Chapter Text
“No,” Sanji whines, taking the sake bottle away from Zoro’s hand, “Come on now, tell me more about your village!”
Zoro sighs and relents, letting Sanji take the bottle away and hug it to his chest. Honestly, he wanted to do this alone, but then Usopp got the great idea that if Zoro is visiting his village, they could all visit their homelands because who knows when they will be in East Blue again? That led to Nami enthusiastically charting a course, and the ones not from East Blue very much looking forward to visiting Cocoyashi, Syrup, Dawn, and Shimotsuki with a final stop at Baratie.
So, for the last five months, they have been doing exactly that. Zoro has nothing to complain about. It was actually nice to visit all these places where so much of his life with Luffy began. They met Nojiko again, saw a healthier version of Kaya (now a doctor, too—Usopp was mad about Chopper hogging all her time), met the women who raised Luffy (both of whom greatly empathised with Sanji), and now they are heading to Zoro’s homeland, about which he has never said much to anyone. So, right now, in the crow’s nest, he sighs, “There isn’t much to tell.”
Sanji juts his lower lip out, scowling, “Bullshit, Mosshead.” He leans against Zoro’s side and whines again, “Why do I have to struggle so much to fish information out of you?”
Zoro huffs and looks down at the enraged head of blond hair. He resists the urge to kiss it, but then remembers that he can. So, he presses his lips atop the blond hair and says, “It’s just a village. We grow rice, practice the same religion as in Wano, and have a dojo.”
Sanji tilts his head back and frowns, “And what about the connection with Wano? Don’t think I didn’t hear what that corpse you fought with on Thriller Bark was called. Shimotsuki. Your homeland. So, spill.”
Zoro shrugs, “Koushirou-san might be better at telling you all about that than me.”
Sanji’s scowl deepens. “How are you not even a little bit curious? Did the moss really infect your brain? Should I be worried? Is it infectious?”
A rare mischievous grin graces Zoro’s face. He cups Sanji’s face and brings it close to his own. Sanji’s breath stutters, and his eyes widen slightly, even if his lips part, anticipating. Zoro smirks, “Why? Worried you might get infected now after I just ca—”
Sanji slaps a hand on Zoro’s face and shoves him back. Zoro merely scoffs, and Sanji fumes, “Stupid asshole, Mosshead.” He starts looking for his pyjamas, hoping to leave this brute of a man all alone in this cold crow’s nest. No matter how his legs wobble now, or how goosebumps erupt all across his thighs. Let’s see how he enjoys sleeping alone like that!
Zoro chuckles again, the sound all gravel and deep. He grabs Sanji’s wrist and pulls him onto his lap. The heat rolls off Zoro’s bare chest, seeping through Sanji’s flimsy nightshirt. Sanji frowns, “You’re such an asshole.”
Zoro presses his head between Sanji’s shoulder blades and smiles, “And you love me anyway, so who’s the bigger idiot here?”
Sanji has no comeback to that. Zoro hears him light a cigarette, and even if he can’t see that face, he knows Sanji is fighting very hard not to smile.
Silence wraps them; the only sound that permeates through the space is their breathing and the occasional sizzle of the cigarette burning. Zoro takes stock of this space that’s all their own.
Sanji had joined him for his watch with a bottle of sake, and Zoro had known it wasn’t out of kindness. Sanji wanted to know more about Zoro’s past, which, honestly, wasn’t much of a past. He doesn’t remember his parents. He was raised by the village. He was taught swordsmanship by Koushiro. Kuina was his best friend.
He got a little wistful and melancholy when it came to Kuina, and Sanji had inched closer and closer, and that led to them making out, which usually leads to them being naked. It can’t be helped. Sanji is one horny bastard, and Zoro is helpless about that (he is just like Sanji too—that’s why they are together). However, Zoro had thought the sex would drive away Sanji’s curiosity, and he’d be too sleepy and pliant to talk. No, it made Sanji somehow more talkative. The sake and sex were both underhanded ploys. Zoro should have known.
Zoro mutters, “It’s, well, as long as I was there, it was a beautiful village. Mountains all around. Rice in every field.”
Sanji hums, “Rice in every field? Does that mean the island cultivates many kinds of rice?”
Zoro shrugs, “Maybe. Never knew the difference.” He imagines them landing in Shimotsuki and Sanji’s excitement at discovering whatever variety of rice, and that thought makes him smile.
Sanji traces Zoro’s knuckles, mapping the many scars and slight sun damage, and says, “You said the village took care of you. What do you mean by that?”
Zoro takes his time to form his answer, which tosses Sanji’s mind down a very dark crater. He thinks about how he at least had a mother. He remembers her warmth, her face, her hair, the things she said, the kindness and love she showered him with. To think that Zoro didn’t even have that? It twists his heart into a wretched shape. Did no one hold Zoro when he got hurt? He must have gotten hurt when he began to learn the sword. Did anyone make Zoro’s favourite foods on his birthday? Is that why Zoro is always satisfied when Sanji makes him the plain onigiri? Is that all he ate? If he had no home to call his own, just his own, is that why he sleeps anywhere, anytime?
They had both been raised differently, in different hells. But Sanji knows he had a glimpse of what maternal love means. He turns in Zoro’s hold and cups his jaw, swallowing the hurt he feels just imagining things. Zoro looks up at him, eye largely lost in thoughts. Sanji runs a thumb along the jaw and smiles, “It’s alright. Don’t answer that if you don’t know how.” He kisses Zoro’s scar. “It’s okay.”
Zoro rests his forehead on Sanji’s sternum and exhales, “Curls, you don’t have to feel bad for me. Can’t miss what I never had.”
Sanji pouts into Zoro’s green hair. The idiot isn’t wrong. But he’s a little miffed that Zoro read him like an open book again. Why is this moss-covered brute so perceptive sometimes? It makes him chuckle a little. He presses his cheek atop Zoro’s head and asks, “Hey, Mosshead, if we grew up alright, do you think we could’ve quit our silly antics and gotten together earlier?”
Zoro laughs, and Sanji feels the vibration of it spreading like waves throughout his whole body. It warms him to the core. Sanji wants to hold each joyous sound that emerges from the swordsman in his hands and then tuck them in a special corner of his heart, never to share with anyone again. Zoro holds him tighter and says, “I can’t imagine us well-adjusted.”
Okay, that makes Sanji lose his entire composure. He doubles over and laughs and laughs until his side hurts. Zoro puts Sanji back on the couch and tucks him to his side. Sanji is tearing up from how hard he is laughing, and Zoro can’t help it, shaking his head as he chuckles. Sanji puts his head back on Zoro’s shoulder and grins, “Damn, we must’ve been meant for each other, huh?”
Despite the huge, shit-eating grin on Sanji’s face, Zoro can see the softness in those ridiculous blue eyes. He tucks a strand of hair behind an ear and smiles, “Must be. I can’t imagine loving anyone but a foul-mouthed, chain-smoking bastard with sexy legs and a kick that can kill you.”
Sanji narrows his eyes and swats at Zoro’s chest. He closes his eyes and throws an arm around Zoro’s torso. He mumbles, “Shut up. Wake me up when your watch ends.”
Zoro hums, and Sanji’s breath gradually slows down, his body getting heavier. Zoro holds him close as he watches the sea outside the window, a smile still in place.
The island appears the way memories do—gradually, then all at once.
It begins as a pale smudge on the horizon, indistinguishable from cloud or coastline mist. Zoro is already on deck when it emerges. He doesn't remember walking up here. His body simply brought him, the way muscle memory carries a sword hand into a stance before the mind catches up.
He stands at the prow, arms loose at his sides. The wind off the water is cold and green-smelling, thick with cedar and something sweet underneath—osmanthus, maybe, though he has no name for it. He had never thought to give names to the smells of home. You don't, when you are nine and have never left.
The island rises from the sea in gentle increments.
First, the mountains, rounded at the crown as though the centuries had worn them with patient. They are draped in a deep, layered green: cedar on the lower slopes shading upward into maple and oak, and above those, where the altitude thins the canopy, pale-barked birch trees ghostly against the sky. The mountains hold the valley between them like cupped hands. Even from this distance, Zoro can see white specks moving slowly among the lower cedar groves. He doesn't understand what he's seeing until one of them lifts its head, and the morning light catches the particular velvet darkness of a deer's eye.
Right, there were deer in Shimotsuki. How had he forgotten that?
There had been deer everywhere. They were sacred to the village shrine, unhurried and unafraid, wandering into the dojo yard during summer evenings while he and Kuina sat on the engawa catching their breath. He used to feed them sweet potatoes from his hand. The memory surfaces without warning and plants itself behind his sternum like a splinter.
He exhales through his nose.
The coastline becomes clearer as the Sunny draws near. The harbour is small, sheltered on two sides by stone breakwaters aged to a dark, mineral grey. Behind the docks, the village steps upward along the slope. Wooden buildings with clay tile roofs, the colour of old ash, their eaves curved like the bows of sleeping cats. Narrow stone paths run between them, worn smooth by generations of foot traffic into a polished, pale ribbon. Maple trees line the main path leading up from the harbour, their branches not yet in leaf, only budding in the early spring chill, holding themselves like ink brushstrokes against the white sky.
The shrine is visible from the water. Of course it is. It always has been. It sits partway up the slope, its torii gate a faded vermilion, its roof dark with old moss. Lanterns hang from the eaves, unlit in the morning. Even from here, Zoro can see the shimenawa rope strung between the gate posts, thick and pale, hung with folded white paper that stirs in the mountain wind. The sight of it does something strange to his chest.
Rice fields terrace the gentler slopes beyond the village. The paddies are still flooded with early-season water, turned to mirrors by the flat morning light, the sky and the mountains reflected in every still square of them. A heron stands at the edge of the nearest field, motionless, as though it has been there since before the village was built.
Eight years.
He tries to make something of the number. He was fifteen when he left this harbour in the other direction, Wado on his back and nothing else that mattered. He had not looked back. Not because he didn't care. He hadn't looked back for the same reason you don't read a letter twice when you've already memorised it.
And yet he had forgotten the deer. He had forgotten the way the mountains hold the valley. He had forgotten the heron and the lanterns and the specific quality of stillness that gathers inside a place where people have prayed for a long time.
He notices his hand has risen to the hilt of Wado without his permission. Not a fighting grip, just his fingers resting there, familiar. I know, he tells her.
A warmth settles against his left arm. Sanji doesn't say anything. He stands close enough that his shoulder presses into Zoro's, his coat collar turned up against the wind, a cigarette burning down to nothing between two fingers. He isn't looking at Zoro. He is looking at the island, at the rice fields, and the cedar groves, and probably at that heron.
The silence between them is the same as the crow's nest. The kind Sanji has learned not to fill.
The Sunny's horn sounds once, low and echoing. Somewhere up the slope, beyond the shrine, past the line of maple trees, there is a dojo. And in the dojo, there is a man who taught Zoro everything that mattered and asked for nothing in return. Zoro doesn't know what his face will do when he sees that man. He thinks probably nothing, and then something, and then he will have to look away.
He watches the island come to meet him.
Beside him, Sanji lifts the cigarette to his lips, exhales slowly, and says, very quietly, the way you speak inside a shrine, “It's beautiful, Mosshead.”
Zoro says nothing.
But his hand drops from Wado's hilt, and without quite deciding to, he finds the back of Sanji's hand with his own, and leaves it there.
The gate of the dojo is exactly as Zoro remembers it: wooden, slightly warped on one side, with the carved characters above the arch that he had spent three weeks learning to read because Kuina had laughed at him for not knowing them. It creaks the same way when he pushes it open. Some things are reliable like that.
What is less reliable is the eight people who file in behind him.
Koushiro is in the yard, running a group of young students through a basic kata. He turns at the sound of the gate, sees Zoro, and goes very still. His expression cycles through several things in rapid succession—shock, recognition, a complicated emotion that Zoro does not have the vocabulary for—before settling into a calm that is mostly dignity and partially the ingrained reflex of a man who has spent thirty years teaching children not to cry.
He smiles, “Zoro.”
Zoro bows his head slightly, “Koushiro-san.”
A pause. Koushiro’s smile widens, “You're late.” It’s not a complaint. It is just a fact, delivered gently, the way you observe that it rained.
Zoro has half a smile on his face. “Yeah.” It's not an apology, just an agreement.
This is, apparently, sufficient. Koushiro nods once and then looks at the assembled crowd behind his former student. He is looking at a boy in a straw hat who is bouncing on his heels. A woman with a staff who appears to be assessing the structural integrity of the dojo with professional interest. A man with a long nose who has already tripped once on the threshold and is hoping no one noticed. A doctor who is a reindeer. A skeleton in a suit who bows, impeccably. A man the size of a small building who is smiling like he's at a festival. A fishman is also looking around the dojo, noting its architecture. An archaeologist in a cowboy hat who actually inclines her head respectfully, bless her.
And one blond man who is standing slightly apart from the others, perfectly dressed in a black suit and a blue shirt, one hand in his pocket, looking entirely too comfortable for someone who has just walked into a stranger's dojo.
Koushiro looks at Zoro.
Zoro says, “My crew.”
Koushiro asks, “All of them?”
Zoro confirms, “All of them.”
Luffy has started petting one of the deer that wandered in through the gate. The deer looks resigned. Koushiro watches this for a moment and then decides, with decades of hard-won wisdom, not to address it. Instead, he says, “Perhaps, you’d like to introduce them.”
Zoro wouldn’t like to do this at all. But he does it. He goes down the line. Luffy, the captain, rubber, stops eating the deer's food when Zoro kicks his ankle. Nami, the navigator, will absolutely take all your money. Usopp, the sniper, currently lying about how many men he's defeated before entering this yard. Chopper, doctor, is the one shaped like a reindeer, yes. Robin, an archaeologist, reads dead languages, very normal. Franky, the shipwright, built the ship himself. Brook, the musician, is in fact dead, but in a fun way. Jinbei, helmsman, dependable and strong.
Koushiro receives each of these with the steady equanimity of a monk who has prepared extensively for this moment across multiple lifetimes. And then Zoro gets to Sanji.
He gets to Sanji, and something happens in his brain that does not normally happen, which is that he hesitates. It's a fraction of a second. It's nothing. No one would notice.
Sanji notices. Zoro starts, “My—”
Sanji goes alert in a way that is invisible to everyone except Zoro and possibly Robin, who smiles.
“—partner,” Zoro finishes.
Koushiro's eyebrows rise. “Your partner?” He looks at Sanji with new, assessing eyes. Then back at Zoro. A slow understanding settles over his face. “Ah,” he says, warmly. He straightens slightly with the air of a man who has just had an important question answered. “Another swordsman? I wasn't aware you had taken on—”
Sanji blurts out, “I'm a cook!”
Koushiro blinks. “A cook?”
“A cook,” Sanji confirms. “The ship's cook.” He pauses. “We cook. Together. On the ship.” He pauses again. “That’s not what he meant.”
“Sanji handles all the food for the crew,” Zoro says, unhelpfully. “So, technically, we're partners in—”
Sanji exhales, “Mosshead.”
“—that sense.”
“Moss-for-brains.”
Zoro hisses, “What?”
Sanji stares at him. The stare says: I will commit a crime. Zoro stares back. His stare says: I don't know what I did. This is a lie, and they both know it.
Koushiro looks between them. He has the face of a man who taught a child swordsmanship for years and, therefore, feels at least partial responsibility for how this person turned out. It is a complicated face. He says, carefully, “Are you... sword partners? Do you both—”
“I use my legs,” Sanji says. “I kick things. I am a cook who kicks things.” He takes a short breath. He puts his hand over his eyes. He speaks into his palm with great enunciation, “We are in love with each other. Romantically. That's what he meant to say. Zoro is my boyfriend. I am Zoro's boyfriend. That is the nature of our partnership. It has nothing to do with swords, cooking, or any professional arrangement of any kind.”
The dojo is quiet.
The deer Luffy has been feeding wanders placidly out of frame.
Koushiro looks at Zoro. Zoro looks at the ceiling, which has not personally done anything to him but is taking the brunt of his attention regardless.
“I said partner,” Zoro frowns. “It's accurate.”
Sanji shouts, “Mosshead—”
Zoro's volume increases as well, “It is technically accurate—”
“I will kick you into the sea—”
“You said it yourself just now—”
“I said it because you didn't—”
“Oi, oi,” Luffy says cheerfully, to no one in particular, “Zoro's embarrassed.” He points. “Look, his ears are red.”
“Shut up, Luffy!”
Usopp offers, “They're a little red.”
“Usopp—”
Robin giggles, “Very cute.”
Sanji rounds on all of them simultaneously, which is impressive given they're scattered across a moderately sized yard. Nami has her hand over her mouth and is not even pretending not to laugh. Franky is openly wiping a tear.
Koushiro, throughout all of this, has not moved. He watches Zoro argue with his crew and his boyfriend with the expression of a man who raised a feral nine-year-old. He is deeply, privately relieved that said feral nine-year-old has somehow, across years and oceans and improbable circumstances, ended up with a person who cares enough to yell this loudly at him.
When the chaos subsides to a manageable level, Koushiro turns to Sanji, and his expression is now simply kind. He smiles, “Welcome to Shimotsuki.”
Sanji blinks. His ruffled feathers settle visibly. He straightens, runs a hand through his hair, and with a grace that appears from literally nowhere, inclines his head with a full and genuine smile, “Thank you for having us.”
Zoro watches this and makes the extremely specific face of a man who is not going to say see, this is exactly why, because that would require admitting something. He has already admitted one thing today, and that is his quota.
“Right,” he says instead. “Where's the kitchen? He wants to see the kitchen.”
Sanji agrees immediately, “I very much want to see the kitchen.”
Koushiro says, “Second building, behind the main hall.”
They both head for it before the sentence is fully finished.
Koushiro watches them go. Luffy appears at his elbow and steals one of the rice crackers from the offering dish by the door of the main hall and eats it in one bite.
“They do this all the time,” Luffy tells him, earnestly. “You get used to it.”
Koushiro decides that he will make tea. A lot of tea.
The yard is quiet in the early mornings, like the dojo itself is holding its breath. The maple trees along the inner wall are catching the first light, their new buds burning at the tips like struck matches. Two deer are grazing at the far end of the yard with complete disregard for the sanctity of a swordsmanship dojo. Zoro is sitting on the engawa with his wrists resting on his knees.
He hears the shoji screen slide open behind him before Sanji appears, giving him approximately three seconds to arrange his face into something other than what it is.
He does not fully succeed.
Sanji's yukata is pale blue—not the sharp colours he usually reaches for, but something softer, the colour of sky at the far edge of morning. It falls simply, no embellishment, and that simplicity is doing something devastating. His hair, usually swept across one eye in its familiar arrangement, is pulled back and tied with a ribbon the same colour as the fabric, so that for once both eyes are visible. He's not wearing his usual expression of awareness, either. He is just walking toward Zoro through the early morning light, and he hasn't done anything at all, and yet.
Zoro looks at him for a long moment. He looks for maybe a beat too long.
Sanji stops a few feet away, tilts his head, and smirks, “You're doing it.”
Zoro scoffs, even though his face heats up, “Doing what?”
The grin only gets more smug. “The thing with your face.”
Zoro looks away, muttering, “My face isn't doing anything.”
“Your face is absolutely doing something. That thing where you think you're being subtle and you are famously not being subtle.” Sanji crosses his arms, which shifts the yukata across his collarbones, which Zoro does not look at. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Go on then,” Sanji says, head tilted back, still entirely smug. “Get it out of your system.”
Zoro looks at him steadily. “You look nice.”
Sanji waits. He raises an eyebrow. “That's it?”
Zoro looks away again. “That's it.”
Sanji stares at him. “You absolute miser,” he says, with feeling. “That's genuinely all you're going to give me. Nice. I come out here in a yukata at six in the morning with my hair done, and you say nice at me like I'm a bowl of soup.”
Zoro amends, “You look very nice.”
“Oh, very nice! He upgrades to very nice! Alert the papers!”
Zoro itches, feeling ready to headbutt the love of his life if he needs to. It's too damn early for this. He groans, “What do you want me to say?”
Sanji throws a hand out, “I don't know, Zoro, something that indicates you are a human man with eyes and basic aesthetic capacity—”
“You're beautiful.”
Zoro says it flatly. Simply. In exactly the same tone, he has said everything else this morning.
Sanji stops. A short silence. Sanji looks away this time, tearing his gaze away from those honest steel eyes. He mumbles, “Oh.”
He recovers quickly, but there is a tell in the tips of his ears that the ribbon does nothing to hide now that his hair is off his face. He sniffs, adjusts the sleeve of the yukata, and turns slightly to look at the maple trees as though they have raised a point worth considering.
“Well,” he says, “Alright then.’
Zoro merely hums, knowing he shut the cook up for good.
“That was—” Sanji clears his throat. “Acceptable. As statements go.”
“Good.”
“You could stand to lead with that.”
“Noted.”
“I'm not actually asking you to change anything,” Sanji says, almost immediately, turning back with one finger raised in pre-emptive correction, "I know you won't, so don't make it weird—”
“I wasn't going to.”
“—I'm just making an observation—”
“Cook.”
“What?”
“You're rambling,” Zoro says. “Because your ears are red.”
Sanji points at him, sharp and immediate, “You say one more word, and I will put this ribbon around your throat—’
“Morning,” says Jinbei, screen sliding open behind him.
They both turn. Jinbei looks at them, looks at the ribbon in Sanji's hand that he is now holding like a weapon, and looks at Zoro. With the specific wisdom of someone who survives entirely on instinct, says, “Oh, sorry,” and slides the screen shut again.
Sanji tucks the ribbon back into place with great dignity. Zoro watches him do this with his elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand. When Sanji turns back and finds this expression waiting for him, he points again. He says, “Don’t.”
Zoro smirks, “I’m not doing anything.”
“You're doing the other thing. The fond thing. Stop it, it's worse.” Sanji’s entire face is red now.
“I genuinely cannot help my face—”
“You can, you simply don't, because you enjoy my suffering—”
Zoro stands. He is bigger than Sanji by just enough to be occasionally irritating, and he uses this now to crowd him in a way that Sanji would describe as aggravating and which is in fact something else. Sanji meets his gaze and lifts his chin in the particular way that means: I am completely unbothered, and if I seem bothered, it is only because I am choosing to be.
Zoro looks at the ribbon. He murmurs, “It matches.”
Sanji blinks. “What?”
“The ribbon.” Zoro looks back at his face. “Matches the yukata. Suits you.”
Sanji's mouth does something involuntary. He overrides it swiftly. “Obviously it matches,” he says, with tremendous composure, “I have a sense of colour, unlike some people who choose to have green hair—”
“Natural,” Zoro says, “as I've told you—”
“Suspicious,” Sanji says, but he's not quite scowling, and they are both aware of this. He looks at him for a moment. Then he reaches out and takes Zoro's hand.
Sanji doesn’t grab Zoro like he does when he’s dragging him somewhere, or the unconscious reach of the night before. He takes it the way you take something you're being careful with. His fingers settle between Zoro's, and the morning is quiet again, and the deer have moved on to the other side of the yard. He asks, “Ready?”
Zoro's thumb moves once across the back of Sanji's hand. He doesn't look at him. He looks at the small path that leads behind the main hall, past the second garden, toward the sound of wind in cedar trees and something he has been carrying for a long time. He exhales, “Yeah.”
They walk together. The gravel path is worn to smoothness, flanked by moss-covered stones and a low cedar hedge that smells cold and sharp in the morning air. The shrine comes into view gradually. It’s a small structure, older than the dojo buildings, its dark wood roof edged in lichen, the morning light falling on it at an angle that makes it look permanent in a way that little else does. A stone lantern stands to the left, unlit. A single white chrysanthemum has been placed in the offering vessel, fresh, which means Koushiro came here this morning before either of them was awake.
Zoro's hand tightens almost imperceptibly around Sanji's.
Sanji does not say anything about this. He simply walks beside him, close enough that the sleeve of the yukata brushes Zoro's arm, and does not let go.
The butsudan is inside the shrine, visible through the small open doors. There is a photograph. There is incense, slowly burning. Zoro looks at it for a long moment.
Wado is at his hip, which is where she has been for eight years. But she began here. In this yard. In the hands of a girl who was better than him and never let him forget it, and died too early and left him the thing she loved most.
He's still working on that part.
Sanji stands beside him in the early morning, in a pale blue yukata with his hair tied back, and says nothing at all. But his presence is in Zoro’s hand, his silent support, and that’s all.
They kneel on the small cushions set before the butsudan. The photograph is small. It is a child's face, serious and proud and so clearly Kuina that Zoro's chest does the thing it does and he lets it, because he is not nine anymore and he can afford to let it now.
Sanji, beside him, settles into seiza with his hands in his lap and says nothing. Zoro looks at the photograph for a long moment.
Then he reaches to his hip and draws Wado, slow and without ceremony, and sets her down before the butsudan with both hands. The white hilt catches the thin morning light.
He sits back. He clears his throat, “Hey, it’s me.” The incense smoke curls upward. A cedar branch moves outside. “I know I’m late.” He glances sideways at nothing. “Don't make that face.”
Sanji, very carefully, lifts his lips in a fond smile.
“I kept my promise,” Zoro says. “Took longer than it should've. Got turned around in Shells Town and ended up in the East Blue for an extra year because I followed the wrong ship, so.” He pauses. “That part's embarrassing. We don't have to talk about it.”
He folds his hands in his lap.
“I fought a lot of people. You'd have opinions about most of them. There was this one guy in Alabasta, who turned his body into a blade, pretty good—you'd have liked his footwork, actually. You always cared about footwork. I didn't at first, and you used to yell at me about it.” He exhales through his nose, the closest he gets to a fond laugh when it's just muscle memory carrying the sound.
The incense shifts.
“I fought Mihawk.” He lets that sit. “I lost. First time. He took the scar—” he touches his chest briefly without thinking, “—and let me live because he said I wasn't worth finishing. Which was the most annoying thing anyone has ever done to me, so.” He pauses. “Thank him, actually. Because of that, I got back up.” Another pause. “After a while. There was a lot of blood. We don't need to get into it.”
Sanji's hand finds his, under the line of the butsudan, where it can't be seen by anyone, which is a meaningless consideration because they are entirely alone, but it seems to be what Sanji needs to do, so Zoro lets him. He turns his hand over.
“Then I fought him again,” Zoro says. “Different circumstances. Long story.” He thinks about how to summarise the last eight years of his life to someone who knew him at nine, and finds that most of it resists compression. “I went to a place called Kuraigana on an island and trained with him for two years. Just the two of us. Well, and a bunch of baboons, but—” He stops, because he can feel Sanji staring at him. “What?”
Sanji says, “Baboons.”
“Fighting baboons.”
“You trained with fighting baboons for two years.”
“And Mihawk.”
“Yes, yes, and Mihawk, but you're breezing over the baboons—”
“Kuina doesn't care about the baboons, Sanji—”
“I care about the baboons—”
“Then I'll tell you about the baboons later—”
“I'm holding this conversation hostage until I get baboon elaboration—”
“Sanji.”
Sanji closes his mouth. He does this with a petulant frown, not done with the baboons but is willing to defer to them, provisionally. “Fine,” he says. “Continue.”
Zoro continues. “Then I fought Mihawk properly. In a real fight, not a test, not a spar.” He looks at the photograph. The serious small face looks back. “And I won.”
He says it quietly. He has said it before. Said it to other people, in other contexts—said it in the way of reporting a fact, a milestone, a check on a list that has run his whole life from behind his breastbone. But he has not said it here, and it sounds different here. It sounds like what it is, which is the end of a promise that began in this yard between two children, one of whom did not get to see it finished.
He breathes out slowly. “So, there. That’s done.”
Sanji's grip on his hand tightens by a fraction. Zoro looks down at their joined hands for a moment. He looks back at the photograph. And then, because he is down here and Sanji is right beside him, and it seems dishonest not to, he says, “There's something else.”
He doesn't know how to do this part. So, he does it in the only way he knows how, directly and quickly, like pulling something out before he can think about it. He says, “I met someone.”
Beside him, absolutely nothing moves on Sanji's face. He is very still, ambushed by an emotion and is not going to let it show in front of a butsudan.
“He's the ship's cook,” Zoro says. “He feeds us. He argues with me constantly, which I know you'd say is probably my fault, and you'd probably be right, which I'd never say to you in life, but you're not here to be smug about it, so.” He pauses. “He's irritating. He's ridiculously vain. He takes an hour to do his hair every morning.” He pauses again. “He always makes sure I eat. He comes up to the crow's nest with sake when I'm on watch and pretends it's not because he wants to talk. He stayed beside me when I—” He doesn't finish that sentence. “He's beside me now, actually. He's kneeling right there, holding my hand, and he's definitely making a face—”
“I'm not making a face,” Sanji says, in a voice that is doing something in the upper register that is not entirely stable.
Zoro glances at him. Sanji is making a face. It’s not the furious face, not the fond face he pretends he isn’t making, not the laughing face. It’s a face that appears to be trying to decide between several things at once, and losing the vote on all of them. His eyes are very bright. His jaw is very set. He is staring directly at the middle distance with the concentration of a man who is about to win a battle of will against himself through sheer bloody-mindedness.
Zoro concludes, “You’re making a face.”
“I'm not,” Sanji says, with enormous dignity.
“Your ear—”
“It's the incense.”
“The incense is making your ear red?”
“I have a sensitivity. It's a medical condition. Stop looking at my ear.”
Zoro looks at his ear for one more second—just long enough to be clear about what he's doing—and then looks back at the butsudan.
“He’s the one,” he says to the photograph. He says it simply, like a fact delivered without ornament.
The incense thread curls slowly in the morning air.
Sanji says nothing. He says nothing for long enough that Zoro looks at him again.
Sanji is looking at the photograph. Looking at the serious face of a girl who was nine years old and is still nine years old and will always be nine years old, who handed down an obligation across fourteen years and several oceans, and somehow at the end of all that chain, Sanji finds himself kneeling in a shrine in Shimotsuki holding the hand of the most aggravating man he has ever loved.
He brings Zoro's hand up and presses it briefly to his mouth. Not a performance—there's no one here to perform to. Just something that needed to happen. Then he lowers it back down and keeps holding it and says, “She had good taste.”
Zoro turns to look at him. Sanji adds immediately, “In rivals. Obviously. I meant in rivals. That's what I said.”
“That's not what you meant.”
“That's entirely what I meant—”
“Cook.”
“I'm talking to Kuina, actually, this is a private—”
“We're both talking to Kuina, it's the same—”
“She's my rival's dead best friend—”
“She's my—” Zoro stops. He takes a deep breath. He looks at the photograph once more, and something in him—the last held thing, the thing that has been sitting behind his sternum since the harbour—comes quietly loose. He says, “Yeah, she did.”
Sanji clicks his tongue and looks away. His ear is still red. Zoro lets him have it.
He reaches forward with his free hand and straightens Wado's hilt by a fraction, not that it was crooked, but his hands want to do something. He leaves her there, in the light, in the cool cedar-smelling morning, in the place she began.
I kept, he thinks, which is not the same as a promise, though it contains that, I kept her safe, I got here. Thank you.
Outside, one of the deer wanders past the shrine entrance, glances in at them with enormous untroubled eyes, and wanders back out. Sanji watches it go. “Was that normal?” he asks. “Are the deer allowed in here?”
“They're sacred,” Zoro says. “So technically they're allowed everywhere.”
Sanji considers this. “That deer looked right at me,” he says. “What does that mean?”
“Probably nothing.”
“Probably nothing, or nothing?”
Zoro looks at him. He looks at the ribbon in his hair and the pale yukata and the very bright eye that is still winning its battle against itself and the ear that is still, quietly, red. He smiles, “Probably she approves.”
Sanji's mouth does the involuntary thing again. This time, he doesn't override it. He lets the smile take hold of his face and lets the blush dust his cheeks. Zoro’s heart stutters, and he can’t help it when he leans forward and gently brushes his lips against one cheek. Sanji mutters something about public display of affection in sacred places and drags him away because their hands are still entangled together.
The village in the morning is exactly the kind of place that makes Sanji's hands itch for a notebook.
He doesn't carry one, but he's mentally cataloguing everything anyway: the smoke coming off the charcoal grills outside the two open storefronts they've passed, the smell of dashi threading through the cedar and cold air, the particular quality of the light coming down between the buildings where the street narrows and the maple branches almost touch overhead. The deer are everywhere. One is sleeping against the base of a stone lantern with absolutely no shame. Sanji respects it enormously.
Zoro is walking beside him with his hands in his sleeves, looking at the buildings and then looking away before Sanji can catch him doing it, which means he is feeling things and would prefer that Sanji not acknowledge this. Sanji has decided to respect.
For now.
“Down this way,” Zoro says, taking a left at a corner where a stone marker has been worn down to near illegibility.
“Where are we going?”
“There's a stall. Had breakfast there most mornings before training.” A pause. “If it's still open.”
It is still open. And maybe it took a few extra turns because of Zoro’s special ability.
The stall is tucked into the ground floor of a low wooden building at the edge of a small square where a stone basin holds clean running water, and three deer are assembled doing nothing in particular. A noren hangs in the doorway—dark indigo, kanji faded with washing to a soft grey. Two long wooden counters face a grill and a stove. Most of the seats are full.
The woman behind the counter is somewhere between sixty and a hundred and ten, with the build of someone who has been doing physical labour contentedly her entire life and has no plans to stop. She looks up when they duck through the noren. She looks at Sanji first—briefly, assessing. Then she looks at Zoro.
She puts down the ladle. She gasps, eyes widening, “Ah!”
Zoro scratches the back of his neck. “Morning, Tae-san.”
She looks at him for a long moment, computing the distance between a small feral child who ate too fast and the very large person in her doorway. She smiles, “Sit down, both of you.”
Sanji looks at the counter, at the grill, at the small dishes already laid out, and feels every instinct align. He breathes in: dashi, soy, something sweet and charred, rice, kakinoha-zushi wrapped in persimmon leaves, releasing that faint green-bark fragrance.
Zoro says, “She makes chakagayu.”
“Tea porridge?”
“Rice porridge brewed in hojicha. And grilled mochi with soy.”
Two cups of hojicha arrive without being asked. The chakagayu follows—smooth and faintly translucent with the tea, topped with pickled plum, shredded nori, thin-sliced fu, and a small bleeding pool of good soy. Beside it, kakinoha-zushi—pressed rice parcels in persimmon leaves, each encasing salt-cured mackerel, the leaf fragrance soaked all the way through. Lastly, there’s mochi skewers grilled to a blistered skin and brushed in dark soy-and-mirin glaze still crackling from the heat.
Sanji takes one bite of the porridge and puts his chopsticks down with the gravity of a man making a formal declaration. He calls, “Tae-san!” She looks up. He grins, “This is extraordinary!”
She regards him. Then makes a short sound that lives in the neighbourhood between dismissive and pleased, and looks at Zoro with pointed implication. “I have manners,” Zoro grumbles, before she can say anything. Tae-san makes the sound again, in a different register. Zoro applies himself to his porridge with great focus.
They eat. The square outside is waking up. Sanji is attempting not to think too hard about what he could do with access to persimmon leaves and a proper press, and mostly failing, when the doorway darkens.
“Oi, Zoro?”
Three people come through the noren. Two men and a woman, roughly Zoro's age, carrying the easy physicality of people trained since childhood. The woman has short, dark hair in a practical knot, grinning like she's won something. She says, dropping onto the counter seat two down from Sanji without ceremony, “Hana said she saw green hair in the square. Thought she was making it up!”
Zoro smiles, “Michi.”
“Eight years. Not a single letter.”
“I was busy.”
“Defeating Mihawk,” says the second arrival, wedging himself between Michi and Sanji with a grin that takes up most of his face. He has the remnants of a healing black eye and the energy of someone who has never once stopped talking in his life. “Half the village heard. Koushiro-sensei heard. I think Koushiro-sensei cried—”
Zoro scoffs, “He didn’t.”
“He absolutely—”
“Takeda.”
Takeda holds his hands up. Tae-san is already adding cups to the counter. Sanji shifts to make room and becomes aware that the third arrival is still standing near the doorway, taking slightly longer than necessary to sit down.
He is—Sanji does a brief involuntary reassessment—tall. Dark-haired, broad-shouldered, with the kind of face that gets described as striking in certain types of novels. A sharp nose, straight jawline, brown eyes, and a soft mouth. He sits down on the far side of Michi with the deliberate ease of someone who has decided to seem like he happened here by accident. Then he looks at Zoro.
Or he starts to. He gets approximately as far as Zoro's chest, and his gaze relocates to the wall, where it remains.
Zoro frowns. “You are?”
The man looks up briefly, aims somewhere near Zoro's left ear. “Shohei,” he says. “Tomoda Shohei. We trained together. Two years below you. You broke my bokken sparring, I—”
Zoro’s frown clears. “Oh, yeah. Shohei.”
Shohei looks like he has several feelings about being summarised as yeah. He looks at Zoro's face for half a second, and then back at the middle distance.
Sanji, who has a very finely calibrated instrument for this particular weather pattern, reads the entire situation in under four seconds. He picks up his tea.
Michi leans forward to look at Sanji. “So, who are you?”
“Sanji,” Sanji says pleasantly. “Ship's cook.”
“Oh! You're with Zoro's crew?” Takeda asks, looking between them with open curiosity. “All of you are staying at the dojo, right? Koushiro-sensei mentioned. How many of you are there?”
“Ten.”
Takeda's eyes go wide. “He's housing ten people?”
“He seemed fine with it,” Sanji says, which is mostly true if you don't count the tea consumption.
Conversation moves on—training stories, village news, something about Takeda's black eye that involves a sparring dispute about footwork that escalated. Sanji listens, eats the last of the mochi, and slowly becomes aware that Shohei is still not contributing much. Shohei is attending to his porridge with great focus, except for the intervals when he is not.
He is looking at the open collar of Zoro's yukata. He is looking at the forearms on the counter. He is doing all of this with the discipline of someone who genuinely believes he is being subtle, which—Sanji has years of experience being a man with eyes at a counter—he is not.
Sanji tops up Zoro's tea. Zoro glances at him with immediate suspicion, because Sanji does not top up his tea unprompted. “You’re doing a face,” he says, low.
“I'm not doing any face.”
“The narrow one—”
“My eyes are a normal width, I don't know what you're—”
Zoro sighs, “What did someone do?”
“No one did anything,” Sanji says serenely. “Eat your breakfast.”
Zoro looks at him for a long, unconvinced moment. Then he looks at the group. Then, because his threat-assessment instincts are supernaturally precise in a fight and periodically inert outside of one, he picks up his chopsticks.
Across the counter, Shohei glances at Zoro's profile. He finds Sanji already looking at him.
Sanji is wearing the most pleasant, open, unreadable expression in his entire repertoire. It’s the expression of a man who has clocked every single thing that has happened in the last ten minutes and has decided, for now, to merely observe.
Shohei looks at his porridge. He does not look up again for a while.
Michi says, “Oh, you all must come to the festival tonight! It’s going to be so much of fun!”
Sanji turns his attention to the lady. “Oh, what kind of a festival?”
Michi beams, her hands clasped together with pure excitement. “It’s the Pale Cherry Festival! It only happens during the peak weekend of the spring thaw. Tonight, the entire mountain path up to the old shrine is lit by hundreds of pale-pink paper lanterns, and the cherry blossoms look like glowing clouds in the dark.”
She gestures toward the bustling main street, where stalls are already being set up beneath the weeping sakura trees.
“The village puts out all the spring specialities—sakura mochi wrapped in salted leaves, grilled dango, and sweet floral sake. The local chefs even compete to see who can make the best spring-themed street food!”
At the mention of “street food,” Sanji’s eyes instantly light up. A soft, genuinely excited smile breaks across his face, his culinary mind already racing.
“Spring ingredients,” Sanji muses, a faint blush matching the cherry blossoms as he looks at the vibrant stalls. He instinctively reaches out, his fingers catching the sleeve of Zoro’s yukata, tugging him a little closer. “Oi, Mosshead, we’re going. I want to see what they're doing with the local sweet bean paste. And you're going to help me carry the ingredients if I buy anything.”
Zoro lets out a low, grumbling sigh. He thinks about the sheer amount of effort it takes to navigate a festival, and his single eye narrows in reluctance.
“A festival? Sounds loud,” Zoro mutters, shifting his weight. He pretends to look annoyed, but he doesn't pull his sleeve out of Sanji’s grip. “And I’m not your pack mule, Cook.”
“Oh, stop being a grumpy old man,” Sanji huffs. “They’ll have seasonal sake unfiltered from the local breweries. The good stuff. If you're good, I'll buy you a jug.”
“Fine,” Zoro grunts, leaning back into Sanji’s space just a fraction. “But you’re paying for the food.”
The festival starts at sundown.
By the time the light is going amber over the mountain ridge, the main path through the village has been strung with paper lanterns from post to post, soft white and pale gold, swaying in the early evening breeze, throwing slow moving light across the stone path and the feet of the deer who have gathered underneath them with the attitude of attendees who were not invited but intend to stay regardless.
Sanji is ready first. He'd found the yukata in the second drawer of the room Koushiro had given them—left out with the silent hospitality of a man who noticed that his guests had not packed for a festival. It is a deep navy, fine cotton, with a pattern of small white flowers at the hem that he appreciates with a professional eye. He'd managed the obi himself after two attempts, ties his hair back, but leaves one eye covered, checks the result with a critical once-over, decides it will do, and waits in the engawa.
Zoro comes out of their bathroom a beat later. The yukata is dark grey, simple, with no pattern. He's wearing it correctly, which is the bare minimum and somehow, upsetting, looks fine. The swords are not on his hip, which must have been a negotiation he had with himself, because his hand keeps finding the absence and then withdrawing. His hair is doing the usual thing.
He looks at Sanji on the engawa. Sanji looks back and says, “Your obi is crooked.”
Zoro looks down. “It's not.”
“Left side. Three fingers too low.”
“That's how it's supposed to—”
“It isn't,” Sanji says, and stands up, because if he doesn't fix it himself, they will spend the evening with Zoro wearing a crooked obi, which reflects poorly on both of them. He retucks it with quick hands, ignoring the way Zoro goes very still when Sanji's knuckles press briefly against his stomach, straightens the fold, checks it, and steps back. “There.”
Zoro mutters, “You could've just told me.”
“I did tell you. And then I fixed it because you weren't going to.” He lights a cigarette. “You're welcome.”
Zoro looks at Sanji for a moment in the early evening light and says nothing.
The idiot looked ridiculous. Ridiculously good, unfortunately. Zoro stares a moment longer. Sanji sighs, adjusting Zoro’s collar. Over the years, he’d learned that Zoro’s silent stares usually meant something, even if translating them was like trying to read a map upside down in the dark.
“What?” Sanji snaps, crossing his arms. “If you're going to complain about the fabric, save your breath. Some of us actually respect festival tradition.”
Instead of picking a fight, Zoro steps closer, reaches out, and shoves Sanji’s carefully styled blonde hair back out of his face.
“Hey! Watch the—”
Zoro cuts him off by pulling him into a kiss.
It isn’t their usual fierce, competitive clash. It is light, sweet, and tastes faintly of the stolen sake Zoro had been sipping since noon. It is the kind of kiss born entirely from the fact that Zoro has been staring at the back of Sanji's head all day and has finally run out of patience.
Sanji melts into it immediately, his hands finding the rough fabric of Zoro’s yukata, kissing him back just as softly.
When Zoro finally pulls away, he lets his hand drop from Sanji's hair, looking thoroughly satisfied with himself.
Sanji blinks, his face flushing a spectacular shade of pink that rivals the festival lanterns bleeding into the dusk. He quickly smooths down his hair, coughing into his fist to regain his composure. “You messed up my hair, you moss-headed brute,” Sanji grumbles, though his voice lacks any real bite. “Is that your way of asking for a favour, or did you just lose your last brain cell?”
“Shut up,” Zoro says, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth as he falls into step beside him. “You talk too much.”
“I talk an appropriate amount! You just have the conversational capacity of a sea stone!”
Bickering like they always did, they headed toward the rising hum and music of the festival.
It is a good festival.
Lanterns all the way down to the square, a drum somewhere in the middle distance, stalls along both sides of the path selling grilled skewers and sweet rice and small cups of warm amazake. The rest of the crew has dispersed into it like water finding every crack. Luffy is already audibly somewhere near the food stalls, Nami and Robin moving through the lantern light with the ease of people who know how to exist beautifully in a crowd, Franky crying about the lanterns with Chopper on his shoulders, Usopp drawing something in a small book, and Brook asking a very patient elderly man if he knows any local folk songs. Jinbei is at the fishcake stall, enthralled by the offerings.
Sanji and Zoro drift through it at their own pace.
They get mitarashi dango from the second stall, lacquered in sweet soy, still warm, and walk without a particular destination, the festival moving around them. Sanji eats his dango and looks at the lanterns. Zoro eats his dango in three bites. A child runs between their legs in pursuit of something and is then chased by an adult in pursuit of the child, and they step apart and back together again without discussing it.
It is fine. It is extremely fine.
Sanji finishes his dango. He says, “So.”
Zoro immediately answers, “No.”
“You don't know what I'm going to say!”
“You've been saving something since morning,” Zoro says, “and the face you're making right now is the face of a man who has decided it is time. So. No.”
Sanji considers this. “Shohei,” he says.
“No.”
“He was looking at you.”
“People look at people, Cook—”
“Not like that,” Sanji says, with authority. “He was looking at you like that.”
“Like what?” Zoro says flatly.
Sanji gestures with the skewer. “You know like what!”
“I don't.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I genuinely—”
“He looked at your chest,” Sanji says, now with barely concealed distaste in his voice, “for the combined total of approximately forty-five seconds across a single breakfast, which I counted.”
Zoro slowly turns his head around. “You counted.”
“I had nothing else to do, I'd finished the mochi—”
“You counted the seconds—”
“It was a rough estimate,” Sanji says, with dignity, “not a precise measurement, I didn't use a clock—”
“Sanji,” Zoro says. “He's someone I sparred with twice years ago. I broke his bokken. He probably just—”
“Mosshead.”
“—remembered me from—”
“Zoro.”
“What.”
Sanji looks at him with the clear-eyed patience of a man presenting evidence to a jury that he is already confident he has won. “He couldn't hold your gaze for more than half a second. He sat as far from you as the counter allowed. He found reasons to look at you and then immediately had somewhere else to be with his eyes.” He takes a breath. “That man had, at minimum, a very significant adolescent experience involving you.”
Zoro processes this. He says, “That’s insane.”
“It's extremely sane, and I think some part of you knows it.”
“He broke his bokken. That was probably the memorable part. Not—”
“You broke his bokken and apparently his concentration for the following decade,” Sanji says, “Those things are not mutually exclusive—”
“You are inventing a backstory for a man you met for forty minutes over breakfast—”
“I am reading a very obvious situation that you’re choosing not to read because acknowledging it would require you to accept that you are, in fact—” Sanji pauses, and chooses the next word with deliberate and moderate care, “—perceptible.”
Zoro stares at him, a smug smirk tugging at the corner of his lips, “Perceptible.”
“People notice you. It happens. You could stand to be aware of it occasionally.”
Zoro can’t stop it. He ends up scoffing, “You’re jealous.”
Sanji protests, “I’m observant!”
“You're jealous of a man whose name you didn't know twenty-four hours ago.”
“I'm noting a pattern of behaviour that I found—”
“Jealous.”
“Mildly alert,” Sanji flares up, finger pointing in the air, “to certain social dynamics—”
“Jealous,” Zoro says, and there is something in his voice now that is different from the argument voice, something that sits just underneath it, lower and warmer, which Sanji would like him to stop because they are at a festival and there are people—
A hand finds his obi. Not grabbing. Just finding it, two fingers hooking loosely into the fold, and Zoro uses this with absolute minimal effort to draw him sideways off the main path and into the narrow gap between two stalls where the lantern light doesn't quite reach.
“Mosshead—”
“Mm,” Zoro says, which is not an answer.
He tilts his head and presses his mouth to the side of Sanji's neck, just below the jaw, and Sanji's sentence evaporates. Against his neck, Zoro says, “I like it when you’re jealous.”
“I'm not—”
Zoro’s mouth goes lower, canines nipping at his pulse.
“I'm not—” The word loses structural integrity somewhere in the middle. Zoro’s mouth keeps doing wicked things, even lower, inching towards the Adam’s apple.
“You counted,” Zoro says. He sounds unreasonably pleased about this. “Forty-five seconds.”
“That was—that was an estimate—” Sanji is staring very hard at the wall opposite and gripping his empty skewer as if it will help. His breath falls short. “You're insufferable, you know that—”
“Mm,” Zoro says again, moving to the other side of the neck, and Sanji's free hand has grabbed a fistful of grey yukata, which is not the firm objection he planned it to be.
“We are at a festival,” Sanji informs him, at a volume that is not quite the full volume he intended.
“No one can see us.” Zoro nips behind Sanji’s ear and grins when he feels the man shiver in his arms.
“That is not—that isn't—” Sanji closes his eyes briefly and then opens them with the energy of a man gathering his administration. “You are doing this on purpose.”
“Little bit,” Zoro agrees, lips still at his neck.
“Because you think it's funny—”
“Because I like you jealous,” Zoro says simply. “Means you're paying attention.”
“I’m always paying attention,” Sanji says, with great feeling, “that’s the entire problem—”
Zoro laughs. It is the low gravel one, close enough that Sanji feels it more than hears it, and that is frankly unfair and should be raised with someone in an official capacity.
Sanji brings his ankle back and catches Zoro's with precise and moderate force. Not a real kick.
Zoro makes a satisfying noise. Sanji steps out of the gap between the stalls, straightens his obi with two sharp tugs, runs a hand through his hair, and walks back into the lantern light of the festival with the bearing of a man who has just been standing somewhere thinking privately, and that is all.
Behind him, he hears Zoro emerge, unhurried, and fall back into step about two seconds later. Sanji does not look at him.
He stops at the next stall and buys two more dango skewers, then passes one backwards without turning around. It is taken. They walk.
Ahead, one of the deer has involved itself in Luffy's food situation, and Luffy is negotiating with it at full volume. The drums are getting louder. The lanterns sway.
It is Luffy's fault, as most things are.
Specifically, it is the fault of Luffy deciding that the drum performance happening in the upper square requires his immediate and total attention, which requires Sanji's immediate and total attention to ensure he doesn't climb something structural. Sanji hands his amazake to Zoro and pushes through the gathering crowd, which requires about four minutes of active Luffy management, and by the time Sanji turns back around, Zoro is gone.
Not gone gone. Just redistributed by the crowd, somewhere in the warm press of people and lantern light and festival noise. Sanji stands on his toes briefly, which does not help as much as he would like, scans for green and finds none, and decides to make a circuit of the upper square and collect him.
He’s heading down the narrower path that runs behind the shrine—quieter, less lit, a shortcut he'd noted on the walk up—when he hears voices.
He wouldn't have stopped, except that he heard a name.
“—just talk to him, Shohei—”
Sanji stops.
The voices are coming from the small rest area beside the shrine's side gate. There’s a stone bench under a cedar tree, a lantern on the post above it, casting a small warm radius. Far enough from the festival noise to be private. Not far enough, as it turns out, from the path.
Sanji does not move.
He’s aware that he should move. He is a reasonable adult man who does not eavesdrop on private conversations at festivals. He begins to move.
“It's not that simple, Michi—”
He stops again and stays very still behind the shrine wall.
“It is exactly that simple.” Michi's voice is firm, fond, the tone of someone who has been having a version of this conversation for a long time and has decided that tonight it ends. “You've had this crush since you were twelve, Shohei. Twelve. That's, I don't even know how many years—”
“I know how many years,” Shohei says.
“Then you know it's too many to keep doing nothing about it.”
A pause. The cedar above them moves in the evening breeze.
“He didn't even remember me,” Shohei says. The self-deprecation in it is honest, not performed. “At breakfast. I said my name, and he said yeah.”
“He says yeah to everything, that's just Zoro—”
“He broke my bokken and walked away and forgot I existed, Michi. That's—that says something—”
“It says he's oblivious,” Michi says, with the confidence of someone who has known Zoro since childhood. “Which you also already knew. It doesn't say anything about whether you should—”
“He has people with him,” Shohei says. “His whole crew. That cook—”
Sanji's spine straightens one degree.
Michi asks, “What about the cook?”
A pause that is slightly too long.
“Nothing,” Shohei says, in the tone of someone who’s lying. “He just—I couldn't tell if they were, there was something—”
“You're imagining things,” Michi says. “They're crewmates. Zoro's always been like that with people he trusts, all in their space, not thinking about it. You know how he is.”
“Yeah.”
“So.” The sound of Michi standing up, practical and decisive. “Tonight. The festival. There will not be another moment as good as this one, Shohei, and I will not watch you waste it.” A pause. “He's here for two more weeks. If you don't say something, you'll be forty-seven on this same bench, wondering about it.”
A long silence.
Then the sound of Shohei exhaling, making a decision that has been sitting in a drawer for a long time. He says, “Alright.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Alright. Yes. Tonight.”
“Good,” Michi says, and she sounds genuinely, warmly pleased about it. “Come on, they'll be at the lower square—”
Sanji removes himself from the path before their footsteps reach it.
He goes the other way, back through the upper square, past the drums that Luffy has now befriended the players of, past Robin buying something small and lacquered from a craft stall, past the amazake vendor he and Zoro had stopped at. He does all of this with the surface composure of a man taking a pleasant evening walk at a festival, underneath which something is moving that might be panic.
Or not. No, he’s very clear on that. It’s not panic, because there’s nothing to panic about, because he and Zoro are—
Shohei's voice: I couldn't tell if they were—
The situation is fine, Sanji thinks. The situation is completely and entirely fine, and he and Zoro are together, and Zoro knows that and Sanji knows that and if a very tall dark-haired man with a decade-old crush decides to say something about it tonight at a festival, then Zoro will simply—
Zoro will simply what, says a smaller voice in his head. You haven't told anyone. You were right there at breakfast, and you both said nothing. Crewmates. That's what Michi said. Crewmates.
Sanji walks faster. He’s not going to be strange about this. He is a grown man with full command of his own responses, and he is absolutely not going to —
He spots green hair at the far end of the lower square. Zoro is standing near the sake stall, alone, watching the festival with his hands in his sleeves and the look on his face he gets when he is somewhere that means something to him and is not going to say so. The lantern light is doing something to his profile that Sanji is not going to narrate even inside his own head.
That stupidly handsome, aggravating, stubborn, brutish, brilliant man is mine.
Sanji crosses the square. He arrives at Zoro's side and stops. He doesn't say anything. He picks up a cup of sake from the stall, pays for it, takes a sip, and stares at the festival.
Zoro looks at him. Sanji can feel him looking. Zoro says, “You were gone a while.”
“I was finding Luffy,” Sanji says. “Luffy's fine. He's with the drummers.”
Zoro says, “Okay. But what’s wrong with you?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re making the same face you had this morning.”
“I have one face," Sanji counters, “it's my normal face—”
“The narrow—”
“Can you,” Sanji says and stops. He looks at the lanterns swinging between the posts. He looks at the deer at the edge of the square, watching the festival with great philosophical serenity. He looks at Zoro's sleeve, close enough to touch. He finishes the sake. “Stay close tonight, to me. Can you do that?”
Zoro is quiet for a moment. He says, “Yeah.” Not why or what happened. Just, yes, immediate and uncomplicated.
Sanji nods. He puts the cup down. He looks out at the festival and is aware of Zoro shifting incrementally closer, not making a thing of it, just closing the distance until his arm is solid and warm against Sanji's. He doesn't look at him, just mutters, “Good.”
Somewhere in the crowd, Michi and Shohei are moving through the lantern light, looking for green hair. Sanji stays exactly where he is.
Sanji sees them before Zoro does. They come in from the left side of the square, moving through the lantern light. Michi is slightly ahead, Shohei a step behind with his hands at his sides and the expression of a man who has made a decision, walking toward it before he can unmake it. His chin is up. His jaw is set. There is something resolved in the line of his shoulders that wasn't there at breakfast yesterday.
Sanji recognises that walk. He has seen that walk. He has done that walk. Zoro, beside him, is watching the drummers.
Michi's eyes find them across the square. She raises a hand in greeting. Zoro turns his head at the movement. Shohei sees Zoro.
Something in Shohei’s face does the thing Sanji has been cataloguing since breakfast, except that this time there is intention behind it, and intention is different from admiration. Sanji's entire nervous system registers the distinction in under a second.
Shohei takes a step forward. Sanji moves. His hand finds Zoro's collar, and he turns him with one firm pull and kisses him.
Not a soft thing. Not tentative. A full, unhesitating, declarative kiss, in the middle of the lower square of Shimotsuki village, with lanterns overhead and festival noise all around and Zoro going completely still under his hands for approximately two seconds before his brain catches up and he kisses back, hands resting on Sanji’s waist like it always does.
Sanji pulls back just enough.
Zoro is looking at him with an expression Sanji has never quite seen on him before—not the suspicious face, not the fond face, but something between startled and intent, like a man reassessing a situation in real time. His voice is low when he says, “You don’t do this in public.”
Sanji says, equally low, “I know.”
“So.”
Sanji tilts his head incrementally toward the left side of the square. His voice is even, quiet, almost conversational. “Shohei was coming over to confess to you.”
Zoro follows the tilt. Across the square, Shohei has stopped walking. He is looking at them with the expression of a man who has just had a door close very loudly in his face. Michi's hand is on his arm. Her expression is harder to read. Zoro looks back at Sanji. “And you kissed me to make a point?”
“Of course I did.”
Something moves through Zoro's face. Not quite a smile. He looks at Sanji for a long moment, at the set of his jaw and the one visible eye that is watching the square with the focused calm of a man who has completed an operation and is satisfied with the result. Zoro smirks, hands tightening around Sanji’s waist, “Cook. I'm yours, you know that, right?”
Sanji's jaw tightens once, almost imperceptibly. He doesn't look at him. “I do.” A beat. “But he didn't know. I had to let him know.”
Zoro scoffs, “You can be so mean.”
That gets Sanji's attention. He turns, and the look on his face is not quite offended and not quite amused and entirely unrepentant. “Oh? Do you feel bad that I'm mean about the guy who was about to confess his undying love to you?”
“Cook.” Zoro says it simply, in the tone he uses when he wants Sanji to stop moving and listen. Sanji stops moving, and his hands stop fidgeting on Zoro’s shoulders. Zoro looks at him directly, in the way he usually reserves for things he's decided, and says, “As I told Kuina. It's you. Always gonna be you.”
The festival noise continues around them. A child somewhere shouts. A drum rolls. Sanji doesn’t hear any of it.
The air leaves his lungs in a sharp, quiet hitch. His fingers, still tangled in the rough fabric of Zoro’s collar, go completely slack. For a second, his face does something entirely uncoordinated: his brows twitch upward, his jaw parts just a fraction, and his eyes widen, suddenly glossy in the lantern light. The smooth, unflappable cook vanishes, replaced by someone utterly exposed, his throat bobbing as he tries, and fails, to swallow down the shock.
A hard flush creeps rapidly up his neck, flooding his cheeks until it burns the tips of his ears.
Unable to hold that heavy, unblinking gaze for another second, Sanji abruptly snaps his head to the side. He stares blindly at a nearby wooden stall, his teeth digging into his bottom lip so hard that it turned white, desperate to collect himself before he came completely undone.
“Yes,” he says to the stall, “but I don't like sharing.”
Zoro's mouth curves. “Oh? But you said sharing is caring.”
“Not,” Sanji says, with great precision, still not looking at him, “when it comes to you.”
Zoro reaches out and tucks two fingers into Sanji's obi, the same way he had earlier in the gap between the stalls, unhurried, entirely certain of his welcome. He doesn't pull. Just holds. “You have me forever, you asshole.”
Sanji makes a sound in the back of his throat. His ear is red again. His jaw works for a second before he arrives at, “Stupid algae-infested bastard. I should kick you.”
“Mm.” Zoro steps in closer, drops his voice, and tilts his head toward Sanji's ear. “Annoying chain-smoking idiot, I should get you out of this yukata.”
Sanji pulls back half a step and looks at him with tremendous composure and somewhat theatrical horror. “Have some shame,” he says. “I think this is your uncle's.”
Zoro scrunches his face, disgust marring the shameless delight he was feeling a second ago. He lets go of the obi. “Argh.” He drags a hand through his hair. “Way to kill the mood.”
Sanji's composure fractures. The laugh that escapes him is short and genuine, surprised out of him, and he presses his lips together immediately after as though he can pretend it didn't happen. He fails. He turns on his heel. “Come on,” he says, and there is something in his voice that is warm and poorly concealed and absolutely not going to be acknowledged. “There are so many stalls to try!”
He walks. Zoro falls into step beside him.
Sanji has, in his life, given away his last cigarette. He has cooked for people who couldn't pay. He has, on at least two occasions, gone hungry so someone else didn't have to. He’s not doing any of that here.
Here, he’s the man who counted forty-five seconds of someone else's attention on Zoro's chest and filed it away like evidence. Here, he’s the man who kissed Zoro in public, like some kind of animal, because a broad-shouldered stranger with good bone structure was walking across a square with intention in his stride, and something in Sanji's chest went absolutely not.
He’s not proud of this. He’s also not going to stop.
Zoro's hand finds his without looking, the way it always does—unhurried, certain, like he's done it a thousand times and intends to do it a thousand more. Which, Sanji supposes, is the problem. Zoro has no idea what he does. He walks through the world like a door left open, and then looks mildly confused when people walk through it.
Zoro scoffs, “Still doing the face.”
Sanji lights a cigarette. “I have one face.”
“Narrow eyes. Jaw thing.”
“My jaw does nothing.”
Zoro's thumb drags once across his knuckle. Slowly and deliberately. Sanji's entire argument fades. He exhales and looks at the lanterns, saying nothing.
Zoro, insufferably, smiles about it. Sanji can't see it, but he knows. He always knows. “I'm not going anywhere,” Zoro says.
Sanji smiles, “I know that.”
“Just making sure you know that.”
“I said I know—”
“Because you kissed me in public.”
Sanji groans, “You don't have to keep saying it like that—”
“In front of everyone.”
“Zoro.”
“Very dramatically.”
“I will kick you.”
“You won't.”
He won't. Sanji exhales again, shorter this time, and his fingers tighten once in Zoro's grip. Involuntary. He is not going to comment on it, nor will Zoro. This is the arrangement.
The thing is (and Sanji will take this to his grave), the generosity runs out here. He will feed strangers. He will cook for kings. He will, in the right circumstances, give someone the coat off his back. He will not share this. He’s not built for sharing this. He has looked at that fact from every angle and made his peace with it.
Zoro knows. Zoro has always known. Zoro, god help him, enjoys it.
The lanterns swing. Ahead, Luffy is being loud about something. The deer watch the festival with the serenity of creatures unbothered by human feelings.
Zoro doesn't let go. Sanji doesn't either.