Archive of Our Own ^beta

When Zoro docks on the island, he breathes a sigh of relief.

The waters here aren’t what he’d call calm, even if they haven’t quite crossed the threshold into what he’d call stormy either. The sky is drawn over with clouds, grey and foreboding, and the air is heavy, like it’s been about-to-rain for the past month. It’s not any better when he disembarks on the gravelly beach, but at least he’s no longer a slave to the waves. If this were the Grand Line, he’d call this place an Autumn Island, but since he’s up in some god-forsaken corner of the North Blue, it’s just bad weather.

It’s been about three weeks since he’d last stepped foot on solid ground if his count is correct (it never is, but it’s rarely far off either.) Not the worst stint he’d done out in the waters – that title goes to the two month period he spent lost in deep South Blue, rationing water even under the awful heat of the near-equator sun – but not the best either, having drained his supplies quite a substantial amount. He’s going to need to find the market square.

When he first threw the idea of setting out on his little journey out there, Nami laughed in his face. Not undeservedly, mind, a navigator of her calibre, and Zoro can admit that directions are perhaps not quite his strongest suit, least of all out on the sea with no notable landmarks, but that didn’t stop him from picking a fight over her lack of faith. The fight was promptly stopped by Sanji kicking him in the ribs for arguing with a lady, which in turn started another fight between the two of them (of course), which was then stopped by Luffy yanking Zoro out of the scuffle by the scruff.

“You want to go travel the world again?” his captain asked, eyes wide and sparkling, bouncing excitedly in his seat.

“I’ve been considering it,” Zoro shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong, all the traveling across the Grand Line was fun, but now that we’re done with that for a while, I’ve been thinking–“

“I’ll get you a ship!”

In retrospect, Zoro isn’t sure why he thought Luffy would care for a justification. Luffy, the man who heard him say he wanted to become the world’s greatest swordsman after finding him tied to a cross in a marine base, grabbed onto him with both hands, and dragged him along until he did. Of course he’d hear the next whim that pops into Zoro’s head and do everything in his power to help him get there.

“Everything in his power” is, nowadays, quite a lot of course. King of the Pirates and all.

It was probably for the best that he didn’t ask for a full justification anyway, because Zoro had no clue how to actually put the torrent of thoughts that crashed him agains the cliff of this particular decision into words. It was something about achieving a goal and feeling emptier after it finally lay defeated at your feet. It was something about the people who you used to spend twenty four hours a day with suddenly having their own thing to do, away from each other, away from you. It was something about meeting up once a week for dinner made by the man who used to cook every meal you ate.

It was something about the man himself, probably, but Zoro wasn’t touching that one with a five foot sword even in the safety of his own mind.

So they finished their dinner, and Luffy got Zoro a ship, and Zoro set sail.

And now he’s here.

He kicks at the gravel and watches as it rains down onto the nearby path as he makes sure the hood of his cloak is secure over his head. Wearing it is something of second nature now – getting recognised got tiring no more than a few months in, after he had to fight off his fourth bunch of pirate hunters. At least the marines seemed to leave the Straw Hats alone for the most part, a silent understanding based on fear and mutual respect in even measures, but that hadn’t stopped the occasional rogue wanting to cash in the second-highest bounty on the Grand Line, or even just to cross their swords with the world’s greatest. Man, Zoro has some sympathy for Mihawk now. The fact that he deigned to humour an overconfident nineteen-year-old yelling into his face at the Baratie all those years ago was a greater indulgence than Zoro had understood.

(When he told Mihawk that, half a year or so into his journey, that time the winds saw it fit to wash Zoro’s ship out onto the shores of a little Spring island he was vacationing at – a climate choice to compromise between him and Red-Haired Shanks, no doubt – his former mentor smirked and told him he was more promising than most. Zoro shuddered at the implication.)

So he got himself a cloak once he got tired, and then dyed his hair black a couple months later when it didn’t help all that much, but wearing the hood became a habit in the meantime. It was a half decent disguise all in all – the scar over his eye was impossible to get rid of, of course, but the somewhat shaggier dark hair and the lack of the famous three swords at his hip usually made it so people didn’t suspect him of being World’s Greatest Swordsman Roronoa Zoro all that often. Instead, they usually suspected him of getting up to some shady business, but that wasn’t anything new.

He doesn’t have the swords with him right now still, having left them in Tashigi’s care a few months back when their paths crossed out on the open waters of the West Blue. The Commodore fussed as always and threatened to put him behind bars, but threats of that kind tend to sound less effective when said over the rim of a cup as you share afternoon tea with their target.

She’d asked him, after the pleasantries were done with, why he wouldn’t bring the swords along and just not carry them when wandering out on the islands, and Zoro was once again struck with the ailment that was the inability to put his thoughts into words. It was something about habits, or maybe something about a challenge, or maybe yet something about reminders. It was something about wanting to be alone, or else not wanting to be alone and yet being so anyway. It was something about setting your own restrictions, and then ignoring the fact that you can lift them any second.

“Just want to try something new, is all,” he wound up saying in the end. Tashigi didn’t understand, or maybe she did and was polite enough not to show it. In any case, she took the swords off his hands, promising to keep them well-polished and to bring them into battle here and there so they don’t go too stir-crazy, so Zoro was satisfied.

Living without the familiar weight at his hip turned out to be weird, but it wasn’t the first time Zoro tore himself away from something familiar, so he adjusted easy enough. He did his best to get into less fights, and when that didn’t work, he did his best to recall all the martial art training he managed to get in between their various pirate adventures over the past years. It sort of defeated the point of getting rid of reminders, considering who he spent most of the time practicing martial arts with, but Zoro was getting better at not thinking about that two years into his stint as a lone sailor. Sort of. A little.

Oh, who is he kidding.

Anyway, point is, he doesn’t have his swords right now, so he’s going to have to remember to be polite and non-confrontational if he wants to get all the necessary supplies without being chased off the island by an angry mob. Zoro doesn’t necessarily enjoy being polite and non-confrontational, but he is capable of it, despite what some people he knows seem to think, so he checks to make sure he’s got his wallet attached securely to his belt, and sets out along a path towards the buildings cluster in the distance.

He doesn’t even get to leave the beach before someone tugs on his cloak.

Zoro yelps in a manner which is a little undignified, and would absolutely get him laughed at had he still been travelling with his crew (this thought, like all such thoughts he’s had, brings little relief.) He spins around on his heel, determined to glare at whoever dared to disrupt his stride, and loses that determination almost instantly once he actually takes in a figure in front of him. Well, two figures, really.

The one who tugged at him is a girl. Zoro is bad at estimating ages, but she must be no older than twelve if that, blonde hair tied into pigtails at the sides of her head. She’s dressed well if a little plainly, long pants and a dark shirt with frilly lace at the ends of its sleeves, and – it’s what catches Zoro’s gaze ahead of anything else, of course – there is a neat ornate scabbard at her hip with a sword’s hilt sticking out of it. She must be an apprentice of sorts, like he and Kuina used to be.

The other figure is a boy, about the same age but seemingly more timid judging from how he is peeking out at Zoro from behind her back. His outfit isn’t too different save for the lace, and he’s got a sword too, a slightly bigger but less ornate one. His eyes are wide and brown, and he’s got a few (somewhat poorly dyed) mint-green streaks in his hair. 

“Hello?” Zoro says.

“Hello!” the girl beams at him, dropping her arm back at her side. “Are you here for the execution?”

This gives Zoro pause. He blinks down at her, although he imagines neither of the children can see it properly under the dark fabric of his hood even despite the fact that they have to look up at him, and straightens his back.

“Who are they executing?”

“Oh, so you aren’t?” the girl frowns, answering his question with another question (turnabout’s fair play, he supposes.) “Huh. Why are you here then?”


She sounds so accusatory that Zoro had to resist the urge to bristle at a preteen.

“Supply run,” he answers, warily. “I’m a traveller.”

“Yeah, but how’d you find this island?” she presses on, eyes squinted at him suspiciously. The boy tugs on her sleeve.

“Maybe he’s a pirate hunter,” he says in a voice which is probably intended to be a whisper but really isn’t. The girl side eyes him before turning her fiery gaze back to Zoro.

“Are you a pirate hunter?”

Zoro considers this.

“Technically, yes” he says. “I did hunt down quite a few pirates in my life.”

The statements may not be as connected as he presents them to be, but neither are, technically, a lie. They also, somehow, seem to be the correct answer – the girl drops all pretense of suspicion and beams again, and even the boy behind her straightens out slightly.

“Oh, well that makes sense then,” she declares, even though it still doesn’t make much sense to Zoro. Clearly, she can tell from his stance that his confusion persists, because she rolls her eyes and clarifies, “This is Venoha Island!”

Or, well, attempts to clarify, anyway. Zoro appreciates the effort, but the name of the island answers precisely none of his questions.

“Really?” the girl pouts, seemingly disappointed at his ignorance. “It’s the most famous pirate hunter island in the whole of North Blue! And soon, in the whole world!”

“Oh,” Zoro says. “Well, I’m not from the North Blue, so.”

“Really? You got pretty far!” the girl laughs. She doesn’t know the half of it. “Well, anyway, this island has all sorts of magical protections on it, so we don’t get visitors often! Except today, of course, for the execution!”

She talks about an execution with such enthusiasm that Zoro wonders whether the word means something different here. Then again, the boy’s face pinches a little at the mention of it, so maybe not.

“Magical protections?” Zoro asks, ensuring he looks sufficiently intrigued, because he knows how to entertain a child. “What kind?”

“Well, my daddy – he’s the governor of the island – he ate the Veil-Veil devil fruit!” she announces with pride. “It lets him shroud a territory in a magic veil and decide who can pass it and who can’t! So in the case of Venoha Island, the only people who can get here are bounty hunters, or those my daddy specifically invited!” She rattles it off confidently, like a practiced script. “And of course no one who plans to help our prisoners can pass either, which makes it a perfect place for the execution!”

“Right, so you keep saying,” Zoro says. It’s an interesting devil fruit power, honestly – something that could, like all interesting devil fruit powers do, serve either a great good or a great evil – so he takes note of this information at the back of his mind. He does associate with pirates, although he’s definitely not planning to mention it now, and this is the sort of knowledge that can come in handy later. “You still haven’t told me who they’re executing though.”

“Oh, right,” the girl says. “Well, get a load of this – my daddy caught the Blackleg himself!”

Zoro blinks.

Blinks again.

Remembers to breathe.

“What?”

Thankfully, the girl takes his pause as awe rather than what it really is (though Zoro doesn’t think he knows what it is himself yet, under all the lawyers of disbelief), because she nods vigorously, her white teeth glinting like a smatter of pearls.

“Yeah! My daddy’s the coolest, isn’t he?”

Zoro reserves the right to not answer that. Instead he waits until his heart rate lowers enough to at least resemble a caricature of a normal tempo, clears his throat, and asks,

“How’d he do that?”

A different person, Zoro imagines, might have found his questioning suspicious, if not because of the heightened curiosity then at least because of the tone of his voice, not even close to calm despite all his attempts. But the girl seems too eager to brag about her father for the thought of suspicion to even cross her mind, clasping her hands at her chest with an enthusiastic half-hop.

“It was so smart!” she exclaims. “So, do you know what the Blackleg does now?” Zoro does, of course, but it seems to be a rhetorical question because she barrels on before he can even open his mouth. “He runs a restaurant somewhere out on the Grand Line, apparently.” (It’s the All Blue, technically, but Zoro doesn’t feel like getting into the semantics right now.) “My daddy says it’s a disgrace how many people he managed to fool into thinking he’s not an evil man by pretending to care about cooking.”

That one’s a bit harder not to comment on – the insinuation that Sanji doesn’t truly care for cooking is as ridiculous as the one that he’s actually evil – but Zoro manages to restrain himself by gritting his teeth. The girl doesn’t notice.

“Well, anyway, daddy and his friends found his restaurant and pretended to be customers, and then once they were inside, they rigged it with dynamite and held the whole thing hostage!” She talks about it with a truly disproportionate level of glee. “And they said that the Blackleg had to come with them or they’d blow it up, and none of his pirate buddies were there, so he had to do it!“

“And when he was on their ship,” the boy adds softly behind her, though unlike hers, his eyes are downcast, “he tried to fight back. So they broke both of his legs and put metal stakes through his feet so he couldn’t.”

The girl rolls her eyes, nudging him in the ribs. Zoro feels vaguely sick.

“That’s,” he says, “smart.”

The girl nods eagerly. The boy doesn’t look up. Zoro clamps down on the urge to scream.

It could, he tries to reason with himself, be a mistake. It’s quite a feat for a small-time pirate hunter from the edge of the North Blue to get all the way to the Grand Line. It’s even more of a feat for a small-time pirate hunter to capture a fighter as good and experienced as Sanji, capture him and then restrain him enough to be able to – Zoro’s mind grapples with the thought – injure him like that. He’d seen Sanji fight before. He’d fought Sanji before. He knows just how strong he is.

For his restaurant though? For his dream?

It could be a mistake. But it could not be.

“When’s the execution?” Zoro asks.

The girl turns to glance at the clock tower behind her, gasping.

“We only have half an hour left!” she exclaims, grabbing the boy by the arm. “C’mon, we gotta run, or we won’t get a good view! Mister, are you coming?”


Zoro’s throat closes up, but he manages a nod. And then, the children are off.

He follows them through the winding, empty streets. They duck through confusing alleyway shortcuts, and Zoro forces himself to watch the girl’s blonde hair as it bobs with her strides, forces himself not to fall behind or get lost. Half an hour. He’s got half an hour. If this is real, if he’d gotten here half an hour later–

And then, suddenly, they make another turn and they’re at the town square. It’s large and spacious, framed on all sides by red-brick buildings and the occasional colourful market stall selling refreshments to go with the show. The sky is still overcast, but it’s early enough in the day not to be dark, so the lanterns Zoro sees hung off the roofs and canopies here and there aren’t lit. The ground under their feet is paved with rectangular tiles, though it is hard to make out the pattern considering the number of people already crowding the square, and Zoro thinks it is no wonder the streets were empty.

“Aw, we can’t even see the platform from here,” the girl pouts, straining to raise herself up on her tiptoes, though that too is futile – even Zoro can’t make out the other end of the square through all the bodies. “C’mon, you two, we have to get to the front!”

Usually, Zoro might have felt a little awkward about pushing his way through a crowd; might have even invested into a few apologetic grunts. But there is only one thing on his mind right now, so he follows the path the children create as people jump out of their way with a single-minded determination. His hands are clenched into fists. He only believes in one god, and Luffy doesn’t really do prayer, but he prays anyway.

It can’t be him.


They reach the other end of the square.

There is a raised podium there – not raised enough to be seen from the back, evidently, but still a couple metres up off the ground, a wooden platform surrounded by wooden stairs. There are no guards, not even a barrier of any kind separating the crowd from their foot, but people still stand a polite distance away. Zoro supposes it’s what you get when the only people you allow on your island are people who agree with what you’re doing.

And him.

He looks up.

It’s been two years since he’d last seen Blackleg Sanji. It was just after that faithful dinner, in fact, the one where Luffy had offered him a ship, that the cook cornered Zoro in the corridor, his leg slamming into the wall by his head to stop him in his tracks.

“You’re leaving?” Sanji had demanded, eyes narrowed and an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. “Why?”

Zoro bristled at the combative tone of the question, but he was too tired that night to give Sanji a fight he was so obviously trying to pick. He just ducked his head instead, away from the seeking gaze of those piercing blue eyes, Sanji’s fringe tucked messily behind his ear to reveal the one he usually kept covered.

“I don’t know, Curly,” he said. “A sense of adventure. A good time. Finding more people to fight.”

You, he didn’t add. Sanji would’ve probably taken it the wrong way if he did.

Sanji had scoffed in his face then and dropped his foot back to the floor, and Zoro remembers thinking just how beautiful he was when he was annoyed. It wasn’t why he started fights with the cook – the man could be genuinely infuriating – but it certainly was a bonus.

“Are you going to come back?” Sanji asked. “Are you going to call?”

Zoro shrugged. Sanji stared at him.

“You’re impossible,” he said, then. And then he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Zoro’s shoulders, and Zoro hadn’t been able to work out that he was being hugged rather than strangled until he stepped away again. “Don’t die out on the sea, shitty swordsman. It would be way too funny.”

And then he turned around and stalked off to his newly-minted restaurant’s just as newly-minted kitchen, and that was the last time Zoro had seen him.

Until now.

It takes him a moment to register that the figure on the podium is, in fact, Sanji. He’s so used to seeing Sanji clean and put-together that any departure from that registers as alarmingly dissonant in his brain. The couple of times he ran into the cook before he’d had the time to comb his bedhead in the morning, it took him embarrassingly long to place just what was bothering him about the sight.

Compared to this, a bedhead is nothing.

Sanji is kneeling, or something close to it, anyway, his feet spread apart behind his back to make sure the crowd can see the metal stakes that nail them to the podium’s wood. They must have been nailed down just now, or otherwise jostled, or outright new, because blood is oozing down his bare feet and pooling in the crevices beneath them. It’s hard to tell just how much of the blood is fresh though, and how much is dry. His feet are burgundy up to the ankles.

His suit is torn up – there is a slash across his chest, also bloody, and the edges of the pants are tattered. It’s hard to tell from a distance, but it looks like they might be soaked from the knee down – a precaution against fire, perhaps. His hands are behind his back, likely cuffed judging by just how uncomfortably far his shoulders are drawn, but if you look at the curve of his spine, it becomes obvious he’s trying to use them to take some weight off his knees. That’s hardly a surprise – if his legs are broken, this position must be agonising.

Not that his face gives it away, of course. Sanji has never known how to not be stubborn, and even now, with his curly eyebrows set in a tight frown and his jaw clenched so hard Zoro can almost hear his teeth grinding, he looks more angry than in pain. Zoro knows his tells, so it doesn’t fool him – he can see the tear tracks on his cheeks, the wide pupils, the trembling lips – but the performance is impressive still.

Would have been impressive, anyhow, if Zoro didn’t feel like crying.

That stupid, stupid, stupid–

He reaches for his swords, then wonders if the universe is trying to punish him for trying something new. If so, it could’ve left Sanji out of it.

“Hey,” Zoro says, turning to the girl. His voice is all sorts of rough, but she doesn’t seem to care, glancing up at him with a quick questioning hum. “Can I try out your sword?

“Huh?” she blinks, clearly not having expected the request. “Why?”

“Well, you said the execution doesn’t start for another half an hour, so we gotta pass the time somehow,” Zoro says, doing his best to project bored nonchalance, at least well enough to fool a child. “And I’m something of a swordsman myself, so I noticed yours looks pretty cool.”

“Oh, really?” she beams, all confusion evidently quenched. “Thank you! I picked the scabbard design myself!”

She spins in place, jutting her hip out towards Zoro to make it easier for him to grab the hilt. He does just that, pulling it out with a quiet clang of metal and looking furtively around to see if it drew anyone’s attention. Evidently, it has not – the people around them continue chatting, and the man at the podium, the one who isn’t Sanji, a black sack with cut-out eyeholes pulled over his head (how cliché, for an executioner), doesn’t so much as glance their way. There is a benefit, Zoro supposes, to pirate hunter communities.

He twirls the sword in his hand, trying it on for size. It’s lighter than he would prefer for himself, obviously, but just the right weight for a twelve-year-old girl (he’d know), and a decent enough length. The girl watches him spin it in earnest fascination. Zoro thinks that any child who gets this enthusiastic about swords probably has some issues that’ll need to be addressed later in life. Zoro thinks about the glint in her eyes as she spoke about Sanji getting captured, and, selfishly, he doesn’t care.

“Can I try yours, too?” he asks the boy.

His friend’s earlier compliance seems to have swayed him enough that he doesn’t question, pulling his own sword out of its scabbard and offering it to Zoro, hilt first, like one would do with a pair of scissors. Zoro wraps the fingers of his right hand around it with a grateful nod and balances the weights of them between his hands. The boy’s is slightly heavier, as expected, so he swaps them between his palms.

“Thank you,” he says.

Ask anyone who knows him, and they’ll tell you that often enough Roronoa Zoro is one for the dramatics. He waits around the corner to swoop in at the last possible moment, he snatches you out of the arms of death itself with a grin and the expectation that you thank him for it. He wants the attention and praise, the kind that comes with last-minute buzzer-beater rescues. He wants to be seen.

But Sanji’s eyes, open though they are, are unseeing right now, clouded over with pain and blood loss. He stares out dully into the crowd, and his feet are pierced with metal, and Zoro can almost feel the way his arms are shaking, about to give out and drop all of his weight onto his broken bones.

He is one for the dramatics, yes, but not today.

“Sorry,” he adds, glancing over at the kids, and doesn’t wait for them to begin processing the word before he dashes forward.

The lack of barriers works in his favour, makes it easy to run up the wooden stairs, skipping one step at a time. He’s fast, fast enough that nobody registers his movements let alone tries to stop them until both of his feet are planted firmly on the podium, and by then, no one can prevent him from swinging the sword. He apologises to the kids at the back of his mind, again, because it must be some kind of traumatic to see a beheading at the tender age of maybe-twelve, but he doesn’t care enough to stop it. So the sword slices through fabric, and then skin, and then muscle, and finally, the would-be-executioner’s head rolls down the stage.

The crowd freezes. The sword – the executioner’s sword, the one that would’ve taken Sanji’s head off had Zoro been even a little later – clatters to the ground. 


Sanji’s head snaps up. His eyes are still cloudy. Zoro doesn’t know if he recognises him or not, but right now, it doesn’t matter.

“Who is that?!” Zoro hears someone scream, a male voice, low and angry. “Someone seize him!”

Oh, he thinks, they want to know who I am.

He stomps his foot at the hilt of the executioner’s blade, sending it spinning up into the air. It’s a clumsy weapon, he can see that already, but it will do its job, like any weapon would do its job when wielded by a skilled enough hand. And he certainly wants to give it a skilled enough hand, so while it spins – while it’s still up in mid-air – he brings his right hand up, and clasps the grip of the little girl’s sword between his teeth.

“Who am I?” he hisses around the familiar shape, his lips curling up into a smirk, not bothering to so much as look away from the crowd as his now-free palm catches the executioner’s sword in an easy grasp. He can feel the ornate guard pushing at his hood, can feel it slipping down his hair – dark, sure, but not at all unrecognisable as he holds a sword in his mouth, his scar reflected in its blade – and he doesn’t care at all. “Take a guess.”

Here’s the other benefit to pirate hunter communities – the crowd can guess.

The crowd screams as one. 

Not that Zoro pays any mind to the crowd. A minute spend screaming is a minute wasted, as far as he is concerned, and he isn’t about to waste anything, not here. He pushes himself off the ground, a jump and a flip, his feet hitting the wooden planks behind Sanji’s back. The cook’s hands are cuffed, as he expected, a short metal chain drawn between his wrists. Zoro weighs the executioner’s sword in his palm, then swings it down. It clinks against the iron links, but where a normal swordsman would let his sword bounce back, he keeps forcing it until it slices through the metal. He’s not known as the world’s greatest for nothing, alright? He’s learned some tricks.

The handcuffs break apart.

Sanji’s arms spring into a more comfortable position, and he might shift some more – Zoro hopes he does, hopes he takes some weight off his legs – but he isn’t left with the luxury of time to watch. More people flood the podium, all of them with swords in their hands (Zoro can only be happy the island favours swords over guns), and he is left to slice his way through the waves, making sure no one can reach close enough to Sanji to hurt him any further.

Most of the townies aren’t good fighters, though one or two are a bit more fun than the faceless masses, occupying Zoro’s attention for more than a couple seconds. It’s been a while since he’s been in a sword fight, let alone an all-out brawl like this, but his training comes back quickly enough, muscle memory swinging into gear. Holding a sword is much like riding a bicycle – no matter how much time passes, you never forget.

It takes a minute or ten, but after a little while, the crowds start to thin, any brave soul who got it in their head that they could fight him either bleeding out on the wooden stage or coming suddenly to their senses. Zoro is panting around the hilt of the girl’s sword, unharmed but for a few scratches. Sanji, having managed, somehow, in all the commotion to move onto his back, knees still bent, is staring up at him with glazed-over eyes. There is something in his gaze, but this is neither the place nor the time to try and understand it.

“Anyone else?” Zoro barks.

He catches a few hisses of his name – a few allusions to the East Blue’s Demon – fewer yet whispers about the Pirate King’s missing attack dog – but the corpses littering the ground around him serve as enough of a deterrent, so no one steps forward. He scans the crowd for a brief moment, but can’t find the kids. Wherever they’ve gone, it’s for the best.

“Well then,” he says, at no one at all and everyone at once, “we’ll take our leave.”

He considers the least painful way to carry someone with two broken legs, though it’s pretty clear from the get-go that even the best he can do would jostle Sanji’s injuries. And his feet are still – nailed down to the podium, fuck, the ragged wounds look even worse up close, sending a cold shudder down Zoro’s spine – though before he can think of the best way to go about that, Sanji seems to remember of the predicament as well, sitting up and yanking the stakes out in one harsh motion. He groans in pain as he does so, obviously, because what is that idiot thinking – even Zoro knows you leave whatever item you were stabbed with in the wound – but now is not the time to start bickering about best medical practices.

Zoro had left his three scabbards with Tashigi along with the swords, obviously, but his belt still has the loops to thread them through, so he shoves the borrowed swords’ blades through them roughly and hopes they don’t cut through the leather as he runs. He’s not planning to steal them, of course, but he’s not stupid enough to assume they won’t be followed, and he hopes having a weapon at hand would act as enough of a deterrent for the less determined of the islanders. He can’t have it in his hands though, obviously, so this is the next best thing.

He bends down next to Sanji’s trembling form, blood oozing down his feet with more vigour now (and that’s why you leave the knife in the stab wound, you moron.) In his brief moment of contemplation earlier he settled on a fireman’s carry (or, more prosaically speaking, throwing the man over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes), so he pushes one arm under his hips and wraps another around his back.

“This is gonna hurt, cook,” he warns. Sanji looks at him, unblinking, and Zoro is forced to take the cloudy stare for an acknowledgement.

He hoists Sanji up, the movement accompanied by another pained groan spilling off the man’s lips as Zoro grasps him around the thighs to support him. His own movements feel sluggish, like he’s moving through water, but he’s acquainted enough with the effects of adrenaline to be able to tell that in practice it takes less than a couple of seconds before he’s upright again, the cook dangling over his shoulder. The crowd has thinned substantially – most of the people who didn’t run at him have taken the smarter choice of running away instead – so he can see the other end of the square from here, the alleyway he and the children have ducked out of only a few minutes ago.

“What are you waiting for?” the same male voice from before roars somewhere above the square. “He can’t fight like this! Get them!”

Zoro thinks his reputation as a swordsman really must’ve tanked in the two years he spent not on the front page of every newspaper if the screaming man thinks he can’t still destroy anyone who comes at him with one free hand and his mouth, but he doesn’t have the time to prove him wrong right now. He launches himself forward instead, pushes himself off the platform and leaps over the stairs, his feet hitting the cobble. People stagger out of his way almost on instinct, or maybe out of fear – Zoro isn’t sure what sort of an expression he’s wearing right now, but it can’t be anything less than wild – and he makes use of the clear path to dart across the square. They chase him, of course, but he’d always been fast.

He avoids their grasping hands and their slashing swords, jumps over those who think it prudent to throw themselves under his feet in a clumsy attempt to trip him up. The alleyway is far narrower than the square, so he takes advantage of the islanders squabbling behind him about who gets to squeeze through first to put some distance between him and the pursuers, weaving through the dingy streets. The single-minded focus on getting away, though, does mean he pays even less attention than usual to the direction he’s taking, and sooner rather than later he finds himself entirely lost in the maze of city streets, panting roughly as the clatter of swords and footsteps behind him drifts ever closer through the air.

Sanji is of no use, of course – even if he were coherent, Zoro doubts he knows his way around the island any better than he does himself – but before Zoro has the time to panic and do something stupid, like promise the uncaring universe that he’s going to do his best to learn how to orient himself, honest, if only they can both get out of this alive, he feels a tug at the edge of his cloak. It’s almost déjà vu.

It’s the boy, the one whose sword Zoro had used just minutes earlier to cut off a man’s head, and which he now has dangling, bloody and unsheathed, from his belt. The boy’s eyes are wide and scared, yes, but the set of his jaw is determined. He meets Zoro’s gaze.

“Follow me,” he says, darting to the left. Then, when Zoro doesn’t move: “Do you want to get out of here or not? Follow me!”

It could be a trap, Zoro considers. They could have sent the child after them, banked on his good conscience and refusal to harm kids to try and lure him back out. But he thinks back to the boy’s downcast eyes earlier, to the way he didn’t seem to take any joy in the girl’s proud recounting of her father’s deeds. He lets his gaze trip, again, over the dyed mint-green streaks in his hair, the colour oddly, remarkably familiar. He thinks about how he doesn’t have a choice.

“Lead the way,” he says, curtly.

They run through the winding streets. Zoro’s still faster, even with the limp weight over his shoulder, but the boy is a quick thing too, weaving masterfully around corners whenever the noises of the crowd come too close. It feels like an eternity and no time at all, at once, before they make another turn and Zoro finds his field of view engulfed with the endless greyish sea. The beach is empty still – the islanders have clearly not thought ahead enough to try and intercept him here – and his ship is bobbing on the waves right where he left it docked by the wooden pier.

Zoro dashes towards it, faster now, hitting the deck with both feet as he jumps onto it over the raised hull. He lowers Sanji’s limp body onto the planks – he can fuss about the cook’s comfort later, once they’re slightly less likely to be killed – right as the boy reaches the edge of the pier, looking at him with wide, wet eyes. Without looking down, Zoro finds the handles of the two smaller swords at his hip and yanks them free, darting over to drop them by his feet.

“Thank you,” he says, voice rough but genuine. “You won’t get in trouble for this, will you?”

“Nah,” the boy says. He bends down to pick up the swords, sliding the girl’s into his scabbard and wrapping his right palm around the hilt of his own. “They’d have to notice me first to get me in trouble.”

It’s something of a worrying sentiment, but the boy doesn’t seem too distressed as he says it, his eyes glinting with what little sunlight manages to find its way through the clouds. Zoro moves to untie the knot that holds his ship at the pier with shaking fingers, but before he can properly pick at the coarse rope, the boy swings the sword down and cuts through it in one motion. The way he glances up at Zoro after, it’s almost like he’s looking for approval.

“Not half bad,” Zoro tells him, because, yeah, he’s been this kid before. He raises his leg to kick the ship away from the pier, grabbing at the handles of the paddle mechanism Franky had installed before he set off to assist in the whole manning a ship by himself thing. “You make your way out to the Grand Line at some point, come find me. I’ll show you a few tricks.”

He wishes he could stay and chat longer, but the screams of the crowd are drawing ever closer, and the sooner he’s far enough away to be able to stop Sanji from bleeding out on his deck, the better. Still, the smile the kid gives him at the offer is as bright as it is determined, and somehow, Zoro has no doubt their paths will cross again.

He tightens his grasp, the handles of the paddle mechanism familiar under his calloused hands, and starts pushing.

The boy turns and runs back down the pier, his footsteps thumping against the damp wood.

***

Zoro isn’t sure if they chase him out into the ocean – if there is one thing the weather surrounding Venoha Island is good for, it’s concealing ships in the rolling fog over the nearby waters. Still, he’s not going to skimp on precautions if there is a chance they’re being followed, so he makes sure they’re a decent distance away from shore before he finally allows himself to let go of the paddles. Taking his time has the doubled advantage of rowing far enough out into the sea that the winds pick up an acceptable amount to carry a one-person vessel, so once he lets go of the manual stirring, he allows himself a few moments to unfurl the sails. It’s not like he has much of a plan for where to go now – as he has pretty much done every day since he’d set out on his journey two years ago, Zoro is willing to let the winds guide him.


But where pulling on the various ropes to catch a favourable wind is nothing new, the other thing he has to do once that’s been done to his satisfaction certainly is.

Sanji’s breathing is shallow and shaky, the sound of the waves breaking against the hull of the ship not quite loud enough to mask the soft groans of pain slipping from his lips. Zoro darts to the cabin where he keeps the first aid kit Chopper had shoved into his hands two years ago and refused to let him leave without, sending silent words of gratitude to their little doctor, wherever he may be. He might not be terribly proficient at caring for wounds, but at least he has proper supplies.


By the time he kneels at Sanji’s side again, a bucket full of fresh water and the open first aid kit at his side, the cook appears all but unconscious, eyes shut and long eyelashes fluttering against the pale skin of his cheeks. Still, as Zoro dips a soft cloth into the bucket and moves to wipe at his injured feet, Sanji’s hand shoots forward, his long fingers wrapping around Zoro’s wrist.

“Oi,” Zoro frowns, though he makes no move to tear his hand out of his grasp, as easy as it would be with how weak the cook is right now. “Let go of me, dartbrow. I’m trying to stop you from bleeding all over my ship.”

Sanji, to his credit and for once in his life, does seem to listen. But even as his hand slips from Zoro’s wrist, Zoro can see a small, shaky smile playing on his lips

“Knew you’d come for me,” he mutters.

And, well. Zoro can’t exactly say that he’s planned this – that he’s heard of Sanji’s impending execution and swooped in to rescue him like a knight in shining armour, or whatever else might be implied by Sanji’s apparent faith in him. Actually, he’s not even sure Sanji’s apparent faith in him is not a product of blood-loss-induced sappiness which the cook will take back vehemently as soon as he’s awake again (and he will be, that isn’t in question for even a moment). But there is something here – the winds that carried Zoro to Venoha Island, the veil protecting it, lenient enough to let him slip by on a technicality. There is something – and here’s a word Zoro doesn’t use often – there’s something about fate.

“Yeah,” he exhales gruffly. “What would I do without you, cook?”

He has no clue if Sanji actually hears his response before passing out in earnest, but with everything he’s been through, Zoro supposes it’s fair enough.

***


It should probably say something that this isn’t even the worst week of Sanji’s life.

It makes the top five easy, sure, but the fact that he almost didn’t come out of it with his head attached to his shoulders makes a few things readily apparent. And that, in turn, isn’t even the worst part.

Well, okay. It’s a pretty bad part, undeniably – Sanji does not want to die, and hasn’t in a long time – but if they had just hacked his head off and been done with it, he probably wouldn’t complain as much. Because he’d be dead, obviously, but also because a quick death is a mercy.

Instead, they broke his legs and pierced his feet and and locked him up in a cell for a time Sanji would’ve lost track of even if they let him had a luxury of a regular sleeping schedule or natural light. And they didn’t feed him once, to boot. He has no idea who these people think they are – it’s like they’re trying to pull an Impel Down or something, honestly – but he is not going to respect any man who doesn’t see his prisoner as human enough to feed.

Not that his respect or lack thereof does him much good when they lug him up to the execution platform. By then, he’s a bit too weak with pain, blood loss, and hunger to put up a fight – the platform is wooden, but they have shown no reluctance in dousing him with seawater every time he tried to make use of his fire, and if you’ve never had seawater in your wounds, well, let Sanji tell you, you’re not missing out – so he focuses his energy instead on just staying awake through the whole thing. If they’re going to kill him, he at least wants to meet the Grim Reaper head-on.

And oh, they’re going to kill him. By the time they push him down onto his knees and go to drive the metal stakes in his feet deeper into the wood, the executioner is there too, a crude black sack pulled over his face and a sword glinting metallic in his hands. That, more than anything, makes Sanji want to laugh.

He’s been thinking about swords a lot recently.

Not in general, obviously. He doesn’t have a thing for pointy things of various levels of lethality. It’s just–

They’re going to kill him. They’re going to kill him. And he–

There’s a lot of poetic ways to put this. There’s a lot of sonnets to write about love, unwanted and unrequited though it is (except how could it ever be unwanted, when it sets Sanji aflame in a way not even his fire does?) There are so many missed chances to catalogue, chances he’d never get to take – or miss – again. But at the most prosaic, at the most grounded level, all it comes out to is this: he hasn’t seen Zoro in two years.

If Sanji had one fewer things to lament right now, he’d likely lament the unfortunate passing of his priorities.

Let him die, he asks of the uncaring universe. Let him die, fine, he’ll grit his teeth and bear it. But let him see his shitty swordsman again, first.

There was that time after dinner, two years ago, right after Zoro had announced his intentions, unprompted, to the table, to Nami’s raucous laughter, Luffy’s immediate support, and Sanji’s quiet heartbreak. That was the time Sanji had followed him out into the dimness of his restaurant’s (his restaurant’s! A dream come true!) hallways, words burning at the tip of his tongue. Can’t you stay? he wanted to ask. Do you really need to go? And, most damningly, Take me with you?

A dream come true, at Sanji’s fingertips, and he was still trying to ask for more. Always so ungrateful, a voice whispered in his head. It sounds suspiciously like one of his siblings.

So all he asked was, Why?, and Zoro gave a dismissive half-answer, and that was that. And now Sanji is going to die, and he hasn’t seen him in two years, and he isn’t going to see him again–

The pain is so all-encompassing, it’s hard to follow that train of thought. That, Sanji supposes, is the final mercy the world will offer him – he doesn’t need any more reasons for tears when he already feels them rolling down his bloodied cheeks. His vision blurs with them, though even if that were not the case, he doubts he’d be able to see much. Things come in flashes, underscored by pain – the jeering of the crowd as it fills up the square; the looming, cloudy sky above; the executioner’s leer, obvious even through the black sack over his head.

The whistle, harsh and high pitched.

The executioner’s head again.

At his feet.

At his feet.

Sanji tears his gaze up.

The final flash, burned into his mind like a photograph, every edge sharp, is this: there is a figure standing in front of him, and the figure holds three swords.

***

Waking up after an injury is always a bitch.

One moment you’re floating, weightless and peaceful, not a care in the world, and the next, your personal little void is suddenly flooded with waves of awareness as they crash over you and steal you back into reality. First comes the pain, of course, whatever pain there is, but that isn’t even the worst part. You never realise just how many discomforts there are to being conscious until you’re suddenly forced to feel them all at once.

Sanji’s throat is dry. His eyes sting, even with his eyelids closed, and sting more when he finally dares to lift one and throw a cautious glance around. His legs and feet hurt, obviously – it takes him a moment to remember why, but once he does, he is profoundly unsurprised by the dull ache – and the rest of his body isn’t much better, his muscles weak and slow to obey. He tries to lift a hand to brush some strands of hair back over his eye, but only manages to move it a few inches before it drops back onto the mattress with a little bounce. He groans.

Then blinks.

Huh.

The final wave of awareness brings with it the obvious in retrospect realisation: Sanji is, for all the pains and aches and parchment-dry throat and the rays of sunshine that seem way too insistent on finding their way into his eyes, alive.

“Huh,” he says out loud. At least his voice, for all its roughness, seems to work.

For a man doomed from birth, he really is bad at dying.

So he’s alive. A good thing, no doubt – you won’t see him complaining about a second chance (he is, of course, at least on his tenth, but who’s counting.) He just isn’t sure how, exactly. He remembers being forced up onto the platform, and then made to kneel, but after that, everything comes in flashes – the crowd, the sky – so he may be alive, and it’s a good thing, but he has no idea–

Wait.

The whole-body flinch does him no favours, pain flaring up in his legs and travelling up his spine, but he hardly feels it, too hung up on the memory that pops into his head. Well, calling it a memory may be a tad too generous – it is nothing more than an image, still, as if caught and forever frozen in his mind in a flash of a camera – but it is unmistakeable. A cloaked figure between him and the crowd, standing proud and tall. And the swords, their blades glinting – count ‘em. One, two, three.

Sanji actually manages to sit up this time, his shoulder blades hitting the wooden headboard of the bed he finds himself in. The pain becomes the least of his concerns very promptly, pushed to the back of his mind by the sudden realisation. Somebody saved him. Somebody got him out of there. And if the image he sees so clearly in front of him when he closes his eyes again is any indication of who it might have been–

Well, it’s not that there are no fools out there who saw an idiot with a sword in his mouth and decided, for some reason, to try and learn his ways. Sanji has met their type. But once a heart is set on something, it is a futile task to change its mind. And Sanji’s heart, today and always, is set unwaveringly on Roronoa Zoro.

He looks around the room. It’s a standard room, if not outright plain, nothing in it terribly of note. It‘s on dry land, if a quick glance out of a window is anything to go by, the horizon crowded by some red-brick buildings. There is a window, first of all, which is a good sign, as is the standard wooden definitely-not-prison-cell door at the opposite wall. The bed he is lying on is comfortable enough, even if the mattress is a bit too stiff for his liking – Sanji has his preferences, but he also slept in a hammock in his many months on various pirate ships, so awfully picky he is not. The sheets are plain white. The set of wooden shelves to his left, stretching from floor to ceiling, is full of jars and vials and various herbs (not all of which he knows from cooking, so he feels pretty safe in assuming they are medicinal). All in all, it is with a fair amount of confidence that Sanji concludes he is in a doctor’s ward.

Alone.

He narrows his eyes.

If Zoro dropped him off at the nearest island and then fucked off again on his search for whatever pot of gold at the end of a rainbow he set his sights on this time without even sticking around long enough to say hello, Sanji is going to find him and kick the mosshead’s teeth out the moment his legs heal, his restaurant be damned.

As soon as he makes this resolution, the door on the other end of the room creaks open.

And the resolution immediately becomes useless, because Sanji can recognise the figure that steps inside with his eyes closed from the footsteps alone.

He smiles.

“You won’t believe this fucking island,” Zoro is grumbling, not sparing him a glance as he kicks the door closed and drops a bag he was carrying down on the floor. “Everyone here is so goddamn money hungry, they could give the sea witch a run for her – uh – money. Seriously, I swear to god, it’s like they don’t even–“

“Don’t talk about Nami like that,” Sanji says, without thinking, because that’s a normal first thing to say to someone after you haven’t seen them for two years. (First thing? Did he says anything earlier, when Zoro first found him, when he was bleeding out? He doesn’t remember.)

“Yeah, well, if Nami doesn’t want me to talk about her like that–“ Zoro begins, and then goes comically quiet, his jaw shutting with a click. He spins on his heel and faces Sanji, his uninjured eye wide and unguarded as it searches his face. Sanji still feels a little too weak to lift his hand in greeting, so he offers him a smile instead.

“Sanji,” Zoro breathes out, on his knees at his side in an instant. Sanji shivers.

It’s not the first time Zoro had said his name by any means, but it’s certainly a rare occurrence to hear it coming from him, and Sanji has come by now to both love and hate the reluctant yet unavoidable delight it brings to see Zoro’s lips curve around its shape. If you grow up like he did, he thinks to himself sometimes with a crooked smile, you learn one thing: being acknowledged is one hell of a drug.

“Hey, Zoro,” he says, because he might as well return the favour. Seeing Zoro startle is as rewarding as ever.

What is also rewarding – though certainly new – is feeling the swordsman’s calloused hand finding its way to his, squeezing it desperately. Sanji does his best to fight back a blush, though when Zoro doesn’t comment on it, he isn’t sure whether it’s because he succeeded, or because the damned marimo wouldn’t know love if it kicked him in the face.

“You’re awake,” Zoro mutters, near reverently, pressing his forehead to their joint hands. “I thought – I was worried – you were so…”

“You were worried about me?” Sanji drawls, slipping into the familiar persona to hide the way his heart flutters. “Consider me flattered, algae-for-brains. I wasn’t sure you were capable of emotions that complex.”

Zoro bristles, clearly, but doesn’t rise to the bait. He looks up at Sanji, half of his face still hidden behind their knuckles, eyebrows furrowed. There is a brief silence in which Sanji tries to fish for another snide comment he can throw out between them, but then Zoro’s expression relaxes.

“I don’t want to fight,” he says, and the softness of it shoots straight through Sanji’s chest. “You could have died. I could have never seen you again. Let me have this.”

Sanji lets him have this. If it’s because his throat closes up too much to manage a word across, well, at least Zoro is none the wiser.

They stay like that for some time, Sanji’s brain too caught up in trying to process the moment to actually keep track of minutes as they pass. Zoro’s hand is warm and rough around his, and the swordsman is breathing quietly, his eye roaming over Sanji’s face with such a taken look that if it had come from someone else, Sanji might’ve almost believed he was something special. He averts his eyes after a few moments, though he’s pretty sure it does little to hide the blush colouring his cheeks. His only solace is that Zoro is as oblivious to it as ever.

There comes a moment when he can’t handle it any longer though, so he asks –

“What the fuck did you do to your hair, mosshead?”

Zoro blinks. He lets go of Sanji’s hand in favour of tugging at a strand of hair by his temple, and Sanji misses the contact instantly.

“Oh,” he says after a moment. “You mean the dye?”

Sanji scoffs.

“Yes, you idiot, I mean the dye. Why the hell do you look like you dipped your head into a bag of soot?”

“Too recognisable,” Zoro shrugs, like it’s not a big deal. “Helps when you’re trying to, y’know, strike fear into the hearts of your enemies and shit, but I just wanted to travel.”

“Right.”

Sanji’s pretty sure he sounds as skeptical as he feels as he lets his gaze take in Zoro’s form in its entirety for the first time in two years. He hasn’t changed too much – still dresses like a man who doesn’t know what a change of clothes is – but the differences stick out like a sore thumb. The earrings, for one – or, the earring, singular, which is kind of the point – though that one, at least, is expected; Sanji knows that of the two that are missing, one has been attached securely to the brim of a straw hat, and the other is clipped around a button of the head chef’s uniform in a small restaurant out in the All Blue, right over the heart. What is less expected are the swords – or, more damningly, the lack thereof.

“And the swords?“ he asks. Zoro scowls.

“Thought I’d try something new,” he says. “Left them with Tashigi.”

That sends a pang of… something through Sanji’s chest. It’s not hurt – this wound is too old to hurt by now – but it’s uncomfortable still, the sudden hollowness he feels. For Zoro to leave his swords behind is highly unexpected in itself, but for him to entrust them to someone so directly…

“Don’t look at me like that,” Zoro grumbles, though Sanji has no clue what he’s looking at him like. “Found some to use when I needed to, haven’t I?”

“I fear to know what old lady you robbed for those,” Sanji mutters, though his heart’s not in it, still caught like a broken record on the thought of Zoro’s precious swords in someone else’s care. The mosshead just… does these things sometimes, and Sanji has no idea what they mean. If they mean anything. Are he and Tashigi–?

“Actually, it was a bunch of kids,” Zoro shrugs, oblivious to his inner turmoil. “And I didn’t rob them. I returned the swords before we sailed off. I didn’t return the one I stole from the executioner, but I don’t think the guy was left in any position to use it, so.”

Sanji thinks back to the executioner’s head, severed from his body, landing in front of him, and silently agrees with that assessment.

“It’s okay,” Zoro continues, unperturbed. “Next time I run into her I’m gonna get them back. The universe is telling me I won’t stop getting into fights, and I think I’d better listen.”

Privately, Sanji thinks that whatever the universe deigns to tell people isn’t nearly as easy to interpret as Zoro is making it out to be. But then, it’s not like he’s had any more luck deciphering its meanings himself, so he smirks curtly and keeps his mouth shut.

***

After prodding at Sanji’s injuries this way and that, the island’s doctor declares him clear to leave his observation. “Doesn’t mean you should be walking around all willy-nilly though,” he adds cheerfully, shoving a pair of crutches into his hands (and the bill for said pair of crutches into Zoro’s, one glance at it making the swordsman’s face scrunch up like he just ate something awfully bitter. Or sweet, as it were, accounting for his stupid taste buds.) “I’d suggest no walking around at all, really, but I understand why that may not be feasible.” He throws an amused glance back at Zoro, and Sanji resolutely tries to pretend this isn’t causing images to pop into his head. Not unpleasant images, mind, but no more realistic ones for it.

Fortunately incapable of reading his mind, Zoro raises an eyebrow.

“You think I’m not strong enough to carry him around?” he demands of the doctor, his expression darkening in the way that sends most people running for the hills. The doctor, damn him, just chuckles.

“I wouldn’t dare suggest, sir,” he says, inclining his head politely. “I’m sure you two can work that out between yourselves. Just make sure you are careful out on the high seas – storms are no good for healing injuries.”

With that, as well as a quick goodbye and another exchange of money (Sanji’s seen a lot of those considering he hasn’t left the room he’s in, and he’s starting to understand Zoro’s previous point about money-hungry islanders), the doctor finally leaves them to it. Not that there’s much to the “it” in question – Zoro professes he’d already bought the necessary supplies and loaded them onto his ship, even if Sanji has some doubts about what the marimo considers “necessary supplies”, and it’s not like Sanji’s got any possessions to pack up (his suit is definitely beyond saving, so he doesn’t even pretend to bother about bringing it with) – meaning they are free to depart whenever. Sanji sits up, trying to figure out how to work the crutches.

“Don’t be stupid, shit cook,” Zoro scoffs, yanking them from his hands and tucking them under his arm in one smooth motion. “You heard the doctor. No walking around for you.”

So, yes, Zoro carries him, and most damningly, Sanji lets him with little more than a token protest. He pretends this is perfectly normal, even as Zoro swoops him off his feet with seemingly no effort at all, his strong arms holding Sanji close and safe. This is also not a first – if anything, Zoro carts his crewmates around with remarkable regularity, always willing to offer a shoulder to somebody who can’t stand on their own – but Sanji has a sneaking suspicion he takes more enjoyment in the closeness than the rest of their crew do. Still, it’s been two years, and he almost died, and his legs hurt – he’s allowed to have this, point is.

They reach the ship. It’s a small one, a yacht of sorts, though sturdier than most vessels of its size Sanji has seen if the thickness of its hull is anything to go by. Zoro hops it easily, even despite the crutches and Sanji’s body in his arms, and deposits both of them onto the wooden deck before falling into the pattern of pre-sailing safety checks. Sanji knows the pattern too – make sure the sails unfurl with no hiccups, check that the water or nearby marine life hasn’t eaten away at the paddles, stuff like that – but although it was neither of their roles on the Sunny, Zoro performs them competently, as though it’s second nature. Maybe to him, it is. It’s been two years.

“So where are we going?” Sanji asks. It’s something he should’ve probably asked before they got to the ship, but after he stopped being caught up on whether Zoro was actually going to bring him along at all or just leave him on the island to fend for himself, the destination had felt somewhat secondary. Still, knowing the shitty swordsman’s navigational, ahem, prowess, Sanji wouldn’t be surprised to find he hadn’t thought of it at all.

Zoro glances back at him like he’s stupid.

“Unless you have other ideas, cook, I figured I’m just bringing you back to your restaurant. That’s where they snatched you from, no?”

Sanji is equally unsurprised to find that Zoro had thought of it in the dumbest way possible.

“That’s on the Grand Line,” he deadpans. Zoro is still looking at him like he does not comprehend, so in his infinite patience, he clarifies – “You know, the stretch of water that is impossible to navigate without a log pose? I’m sorry, Marimo, I didn’t exactly have time to grab one when I was being kidnapped from my own kitchen.”

At that, Zoro scoffs and rummages through his haramaki. He tosses something at Sanji, something Sanji catches only because he has a very good reaction time, and he’s about to scold the swordsman for throwing shit around before it hits him exactly what he is holding. It is, indeed, a log pose – a little glass sphere sandwiched in a hourglass-like wooden frame. The top of the frame is emblazoned very neatly with the words, Le Grand Bleu.

Sanji blinks at it.

“Do,” he says, not daring to look up and check whether Zoro had turned away, “do you have any other log poses? Like, to Luffy’s place?” 

“Nope,” Zoro shrugs. From the way his voice sounds, slightly less clear than before, he must have gone back to oiling the paddle hinges.

“Do you even have a normal compass, then?” Sanji demands, hearing his voice climb up a few pitches.

“Nah,” Zoro says, just as flatly as before. “Can’t read ‘em, don’t have any use for one. I let the winds take me wherever they feel like.”

“Right,” Sanji says. He stares at the log pose in his hands, its needle pointing, impassively, in a set direction, the only leading line Zoro had seen fit to leave himself before setting out on his journey, connecting him not to his captain, not to any other of their nakama, some of whom, Sanji can admit almost without a pang of jealousy, are closer to Zoro than him, but to Sanji himself. “Right. My restaurant, then. That works.”

Zoro unties the rope connecting them to the pier.

***

In the end, the destination they pick for themselves doesn’t even matter, but that’s the end. Before they get there, they need to get through the middle, and Sanji is beginning to think that is going to be something of a struggle. Not that Zoro is a bad shipmate – he never has been, despite all the many spats he and Sanji have gotten into over their time knowing each other – but there is two years of distance between them now. And unlike the last time there were two years of distance between them, there is no Luffy or Chopper or Usopp to conveniently curb the tension. It’s just the two of them, on a small ship, in the middle of a vast sea, and Sanji can’t even walk.

Well, okay. He can stand up for prolonged periods of time, and limp around a room if he really needs to. But it’s not really any fun, and – perhaps more importantly – Zoro is set on not letting him. Zoro is almost as annoying as Chopper used to be sometimes when one of the Straw Hats got themselves injured, practically breathing down Sanji’s neck whenever he so much as expresses the desire to move somewhere. It’s as endearing as it is utterly infuriating.

“I’m not a fucking invalid, shitty swordsman,” he seethes, not for the first time and certainly not the last. Zoro, as Zoro is wont to do, does not listen as he sweeps him off his feet.

At least he concedes, after a couple rounds of shouting matches, that Sanji can shuffle around the galley on his own. Well, “galley” is a bit of a generous way of referring to the little corner of Zoro’s ship dedicated to food preparation, but it has the necessities, and the marimo has even had the good sense (for once in his life) to acquire a decent collection of cooking essentials. When Sanji reaches for something, he finds it more often than not, which is already more than he expected.

“Don’t tell me you’ve gotten into cooking on your lone samurai journey,” Sanji jokes, glancing back over his shoulder to where Zoro is watching him like a hawk. Zoro shrugs.

“Had to eat something,” he says. “Not as good as you, obviously. But I can do the basics.”

“Of course you’re not as good as me,” Sanji snorts, even as the compliment crawls its way through his arteries and settles by his heart. “Pardon me if I don’t trust you with the provision, mosshead.”

“That’s okay,” Zoro says. “I missed your cooking.”

Sanji’s response to surprise is always to tighten his grip rather than let go, so he doesn’t drop the bowl he’s holding. It’s a trained reaction.

He bites back his comments from then on, and Zoro seems content to let him, his cheek resting in the crook of his arms, folded over a small table. He does not close his eye though, and Sanji can feel his gaze burning between his shoulder blades. It isn’t new, but it has been two years.

“Is it strange?” Zoro asks. “Cooking on a ship again?”

“Le Grand Bleu is a ship,” Sanji shrugs, even though he knows that’s not the question. His restaurant has a state-of-the-art kitchen and as many sous chefs as his heart desires. Zoro’s little vessel has a stove with one burner. “No. Yes. I don’t know. Is it strange having someone else cook for you?”

“A little,” Zoro says. “Less than it should be, probably.”

“Yeah.”

The silence between them makes Sanji’s skin prickle. He compensates for it by setting the bowls down on the counter a little harder than he needs to, scraping the spoon against their sides a little more often than he should as he mixes the vinegar into the rice grains. True to form, Zoro’s kitchen has a lot of fish, and Sanji falls into making onigiri practically without having to think about it. He’s learned more fish recipes in his years of running Le Grand Bleu than he could have ever imagined, but somehow, when it comes to the mosshead, making any of those as their first meal after running into each other again wouldn’t feel right. Sanji thinks it means he’s an awful romantic, but then, what else is new.

It’s a fast dish, at least – no more than half an hour, and onto the table they go, along with some expertly plated sashimi on the side (Sanji couldn’t resist.) Zoro doesn’t smile, but his eye crinkles in that way Sanji had learned to recognise as a pleased expression years ago. It makes him happy to know that this, at least, hasn’t changed. He settles down opposite him – the table has two chairs, fortunately, though it means Sanji has to resolutely not think about whether the swordsman has invited anyone else on his ship before him, if he’d let someone else make him dinner – and pours them both a glass of wine. Zoro, ever the brute, finishes his at a few swallows without so much as a thank you.

“You’re welcome,” Sanji says, anyway. The mosshead snorts.

The silence in which they eat is more companionable, but there is still a question scraping against the roof of Sanji’s mouth. He’d wanted to ask it since – well, since he saw Zoro again, that’s for sure, and he’d been thinking about asking it for way longer than that. Zoro seems different somehow, but still the same, just like after those two years he’d spent training under Mihawk, and Sanji thought the answer would’ve been yes then, but he isn’t quite so sure of it now. So he asks –

“Hey.” And then, when Zoro looks up, catching his eye before he can think any better of it: “Did you find it?”

“Huh? Find what?” Zoro says. He swallows his bite of onigiri, but doesn’t take another one, sensing, as he always does, the shift in Sanji’s tone. Sanji breathes out.

“You know,” he says, waving his hand vaguely around the room in a gesture that is meant to encompass nothing less than the world itself. “Whatever you were looking for.”

Zoro stares at him. He doesn’t answer, jaw tight, for almost long enough to make Sanji throw in the towel and tell him to forget about it, but then his shoulders relax and he lets out a snort.

“Funny you should ask that, cook,” he says, leaning back in his chair in a way that would almost be leisurely if not for the way he doesn’t close his eye. “From where I’m standing, I found what I was looking for a while ago. It just wasn’t looking for me.”

Sanji blinks. For Zoro, that way of putting it is almost poetic.

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this is about love,” he teases before his brain can catch up to his tongue, not daring to find out what silence after that sort of statement would bring. As ever though, trying to avoid silence is a futile endeavour – although he’s still looking at him, Zoro doesn’t respond. Sanji feels his traitorous heart drop. “…Is it about love?”

Zoro lets it drag on again, but this time, Sanji isn’t tempted to wave off his question. There are needles pricking at his skin, and he needs to know – he needs to know – whether to drive them under his fingernails.

Zoro scoffs again. Finally – all too soon – the steely gaze of his eye falls away.

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” he says. “What’s it to you?”

Which, if you know Zoro-speak (and Sanji, damn him to hell, is fluent) is as good as a yes. He smirks, and it feels like a gash in his skin.

“I didn’t realise you were capable of feelings that serious, Marimo,” he drawls, and his voice is perfectly airy, perfectly mocking. First and foremost, Sanji is a cook, but from time to time he finds he’s not a half-bad actor. Or maybe not; maybe he’s just abnormally used to masks. “Well, who is it, then?”

“Why the hell would I tell you?” Zoro grumbles, which would hurt, but in the face of a hole in your chest, an oil burn stings very little.

“We are friends, aren’t we?” Sanji shrugs. “And I’m something of an expert on love, if I say so myself! I can help you win any fair maiden’s heart!”

He would, too. It would kill him, probably, but he would. As always, Zoro need only ask.

As always, Zoro doesn’t.

“Yeah, right,” he laughs, amused if not a little harsh. “You fall in love with every woman you meet, and I haven’t seen a single one return your affections.”

“I adore every woman I meet,” Sanji corrects him, affronted. “All of them are goddesses who deserve only the highest of comforts, and I am always willing to lend a hand. But that’s not love. Love is–”

You, he does not say, because he’s a moron, not a masochist. Zoro seems to derive his own meaning from the ensuing pause regardless, because he softens a little, a small smile tugging at his lips. He looks so comfortable like that, thinking about love. About whoever he’s in love with, Sanji’s brain helpfully supplies. He yanks his fringe over his eye to shut it up.

“It’s Tashigi, isn’t it?” he blurts out before he can think any better of it. Maybe he is something of a masochist after all, but he needs to know. “She is a beautiful lady, I approve.”

Zoro frowns at him.

“What?” he says. “No. Why the fuck would it be Tashigi?”

“Well, you’re both swordsmen, right?” Sanji begins. “And she–“

“Is a good swordsman,” Zoro interrupts, sounding exasperated. “One of the best. We share a sense of honour, and I respect her for it. Definitely not like that though.”

Sanji isn’t sure if he’s relieved to hear the immediate denial, or just put more on edge. Tashigi was the easy answer, the expected answer. If it’s not her, he’s floundering a little, and Zoro doesn’t look about to throw him a bone.

“Well, it’s not Nami, obviously,” he reasons out loud. “You two are like siblings. And as lovely as Robin-chan is, she cannot possibly be your type.” Zoro had phrased it in a way hinting at unrequited love, which means Hiyori’s out too – that woman was practically throwing herself at him every time they were in the same room. “Oh, what was that pink-haired darling’s name? Perona, no? She–“

“Cook,” Zoro deadpans, eye narrowed. “If you want to guess sometime this century, you need to stop listing women.”

Sanji snaps his jaw shut.

Huh.

He hadn’t thought of this (quite resolutely, in fact, because there is a world of difference between Zoro not liking men, and Zoro just not liking him), but it makes sense. The swordsman had never shown any interest in women beyond sometimes admiring their skill, but what Sanji had taken as a disinterest in romance in general may very well have just been a disinterest in romance of that kind. He’d never made much of a distinction himself (his exceedingly well-known admiration for women aside), but of course, he’d also never begrudged it to people who do.

“Huh,” he says out loud. And then, in the same breath: “Luffy.”

Because that’s the only answer there, isn’t it? Zoro the first mate, the first to join the crew, the one to make it a crew at all. Zoro, who had referred to Luffy as Pirate King years before their captain had gotten anywhere within reach of the crown, not an ounce of doubt in his voice or actions the entire time Sanji had known him. Zoro, who took the brunt of Bartholomew Kuma’s power head on, pushing Sanji out of the way, for Luffy. Zoro, who Sanji had seen tracing the scar across Luffy’s chest with his gaze too many times to count, using the evidence of what he saw as his own failure to protect his captain to push himself further, faster. Endlessly devoted.

And Luffy – Luffy loves Zoro, Sanji has no doubt, but Luffy loves every one of his nakama. Luffy loves with the power of an ocean’s storm, too grand and all-encompassing to be directed at a single person, and utterly pointless, if not outright cruel, to try and contain. While Sanji wouldn’t put it quite as harshly as Zoro did – Luffy was certainly looking for his swordsman, if not in the same way – it is true, certainly, to say that expecting romantic reciprocation out of him would be a fool’s endeavour. Loving him is not – love never is, Sanji maintains, even as he says it through gritted teeth – but he would not fault Zoro for hurting.

Except here, again, Zoro frowns. Not dismissively, the way he had when Sanji brought up Tashigi, but not with the frustration of a man with a secret guessed either.

“Luffy,” he says, slowly, as if trying to find the right words, “is important to me, more than almost anything. He is my captain. My life is his, even if he will never come to collect it.” He pauses for a moment, then shakes his head. “But it’s not like that. No. Not the kind of love you’re asking about.”

Which – well, good for him, maybe it’s not quite as hopeless as loving a man who will always love you back but never like that – but. It just means Sanji’s confused, now.

“No?” he repeats, unable to entirely keep the baffled tone out of his voice. “Are– are you sure?”

Zoro looks at him like he’s stupid. Which might be justified given his no doubt bewildered expression, admittedly, but Sanji was so confident in his answer, and now he’s got just, like, no clue. Zoro is closest to Luffy by far out of every man Sanji had ever seen him interact with, and the list of men he hadn’t seen him interact with (out of the ones they’ve met when hunting for the One Piece, anyhow, since Zoro hadn’t made any attempts to discourage him from that line of guessing) is sorely limited.

“It’s not Mihawk, is it?” he tries sheepishly. Zoro slams his wine glass on the table.

“This is pointless,” he spits with a surprising amount of venom, pushing himself up to his feet. “Are you being intentionally obtuse? I don’t like taking fucking hints, cook. Just say it to my face.”

“What?” Sanji blinks. Usually, when Zoro takes up that sort of tone with him, he defaults to responding with anger right back, but this time, he flounders. He’s too confused to slip into the familiar back-and-forth, or too distracted, or too– too something (hurt, his brain supplies, and he yanks at his fringe again), so he is left to stare, baffled, as the swordsman spins around on his heel and storms out onto the deck. The galley door slams shut behind him.

Thing is, usually when they fight, Sanji can at least pinpoint what he’d done to get a rise out of the mosshead. But Zoro didn’t seem offended by his attempts to guess at the identity of his love interest – bemused at most – so his sudden outburst really does feel like it had come out of nowhere. Was he mad Sanji hadn’t paid him enough attention to notice something that big? But Sanji had, he knows he had, for reasons Zoro is definitely never allowed to find out about now, and he still doesn’t know– he still doesn’t know–

Maybe he just doesn’t want to know? Maybe his brain, thrice damned as it is, has decided a lack of recognition would bring with it a lack of hurt? If that’s the case, so much, he thinks bitterly, for that.

He gets up too, limping. He clears away the table – there’s a few onigiri left, along with a couple pieces of sashimi, but the ship’s fridge is more than big enough to accommodate for the leftovers. He stacks the plates in the sink and runs warm water over them. He finishes his wine. The door stays shut.

It’s been two years. He isn’t doing this.

Unlike the Sunny, or the Merry before her, Zoro’s ship is small. It’s only got the one level – though one could technically climb atop the rounded roof that covers the galley and the one cabin she has, it wouldn’t be the steadiest place to stand. It does have a mast, thin as it is (Sanji is pretty sure he could wrap his arms around it and have his fingers touch), but the crow’s nest that sits atop of it hardly looks like a comfortable place to spend your time, a round wooden platform without so much as a barrier around it. It’s not without sense – this isn’t a pirate ship in anything but the identity of its captain, so there’s far less need to keep watch.

All of that, of course, is to say that when they’re out on the open ocean, there are only two places where Zoro can run – the cabin, or the deck. And he’d practically relinquished the cabin to Sanji since they’ve set sail, despite Sanji’s protests that he was perfectly fine to sleep on the floor, do you think I’m weak or something, shitty marimo, so running off to there would be sort of like admitting defeat in that fight. Which at least means finding him should be easy.

Sure enough, Sanji spots the figure resting its elbows on the railing pretty much as soon as he gathers the courage necessary to open the galley door himself. He hopes the fact that Zoro had chosen to position himself directly in view from its porch is a good sign, or at least not a bad one. Then again, the swordsman doesn’t so much as glance his way as he walks over to join him, so perhaps the hope is misplaced. Mixed signals, mixed signals. Always like that with him.

Sanji lights a cigarette. It’s not the brand he favours nowadays, but it is the one he preferred two years ago, and when Zoro presented him with the pack and a small plastic lighter soon after their departure from dry land, Sanji could feel his heart squeeze at the notion of being remembered. He feels it squeeze now, too, but after the blow that had been dealt to it, the sensation is far less pleasant.

He stares out at the ocean. They’re not anywhere near the Grand Line yet, which means the sun has slipped under the horizon even before dinnertime. Now the sky is just dark, the clouds hiding even the hints of stars that might’ve helped a weary traveller find their way across a different Blue. Somehow, this feels appropriate. He takes a drag of the cigarette, sending a silent word of gratitude to Trafalgar Law for keeping his lungs from shrivelling up like raisins (and to Luffy, for somehow worming his way into Trafalgar Law’s affections enough that the man decided to contribute to keeping his crew from falling apart at the hands of their own bad habits). The smoke in his lungs helps him breathe.

“Listen,” he says, and then pauses, because for all the time he’s taken, he still isn’t sure how to say this. “Listen,” he begins again. “I don’t – I don’t understand why you’re angry.” Zoro throws him a sharp glance, and he grimaces at the way that came out. “No, shit – that sounds bad. I don’t mean it like that. Well, yes I do, but– I’m sorry for prying, if that’s what this is about.”

“It’s not,” Zoro says, taking advantage of the momentary pause Sanji takes to collect his thoughts. His voice is rough.

“No, see, I didn’t think so,” Sanji sighs, or maybe chuckles, though if there is any humour in his tone, it is soured by the pain. He taps his cigarette at the hull, watching the glowing particles as they drift off into the water. “I just, I really don’t know, then. I’m sorry for – not paying more attention to your romantic prospects?” Saying that aloud makes it sound ridiculous enough to cringe at, but he may as well take his shots in the dark here. Funny how almost dying makes you more talkative. He refuses to let it make him any less snippy though. “Though really, you’re making it out to be fucking obvious or something, and it really–”

–is not, is what he wants to say. And then, maybe, But I also don’t see why you’d be so pissed at me about that, and It’s not like I don’t fucking pay attention to you, and Why would you complain about that anyway even if I didn’t, and then maybe a whole lot of other things depending on how Zoro responds, and then maybe they’d get into a fight, and all would be right with the world again, or not right, but as close to right as it ever could be, but–

But.

But.

The thing is, Sanji doesn’t realise it’s happening before it’s over. He would have really fucking liked to have realised it was happening before it was over, for the record, but.

You know that feeling when something happens, and it doesn’t fit in your understanding of the world at all? Say you see someone raise the dead. Say you see someone snap their fingers and make the sun go out. Say you see Luffy set his plate aside, politely, and say he isn’t hungry anymore. Something that is at odds with the laws of the universe as you know them, and it’s happening right in front of you.

It just.

It doesn’t compute.

And then it’s over.

Sanji’s cigarette flutters down from his slack fingers and into the ocean. So much for a trained reaction, he’d think, if he could think.

Zoro leans back, expression impassive. He takes in the look on Sanji’s face.

“Huh,” he says. “You really were oblivious. Damn.”

Sanji has no idea what the look on his face is right now, and he hopes he never finds out.

“Now I feel a little bad”, Zoro adds with an amused huff. For a man who had just reduced a fundamental law of Sanji’s universe to dust with one brush of lips, he looks remarkably unbothered. Or maybe he’s just unbothered compared to Sanji. Not like that’s hard. “I really thought you knew and were being an asshole on purpose. I haven’t exactly been subtle.”

“What,” Sanji says. He’s very proud of himself for managing the word, even if he sounds sort of like a dying fish. He’d know. He’d seen a lot of dying fish.

“You know, with the whole trying to guess thing,” Zoro shrugs, having clearly taken his question as addressing the first half of his statement. Which is fair, given that Sanji hasn’t exactly clarified. “Though even if you didn’t know, you’re really fucking dumb, cook. I mean, I guess Luffy wasn’t a bad guess, but – Mihawk?”

He makes a face. Sanji’s thoughts move slow, like molasses, but even as he grapples around for a coherent sentence, there is one thing he knows for sure.

“That,” he says. “That is your fault.”

“Heh?!” Zoro exclaims, whipping his head back around to squint at him. “How the hell is you being shit at guessing my fault, curly? Just because you refuse to consider yourself a viable option because of all that self-deprecating bullshit you have going on–“

“You,” Sanji yells, finally finding if not a strand of thoughts to pull on, then at least enough annoyance at Zoro to shove it in his face just how wrong he is, “gave me wrong fucking clues!”

“Where the fuck,” Zoro yells back, giving, always giving, as good as he gets, and, fuck, isn’t that a thought Sanji is now probably allowed to be having, “did I give you the wrong clues?!”

And, well.

He is asking for it.

Sanji does know it’s happening this time, though the benefit of foresight doesn’t help as much as he would’ve hoped. It still feels remarkably not unlike an explosion going off in his chest, rattling him to his very core even as it stays wholly contained. And yet, and yet, where an explosion would have hurt and burned and consumed everything in its path until there was nothing left for it to feast on, this fills Sanji up until he feels like a balloon about to burst. And still, he wants more.

Zoro’s lips are chapped and warm.

Sanji is not too proud to admit he imagined this many times. Sanji is not too proud to admit he could never have gotten it right.

Sanji is too proud to get so lightheaded because of a kiss that he passes out in the middle of the deck though, so he forces himself to tear away and remember how to breathe again. It’s a remarkably monumental task.

If the look on his face earlier was anything like what the one on Zoro’s is right now, he really hopes he never finds out. The swordsman is staring at him with a slack jaw, his singular eye so wide it’s almost comical. His arms are hanging limply at his sides, like he isn’t quite sure what to do with them. Sanji does empathise, to be fair, but he’s not about to let him off the hook here.

“‘It wasn’t looking for me’ my ass,” he hisses, jabbing an accusatory finger at Zoro’s chest. “How’s that for a wrong clue, huh?! If I had my way, we would’ve been doing this since Thriller Bark!”

Zoro glances down at his finger. Sanji lets him have his moment. Sanji is still, to be fair, having his own moment.

Zoro is. Zoro is. Well.

Maybe not in love. He did say it maybe wasn’t about love. But he did say it maybe was, so maybe, maybe…

“Water Seven,” Zoro says.


Sanji stares at him. His lack of understanding must display on his face, because Zoro huffs, in that way which would sound annoyed if Sanji couldn’t see the look in his eye, and just sounds restless since he can.

“You said,” he clarifies, forcefully, “if you had your way, we’d be doing this since Thriller Bark.”

Oh. Sanji did say that, didn’t he.

“Oh,” he says, out loud. Blinks, once, forcing his brain to at least work well enough to remember the order of their adventures. Narrows his eyes. “What, is this a competition now?”

“What?” Zoro sputters, bristling. “No, that’s– you gave me a time! Did you not want to know mine in return?!”

Fair point.

“No, I– I did,” Sanji admits. Antagonising Zoro is just sort of his default when he doesn’t know what else to do, and he really, really doesn’t know what else to do right now. Or, well, he has a few ideas, but he needs to get his heart rate under control before getting anywhere near implementing those, and that isn’t seeming terribly likely. “I did. Sorry. I think my brain needs a moment to restart.”

Zoro laughs. The sound of it is so nice, Sanji almost doesn’t mind the fact that he’s the one being laughed at.

“It baffles me that you’re so surprised about this,” he says, which Sanji would be offended at if he didn’t sound so earnest. “Everyone told me I was being exceedingly obvious. And anyway, shouldn’t I be the one surprised here? You’re into women, cook!”

“Among other things!” Sanji almost screeches, throwing his arms up in the air. “Ever heard of bisexuality, you shitty piece of sentient plant life? I can like whomever the hell I want!”

“You think I’m complaining about that?” Zoro exclaims, practically mirroring his pose. The two of them have always been like that, mirroring. Sanji thinks back to an old book on human behaviour he found on Zeff’s shelves and read from cover to cover in an attempt to figure out how to make people like him more. “Fuck, I don’t care what fucking genders you’re into, Curly! As long as you’re–“

And then he clamps his mouth shut.

Maybe not in love, Sanji had thought, earlier.

Sanji knows Zoro. Mirroring, mirroring.

“In love,” Sanji offers into the silence, because, what the hell – they’ve gotten this far. “I am. In love. With you.”

Zoro looks at him. Sanji lets him. He’s being brave and vulnerable and open here, and the fucking universe better watch him serve his fucking heart on a silver platter and reward him accordingly.

And maybe the universe does care for it, a little, because the grin that blooms on Zoro’s face after a few more beats of silence is the most beautiful thing Sanji has ever seen.

“Yeah,” he says, leaning closer. “Me too.”

This time, they both see it coming.

***

“So, when you said everyone told you you were being exceedingly obvious,” Sanji says, later that night. They’re in the cabin, both of their hearts still beating faster than is probably healthy, reeling with the realisations of the evening. Zoro is still on the floor, despite Sanji’s multiple protests about how they can definitely share a bed now, and in fact probably should, and in fact Come here, you moss-headed idiot, do you know how long I’ve wanted this?! But Zoro is apparently dead-set on being reasonable, pointing out that Sanji had already been up and about way more than he should today, so he should at least give his legs some time to recover at night, and that doesn’t involve squeezing two people into a single bed. Sanji maintains that Zoro is the last person who gets to be all fussy about injuries, but stubborn as he is, the swordsman remains unmoved by his protests. Sanji will have to get back at him later. “Who exactly does everyone entail?”

“Who doesn’t it?” Zoro scoffs. “I’m pretty sure even Luffy knows. Though all he used it for was to poke fun at me whenever he felt like pickin’ a fight. Better than the sea witch trying to extort me for money to keep it a secret.”

“Don’t talk about her like that,” Sanji mutters, though automatic as the response is, it has less heart behind it than usual. “Yeah, she, uh. She did that to me too.”

“What?!” Zoro exclaims, bolting upright. “Oh, that money-hungry– I’m telling you, when I get my hands on her!..”

“Don’t you dare fight a beautiful lady, mosshead.” Sanji crumples up one of the tissues from the bedside table into a ball and tosses it at him, though he can’t tell if it connects in the dark. He does consider though, allowing himself to concede after a moment: “Though perhaps in this particular case your assessment of her character is… not entirely unjustified.”

“No shit,” Zoro snorts. They both know, for all his threats, there is no real heat behind them – Nami has her quirks from time to time, but she is a good and valued friend. And anyway, how well would that have gone down? If she sat them down and told them they were into each other. Sanji tries to imagine how he would have reacted. A lot of screaming, probably, at first, if it happened anywhere around Thriller Bark. And then there were the two years, and he’d needed time to settle into Zoro’s presence again, even after he’d come to terms with his feelings. And then, all too soon, there was Whole Cake and its aftermath – the less said about that, the better. And then Luffy became the Pirate King, and the celebratory whirlwind that followed wouldn’t exactly have been the easiest backdrop to a start of a relationship, so–

“Probably for the best she didn’t tell us,” he admits into the darkness. “We needed the time. And to do it ourselves, I think.”

Zoro heaves a long-suffering sigh.

“Probably,” he agrees. “But don’t tell her that. Or she’ll try to charge us for the services of her infinite wisdom.”

Sanji laughs, and his chest feels lighter than it has in years.

***

In the end, the destination they pick for themselves doesn’t even matter, and here’s why: they dock at an island to replenish their supplies, and Zoro hears a familiar voice.

He’s at the market square, clutching at a grocery list Sanji had meticulously written out for him and trying to figure out if there’s actually a difference between sweet potatoes and yams or if the cook is just fucking with him, when he hears it. Two years or not, Zoro had trained himself to pick out his nakama’s voices from a crowd at a drop of a hat – you never know when those idiots will get themselves into trouble and need a conveniently-threatening swordsman at their side – so as soon as the demanding notes drift through the air towards him, he knows.

It’s not hard to find her – he spots the flaming beacon of ginger hair practically as soon as he spins around on his heel towards the source of the voice. That might also have something to do with the fact that there is a nine foot tall skeleton with an afro at her side, or the fact that the rest of the crowd are giving the two a wide berth, but that, as far as Zoro is concerned, is not the point right now. He’s got some choice words for the owner of the voice first and foremost.

“Oi,” he demands, stomping his way towards her (luckily for him, the crowd is giving him a wide berth too, though he imagines that has less to do with being recognised and more with the thunderous expression on his face.) He comes to a stop in front of her, crossing his arms on his chest to fully convey the extent of his annoyance. “Sea witch. I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”

His hood is down, and his hair, as Sanji has so helpfully pointed out earlier, has been growing green roots. Even if that weren’t the case, he is damn well sure Nami knows what his face looks like better than an average schmuck whose only exposure to it would’ve been a bounty poster or two. So he’s not surprised at the expressions that cycle through her face as she takes him in – alarm, to defensiveness, to recognition.

He is, however, surprised when the expression it settles on in the end is an acute, and obvious, sorrow.

“Zoro,” she exhales, and then she throws herself into his arms.

It doesn’t work out great, what with said arms still crossed on his chest, but Zoro manages to pull them out and settle them awkwardly on her shoulder blades. He and Nami don’t not hug – they’ve done it before, at least a few times, most of those times involving heightened emotions they would both vehemently deny later – but this, the near desperation with which she clings to the fabric of the shirt on his back, still feels weird. Any of the already played up annoyance he was feeling at her falls away instantly, replaced by protective alarm.

“What happened?” he demands, placing his hands on her shoulders to gently push her back and assess the look of her face. The sorrow is still there, hauntingly so, in the creases around her eyes. “Who are we killing?”

She lets out a laugh that comes off not terribly unlike a sob.

“Didn’t think I’d have to explain this to you so soon,” she mutters, ducking her head. “Didn’t think I’d have to explain it at all, I mean, you would’ve found out on your own, it’s been in like, every newspaper, it’s, it’s – it’s Sanji.”

Zoro blinks. That was not what he was expecting.

“What about the shit cook?” he frowns. “I thought he would rather throw himself into the sea than do anything to upset you.” Not to mention that he’d have had no chance to actually see Nami for the past two weeks or so, what with his whole ordeal. Zoro wonders if she’s heard about that, actually. It would make for a fun story to tell.

“No, no, it’s not–“ Nami sputters, gritting her teeth. Her eyes are dry, but with how she sounds, Zoro imagines it takes some effort to keep them that way. “He hasn’t– it’s just, there were these pirate hunters, and they captured him, and we couldn’t– they said they were going to execute him, and that was a week ago, Zoro, he–“

Ah. So she has heard about that.

Nami cuts herself off again, and Zoro takes a moment to consider the situation from her point of view. A bunch of pirate hunters capture Sanji and manage to get him back to their island, protected as it is with those weird devil fruit powers. They publicise it, evidently – the little girl back on the island had seemed unsurprised about the prospect of a visitor arriving to watch the execution, and Nami did just mention newspapers. They likely give a date.

And for the whole week that follows that, the rest of the Straw Hats see neither hide nor hair of Sanji.

Yeah, okay. Zoro understands the expression of sorrow now.

Unfortunately for Nami though, from where he’s standing, this is also incredibly funny. And she sort of owes him one for all the amusement she had derived out of his love life. And in his defence, it’s not like he’s planning to drag it out for long.

So he lets his arms drop to his sides, takes a half-step back, and draws in a breath.

“Do you know where the North Harbour is?” he asks. “Can we go back to my ship?”

She opens her mouth, perhaps to protest, but seems to think better of it.

“We can’t take too long,” she says instead, shoving the two bags she was carrying into Brook’s arms in addition to everything he already has in his grasp (she never did get over the habit of using her crewmates as pack mules.) “We’re still trying to– I mean, there’s a chance–“ She takes a sharp breath and shakes her head. “Brook, get back to the ship. I’ll be there soon.”

“We will be waiting,” Brook says, inclining his head. “It is good to see you again, Zoro-san. I wish the circumstances could have been better.”

Zoro nods back, sending him a silent apology for getting him involved. He doesn’t feel too bad though – Brook knew what he was signing up for when he agreed to join their crew of complete rascals.

Nami does not waste any time watching him as he disappears into the crowd. She hooks her arm through Zoro’s – he’s lucky he hadn’t actually made any purchases yet, leaving himself free for her to tug around – and pulls him through the streets. Honestly, it’s probably for the best he ran into her – he was so certain he knew his way back to the harbour, but he wouldn’t have thought to take half the turns she does. 

The North Harbour is small and cramped, made for little vessels like Zoro’s. He’d left her at the very edge, the first free spot he could find as they pulled into the island waters. It wasn’t meant to be a long stop. It probably won’t be, still, but he certainly hadn’t thought it would turn out this eventful.

He points Nami to the ship. She’d seen it once, two years ago, when she had come to see him off on his journey and declare there was no way he was going to last longer than a month without a proper navigator. The joke’s on her, of course, but Zoro’s not going to remind her of it now, before the other joke that’s also on her can play out.

They climb aboard the ship. Nami turns to him.

“I don’t know what else you want me to tell you,” she says softly. “We don’t even know where the island is. Well, we do in theory, I have the coordinates and everything, but there’s some – magic thing happening, I don’t know what or how, and none of the newspapers seem to agree–“

“Devil fruit,” Zoro informs her. She shrugs one shoulder, in that way which means she acknowledges it being a possibility, but isn’t quite convinced. Zoro respects her healthy dose of skepticism, but unfortunately for her, he knows he’s right.

Or – fortunately for her, as it were. Zoro is pretty sure she’s going to be happy about this one.

He walks up to the cabin door and bangs against it.

“Oi, you better not be asleep in there!” he yells. “I brought a friend!”

“Unlike you, I don’t sleep twenty hours a day!” Sanji yells back. His voice is muffled by the door between them, but Zoro is pretty sure that Nami, like him, doesn’t even need a full sentence to recognise their friends’ voices. “Also, I swear to god, mosshead, if you’re gonna try to get me to a doctor again–“

He swings the door open from the inside. To his credit, he’s using at least one of his crutches, leaning against it where it’s wedged under his right armpit, though something is telling Zoro this isn’t going to last long. Expecting Sanji to be reasonable about his injuries is sort of like – expecting Zoro himself to be reasonable about his injuries, probably – which is to say, entirely hopeless. Hey, just because he’s self-aware doesn’t mean he’s going to change any time soon. And as ever, Sanji is the same.

“I told you a million times, I’m healing perfectly fine, so if you–“ he’s saying as he steps out onto the deck. And then, with hearts in his eyes, in a damn near immediate switch (because of course, anything else coming from him would be absurd): “Nami, my love!”

In a move which surprises precisely no one, at least where Zoro is concerned, he drops the crutch nigh instantly, twirling his way towards Nami and grabbing one of her hands with both of his.

“Had I known we’d be having such lovely visitors today, I would have made sure the ship is spotless,” he laments. “Travelling with the marimo here, you understand, he isn’t the most refined crewmate–“

“Hey–!

“Oh, shush, you, I’m right and you know it. When was the last time you washed the deck, huh? And don’t even get me started on the galley!”

“Okay, that’s–“

“Shut up!”

Nami’s screech is loud enough to spook a bunch of birds out of a nearby tree, and although Zoro isn’t going to admit it, he’s with the birds on this one. Sanji seems to hardly even startle though, his mouth falling shut instantly, incapable as ever to deny Nami her demands. Then again, even Zoro, contrarian as he often is, figures he’d let her have this one. He’s been mean enough for the hour.

“Shut up,” Nami repeats, even though neither of them is talking. And then, jabbing a finger towards Zoro: “I – hate – you!”

“Payback,” Zoro shrugs. She gapes at him.

“For fucking what?!” He opens his mouth, and she snarls at him. “No, don’t – don’t you dare answer that. You asshole. You could’ve just said you– what the hell did you even do?! Don’t answer that either, you can explain to everyone later, but– you!”

Zoro can’t help his grin. It’s always a good day if he can make Nami seethe with rage.

“And you,” Nami continues, turning away from him to glare at Sanji again. Zoro can see Sanji tensing, prepared, no doubt, to get smacked over the head. This, of course, makes it all the funnier when she sobs and falls into his arms.

“Uh,” Sanji sputters, utterly lost, even as he doesn’t so much as sway on his feet. Zoro’s going to give them a couple minutes for the reunion before prying her away from him, because supporting a person’s weight on two broken legs, even if the person in question is as light as Nami, cannot be conducive to healing.

“We thought you were dead,” Nami wails into his shoulder. “We thought they were going to execute you!”

Sanji, who has undoubtedly had no idea what brought on this sentimentality until she said this, straightens a little. 

“Is that what this is about?” he asks. “The pirate hunters? Oh, Nami, darling, you needn’t concern yourself with such trivial matters! I mean, yes, they were definitely going to execute me, but even if they had–“

This time, Nami does smack him. Deciding that wasn’t enough to make her point, she rocks back on her heels, planting her palms right below Sanji’s shoulders and shaking him back and forth.

“If you finish that sentence, I will throw you overboard,” she says, sweetly. “Blackleg Sanji, you’re one of the people I hold most dear. If you died, I would have been very devastated, for a very long time, and I sincerely doubt I would ever actually go back to being as happy as I have been over these past few years. If you so much as imply that the possibility of your execution should not affect me on a deep and permanent basis, I will take it as a grave personal insult to both me and our relationship. Are we clear?”

“Crystal,” Sanji squeaks. Zoro’s pretty sure there’s a teary film in his eyes. He decides he will forgive Nami for some of her transgressions for her valiant efforts in the eternal battle with Sanji’s self-deprecating tendencies.

“Good,” Nami smiles, lifting herself up to her tiptoes to pat him on the head. Sanji, being Sanji, grins at her dopily, though Zoro isn’t fooled into thinking he’s not on the verge of tears, and neither, he has no doubt, is Nami. They’re good friends though, so they let it slide. “Now how about we get our asses in gear and over to the South Harbour, huh? Unlike somebody, I’m not the sort of asshole who makes people think their friend is dead for longer than is necessary for their personal entertainment!”

She glares at Zoro. He shrugs.

“And I’m not the sort of asshole who blackmails two people about something that apparently isn’t even an issue, but here we are.”

“What does that even–“ Nami begins, before narrowing her eyes, her gaze flitting between the two of them. if Zoro’s words didn’t give the game away, then the blush that creeps up Sanji’s neck sure would have. She gasps. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. That’s what it takes? Of course. You people can’t do anything normally, can you? God.” She shakes her head, finally letting go of Sanji’s shoulders in favour of burying her face in her palms. “Congratulations. Idiots. Took you long enough.”

“And there’s nothing you could’ve done to speed it up at all,” Zoro deadpans.

“Exactly,” she smirks. “Glad we’re on the same page. Now come on, chop-chop. If you want to complain about my perfectly rational decisions, you can do that while we’re actually making progress.”

“Yeah, mosshead, come on, chop-chop,” Sanji grins. Zoro flips him off even as he makes his way over to untie the rope securing the ship to the pier post.

“You sit your ass down, shitty cook. You’ve got holes in both your feet and two broken legs, you’re not chop-chopping anywhere.”

“You’ve got what?!” Nami exclaims. Zoro smirks at Sanji’s betrayed sputtering as she pulls him down onto the deck, scolding him for being stupid enough to stay standing. He’s getting in so much payback today. Maybe he can forgive the universe for its trespasses after all.

(As if Sanji loving you wasn’t enough for that, a voice chuckles in his head. It isn’t wrong, of course, but Zoro’s gonna milk his debtors for all they’re worth. He did learn from the best.)

***

The island they’re on is big enough to justify having two harbours, but not so big that getting between them turns into a chore, especially with the wind in your favour. And the wind is always in favour of whichever vessel has Nami on board, obviously, so it takes them no longer than twenty minutes to make a neat semi-circle around the coast. For all that he’d done well for himself on his not-so-little journey, Zoro is forced to admit (if only in the safety of his own mind) that having a navigator does have its perks.

“There,” Nami declares, one leg propped up at the bow of the ship, as she points towards the entrance to the harbour. “Shouldn’t be too hard to find a spot.”

She sounds amused when she says this, the reason for which becomes exceedingly obvious as soon as the moored ships come into proper view. This is a busier harbour than the North one, and the vessels it houses are larger – trade ships, passenger ships, Zoro even spots the Marines’ white-and-blue. Nothing, however, stands out more than the ship anchored neatly halfway down the docks. It is not the largest here, not even the most technically impressive, but the three or four spots on either side of it are nonetheless conspicuously empty.

The reason for that is, of course, readily apparent as soon as you look at the flag.

“Is that the Sunny?” Sanji asks from his spot on the deck, sounding as breathless at the sight of her as Zoro feels. “You got her out for this?”

“Personal insult,” Nami reminds him in a sing-songy voice, catching onto, just like Zoro does, the disbelieving notes in his tone. “She was our best bet, wasn’t she? Fast as the wind, and recognisable as anything. Anyone with a brain knows better than to mess with the Pirate King. Especially since they’ve all probably also read the newspapers and knew he was out for blood.” She shivers. “Which, y’know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Luffy quite so out for blood, actually. He’s not the type of guy to hurt the innocent, but I think if we got to that pirate hunter island, it would’ve been a close call.”

Zoro gets that. He’s also not the type of guy to hurt the innocent, but if he hadn’t been so afraid Sanji would die of blood loss on him, he’d have taken the time to cut off a few dozen more heads.

Now, though, all that is in the past. It’s remarkably difficult to think of violence uninflicted when his heart is threatening to burst from the warm nostalgia that floods him as soon as he sees their ship. And it is their ship, still, will always be, no matter how long it has been since they’ve sailed together. That crow’s nest is his space. The galley is Sanji’s. The lion-shaped figurehead upfront belongs forever and always to their captain. It’s been so long since he’d seen her, and he’s not exactly great at remembering his way around spaces, but Zoro is pretty sure that if you asked him, he could map out her every square foot. That’s his issue, he thinks, and has always been his issue. He never expected he’d have to live anywhere else but on her deck, and when he suddenly did, he had no idea how to do it.

Nami must see something in his eye, because she hops down from the bow to come and slap him on the shoulder.

“Stop looking like a half-drowned kitten, you idiot,” she says. “And talk about your feelings for once. Look where it got you with Sanji.”

Zoro gives her a lazy snarl, but between all the nervous butterflies in his stomach and the effort it takes to moor a ship properly, he doesn’t have time to squabble. He pulls up into the spot just off to Sunny’s right, lifting the paddles out of the water to dry and securing them with a few twists of a knob. Sunny is a tall ship, enough so that he can’t see onto the deck from where he’s standing, but he’s pretty sure there has to be someone up there. Even if he didn’t know that Nami had sent Brook off back towards Sunny earlier, he remembers the rule well enough – never leave your vessel unattended. Sure, it’s a rule he broke a lot, being that he travelled alone for two years, but he remembers it still.

He finishes tying his ship to the pier again, then glances back at Nami, uncertain. She rolls her eyes.

“You’re going to make me do everything, sword boy? Fine. But next time you think of pulling something like this, remember how nice I’m being, capeesh?”

“I can help,” Sanji offers sheepishly from where he’s sitting with his back propped up against the hull, but Nami either doesn’t hear him or just feels less inclined to make his life difficult than she is Zoro’s, because she’s already leaning over the hull on the opposite side by the time he finishes speaking, neck craned up and arms cupped around her mouth in a makeshift loudspeaker.

“Hey y’all up there on the Sunny!” she yells. “I bring a gift nobody asked for!” And then, turning back to glance, briefly, at Sanji: “That’s Zoro, for reference. Trust me when I say everybody had asked for you.”

Zoro would complain about that exceedingly unflattering characterisation, but her aside brings a small, unsure smile to Sanji’s face, so he decides it wouldn’t be worth ruining the moment. Judging from the way she sticks her tongue out at him, Nami knows that, too. Damn witch.

Before he can think of a way to get back at her in the future for taking advantage of his stupid heart (Vivi would have to be involved, obviously), there are two heads peeking over the side of Sunny’s hull to see what all the commotion is about. Or, if you want to be pedantic about your definition of a head, what actually peeks over said side is one skull, one deer snout, and – if Zoro’s vision isn’t betraying him – one teal blue eye growing out of the wooden planks.

Ah, yes. Disembodied body parts popping up in random places. How he missed them.

There is a moment of stillness. Nami takes advantage of it to plant both of her feet firmly back on the deck and stretch her arms out to indicate at Zoro and Sanji, like she is a particularly enthusiastic museum curator showing off a curious oddity. Being that she hadn’t exactly left him much of a choice, Zoro lifts a hand in greeting. The wave Sanji gives is far more enthusiastic, though given the stupid dreamy expression that instantly finds its way onto his face, Zoro imagines this has the most to do with the aforementioned eye. The pervert cook is so lucky Zoro understands him too well to be upset. 

Clearly, their waves are enough to break the stillness. The eye blinks closed, and Chopper’s head disappears from view too quickly for it to be because of anything else but their doctor tumbling back onto the deck in shock. Brook’s face is a skull, of course, so it’s not exactly possible to discern his emotional state from his expression, but the speed with which he dashes towards the rope ladder on Sunny’s side is more than enough to betray his surprise. Brutally efficient as she is, Robin doesn’t even bother with the ladder – one second she appears in view, and the next she leaps over the hull, taking the direct way down onto Zoro’s ship. She lands the jump, fortunately, though not before Zoro has the time to think that leaving three devil fruit users alone out where they can fall into the sea was not one of the crew’s brightest ideas.

“Swordsman,” she says, her voice softer around the title than most people’s are with names. “Cook. I am so happy to see fate has been kind.”

Even as she speaks as loftily as possible, the sincerity in her voice is obvious and disarming. Sanji chirps something about being flattered that his darling Robin was worried about him, though before he can get into the spiel properly, Chopper barrels onto the deck, tears already streaming down his face as he runs headfirst into Zoro. Brook, having clearly been nice enough to let the reindeer climb down first, follows close behind, darting to Sanji’s side.

“Had us worried, Sanji-san!” he exclaims, leaning over him and looking him up and down with a critical eye… uh, socket. “One dead man is enough for the crew, don’t you think? Yohoho!”

“Sanji! Zoro!” Chopper wails in the meantime, his hoofed arms wrapping around Zoro’s legs best they can. “I’m so glad you’re okay! Are you okay? Are you hurt? Is anyone hurt?”

“Yeah, uh, both of the cook’s legs are broken,” Zoro says, because he’s never been especially good at lying to anyone, let alone Chopper. Their doctor lets out a horrified sob, peeling himself away from his side to dash over to Sanji’s, and the cook gives Zoro a betrayed glance, but it’s not like this wouldn’t have come up eventually. And Chopper’s wrath about them hiding injuries from him would really not have been worth it. “Though if we’re planning to do something about that, can we get up to the Sunny? I don’t think my ship is made for six people, honestly.” The waves are already lapping higher up its hull than he’s comfortable with.

“Right, yes, of course!” Chopper exclaims. “Don’t stand up, Sanji, I’ll carry you!”

“No, seriously, I can walk,” Sanji protests, but his feeble attempts are nothing in the face of the natural disaster also known as Chopper when there’s some doctoring to be done, so quickly enough he ends up tossed over the shoulder of the reindeer’s bigger form. Zoro feels silently vindicated in knowing that he picked the correct method of carry. 

They get up to the Sunny in a flurry of commotion, but Zoro still can’t help the way his heart pangs when his feet touch her deck. It’s the closest to coming home he’s ever felt, and it’s terrifyingly temporary. But that is a problem for the future him to deal with, even if Robin is already giving him knowing looks over her shoulder (it’s like it’s been no time at all), so he lets himself be guided into sitting down by the mast by Brook. Sanji’s protests seem to have had some effect after all – Chopper does not haul him into the medbay, even if he is clearly displeased about that, laying him out on the grassy deck instead.

“I still want to give you a full exam,” the doctor is muttering, having poofed back into the raccoon form, his muzzle scrunching up adorably. “Did you say your feet got pierced too?! That’s so dangerous, do you know how many nerve endings are in your feet?”

“Nothing the marimo hasn’t done before,” Sanji says, which Zoro supposes is true, even if Chopper hadn’t actually been a part of the crew at that point. He gives a half-hearted shrug in response to the accusatory stare the doctor levels him with – Sanji probably only brought him into this as revenge for him tattling – and peers down at the cook.

“Now who’s making things into a competition?” he smirks. A bit of a low blow, maybe, but it shuts him up enough to give Chopper a chance to settle at least his most pressing worries.

They’re all so distracted by the goings on – Robin listening to Chopper mutter under his breath as he works, Nami by pretending she isn’t shuffling closer to Zoro by the minute until her head ends up resting on his shoulder, and Brook by plucking the strings on his guitar, already threatening to compose a song about Sanji’s miraculous survival without even having heard the full story of it – that they miss the additions to their merry company right up until they hear Usopp scream.

“A g-g-g-ghost!” he exclaims, jaw hanging open, a trembling finger pointed at Sanji. At his side, Jinbe seems far more put together (and probably jumping to far less ridiculous conclusions if the way his gaze darts calculatingly over to Zoro is anything to go by), but Usopp’s the one most readily arguable with, and Sanji has never been the kind of person not to take the bait.

“No, you idiot, why the hell would I be a ghost?!” he exclaims, bolting into an upright sitting position to Chopper’s dismayed protests. “The currently not moss-headed dumbass over there just happened to be in the right place at the right time to get me out of there before they chopped off my head!”

“For all the thanks that got me,” Zoro grumbles, conveniently ignoring the fact that it did in fact get him some damn good thanks for the sake of getting into a fight. Sanji, as expected, does not ignore it, drawing in an offended gasp as he twists his torso to glare at Zoro instead.

“Oh, I’m sorry, was all of that not good enough for you, you ungrateful shitty swordsman?!”

“I’ll have you know, my so-called shitty swordsmanship is the only reason you’re–“

“Sanji?”

Later, the rest of the crew is going to explain that those of them who have left the ship for supplies and information gathering were sent out in pairs, for company as well as general safety, and the fact that two of the pairs had showed up at nearly the same time was nothing more than a lucky coincidence. Not that this knowledge, even if he and Sanji did have it in the moment, would change what they see right now – the most feared man in the world, the King of the Pirates, the legendary Straw Hat captain, or, more simply put, Monkey D. Luffy, standing on the deck in front of them with the most stricken expression either of them had ever seen on his face.

Zoro clamps his mouth shut. Sanji straightens his back.

“Captain,” he says, because Luffy is Luffy until it matters, and then he’s always captain. “I deeply apologise for causing you and the crew trouble. Um, again. I wish I could say this will be the last time, but with my track record…” He breathes in shakily. “I’m sorry. I promise to try and do better.”

She stays quiet, but Zoro can practically feels Nami’s silent groan resonating through his body. He pats her reassuringly on the arm. It’s not that you can’t get through to Sanji, certainly, but it sure does take some time.

Luffy does not blink. He tilts his head to the side, a little too much for it to look natural, his eyes trained on Sanji. Then, after a moment, he steps forward – or moves forward, anyhow, because he has that way of moving that doesn’t strictly require steps – and crouches down in front of him.

“Please keep causing us trouble,” he says, as serious as only a man who is hardly ever serious can get. “Do nothing but cause us trouble, for all we care. We will never, ever not be happy to have you with us.”

He tugs at the drawstrings around his neck. From his limited experience, Zoro knows that the knots Luffy ties those things into are damn near impossible to undo – they have to be for his hat to stay on as he pirouettes through the air or flings himself into the oncoming winds with no care in the world – but at times like these, the strings always come apart easily. Luffy tips his head again.

“Keep coming back to us, yeah?” he says, softly, reaching forward, and Zoro can’t help thinking that as always, the straw hat looks right at home in Sanji’s wheat-blond hair. “We’ll sort the rest out from there.”

Sanji definitely whimpers when Luffy winds his arms around his shoulders, but everyone on the crew knows by now what it feels like to be hit by the full weight of their captain’s earnestness, so it’s not like any of them can judge.

And if Luffy stretches his arms out from behind Sanji’s back to yank the rest of them into the impromptu cuddle pile – and if all of them go along with it practically without protest, save for Chopper halfheartedly muttering something about injuries – and if they stay there, basking in the warmth of the sun and the bodies around them, for a little while longer – well. You can’t blame them. It’s been a while.

***

They have to move eventually, of course – Nami starts complaining about pins and needles, and for all his damn near angelic patience, Chopper has learned by now how to have his way with their crew. Sanji succumbs to a full physical exam after a few rounds of reindeer puppy eyes (in part, Zoro imagines, because he trusts Chopper more than just about any other medical professional out there), which at least serves the benefit of confirming that he shouldn’t expect any lasting damage from his injuries. Of course, as soon as the cook hears that, he takes it as blanket permission to disappear into the galley on his own two feet, but at least Nami follows him in with a promise to keep him from exerting himself too much. It’s clear from the way she starts whispering at him frantically even before the door closes behind them that she has her own agenda of some sort, but Nami always has her own agenda of some sort, so Zoro lets it slide.

The rest of them make their way to the upper level of the deck. Zoro settles with his back to the main mast, his eye half open as he watches the rest of the crew hustle about. It’s been two years since he’d last seen them, and it’s been longer than that since they’ve all shared space on a ship, but it’s easy to fall into a familiar routine. Zoro’s sure he’s not the only one who’s noticed it, too – they all gravitate to their preferred spots so naturally, it’s hard not to think of magnetism. Or fate.


So Zoro thinks of magnetism, and fate, and of losing it all again, and then out comes Nami with a tray full of drinks balanced precariously in one of her hands. He catches her eye, and she grins at him like a cat who’s got the canary before offering him one of the condensation dotted glasses.

“Don’t expect me to play waitress ever again, but given the state our dear cook is in, I figured it’s only polite,” she says. Zoro is still pretty sure she has her own agenda – the grin isn’t helping – but he isn’t about to pass up on booze, so he accepts the glass with a nod and takes a sip. It’s good, of course. Sanji made it.

He watches Nami as she flits away to distribute the rest of the drinks with an exaggerated flourish. She presses a kiss to Robin’s knuckles (in Sanji’s stead, she explains with a laugh), holds Chopper’s glass above his head for a few moments to make the little reindeer jump for it, and offers Usopp his with a theatrical bow. Her own drink is the last one left, something orange-coloured and fizzy, probably too sweet for Zoro. She plucks it off with a satisfied smile and tucks the empty tray under her arm.

And then, instead of going back to the galley, she lingers.

With all the fuss she’s caused, everyone’s eyes are already on her, so they can all tell she is lingering on purpose. There is an innocent smile plastered across her face, the kind that never fails to make her look incredibly suspicious, and the long sip she takes of her drink as the rest of them zero in on her, waiting, is nothing if not a purposeful attempt to draw out the moment. Zoro supposes that after what he’d pulled earlier today he can’t exactly begrudge her some dramatics, but that doesn’t make him any more patient.

“What do you want, witch,” he says. Sanji can’t hear him from the galley, probably, so no harm no foul.

“Such harsh words,” Nami snickers, the smile not leaving her face for a moment. “But since you’re asking, I’ll tell you. I want to draw a map of the world.”

Zoro blinks. Not strictly what he was expecting.

“Yes,” he says, slowly. “We know that.”

“I want,” Nami repeats, forcefully, “to draw a map of the world. The whole world. I mean, sure, the Grand Line’s a good start, and I’m doing well enough on the East Blue, but that still leaves–“ She sweeps the arm that is holding her drink out behind her in a valiant attempt to indicate at the rest of the Blue Sea and all the landmasses therein. “My point is that it’s unfair that it’s my dream that involves travelling the world, and Zoro is the only one who gets to do it!”

Zoro blinks again. Nami has had her more than her fair share of ridiculous gripes with him, but this one might take the cake.

“And me travelling the world is stopping you how, exactly?” he asks, too baffled to even give her a proper frown. He’s not sure what he expects for an answer – something equally ridiculous, probably, and knowing what she can be like, undoubtedly just as petty – but from the way her grin widens, he suddenly gets the sense that he played right into her hands.

“Oh,” she says, casually, “it isn’t.” And then, sweeping her gaze across the deck so easily, it’s like she doesn’t even know her next words are going to steal the breath out of Zoro’s lungs: “Who’s in?”

The ice in Robin’s cocktail clinks softly against the walls of her glass as she sets it, without missing a beat, down on the table in front of her.

“There are many fascinating archeological sites I am yet to visit,” she says, serenely. “I will gladly take the opportunity to explore more of them.”

“If Robin is going, I’m coming too!” Franky calls out from his spot over by Sunny’s rails, where he’s been busy lovingly polishing the planks of her deck. “And anyway, it wouldn’t be very super shipwright of me to let my ship go on adventures without me, would it?”

“That’s the spirit,” Nami laughs, not even pausing to acknowledge the implication in Franky’s words of which ship, exactly, they plan on taking (if plan is even a word one can use to describe whatever is happening here.) “Hear that, Usopp? Adventures! A brave warrior of the sea wouldn’t miss out on something like that, right?”

“That’s right,” Usopp grins, with all the confidence of a man who is definitely going to end up running away from at least one fight they’re definitely going to end up picking. “Someone needs to keep all of you safe, after all!”

“Someone really needs to keep all of you safe,” Chopper chimes in, sternly, before tapping his front hooves shyly together. “Besides, I mean… I’m not saying I was thinking about doing more research about medicinal practices around the world, but if you guys are offering…”

“What a noble goal!” Brook exclaims, the praise, unsurprisingly, sending Chopper into his wiggly dance. “Medicine is an important field to research… for the living, at least!” His laughter rattles across the deck, gathering the responding snickers and groans. “Ah, but if it’s not too much trouble, could we perchance swing by Laboon again? I know Nami-san has that area mapped already, but should the opportunity arise?”

“It can’t hurt”, Nami says, casually, though there is an unmistakeable blush dusting over her cheekbones. “That is to say, he is sort of on the way to Alabasta, so…”

“Oh, I see how it is!” Usopp teases. He’s sitting down too, so he has to stick his arms out to catch himself from tipping over as he leans towards her with a smirk. “So we are going to Syrup Village then, right?”

“I would certainly be interested in seeing the places where you’ve begun your adventures,” Jinbe interjects, shuffling closer to the rest of them. “I have heard many a rumour about the origins of the great Straw Hat crew, just as I have heard the stories from the rest of you, but I am curious to see it all with my own eyes.”

“Oh, what the hell,” Nami chuckles, a notable softness in her voice. “Maybe we even swing by Cocoyashi while we’re at it.” The softness is in her eyes, too, as her gaze snaps over to meet Zoro’s, but it’s not the only thing there. He doesn’t need depth perception to notice the calculating intent in the stare she levels him with as she rolls forward on the balls of her feet. “And you, Zoro? Care to see what happened to Shells Town in the past half-decade?”

And – Zoro does care to, of course. In fact, there’s almost nothing out there he wants more – not than seeing Shells Town, per se, but than everything seeing Shells Town would imply, a journey, an adventure, fuck, maybe Franky had a point, his crew, his crew, together, kind of, travelling, as they do except for when they don’t.

But the key word here is almost. There are so many fancy words he can say, if only he could find them under the weight of their expectant gazes, to explain just what keeps him from diving head-first into something – something new, something better, something wonderful. He wants it, yes, wants it almost more than anything, almost, but…

Well, here’s the thing.

Sanji owns a restaurant.

And where Sanji goes– If Sanji lets him–

Zoro doesn’t want to explain it any more than that, so this better sum it up. He opens his mouth to speak.

And then the galley door swings open.

Sanji steps through it with a practiced ease despite his injuries, oblivious to the way his name stings on Zoro’s tongue. He is waving a piece of paper, thin and fluttery in the wind, as he bounces up to where Nami is still standing. “I made a list of all the extra supplies we’ll need,” he says, blasé as anything. “Some of the spices aren’t sold in the North Blue though, so can one of you please remind me when we get to the South?”

Zoro wonders if he’s dreaming. He is no stranger to falling asleep during the day, after all.

“But your restaurant,” he says, he chokes, frankly, staring up at him. Sanji raises an eyebrow, leaving the list in Nami’s occasionally reliable hands.

“My restaurant,” he says, “has competent enough staff.” He steps closer to Zoro, leaning down, down, until Zoro can feel a feather-light touch of lips on the crown of his head. “My dream was to find the All Blue, not to stay there. And my other dream has only just come true, so I’m not letting go of it any time soon.”

“Get a room,” Nami heckles, at the same time as Zoro half-hears Usopp gasp something about finally. The jeering from the crew would usually stir up annoyance in his chest, but there is no space for anything between his ribs right now except his frantically beating heart. Sanji wants to, he thinks. Sanji wants to travel again. Sanji wants to travel with–

“You,” Sanji whispers into his hair, as though he is reading Zoro’s mind, or maybe just continuing his own thought that just so happens (as their thoughts often do) to meet his halfway. “Always.”

Zoro isn’t the sort of person to cry from happiness, but it is sometimes a close call.

His chest feels full to bursting. Sanji wants to travel with him, he thinks, with them, on their planned adventure, even if planned is still too generous of a word to use, and any thoughts of almost fall away. But there is still, he can’t help but notice, someone who hadn’t spoken up in their conversation. Not that he thinks their captain would be against it, certainly. Not when the whole thing started with the talk of Nami’s dream. But he hasn’t said anything, not yet, and he’s just about the only person who can stop the rest of them when they set their mind to something, and if he stops them – if anything stops them–

The Thousand Sunny lurches. Not much – she is too large a ship to be seriously swayed by anything less than a Grand Line storm – but noticeably still, and all of them straighten, looking around for the source of the motion. The source presents itself readily, just off to the side, holding Sunny’s raised anchor in his hands.

“You were done talking, right?” Luffy grins.

They were not, technically, done talking. But they have said all that needed to be said, and there is just about no better approval to be found than the wide, brilliant smile on their captain’s face. Really, Zoro has to admit, laughter bubbling up in his throat, being concerned that Luffy might pass up on the promise of adventures was not one of his brightest moments. And with the company they’re keeping, there will be adventures galore, he has no doubt, so as Zoro glances around at their smiling crew, he dares to think–

“Wait, you idiot,” Sanji yells, lunging for the anchor, “we still have stuff we need to get from marimo’s ship, and I was literally just talking about extra supplies–”

Oh yeah, Zoro dares to think, settling on the sun-warmed deck with his eye closed and his arms folded behind his head. They will be just fine.