Chapter Text
Sanji has died and gone to heaven.
That’s the only explanation for her presence being blessed by not just one, but two of the most beautiful women in the East Blue. She doesn’t know how Chore Boy did it, but he’s friends with the most gorgeous, angelic, lovely people she’s ever seen. And that one guy who’s a compulsive liar.
Sanji sets the delicate flower’s order in front of her first, an artfully arranged seafood carbonara, topped with scallops as pale as the woman’s skin. Her ginger hair curls around her ears, cut just to the chin, and when she bats her caramel eyes up at Sanji, her knees go weak. A faint scoff comes from beside her and, never one to leave a woman waiting, Sanji delivers a neat plate of spiced crab curry and rice with a flourish. “Anything else, mademoiselle?”
The other woman looks down at the curry dish, back up at Sanji, and down again. “This isn’t what I ordered.”
Sanji gazes into her steely cold eyes and fights valiantly not to swoon.
“Chef’s special. Trust me, you’ll like this better.” She even throws in a wink.
Zoro’s eyebrows furrow in confusion, minty green just like the short-cropped hair on her head, a perfect offset to the warm brown of her skin. Her row of earrings glint in the light, and the subtle swell of her biceps shift as she moves to try a bite. Sanji watches her unpainted lips wrap around the spoon, and stays captivated when the pink tip of a tongue darts out to lick off a grain of rice. Softly, almost involuntarily: “Damn.”
Sanji grins. “Is it to your liking?”
“Pretty good, yeah,” Zoro tells her, but by the way she’s practically inhaling her food, it’s clear it’s more than good. Not very ladylike, but Sanji’s heart still swells.
“And as per usual…” Nami interjects, a hopeful note in her beguiling voice.
“On the house, just for you angels!”
Zoro mutters something under her breath.
“What was that?” Nami asks, sharp and sweet all at once.
“Said you’re shameless,” Zoro repeats louder.
“I haven’t seen your broke ass rushing to pay either.”
“At least I don’t extort her for the expensive shit,” Zoro snaps back.
“Oh, look at miss high and mighty over here—”
“You bitch—”
“Ladies, ladies, no need to fight over me!”
Nami and Zoro turn to her in unison with withering glares, and Sanji just about melts. They’re so hot. Luffy is so fucking lucky to have them on his crew. It’s all almost enough to make her take him up on his offer to become a pirate. Alas, she has just enough of a moral backbone left to not abandon Zeff like that. (And perhaps a bit too much of a guilt complex too.)
“Um…” Usopp interrupts with a raise of his hand. “Could I get my dinner too?”
Duty calls. Sanji sighs, long suffering, and tears herself away from her beautiful ladies to get the man his food.
Sanji is… conflicted regarding Zoro’s decision to fight Mihawk. On one hand, she would never call a lady an idiot, but there is something patently unintelligent about dueling the strongest swordsman in the world to the death, and expecting to come out of it anything but dead. The fact that Zoro is alive at all is a small miracle. In fact, Sanji gets so worried during the whole ordeal that she even slips up and yells at Zoro, incredibly unhelpfully, about how it should have been easy to just give up on her dream instead of dying like this.
On the other hand, there’s the fact that seeing Zoro’s unchecked ambition and satisfied resolve towards her dream sparks something in Sanji.
She remembers being a little girl, locked in a dungeon too big for her, trapped with a helmet too small for her head, reading a book with what bare bit of delight she could conjure up. She remembers seeing Zeff for the first time, still bruised and aching from when he’d kicked her into a ship's mast, before he knew she was a girl, and cussing him out about how she couldn’t die before she found the All Blue. She remembers sleeping on the chest of that same man many months later, calling him Papa for the first time and hearing him tell her that they’ll find it together. Fulfill their shared dream of finding the mythical All Blue. Just have to wait a few years for the Baratie to get its footing, so they have a steady source of income, and then a few more years until Sanji’s not a kid anymore, and then a few more until she’s a good enough fighter.
Sanji knows it isn’t happening anymore. Zeff still kicks like other men box, strong like a well-rooted tree, but he’s older now, much older than most other parents of teenagers her age. He has a restaurant to run, one that’s too famous (or infamous) to leave unattended for long. Too many people rely upon this place, using the Baratie for a salvation afforded to few on the high seas. Zeff has found his place in this world, and Sanji’s gotten used to pretending she’s found hers too.
Now, though…
Holding Zoro’s hand while she sleeps, stitches fresh and blood barely cooled, Sanji feels a fire light in her heart.
Later, she tells Luffy about the All Blue. He looks at her like he believes in it too.
Sanji sobs into Zeff’s chest.
Luffy is behind her, patiently waiting for her to join him on the boat towards Cocoyashi. The other chefs surround her in a half-moon, a crowd that was doing a much better job of pretending to hate her before she broke down into tears. The fact that Zeff isn’t giving them all a verbal lashing for making his baby girl cry is proof enough that he’s the one who put them up to this.
“You’re too old for this,” he tells her, voice gnarled and rough, but still wraps his arms around her. They’re sturdy and warm, just like when she was a kid. A welcome blanket of comfort. “Go off now, shoo!”
“You shitty old bastard,” Sanji sniffles. “I hate you so much.”
She’s always had a tumultuous relationship with her dad, but he’s always known that much isn’t true. No matter how many arguments they get into, or how sparse Zeff is with his affections and how prickly Sanji is, they’ll always love each other.
“Get lost,” he tells her, and his voice might just start trembling.
“You didn’t have to take care of me all these years, Pa. I’ll never be able to thank you enough.”
Zeff pulls away and rubs a thumb down her face, cleaning her tear tracks away. “You don’t owe me a damn thing, Little Eggplant. Go out there and live your own life, for once.”
“I’ll find it for us,” she tells him. And she doesn’t even have to spell it out for him to know.
“With any luck it’ll be before I’m dead,” he grumbles, and gently shoves her back, until her shoes hit the edge of the dock. She climbs into the boat after Luffy and watches the Baratie get smaller and smaller, disappearing into just another speck of reflected light across the ocean’s surface.
She’s smoked her cigarette down to the filter. Her fingers ache for another one, but she grips the railing tight instead and breathes in deep. Nothing but clean ocean air for miles and miles, no scent of fish being grilled or sauces being emulsified. No oil, no oregano, no chili. No stench of Zeff’s old-man cologne. Nothing but ocean and the faint residue of tobacco on her suit.
Later, after they save Nami and Luffy defeats Arlong, Sanji spends the better part of her day cooking a feast for the village. It’s nightfall by the time they really get to celebrate, and she’s stepped away with a plate of food herself.
She finds Zoro tucked into the space between two houses, leaning back against the gritty brick with her legs splayed out on the floor, sword pressing a line along her thigh. Her shirt is unbuttoned just enough to see the white of her bandages. A pang of concern goes through Sanji, remembering the way the stitches tore and bled during the fight with the Arlong Pirates.
“How are you feeling, Darling— need some water? A massage? Anything?”
Zoro startles, like her soul’s been elsewhere and was just shocked enough to settle back into her skin. Her eyes flicker to Sanji’s, somehow managing to have missed her sitting down in front of Zoro.
“Fine. Quit being weird,” she tells Sanji, a few beats too late. She’s clearly distracted.
Sanji leans back and watches the way Zoro’s head turns onto the wall behind her, staring out into the throng of people. Her steel-gray eyes are dizzyingly relaxed. Sanji follows the gaze to find Luffy with an arm thrown over Usopp’s shoulder, head tipped back into one of his boisterous laughs. She looks back at Zoro, whose body uncoils, eyelids half-shut, irises tracking every little movement he makes.
Oh.
Sanji busies herself with her dinner, unwilling to torture herself further like this. Staring hard at the ground, she can see Zoro’s shoe where it’s lined up inches from her own.
Sanji’s never seen her like this (though it’s not like they’ve known each other very long). Zoro’s unwound like a cat napping in a ray of sunshine, deriving comfort from just keeping Luffy in her line of sight, pain dissolving from the massive gash in her torso. It’s like watching an opiate take effect.
It gets worse.
Once, Sanji could chalk up to the post-almost-dying endorphins, but it happens again, and again, and then yet again. A hand lingering too long on Luffy’s shoulder, pulling him back from the Merry’s railing and keeping him from going overboard. A gentler grin directed at him than anything else Sanji’s ever seen, fond and delighted by his bright smile. The constant movement of her eyes, tracking him steadily wherever he goes, like a there’s a line between them pulling the two together.
Sanji, observant as ever, knows Zoro is, inexplicably, insanely, bafflingly in love with Luffy.
She’s never been more heartbroken. Zoro rejects her advances and for what? Him?
Luffy, who’s her Captain. Who saved Nami from a nightmare and Sanji from herself, and presumably saved Usopp and Zoro similarly. Luffy, who’s an undeniable idiot but always has the best intentions at heart. As insufferable as he can be sometimes, he’s still a sweetheart. Sanji wouldn’t have fallen fast and hard into (strictly platonic) love with him otherwise.
But still. Zoro and him? No way! What the hell would Luffy do anyway, he wouldn’t know what to do with all that woman. Zoro would crush him!
Sanji quietly simmers in her jealousy like a slow-cooking pot of roux. She then places the pot onto a backburner, turns the heat down low, and focuses on her entrées instead. She could never take it out on lovely Zoro, or even her Captain, so it sits and does nothing more, as she concocts elaborate recipes for her beloved swordswoman and falls prey to Luffy’s weedling her for more and more snacks.
Zoro doesn’t like Sanji.
Sanji’s used to beautiful women not liking her.
Life goes on.
“Looking good, Sanji!”
Sanji cranes her head up, catching sight of Nami standing on the edge of her rooftop tangerine grove. The sun halos her hair as the wind whips it around her brilliantly grinning face. Sanji almost drops the tray of drinks she brought out of the galley, so distraught by the gorgeous sight.
“Is that for me?” Nami points at one of the drinks, a simpering smile across her pink lips. “The one you made last time was delicious.”
“I’m so happy you thought so,” Sanji tells her. She reaches up over the galley as Nami reaches down, and when their fingers brush as she passes on the drink, Sanji swoons.
Someone catches her as she stumbles backward. Warm, solid. Hand rough and big on her back.
“Ah, thank you, my dear, you really shouldn’t have!”
Zoro looks at her strangely, one eyebrow raised, before she plucks a tall glass right off the tray. That’s Sanji’s own drink, not Zoro’s, but far be it from her to embarrass a woman. Sanji lets it slide and watches the way Zoro closes her eyes contemplatively at the sour-sweet taste. “Not bad.”
“You flatter me. Try this one next!” Sanji holds out the drink originally intended for Zoro, a refreshing blackberry mix spiked with alcohol.
“Ignore her,” Nami calls back down. She’s sitting with her legs draped over the edge of the roof, long legs bent gracefully against the wooden panels of the galley wall. Sanji is mesmerized by the gentle slopes of her bare calves. “Zoro’s always such an unappreciative asshole. Your drinks are phenomenal. And,” she adds with a pout, a sheepish pink across her cheeks. “They’d pair deliciously with an hors d'oeuvre or two.”
“Correct as always! Let me go get started on something—“ She scans the deck, finding a familiar figure emerging from under the deck. “Usopp, go take this to Luffy, would you?”
Zoro glares at Nami as Usopp starts up the stairs towards their little congregation.
“The cook needs to get started on dinner,” Zoro tells her, voice hard.
“I’m sure a little snack wouldn’t put her out,” Nami rebukes. “Right, Sanji?” She bats her long eyelashes here, and Sanji just about flatlines at the way she says her name.
“Right, my sweet! Your concern is much appreciated, Darling, but it’s nothing I can’t handle,” Sanji says, turning to Zoro.
“Not fucking concerned,” Zoro tells her. She sees Usopp trying to sneak back off silently after taking the tray of drinks. “Usopp, you’re not hungry for whore durrs, tell the witch to fuck off.”
Nami snickers. “It’s hors d’oeuvres, you idiot. Usopp, tell Zoro she’s being ridiculous.”
“Uh…” Usopp’s head ping-pongs rapidly between the two women before shuddering. “I’m not getting in the middle of this lesbian love triangle, you’ll kill me!”
The words startle a laugh out of Nami and have Zoro flushing dark. Sanji’s heart stutters, awash in sudden moroseness.
Sanji wishes that’s what this was. Zoro’s clearly in love with Luffy, and though Nami might have started flirting back lately, there isn’t enough heart in it. She’s sweet for indulging Sanji’s affections, but the light in her eyes is bright with fun more than it is dark with need. It’s all really more of a Love Angle than a triangle, honestly, with how it’s just Sanji (the hapless vertice) projecting her affections desperately onto these two (rays of sunshine).
(Well, Zoro may be more of a moonbeam than anything sun related, but the point still stands).
Nami especially doesn’t like her. She enjoys being desired, that much is certain, but not necessarily by Sanji. That point is made abundantly clear when, not even a week later, Vivi joins the group and Nami is immediately smitten.
Sanji sees them lying side by side on one of the narrow beds in the women’s quarters, Nami drawing wayfaring constellations onto the air, up at wooden ceiling like they can see the night stars right through it, even though it’s high noon outside. One of Vivi’s bronze hands is curled into the ends of Nami’s hair, the other on her heart. Nami’s fingers are tight on the hem of Vivi’s floaty sundress. Sanji feels an intruder for disturbing their little world.
She shoots them a tight smile when their heads turn in sync at the sound of the door opening, and quickly grabs a pack of cigs from her drawer. They go back to what they were doing before, speaking in hushed tones in the dark. Sanji steps out into broad daylight with an itch in her fingers and sadness nipping at her heels.
Sanji finds the stern a peacefully silent place, absent of shouting from whatever game Luffy and Usopp and playing out on deck. She only intended this to be a quick smoke break, now that she’s set her stew to simmer and the sea king meat to bake, but she finds herself halfway through a second cigarette and craving a third when Zoro comes around.
“Those things are gonna kill you,” she tells her.
“And your concern alone would be enough to bring me back to life, my darling.” Sanji tilts her head up, blowing a perfect ring of smoke out towards the sky. She turns back to Zoro with a grin, but she only looks deeply unimpressed.
“Not concerned.” Zoro’s said that same phrase often enough that Sanji probably has it etched into the vinyl of her brain by now. No matter how coldly she says it, Sanji knows there’s still some warmth buried in there. Deep, deep in there. Zoro stands next to her and looks back in the general direction of the women’s quarters. “Hoping the cigs will kill you before this whole situation does?”
Sanji tries to remain level-headed. “Clever as always.” (A blatant lie.) “I’m afraid spending too much time in the presence of yet another gorgeous woman on board, a princess of all things, might just send me into cardiac arrest. Not that you’re any less heart-rendingly pretty, Darling.”
Zoro rolls her eyes. “Cut the shit. We all know you’re upset about the Nami thing.”
“We?”
“Luffy is the one who told me. You’re clearly doing a terrible job of hiding it.”
So that’s it. Sanji thought this was weird. Gruff, generally oblivious Zoro wouldn’t just come to comfort Sanji without reason, so of course Luffy put her up to it. Sanji is too fresh off one heartbreak to take another, and not so deep in self-pity that she’ll linger on this condolence masochistically. “Tell Luffy I’m doing fine.” She smiles, hoping Zoro takes the hint and leaves her be for another two or ten smokes.
Zoro huffs, but backs away from the railing. “I warned that witch to stop messing with you for a reason,” she mutters. “And look where we are now.”
“You were looking out for me?”
Zoro spins on her heel, marching away hurriedly, but the tips of her ears are red. Sanji watches her go and stubs out the rest of her cigarette.
Zoro may not reciprocate her feelings, but knowing she cares even a little, even as a friend, has Sanji’s heart sparking back to life, like a flame flickering into being at the edge of a lighter.
The next island is a brief pitstop made to restock. The log pose resets in just over a day, so they need to go about their business quickly. Sanji looks over the crew to see who she can take with her to help carry supplies.
Nami wants to take Vivi out to town and distract her from the anxiety of her kingdom’s well-being, but even if that wasn’t the case, Sanji would never force them along. Luffy and Zoro are currently absorbed in a conversation, looking out to the other ships docked around them. The Merry’s jolly roger is rolled down for now, to blend in, and Luffy’s signature straw hat is hanging around his neck. He’s crouched on the railing, knees folded up like a frog ready to spring forward. Zoro already has a hand outstretched to catch him if he tips over into the sea.
Sanji finds Usopp below deck, messing around with a staff and some screws. He startles when she prods at his back.
“What are you doing?”
“New invention for Nami. Did you need something?” He takes his goggles off and yawns, stretching his arms overhead. Sanji feels a bit bad about disturbing him, now that she knows whatever he’s working on is for her sweetheart, but she really does need an extra pair of hands.
She’s in the middle of explaining her overlong list of items and where they could get them when Zoro enters the room. “I’ll go.”
(Sanji’s heart skips a beat at the offer, at Zoro actually wanting to spend time with her, before she comes to her senses.)
“I could never trouble you like that!” she insists. “Weren’t you going to town with Luffy?”
Zoro scoffs. “He saw some giant bird and went flying after it. How the hell am I supposed to follow him without slingshot arms?”
(Yet again, Sanji silently fumes at the idea that Luffy has this tall, strong, gorgeous hunk of a woman pining after him and all he knows how to do is leave her in the dust. Oh, how sweetly she’d treasure Zoro if she got to be her keeper. Alas, the universe is deeply unfair.)
Zoro snatches the list from Sanji and scans through the items. “Between the two of us, we could have this done by dinner.”
Sanji snatches the list back. “I would never force a woman to carry things for me! Usopp will do just fine.”
Zoro raises an eyebrow. She yanks Usopp’s arm up (with a squeaked out protest from his end), and shows off his admittedly pathetic bicep. “You calling me weaker than him, Curly? I guarantee I can carry way more than you today.” Zoro drops Usopp’s arm and rakes her gaze down Sanji’s lanky figure, a hostile smirk blooming across her mouth.
Sanji flushes. “Fine! We— we can do whatever you want, Darling, like I’d ever deny a date with a lovely lady such as yourself!”
Zoro’s smirk immediately drops to an annoyed frown at the word ‘date’, but she still tags along as promised. The supply run goes by much faster than expected, and Sanji admires the way Zoro’s arms flex deliciously as she hefts more and bags. Thank god she decided to wear a tank top today.
On the way back to the ship, a small stall catches Sanji’s eye. She excuses herself from Zoro’s side for a moment, before rushing back with a small package wrapped in blue paper. “Here,” she breathes out, placing it into Zoro’s hand and folding her own fingers over it.
Zoro eyes it suspiciously. “What the hell is this?”
“A gift!”
“Yeah, and where’d you get the money for that?”
Sanji shrugs, brushing her fringe out of her visible eye. They’d bought enough things on sale to have a little Berry left over. Even if they didn’t, she’d have dug the money out of her personal allowance anyway. “Go on, open it!”
Zoro heaves a sigh, as though the action of accepting a gift is the most laborious thing she’s done today. She shifts her bags all over to one arm, bicep bulging with the movement (extremely sexy), and uses her teeth to rip open the packaging (confusingly sexy), spluttering and spitting out little bits of paper that get caught on her tongue (deeply unsexy, but Sanji does her best to pretend she doesn’t notice).
“What the fuck is this?”
“A necklace. Don’t you like it?”
Zoro holds out the delicate leather strap of it like the thing is a biohazard instead of an accessory. The shards of agate and quartz get caught in the setting sun, sending patterns of refracted green light scattering across Zoro’s scowl. “I don’t want this,” she tells Sanji, voice pitched high as though she’s both deeply offended and asking a question.
“It’ll look so pretty on you!”
“I don’t give a shit about that, Cook, I don't wear jewelry.”
Sanji stares pointedly at her earrings. Zoro growls and shoves the necklace back back at her. “Doesn’t count. Go give this stuff to Nami or Vivi, they’d actually use it.”
“Don’t know how well they’d appreciate it,” Sanji tells her, and tries not to sound too crushed. “The color fits your hair much better than either of theirs.” She curls her hands protectively around the necklace, the leather strap soft and pliant as it winds around her fingers, the jagged crystals digging into the soft flesh of her palms. The dangerous beauty of it fits Zoro perfectly. Even the golden accents match her earrings, and its length would tuck it gently against the curve of her throat, preventing it from being a liability in a fight. Sanji thought she’d considered everything (except, apparently, that Zoro wouldn’t want her gift).
Summoning up a brazen bit of courage, Sanji asks, “Did I do something wrong?”
Zoro starts walking back to the ship. “No.”
“I must have! Just tell me what, and I’ll fix it. I promise, alright?”
Zoro looks back over her shoulder to see Sanji stumbling in her efforts to catch up. She breathes in one long breath; eyes sharp, next words sharper. “Don’t you dare do that again, Cook. I get that you’re sad about the Nami thing, and I feel bad she led you on in the first place, but this shit?”
She stops in her tracks, pointing a finger between the two of them.
“Whatever this is, needs to stop. Just because Nami’s off limits now doesn’t mean you can use me to move on.”
Sanji stares at her, stunned. Part of her is in shock at the raw honesty of it, something she doesn’t often expect in their relationship, which is built on Zoro sidestepping her flirting without ever acknowledging her feelings. The other part of her is in shock that Zoro actually had the social dexterity to conclude this is what’s happening. (She’s wrong, of course. Zoro is often wrong, but Sanji doesn’t hold it against her.)
“I would never, Darling,” Sanji says, voice coming out rougher than intended. “I love—”
“I’m not going to be your fucking rebound, so forget it.”
Zoro stomps back to the ship, leaving Sanji standing there with all her bags and an abandoned necklace in her hand.
Duly noted. She will refrain from purchasing meaningless gifts for Zoro in the future.
She walks back to the docks, sees the Merry off in the distance, and finds an empty bit of ocean. Sanji steps forward with one foot, rears her opposite arm back, and flings the necklace into the depths of the waters. There. Now she can move on from Zoro too.
When she first set out to sea with Luffy, Sanji didn’t expect her heart to get thoroughly shattered twice in the span of one month, but that’s just how it goes sometimes. She’ll live.
Little Garden gets them an eternal pose to Alabasta (courtesy of Sanji, who basks in the brief bit of praise this earns her) and Drum Island gets them an entirely new crewmate. Chopper is an adorable little reindeer who calls her out on the amount she smokes far more often than anyone else ever did, but Sanji lets it slide because he’s only a fifth her height and a doctor, so it’s practically in his job description.
Docking in Alabasta gets them another visitor.
Having Luffy’s brother around is a delight. Sanji doesn’t say this about many men, but he’s polite, offers to help her wash the dishes, and even lights her cigs for her. He’s the perfect guest.
“Nami and Vivi are pretty close, huh?”
She looks over her shoulder, up to her elbows in suds. Ace is methodically drying plates beside her, stacking them neatly aside so she can place them into the correct cabinets later. He raises one dark eyebrow at her, and Sanji purses her lips.
“More than close, I would say. Why?”
“Just asking.”
“They’re both taken,” Sanji tells him. “By each other.”
Ace raises his hands up, mollifying. “Hey, hey. It’s not like that, promise. Wouldn’t wanna get in the way of something good.”
Sanji huffs, going back to the dishes. He has no idea just how close he came to being banished from the short list of men she actually likes.
“Besides,” he continues, fingers brushing hers when he takes the next plate, “They’re not really my type.”
“Excuse you— they’re stunning!”
“I would not disagree with that,” he says, very carefully, eyeing her like she’s a bomb he’s disarming.
Sanji pokes her elbow into his naked ribs. “But?”
“But, I like ‘em a little rougher.” A slow grin unfurls across Ace’s lips, wild and sharp, all canines and dark promises. Sanji matches it with an equally dark smile of her own.
She knows from mortifyingly personal experience that “Zoro is also off-limits. Hands off, loverboy.” (Not that Zoro is officially taken off the market. Sanji is certain by now that Zoro’s love for Luffy is just as painfully unrequited as Sanji’s own love for her. What a pair the two make; she’s not bitter at all!)
Ace shakes his head fondly. “Not what I was getting at, but okay. For the record, I like them a little dense too, apparently.”
(Zoro is, admittedly, very dense. But Ace must be too, if he’s still not getting the hint.)
“Like I said, she’s not interested.”
Ace backs up, shaking out the water on his hands and spraying her in the process. Sanji squeals in dismay as he laughs, running his still-damp hands through his hair, pushing the shaggy black strands out of his line of sight. “You’re kind of adorable. Anyone ever told you that?”
“Huh?”
“Crazy pretty too. And got a hell of a mean streak.” Ace leans forward, wrapping his long fingers loosely around her elbow, and Sanji stares at him blankly. “Like I said, you’re just my type. Sanji, I—”
The door slams open with a bang, loud enough to reverberate through the galley, and Sanji and Ace both snap their heads around to watch Zoro enter the room. Instead of heading for the pantry for a snack or some booze, Zoro strides forward with purpose and sets one hand on Ace’s shoulder. She looks him dead in the eyes and says, firmly, “She’s a lesbian. You’d have better luck with Usopp.”
Ace’s hand drops from Sanji’s elbow.
“I see,” he says, very slowly.
He looks at Zoro for a long moment, and then back to Sanji. “Sorry about that, I didn’t realize. Just got so lost in your eyes that I didn’t—”
“She’s not. Interested,” Zoro all but hisses.
Ace glances back at Zoro and grins.
“My bad. Looks like I was getting in the way, afterall.” He backs up, lazy curl of his mouth still in place, and winks at Sanji. She’s still frozen in place, stunned and confused. Ace shoots Zoro a salute before he exits the kitchen.
“She’s all yours! Take good care of her!”
“Fuck off!” Zoro yells after him, face set into a deep, flustered frown.
“He—” Sanji starts. Stops. Can’t continue.
“You’re welcome, by the way.”
Sanji whips around to Zoro, who has her arms crossed tight over her chest. Sanji comes back to herself, bit by bit, like an incandescent bulb sluggish lighting up. She sets a (soapy, damnit) hand to her heart and croons, “My knight in shining armor! Thank you for the rescue, Darling—”
Zoro’s gone before Sanji can even start serenading her, the galley door swinging shut behind her. Sanji watches it settle into its hinges with a fond smile.
From snapping at Sanji to not be sweet on her, to listening in from outside the galley to stop (poor, nice, all-good-intentions) Ace in his tracks. From shunning any kindness to looking out for Sanji herself. From hot to cold to back again, she can’t get a read on Zoro. It’s frustrating, sometimes, but Sanji supposes that’s part of the appeal. Like the other woman is an alley cat doling out just the barest bits of affection needed for a place to stay the night, or maybe a housecat too enamored with the allure of the outside world to stay in your lap for very long.
Sanji goes back to her dishes. She really could use a smoke.
Leaving Alabasta behind is tough on all of them, but most of all on Nami.
Sanji catches her staring out into the horizon behind them, searching like she’ll find hints of Vivi staring back at her in the movement of the clouds or the shape of a wave. It hurts to see someone she loves also hurt, and that puts two of them in a bad mood. The only saving grace to the miserable aura aboard, everyone missing Vivi’s presence like a lost limb, is the new addition to the crew.
Robin is lovely (once you get over the whole Baroque Works thing).
She’s witty and observant, quick to adapt to the crew’s dynamics, joining the fold like she’s been there all along. She’s gorgeous, too, tall and bronzed like a goddess in spurred boots and a ten-gallon hat. Sanji appreciates the addition of a new woman to dote over, especially one without all the baggage attached to her relationships with Nami and Zoro (though that’s not something she’d ever admit out loud. She still loves them, despite everything.)
Sanji busies herself with delivering Robin new flavors of tea and experimental snacks while she reads, learning her tastes and what jokes make her giggle. Zoro yells at her once or twice for fraternizing with a woman who just so recently tried to kill them all, but even she comes around eventually, just as they all do.
One day as Sanji brings out a round of new cinnamon cookies she’s trying out, made with a mix of unique spices they brought from Alabasta, Robin catches her forearm with slender fingers.
Quietly, the older woman tells Sanji that while she’s flattered and appreciates the special attention, she should make clear that she isn’t all that into women.
Nami overhears and chokes out a laugh. “You’ve got nothing to worry about,” she says, eyes twinkling. “Sanji’s just… like that. You’ll get used to it.” Nami winks at her, for the first time since Vivi, and Sanji goes bright red. Something like embarrassment cloys at her chest, though she’s unsure if it’s because of the words (a tiny bit humiliating), the wink (cute), or the implications of the wink (Sanji loves Nami, really, truly, but there’s only so much battering her poor heart can take. Now that Vivi’s gone, having Nami cope with the loss by going back to meaninglessly flirting with Sanji again and bringing her hopes up feels… well, Sanji would hesitate to use the word cruel for any woman, but it’s a near thing).
Luffy jumps on her shoulders and steals a cookie before she can blink. “Hey, this is pretty good!”
Sanji pulls the platter back before he inhales the rest of them, holding it high above her head. “Oh, no you don’t. I have your portion set back in the kitchen— no, wait, you can not go back in there alone!”
Sanji hands off the platter of cookies to Nami before she chases after Luffy, fully intending to tackle him before he eats her out of house and home. Given the chance, he’d clear out their fridge in less than a day without any hint of a guilty conscience.
“Yo ba-ing’s a besht,” he mumbles around a mouthful of cookies (‘your baking’s the best’, if she deciphered that right), and Sanji breathes out a sigh of relief that he hasn’t noticed the sandwiches she set aside for lunch yet.
“Don’t speak with your mouth full, Captain, it’s fucking disgusting.” Sanji rinses out a cup to pour him a glass milk to go with the snack. As she’s setting it in front of him, Luffy gulps down whatever’s in his mouth and pokes at her shoulder with one crumble-coated finger.
“Zoro said you’re upset about Nami,” he announces, apropos of nothing, and Sanji has to practice extra concentration to set the glass down without spilling anything.
“Zoro seems to worry a lot, for someone who claims she doesn’t care about me.”
Luffy grins. “Zoro loves ya’,” he tells her, and the admission makes something warm rise in her chest. “We all do, including Nami. But she doesn’t know you like her.”
Immediately soured, Sanji leans back against the table and combs through her fringe. “I think everyone on this ship and any port we land at does.”
“Nah, not like that. You know what I mean.” Luffy takes another cookie and chews on it the slowest she’s ever seen him. “She thinks you’re just like that.”
“I am, though. I can’t help it. Falling in love is sort of my whole thing.”
“Your thing is cooking,” Luffy tells her wisely.
Sanji waits for something else, but he just goes back to inhaling his cookies, conversation effectively ended. She tries to summon up hate for the way he can be so preternaturally perceptive at times, but she could never really hate Luffy. He’s just like that too.
That same night, Sanji’s out smoking on the stern of the ship under the eerily silent sky. Nothing above her but a galaxy, and nothing behind her but her sleeping crewmates, until Nami shows up behind her. She’s holding a blanket over her shoulders, chin tucked into the warmth of it, looking pale and blue in the moonlight. That vibrant ginger hair of hers is muted brown. “Mind if I stay?”
“Who would ever deny you?” Sanji scoots over to make room for her, moving to stub out her cigarette when Nami waves her off. Sanji places it back between her lips, taking another drag.
After a long moment of silence, Nami finally speaks up. “Robin overheard you and Luffy, earlier today.” (Sanji feels her blood run cold.) “I didn’t… realize. I mean, you’re always so over the top with everyone, and you even flirt with Zoro, and she’s disgusting, so I just assumed the whole thing was a bit.”
“I wouldn’t joke about this,” Sanji tells her, and the smile she’s trying for feels pathetically unconvincing.
“Apparently not.” Nami huffs, turning to face her straight on. “You should have told me. I wouldn’t have flirted back if I knew it was real— not like that, don’t make that face.” Nami sighs. Bites her lip. Reaches out one pale hand to cup Sanji’s jaw, running her thumb along her cheek. Sanji closes her eyes and stays so statue-still that she doesn’t breathe. “I don’t want to hurt you, that’s all. You’re my friend, and I do love you… just not like that. I’m sorry if I made it seem any other way.”
Sanji opens her eyes to find Nami staring up at her, face pinched in concern, caramel eyes wet and unusually guileless, nothing but pure sincerity there.
“Thank you for the apology, but really, there was no need. It’s alright, Sweetheart.”
“It’s not—”
“No harm done.” Sanji envelopes her fingers around Nami’s small hand, warm from the blanket and the bunkroom, where she must have just come from to find her. She pulls Nami’s hand back down and steps away. “How about a midnight tea? I can put on some chamomile to help you sleep better.”
Nami frowns, but eventually nods and follows her back to the galley. “That does sound nice.”
Sanji hums and puts a pot of water to boil. She pulls out the little ashtray by the sink and taps her cigarette into it, watching the ashes collect, the stick almost used up completely. Two months into the Grand Line and she’s already fallen in love with four women, gotten outright rejected by three, and left the fourth behind to a life of endless servitude to her homeland. This can’t have been what Zeff was thinking when he practically shoved her out his front door all those weeks ago. She resolves not to think too hard about it.
Zoro’s hair has gotten longer.
Not terribly so, but just enough that it tickles her ears and sticks sweat-slicked against her forehead when she works out. (Sanji would almost call it shaggy enough that, combined with the bright color, it makes the back of Zoro’s head look like a moss ball. She doesn’t say that out loud, of course, but. The thought is there.)
Usopp points out the hair thing in a stray observation, offering to try and make some makeshift clippers for her to use. “Fair warning though, they might take your head off on accident?”
Zoro raises a hand to her neck, circling around it. (And Sanji tries her best to banish all the unholy images that immediately brings up, the sight of rough fingers carefully choking the perfect column of her warm throat like that, but it’s a damn near impossible task when Zoro’s looking all hot and sweaty, with that post-workout glow…)
“No thanks,” Zoro tells Usopp. “Don’t think I could really hold onto Wado without a mouth.”
“That’s your concern?” Chopper exclaims in pure distress. It’s a good thing he wasn’t around for the ‘Zoro almost cuts her own damn legs off’ incident, because that might have actually sent him into an early grave.
“I could help. I always cut Zeff’s and my hair back at the Baratie. What?” Sanji says, when the others turn to look at her. “It’s not exactly easy to find a regular barber when you live in a nomadic floating restaurant.”
“...I’m just surprised that didn’t come with an offer to kiss her feet too,” Usopp tells her. And then he immediately slaps his hands over his mouth, like he’s scared she’s going to kick his ass for the comment. Sanji admits that she does consider it, but she decides to be magnanimous and let him go for now.
“It’s a haircut, not a massage— though I am open to any other special services my darling has in mind?”
Zoro’s nose wrinkles in distaste. “Take that shit somewhere else. You’re serious about the rest of it though? The haircut?” Sanji nods. Zoro raises a hand and shoves it artlessly through her short locks, attempting to push them back and only half-succeeding, with the way her temples are plastered with stray green strands. “Fine.”
Sanji grins, delighted at the opportunity to be of service, until she notices Zoro heading straight for the woman’s bunk room. She gives chase.
“Are you… uh… going to shower first?”
“I just showered this morning,” Zoro says, like that’s an explanation. “Why? You’re not gonna help me if I don’t?”
“That— I’d never walk back on my offer—”
“Good, cause I’m not. We either do this right now, or never.”
Sanji closes her eyes tight. Clenches her fists. Takes a deep breath of nothing but pure, dirty woman-musk. This is just yet another of god’s little tests.
“I’ll set up a place in the bathroom so we don’t get the bunks dirty,” she says, and Zoro grins.
They sit on the hard floor over a spread of old newsprint, Zoro settling between Sanji’s spread legs to give her a better angle. There’s a thin pair of sewing scissors in her hand, and she’s working away at Zoro’s hair, snipping the strands so they’re cropped tight to her skull. Zoro’s usual preferred style is militaristic and simple, only concerned with keeping hair out of her eyes while she fights. Replicating it with scissors takes quite a bit of maneuvering. The task would definitely be easier with a pair of clippers, but Sanji thinks she might actually kill Usopp for real if he inadvertently decapitates her darling.
“Mmm.”
Zoro hums as Sanji runs her fingers firmly over the base of her skull, brushing away strands of cut hair. She leans back, probably involuntarily, and Sanji’s stomach goes tight with nervous anticipation. She’s so close that Sanji’s breath ghosts the golden-brown nape of her bare neck. Half her sweat has dried her wifebeater to her back as well, showing off the strong muscles under the thin, white fabric. She smells like ocean and musk, by all means terrible, but Sanji can’t actually bring herself to care, which is enough of a problem in itself.
Sanji’s not so far gone that she denies that Zoro can be a little bit gross sometimes, what with the lack of manners and inconsistent showering habits, and that does make it a tad harder to coo and titter about her compared to the other girls. There’s only so much proximity to stank that Sanji can take before she feels the need to go take another shower herself.
But for some reason, sitting right behind her, inches apart, Zoro practically in her lap, Sanji can’t bring herself to be bothered by the musk or the sweat or any of the rest of it. In fact, she wants nothing more than to reach forward and press her mouth to the back of Zoro’s neck, wrap her arms around the other woman’s waist and hug her close. The allure of body heat and skin against her tongue is almost overwhelming, and definitively dizzying.
Sanji draws back and forces herself to behave.
(Think of Zoro’s typical stink. Think of Zoro’s atrocious manners. Think of Zoro laughing so hard she shoots soup out her nose. As much as you love her, you can’t lower yourself into becoming the sort of degenerate that has a sweat kink!
Sanji thinks, and thinks, and thinks, and it doesn’t work.)
She’s so fucked. Zoro’s fundamentally changed her for the worse.
Goddammit.
The White-White Sea is magical, the Skypiean flowers smell like agave and mango, and the sunlight filtering through the cloud infrastructure casts everything and everyone into a heavenly glow. It’s the most beautiful place Sanji’s ever seen, but she can’t commit the details to memory because she’s distracted by someone else even more beautiful.
Conis has feathery dove wings and platinum blonde hair, almost white, and is the closest Sanji might ever get to meeting a real life angel. She falls in love with her on sight, of course. Afterall, Conis is pretty, kind, and most importantly, actually interested in Sanji.
She giggles and humors Sanji’s flirting with a pale dusting of pink across her cheeks, meeting her eyes with a certain fondness that’s unfamiliar. It’s addicting, to say the least, and Sanji already mourns their inevitable parting. A bird and fish can’t fall in love, and Conis won’t come down to the sea just as much as Sanji won’t stay up here and abandon her crew and dreams. So they take what time they have and spend it as wisely as possible, and Sanji knows even when Conis turns them in, that they still have something between them.
Between getting hunted by the sky police, Enel, and everything that goes on in the Upper Yard, Sanji can barely take but a few moments to think of Conis before she’s struck down by lightning.
Much, much later, when the golden bell is rung and a celebration is had, Conis finally finds her again by the bonfire.
“I was worried about you,” Conis tells her, and Robin excuses herself (with a wink, how embarrassing) to give them privacy.
Sanji takes Conis’ hand in her own and presses her lips to the white knuckles. “You don’t know how happy that makes me. Please, worry about me some more.”
Conis blushes a delicate, petal-pink hue. “You really don’t hate me?” she breathes out, her other hand skirting along Sanji’s patterned shirt, coming to a rest at her heart.
“I could never hate you, pretty thing.”
Sanji leans forward, praying she didn’t read things wrong, and is relieved to find a pair of soft lips meeting her own. Conis’ lips are fair and thin, and she kisses with a fragility deserving of her demeanor. Sanji’s clumsy at first, but a quick study, and soon she presses back hard enough that Conis is making little noises into her mouth.
Conis pulls back, breathing hard, pale eyes wide and hair askew. “Not here,” she says, pink high on her cheeks. She takes Sanji’s hand and pulls her up. Sanji looks around a bit frantically to see if anyone is noticing this scandalous behavior, and nearly falls over herself when she meets Zoro's hard-set gaze as Conis drags away from the searching light of the giant bonfire, seeking out a shadowed and secluded place near an outcropping of rocks.
Conis sits so she’s half-laying on top of a flat boulder, and pulls Sanji up over her.
It’s clear who the more experienced one is, but Sanji is certain she makes up for it in enthusiasm, if Conis’ unsteady cries of her name are anything to go by.
It’s there, in the firelight of a pyre, still raw and burnt from being electrocuted so recently, that Sanji has her first kiss, her first relationship (short-lived though it is), and her first of many other things.
It’s more than she could have ever imagined. Conis is soft in all the right places, supple and pliant under Sanji’s hands, and her hips are both biteable and grippable. Her wings, when Sanji pets them, are just as downy and delightful as imagined. Conis squeals when Sanji touches her there, or on her stomach, or anywhere else, really. She’s beautifully reactive. Sanji’s not used to being wanted, and especially not being wanted this much. She loses herself in it, drowning on air.
It’s all so perfect. No, beyond perfect.
Sanji can’t stop thinking about Conis at all, heart left ashore on the seam of the White-White cloud seas and the beach of Skypiea when they leave a few days later. She’ll never be the same without that connection. It’s left behind in the same way promises are, in the same way her dreams of a White-White cloud wedding and cloud honeymoon are. She wants to wake up to that smile every day, go to bed to those flushed cheeks and fragile moans every night.
Sanji doesn’t stop thinking of Conis as they come crashing down from the sky island and almost die from the impact, nor as they get caught up with a bunch of idiot foxy pirates who try and steal their crew mates away. She doesn’t stop thinking of her right up until they get to Water 7, they find out their ship is dying, Usopp and Luffy get into the worst fight of their lives, and her dear angel, Robin, goes missing.
Sanji gives chase after Robin, because of course she does.
The look in Robin’s eyes when she tells Chopper and Sanji to leave is hauntingly familiar. The concept of using self-sacrifice as a guise to just give up isn’t something foreign to her, considering Sanji almost rebuffed Luffy and the best adventure of her life just to not make her dad sad. Robin’s version of martyrdom is far darker, though, evident by the lifeless gaze and tired slope of her shoulders. She intends to die like that. Sanji won’t let her.
In the end, it takes crossing the ocean during a natural disaster, facing off against CP9 until they’re near-death themselves, and declaring war on the World Government to bring Robin back to them.
It’s worth every second of suffering.
Sanji watches her rest in the cabin they’ve been given for their time in Water 7, leaning back onto the headboard of her bed and watching Luffy and Chopper chase each other around. It’s the most content Sanji’s ever seen her. Whatever weight was on her shoulders has dissipated, leaving behind a light in her eyes and a sincerity in her smiles.
Sanji walks over to the trio with a tray of morning canapes. She sets a coffee and a plate of chocolate coated rusks on the bedside table for Robin, and grab’s Luffy’s arm when he passes by.
“Thank you!” Chopper finally catches up, throwing himself onto Luffy’s head with an adorable growl. “I told you, you’re supposed to be on bedrest for the next few days!”
“But I feel fine,” Luffy whines.
Sanji can’t help but laugh. “You look like death warmed over, Captain.” She holds a croissant sandwich out to him, which succeeds in making Luffy slow down for approximately one minute before he’s turning his enormous puppy-dog eyes up at her in hopes for more. She sighs and points him to the plate on the kitchenette counter, and he yelps with delight before running over, Chopper holding onto his straw hat for dear life.
“It’s like watching a mother and her toddlers,” Robin says, and Sanji chokes on nothing.
“You can’t do this to me, Angel,” Sanji pleads. “Mothering this crew might actually send me to an early grave.”
Robin’s eyes shine, lips curling up in amusement, and she takes a sip of her coffee. “Zoro and others just came back from town, if you wanted to deliver their snacks too.” Sure enough, when Sanji looks out the window she can see them hauling supplies together, down the beaten path to the cabin. Robin’s ability to simply know just about anything and everything is uncanny.
Sanji sets up everything on the small dining table, warning Luffy not to help himself to the others’ food before they get a chance to try them, and goes to help put everything away.
Nami gives up her load willingly, and though Sanji holds her hand out for Zoro, she pulls back with a warning glare. Expected. Unexpected, though, is the way she continues to eye Sanji with irritation and grumbles under her breath. At a bit of prompting, she speaks up. “Just surprised you’re still here. I though you would’ve found some random girl in town to fuck around with, by now.”
“Huh?”
Zoro pointedly does not meet her gaze. “You didn’t really seem to have a problem abandoning us back in Skypiea.”
Skypiea feels like eons ago. She racks her brain, wondering what the hell Zoro is even talking about (she’d never abandon her crewmates in the middle of a fight, and the First Mate knows this too) before it clicks. Sanji stops her just outside the cabin with a hand at her elbow, letting the others filter in before them. “You’re upset about Conis?”
“Why would I be upset?” Zoro snaps, and the look in her eyes tries for confrontational but ultimately reads uncomfortable. “You just got struck by lightning, almost died, and decided to fuck off without telling any of us for multiple days, that’s all. You were supposed to be resting in bed, Cook, not fucking in it.”
“So… you were worried?”
(Sanji’s not sure how that’s supposed to make her feel. On one hand, having her darling be worried for her is a wonderful feeling, and it should be making something content warm her chest, but on the other hand… This conversation doesn’t feel right. Sanji would almost say Zoro sounds petty and jealous, if she didn’t know any better. That should also make her happy, but instead, thinking off all the times Zoro’s explicitly rejected her random acts of kindness, it sort of makes her angry—
Frustrated. Not angry. Because of course, Sanji could never be angry at a woman, and especially not her darling Zoro.)
“Not for an idiot,” Zoro tells her, surprisingly vicious. Zoro’s never had as much tolerance for Sanji as the others, but she’s never sounded so outright mean before. “I just don’t get it. How do you go around acting the way you do with Nami, and Robin, and— uh, whatever. When you’re just going to abandon everyone at the first sight of pussy you see?”
“That is— it is not like that—”
“Or is it the other way around? How do you go from chasing Conis around like a dog for four days straight and then go back to flirting with the rest of us?”
Sanji sets her bags down. Leans back against the cabin wall, aware that there are probably more than a few keen ears listening from inside. She takes a deep drag of air and wishes it was smoke instead, but she left her cigs in the kitchen, and a hit of nicotine wouldn’t solve this problem anyway.
“I can’t tell you that it didn’t mean anything,” she finally decides to start with. “I miss her a lot. But we both knew that could never really be for long anyway and…” Frustrated, confused, she lets out a little distressed grunt. Sanji runs her fingers through her fringe, an itch in her hands, an itch in her temper, and looks away from Zoro. “Can’t I just have this one thing? Everyone else gets to push me away, but I suddenly don’t get to have Conis?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
When she turns back, Zoro’s eyes are wide and startled, like she can’t even find the answer herself. Sanji continues, watching the way Zoro’s mouth clamps shut, looking more and more troubled with each word. “Help me understand what you meant, because I can’t think of any other way. Why do you care who I have sex with?”
After a moment of garbled stuttering, Zoro finally breaks. “Fine. You can go fuck whoever you want, I don’t care. Sorry for making it my business.” She grabs the bags Sanji set down too and storms back inside, ears red, kicking the door frame on the way in. “Have fun on your night out,” she shouts out. “I feel bad for whatever poor girl has to put up with your non-existent sexing skills!”
“My sexing skills are perfectly fine, thank you very much, Darling!” Sanji calls back inside. Then she sees the guilty faces of her crewmates, some trying their very best to look like they didn’t hear anything at all, and is mortified. She stomps down the path back to the city, if not to follow Zoro’s advice then to at least bum a cig off of someone else. She just can’t stand to be in the same room as… well, anyone she knows at all right now.
Sanji doesn’t end up in the bed of any random girl that night, nor the night after that, nor even after that. She stays back, diligently cleaning the cabin from top to bottom and indulging in new recipes with ingredients that won’t keep for long at sea. She makes it a point not to avoid Zoro either, because it would make it seem like the other woman won the argument or something, but isn’t afforded the same consideration.
Zoro is… different, now. Avoiding Sanji in anger would be normal. but that’s not even it. Sure, she exits a room whenever Sanji enters, and takes her meals quickly and quietly, and volunteers for nightwatch to avoid getting cornered at bedtime, but that’s not all. It’s oxymoronic, her sudden change in demeanor. Sanji feels Zoro’s gaze on the back of her neck, a pair of feline eyes following her movements near constantly. Zoro doesn’t thank her when Sanji sets a plate piled high with rice and meat in front of her, but she does stare intently at her hands like they’re birds of prey she’s waiting to pounce on. It’s enough to drive a woman insane.
Sanji tries to call her out about it one day. “My dear, did you need something?” Zoro startles from where she’s watching her through the open window, hackles practically rising like a cat. The sunlight comes in from behind her hair, lightening the pretty color, and Zoro shifts from her sunbathing spot where she was supposedly napping with Chopper on the grass. Before she wriggles her way out from under the reindeer and bolts, Sanji captures her ire with a well-timed “I dislike being avoided by the people I love.”
“Don’t start,” Zoro sneers. “Just. Don’t.”
Sanji sets her knife down, so she doesn’t accidently julienne her thumb instead of her zucchini. “If I had to pick a person who started all this…”
“Still you. You started all of this shit back at your restaurant, because you couldn’t keep it in your pants around us even then.”
“I thought we had a working balance,” Sanji exclaims. “You never seemed to mind it all that much before!”
“You didn’t—” Zoro stops herself, teeth grinding down hard on each other, expression furious and strained. Quietly, she says, “Before was different.”
“How?”
“It just was,” Zoro grunts. She finally manages to move without waking Chopper, and disappears around the side of the cabin, out of sight and down to the coast.
“So…” The sound comes from behind and Sanji startles so hard she almost gives herself whiplash from turning around. “Bad time?” Franky is standing in the middle of the empty room, rubbing the back of his head sheepishly. He’s got a sweat-soaked towel around his shoulders, but looks relatively clean other than that. It’s past midday, so he’s probably come over in search of some nice, cool cola. That always seems to give him a second wind, and the faster this new ship gets built, the better. Sanji grabs a bottle from the refrigerator and pops the top, sliding it to him across the counter.
Franky thanks her and tips it back, letting out a refreshing bellow about how suuuuper it is. After he finishes, he lingers longer than usual, a serious frown on his face.
“You doing okay there, lil’ sis? Trouble in paradise?”
Sanji sneers. “As if! That would imply a paradise to begin with.” She starts dicing an onion, perhaps a bit too aggressive, and her eyes water from not only the sulfur. “I’ll refrain from boring you with the details.”
“Hey, no worries. I’m used to listening to girl troubles anyway, with my little sisters and all. Just let Big Bro hear it!”
Franky’s grin is over-the-top yet bafflingly sincere, as all things he does are, and Sanji can’t help but let out a little puff of laughter. She might as well vent to him, considering everything they’ve been through already. “It’s just… I don’t get her. What am I doing wrong? She hates when I show her affection so I tone it down, fine, but then she goes ahead and acts like she hates it when I don’t pay attention to her too?”
“Maybe she’s just confused,” Franky surmises. “Zoro doesn’t really seem like the brightest tool in the shed.”
“She’s brilliant,” Sanji snaps. “Don’t you dare insult her, you giant cybernetic oaf, she’s smart enough to put your ass in the ground in a fight.”
Franky’s hands fly straight up in surrender, his eyebrows rising with them. “Woah! Guess I touched a nerve there, huh? Didn’t say she couldn’t do all that!”
“I love her,” Sanji tells him, miserable. “Despite this, I still love her, obviously. So don’t insult her, only Nami can do that!”
“Aha!” Franky snaps his fingers. “I think I see where the problem is. You’re just as psycho about her as she is about you—” He yelps, dodging the kitchen stool Sanji kicks at him. “Ooookay, sensitive about that too— Hey! Not the hair!”
Sanji chases him out with threats and occasional kicks to the shins (and okay, sometimes kicks aimed at his head) until he runs out screaming bloody murder. She slams the door shut, breathing heavily, toes aching something fierce where they made contact with his metal-plated front half. Far be it from her to get advice from a maidenless man in his thirties with a pompadour. She’ll deal with this on her own, thank you very much!
She doesn’t really get time to deal with it, considering Thriller Bark. Sanji couldn’t have imagined they’d get kidnapped by a zombie-infested island as soon as they set sail on the Sunny’s maiden voyage, and she could only imagine less how quickly the situation devolves from troubling to downright terrifying.
There’s the matter of Nami getting sexually assaulted for one, by that freak with the Clear-Clear fruit (which Sanji is truly engraged about. How dare that disgusting piece of filth use those powers for hurting other women, when all she wanted as a little girl was to get her hands on that fruit and disappear forever, hiding from those walking assholes called her brothers?) Then they all get their shadows stolen, Luffy’s gets put into Oars, and even when they beat that guy, Gecko Moria comes out to add yet another impossible fight onto the long list of terrible ways this shitty island-boat-whatever fucks them over.
And then, after everything else, when they’re all worn out and Luffy’s half-dead, the universe pulls a cruel twist of fate on them and sends out fucking Bartholomew Kuma.
It passes by in a blur:
Attempting to fight and quickly realizing it’s a losing battle. Everyone getting knocked out. Zoro martyring herself and offering her head for Luffy’s, and then Kuma accepting it, like some fucked up executioner doling out tests of strength to see if they’re all worthy of being left alive or not, like their lives are just a game to him, and Sanji’s never been so terrified.
She tries to make it stop. Tries to give herself up instead of Zoro.
It’s not appreciated. All she gets for her efforts get her are bruised ribs and Zoro’s resolute frown, which hurts more than any insult would have.
When she comes to, everything’s over.
Sanji hears the others stirring around her, but goes out in search of Zoro. Frantic, blood rushing in her ears, pulse throbbing with raw fear. When she finally finds the First Mate she’s alive, thankfully, but it’s a miracle she’s even conscious. Zoro’s blood is thrown around the clearing all around her, so much that it seems like every last drop must have been flung out from her very veins. Even though she’s standing strong, arms crossed over her chest, her eyes are unsteady, unseeing.
Nothing happened, she tells Sanji, nothing happened. It should make her furious, but the way Zoro crumples right after floods her with panic instead. Sanji leaps forward and catches Zoro in her arms just before she hits the ground. It’s like being struck by an anvil, stabbed straight through the chest, electrocuted by lightning. Sanji feels raw and burnt, even though Zoro’s the one who’s hurt all over.
Sanji pulls Zoro close, wipes away the blood splattered across her face. Presses their foreheads together, just for a few seconds. “Idiot.”
Her eyes well with tears, but Sanji holds them back. Not now. She has a job to do.
She takes off her blazer and drapes it over the other woman’s prone form, her shirt so tattered it’s a surprise it’s still staying on. Then she hoists Zoro up as carefully as she can, trying not to jostle her wounds too much, an arm under her knees and another around her back. Chopper screeches when he sees Sanji return with a battered body in her arms, and then screeches some more when he realizes it’s a dying Zoro.
He fixes her to the best of his ability. She’ll live, he says, but it’s a near thing, if Sanji was just a few minutes later then the blood loss would have gotten to her.
The next few days blur. Sanji tries her best to be present and welcoming to Brook, when he finally joins their crew, since Luffy seems to love him so much. It’s clear to everyone around her that the only thing on her mind is Zoro, though. Even when the swordswoman finally wakes up, Sanji spends practically every waking moment around her, nursing her back to health whenever Chopper isn’t there. Everyone’s more fragile around her, though very few know exactly what happened back there (good, Sanji intends to keep it that way) but Sanji and Chopper are probably the worst.
They set back out to sea as soon as possible, Zoro up and out of bed far too soon for both the doctor’s and cook’s liking. Sanji makes sure to be even more particular about her meals than usual. Good health comes with good food, after all. Zoro mostly just lets her do whatever it is she wants with exhausted eyes, which just serves to make Sanji even more worried.
She’s aggressively cleaning the kitchen a couple of days later, unable to sleep despite how the moon is high in the sky and the floors are already spotless, when she hears someone fumbling with the door.
Sanji turns just in time to see Zoro stumble into the galley and rushes forward to help her into a seat. She really, really shouldn’t even be up like this. Her wounds are still healing, freshly bruised and bled, mottling her body in blue and red. The bandages are pure white, at least, meaning she’s at least let Chopper redress them.
Admittedly, a part of Sanji’s current, constant pampering of Zoro is because she’s trying to outrun the fact that she’s still a bit angry about the whole incident with the sheer force of her love. It’s difficult, at times, when she thinks about the way her ribs smart or how Zoro felt in her arms, body cold and trembling, but she still makes a valiant effort.
Sanji knows Zoro only hurt herself like that for the rest of them. The fact that it’s apparently a First Mate’s duty to her Captain is not lost on Sanji either, and she tries not to feel bitter about Luffy’s role in all this. It’s not Zoro’s fault that Sanji is jealous of her love, nor is it her fault that Sanji’s projecting all that onto her duties within the crew. If Zoro were a man then Sanji might have lashed out by now, but she smothers the urge with her genuine concern for the other woman.
She grabs a blanket from the couch and tucks it around Zoro’s shoulders, hands hovering over her.
“Are you hungry? Of course you are, you struggled to even eat your dinner— hold on, let me go put something together. I can make some tea, too—”
“Can you just fuck off for a second,” Zoro tells her, and Sanji’s jaw snaps shut with an audible click.
With how pliant and amenable she’s been to the pampering lately, the words are like getting dunked into icy waters. Zoro’s never appreciated her doting as much as Nami or Robin, but she’s never outright been this hostile to Sanji either. Did she do something wrong? Was it something she said? Or is this just Zoro being prickly as she always is around Sanji? (Not that the last option doesn’t wound her just as much as the others.)
Zoro throws the blanket off, struggling to stand again. When Sanji rushes forwards again, she raises a silent hand and glares fiercer than Sanji’s ever seen directed at a crewmate. “That. Yeah, all that— stop it. I don’t need any of this shit. I can make my own damn tea.”
“But you’re hurt—”
“You always do this,” Zoro accuses. “With the others all this… this… babying is bad enough, but you’re just so fucking suffocating!”
Suffocating. Sanji is suffocating her beloved.
“Even back then with Kuma. You didn’t have to get in the way, it’s not your business. I’m First Mate. I do what I need to do.”
“I just didn’t want you to get hurt,” Sanji tells her, voice clipped, not what she meant to sound like at all. Sanji is confused, concerned, and deeply heartbroken, but the sizzling anger is the one thing she’s trying so hard to push back on, to no avail. It’s always like this with Zoro, a push and pull of affection and frustration. Sanji wishes Zoro would just let her love her, even though it’s an impossible dream.
“Yeah,” Zoro says, and Sanji waits a moment longer before she realizes that’s all.
Having said her piece, Zoro makes her way to the kitchen counter by supporting herself with one hand on the wall. Sanji’s fingers twitch at her sides, and she wants desperately to help, but she stops herself so she isn’t so suffocating anymore.
“You didn’t—” Sanji clenches her fists and closes her eyes tight, light and dark dappling the back of her eyelids. “You don’t care if you get hurt, so I cared instead. I don’t get why you’re always so stubborn, and bullheaded, and doing stupid shit all the time.”
“At least I’m stupid with a reason,” Zoro snipes back. She’s rummaging around in the cabinets, probably messing up Sanji’s intricate organization system while searching for tea bags on the opposite side of the room. A spark of anger leaps into the kindling already lighting in Sanji’s chest. Zoro continues to bang around in the precious kitchen, tracking her infirmary grime everywhere. Face twisted up, still elbow deep in spices, Zoro turns and snarls over her shoulder. “You’re the dumbest person I know! You don’t care if you die as long as another girl doesn’t get a couple scratches, but that would be fine if you weren’t so fucking suicidal about it at least!”
“Oh, fuck you!”
Sanji startles, surprised by the force of her own yell. She starts to wilt, ashamed for even being so hostile to someone she loves, but Zoro just gives her a wicked grin, something truly mean in the glint of her canines.
“You wish. Glad you’re finally being real, for once, instead of all that fake bullshit.”
“It’s not fake, not like you would know any better—”
“Mad about this, or are you mad I clocked your self-sacrificial bullshit? We should just go ‘find another cook’, huh?”
“So that’s what this is about?” Sanji stomps forward, face so warm with blood she feels lightheaded. “You’re always so preoccupied with Luffy that I’m surprised you even care enough about me to get upset.”
Zoro slams the cabinet closed so hard it bounces back open, the sound reverberating through the air. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Sanji bulldozes ahead, finally getting everything she’s been holding back for months off her chest. “You’re always so callous with my feelings, even when I give you my heart on a sleeve, and then you expect me to believe you when you say things like that? Don’t be cruel, Darling.”
“Don’t call me that,” Zoro snaps. “And me? I’m the one who’s cruel? What about you doing all this shit—” she waves a hand at the blanket strewn across the floor from where Zoro threw it off, the chair still pushed out from the table from when Sanji tried to help earlier— “and then going gaga over Nami and Robin seconds later? You don’t care.” Zoro’s lost some of her steam over the course of their argument. The bandages at her shoulder might be bleeding red under the shadows, and the set of her shoulders is resigned. “Never once have you actually cared.”
“That’s not true.”
Zoro sends her one final glare and starts walking out, midnight snack forgotten.
Sanji catches her wrist on the way out. She can handle a lot of things, but being presumed insincere is not one of them.
“I love you,” she says slowly, and when Zoro tries to shake her hand off, just grips tighter. “And I love Nami, and Robin too. And, before you come to conclusions, I love Luffy, and Chopper, and Usopp, and even Franky and Brook, though we haven’t known them as long. Because you are my friends.”
“We’re crewmates,” Zoro confirms, but instead of comforted, she just sounds bone-tired. She finally slips her hand out of Sanji’s grasp, going to hold onto the doorway instead with the way it’s trembling. “I know all that already, but that’s not what I’m talking about. That shit you pulled back there? Would you do that for Robin?”
“Of course.”
“Then I don’t want it. All this shit you do, it pisses me off because you’re only doing it because I have tits. You’d throw your life away for any woman.”
Sanji doesn’t have a response to that particular point, because she’s guilty of many things surrounding all that. She’s not fucking suicidal like Zoro implied, thank you very much, but if anyone one of them had to sacrifice their life to get out of that situation, then she’d much prefer it be her. Cooks are as plentiful as fish in the sea, anyone could learn how. Usopp’s already halfway decent with a skillet. She doesn’t want to leave this conversation like this, though.
“I don’t do all these nice things for you just because you’re a girl, or because you’re hot,” Sanji tells her, even though that might have all been true at first. “I do it because of who you are, Zoro. And I really love who you are, when you’re not toying with my heart all the time.”
Zoro, one foot out the door, halfway to leaving, finally turns back to look at her.
“You can be really damn frustrating, sure, but you love your friends so much it makes me feel insane sometimes. Being… cared for by you is something special, and I’m just trying to reciprocate the only way I know how.
“If you really hate it all, I’ll try and hold back,” Sanji promises. “I know you don’t like me the same way. And for the record, I wasn’t expecting to get anything out of it all either. I just did it because I like doing nice things for you.”
Zoro continues to stare at her, jaw slack. Sanji wants to reach forward and close it. She looks so dumb like that, a fly could just wander in and make itself a new home.
“Can I walk you to the infirmary?” she asks, even though she just promised to stop coddling Zoro.
“I— uh, I can make it.”
Zoro doesn’t move.
Sanji wishes with all her heart she wasn’t in love with her, but it’s a losing battle.
She pushes Zoro gently out the door and wishes her goodnight.
The next day they meet Camie and Duval (does that shitty wanted poster really look that much like a man? Sanji wants to cry, just a little bit. Is it the hair? Should she grow it longer? Usopp assures her no one would mistake her for a guy, but she still resolves to grow it out) and then they dock at Sabaody, and it should be easy, it should be fun, it should be business as usual. But instead they get hunted down by the navy and Kuma, again, and then yet another Kuma, again!
The last thing Sanji remembers is Zoro. Robin’s across the field and Nami’s right beside her, and Sanji knows she shouldn’t be picking and choosing when they’re all in danger, but the only thing on her mind when she sees Kuma move in is Zoro.
Zoro, Zoro, Zoro, Zoro, who is injured beyond repair, who just gave everything she had in her down to the last drop and more for the crew, who’s vulnerable and hurt and who Sanji wouldn’t give a second thought to save if she could. Who hates her, even though Sanji loves her, loves her so much it feels like she can’t even breathe sometimes, that she can’t even move on from her.
Sanji thinks too much, and that’s why she’s always so heartbroken. If she could just let Zoro go then it would save her so much pain, but instead she’ll think back through every little moment with her and find herself struggling with her temper. Zoro’s frustrating, and irritating, and confusing, and so, so, so difficult to love, but Sanji still does anyway, and right now, that feeling consumes her. So Sanji doesn’t think— she does.
She runs for her, feet thudding hard and fast, lungs rattling in her chest, breathlessly trying to call out to her, and it feels like death itself when she sees Kuma reach forward and Zoro just… disappears.
Luffy yowls from somewhere behind her, something so raw and ripped from the soul that it tears through the air, and it sends the others crying out too. Sanji is silent in shock. The last thing she remembers is Zoro’s stunned face, staring her down back in the galley after just giving her the verbal lashing of a lifetime. And now she’s just… gone.
Sanji doesn't see her again for 2 years.