’t try to bite Sanji again.
They totter back to the room like two drunks, and Sanji can feel the tremors running through the man’s body everywhere they touch, privately impressed by the sheer stubbornness that seems to be holding him upright. He doesn’t exhale in relief when Sanji deposits him back on the bed, but something about him loosens up, the tightness leaving his eyes. When Sanji thrusts the plate of onigiri into his lap, he stares at the food uncomprehendingly until Sanji pulls out the chair from the desk and tells him, “Get to chewing, I want to go back to sleep soon.”
He gets a suspicious glance thrown his way, and then the guy picks up one of the balls, sniffs it like a dog, and gingerly bites into it. It’s a small bite, he probably didn’t even get to the filling, but Sanji watches with no small amount of pleasure as his eyes light up. He chews, swallows, and then crams the rest of the riceball in his mouth in haste, chewing fast and driven by hunger.
The second one disappears just as quickly, and the third is halfway gone when he finally pauses for a deep gasp of air. He licks his lips, and Sanji follows the movement of his throat as he swallows, Adam's apple so faint it’s almost non-existent. There is a strip of red, scratched skin beneath the hinge of his jaw, stark and angry-looking against the otherwise unmarred skin. His eyes watch the plate like it’s something sacred, fingertips curling around the edges to keep it secure.
Sanji grips the fabric of his pajama bottoms in his hands, then lets it go, smoothing out the wrinkles as he says, “I’ll make you more tomorrow, if you’re awake.” He’s going to be working, but he can spare some time to make more food for their guest. And he should probably go check up on him every so often, because as all evidence so far suggests that he’ll be a horrible patient.
Mosshead moves his eyes from the plate just to pin them on Sanji with a startling sort of desperation, his fingers twitching around the onigiri in his hand. Without looking away, he points with it at the corner where his empty scabbards are leaning against the wall and the bedside table. It takes Sanji a moment to figure out what he’s asking.
“Oh,” he says. He could say that he doesn’t understand. He could say the half-truth, that he only had these empty scabbards with him when they found him. He could blackmail him into behaving, just in case, and a million other awful things. Instead, he says, “It’s with me. I’ll bring it back here.”
He didn’t even realize how tense the guy still was until his shoulders unwound at that. He unfolds like a fresh tablecloth, ironed lines in the way he holds his body against the pain and exhaustion, all of him tender and soft and uncomfortably unguarded. He takes a big bite of his last onigiri, and Sanji stands up, clearing his throat.
“I’m going to bring your katana back,” he tells him. “If you try to leave again, I’m gonna shove it up your ass and tie you to the bed if I have to.”
All he gets for his trouble is a mild look and a set of arched eyebrows, not impressed or intimidated in the slightest – tough crowd.
When he returns, the empty plate is waiting for him on the nightstand, and Mosshead is still sitting on the bed. He supposes that’s progress, or the man has simply lost his drive now that the object of his determination and anger is within his sight again.
His arm reaches out for the weapon and Sanji hands it to him, watching Mosshead’s fingers wrap around the white scabbard just beneath the hilt like they’re puzzle pieces clicking into place.
Cautiously, he slides the blade out just a little, just enough for the steel to catch on moonlight like a ray of pure white light, and slides it back in with a satisfied exhale. He sets it into his lap gently, spine bending to bow over it, and then straightens with a pinched expression on his face.
He stares off into some middle distance with a furrow between his brows, mouth pressed tight, and Sanji figures that he just got reminded of his very grave injuries. He looks down at his torso with a betrayal that would be comic if his bandages weren’t spotting pink and red.
Sanji doesn’t know what it says about him – that falling down and forcing himself back up didn’t do anything, but bending down made him bleed – but he has an inkling that it will be a good character guide from here on out.
✻✻✻
The next morning, Patty corners him in the staff kitchen, hissing, “Why’d you give him the sword back? I almost shit my pants when I saw him sleeping with it!”
Sanji blows smoke out of the corner of his mouth, coffee cup held between thumb and ring finger, and says, “Just to fuck with you.”
It’s none of Patty’s business, anyway, if Sanji saw the guy eating his food in the dark of their guest room, so fucking stubborn and desperate, and thought that he has no intention of hurting any of them.
Patty scoffs, turning to prepare the sludge he calls coffee, then asks, “How the hell did you even do it – tucked it in with him before going to bed?”
Sanji blinks. He told Zeff what happened when they were both making their coffee earlier, but he hadn’t bothered with the rest of the guys. “Ah, he woke up during the night.”
Patty turns his head to look at him. “The fuck you mean he woke up? He lost enough blood to fill a bucket, and that’s not even what ended up in the sea.”
Sanji shrugs, sticks his cigarette between his lips to mumble, “Well, he was fuckin’ awake.” After a drag and one last gulp from his cup, he adds, “He was hungry, so I made him onigiri. And he’s bedbound.”
He accidentally leaves out the part where he was stalking through their hallway like a ghost.
Patty grumbles, turning to stir his caffeine abomination. He tosses the spoon into the sink and asks, “Well, then, what’s his name?”
The million-dollar question, Sanji thinks to himself.
He finishes off his cigarette with a long pull, the tip burning red. The words, when they leave him, are accompanied by a plume of white smoke.
“I don’t know. He’s mute.”