defending sanji&usopp friendship isnt enough i need a GUN

“Wait,” Sanji hisses, and Usopp waits.

Luffy finds the map under his plate and shouts so loudly half the ship comes running, before proceeding to follow the clue trail with exactly as much excitement as Usopp figured he would. The storage locker door flies open and the bucket of fish descends and Luffy, splattered from hat brim to sandals in cold seawater and slippery silver scraps, says in a tone of stunned awe: “Whoa.”

Usopp nearly folds over at the waist laughing so hard, his knees going soft and lungs locking up. Sanji catches him easily, arm around his ribs for one staggering helpless second while both of them wheeze themselves half to death against the mast. EVen through the nonsense, Usopp can feel the solid line of Sanji’s forearm under his ribs and the clench of fingers into the fabric of his shirt. For a second they’re sharing the same breath, the same helpless and ugly and perfect sound.

Luffy’s still standing in the middle of the disaster, blinking fish scales off his lashes. “Is this treasure or mutiny?”

Sanji does laugh then, properly, the sound breaking out of him with his whole body, leaning against Usopp because he can’t seem to stay upright through it; Usopp feels the exact moment Sanji’s forehead drops against the side of his neck, from the press of damp hair and warm skin to the way Sanji’s hand grips his upper arm like he needs something solid to hold onto while the laugh wrecks him. The whole world kind of shivers and later – much later – Usopp tries to identify the exact the second the afternoon shifted from funny to dangerous. It might have been then, maybe: Sanji laughing helplessly against him, sun so bright off the water it made everyone look touched by something almost holy. The weight of Sanji’s forehead and the shake of his shoulders and the way Usopp’s own body had gone so alert underneath all the laughter.

Maybe it was afterwards, actually, after Luffy had washed off and declared vengeance only to immediately forgive them because Sanji cut his sandwich into the shape of a skull. Maybe it was when Usopp had found himself alone by the rail with Sanji, both of them catching their breath while Sanji lit another cigarette, fish guts on one sleeve but his face softer than Usopp had seen it in a while. 

“That was art. And now you know better than to start without me.” The words had come out lightly, even jokingly, but something in them had lodged, low and warm and unwanted, right under Usopp’s ribs.

Usopp should’ve responded with something funny or smart or easy but instead he’d said, stupidly honest: "You're kinda funny.”

Sanji had looked surprised only for a second before he smirked again, slow and pleased. “Obviously.”

And, sure, Usopp laughed it off at the time but his face had gone warm and he’d no idea why, not until he’s in his bunk that night with everybody breathing their own sleepy little rhythms nearby, finding himself replaying the sensation of Sani’s hand on his wrist and how perfectly the bones of the blonde’s fingers had fitted against the skin over Usopp’s pulse. The heat of him at Usopp’s shoulder when they’d leaned over the map and the shift of muscle under the thin fabric of his shirt and the way his breath had moved the hairs at the nape of Usopp’s neck and the way he’d said you know better now.

Usopp stares up at the world above him and feels, with growing horror, that the highlight of his day had not actually been humiliating Luffy but it’d been Sanji, bright and wicked in the sun. Sanji’s hands and Sanji’s laugh and Sanji’s hip knocking against his like it belonged there and –

“Oh. Oh no.” Usopp puts one hand over his own face, fingers pressing hard into the warm skin of his cheeks. “Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me.”

x

Usopp decides not to do anything stupid about whatever the hell’s happening in his head... and then gets a little sidetracked from that because, really, what even counts as stupid amongst their crew anymore? 

Like, is it stupid to think about Sanji while trying to fall asleep? Does watching Sanji too closely across meals count? Apparently yes, because he gets a little too fixated on the way Sanji’s hands move when he plates food and the satisfied angle of his head when someone actually tastes whatever he made. Does being stupid include replaying the exact shape of the blonde’s laugh in the sunlight count? Unfortunately also a yes, but Usopp reckons can probably keep that one inside his own skull for now.

He tells himself over and over that as it’ll settle and disappear and life will go back to normal. It’s just a little crush, after all – a weird one, considering it’s Sanji, but it’s not like it’s the end of the world. He just has to let the novelty wear off and watch the attraction fizzle out from overexposure or something, which would work beautifully if only he could keep the fuck away from Sanji. The first time he ‘accidentally’ ends up in the galley it’s because he’s spent the whole damn morning trying not to end up in the galley and so, because Usopp is generally doomed, he just walks into it himself. The galley’s warm in the rich way it always is by midday, all sunlight and steam and full of smells Usopp wouldn’t be able to identify if his life depended on it. It’s always felt like its own little world, here, like the rest of the ship has dropped away. Sanji’s got a mountain of herbs under his knife and sweat across his throat as the knife moves in a nice little rhythm, tidying the greenery into neat piles. He glances up as soon as he realises Usopp’s hovering in the doorway. “What?”

Usopp, who hasn’t actually thought beyond go in there and be normal, says the first thing his brain offers. “Herbs?”

Sanji quirks an eyebrow. “Congratulations?”

“No, I mean…” Usopp steps in, the air feeling very thick in his lungs which is ridiculous because this is Sanji. This is Sanji! Usopp’s seen Sanji every which way since they started sailing together, ranging from dangerously nimble to downright pathetic, so. “I… wanted to ask about herbs.”

That gets him a proper look of confusion, enough for Sanji to set the knife down. His expression is baffled, eyes narrowed the slightest fraction like he’s trying to decide what’s missing from whatever his brain is tasting. “You want to ask me about herbs?”

Usopp folds his arms because that at least looks deliberate and what else is he meant to do when his heartbeat’s doing something lethal. “Yes.”

Sanji gestures at him with one leafy hand, where there’s a faint green stain along the side of his thumb. “You’re the plant guy here.”

It’s not like Usopp can deny it: he's spent years learning leaves and roots and seeds and growth cycles and toxins and fibres and – all of it. If anybody on the ship shouldn’t need a remedial herb lesson it’s him, which means he has to lie. Luckily for him, that’s his whole jam. “Yeah, but mostly wild plants? And, uh, medicinal stuff. And some munitions applications. I figured… maybe kitchen herbs are different? One way to find out, you know!”

Sanji narrows his eyes further, his mouth doing a crooked little thing like he wants to smile but is reining it in. “You’re weird.”

Usopp brightens. “So you’ll teach me?”

“Oh, that is not what I said.”

“But it’s what you meant.”

Sanji rolls his eyes so hard the motion makes the tendons in his neck stand out for a second and Usopp has to look away before he gives himself away in the most embarrassing way possible.  “Fine. Get over here.”

At first, Usopp tells himself he’s only there because it’d be suspicious to leave immediately after winning the right to stay. He plants his shoes on the galley floor like they might try to run without him and watches Sanji’s hands as they move over the herbs, pointing at a pile of flat green leaves with the tip of his knife. “Parsley.”

“I know parsley.”

Sanji gives him a wry look before pointing at another. “Coriander.” 

Usopp kind of wilts, not unlike the poor dill waiting to be sliced and diced. “Yeah, man, I know coriander too.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Uh, revision?” Usopp laughs before he can stop himself, the sound coming out low and surprised, and it makes something in Sanji’s shoulders loosen the tiniest bit. Then he rolls his eyes again and actually starts explaining, it gets worse because Sanji is good at teaching. Usopp’s always kind of known this in a very abstract way, because surely Sanji had chefs under him at the Baratie, but it’s different being on the receiving end of it. Sanji teaches like somebody letting you into a secret society one rule at a time – he assumes competence and expects attention, talking with his hands and crushing a leaf between his fingers to hold under Usopp’s nose so that the lesson’s delivered in smell as much as language.

“Don’t look at them first,” Sanji instructs. “Smell them. Basil and mint can fool your eyes from a distance if they’re young enough.”

Usopp leans in to where the leaf smells sharp and sweet and green in a way he absolutely already knows, but that part doesn't matter. What matters is that Sanji’s fingers brush his chin by accident as he passes the herb over, just the side of his knuckles and the very edge of a fingertip dragging light across the curve of Usopp’s jaw as the leaf’s offered. Usopp’s whole body reacts like somebody’s gone and struck a tuning fork somewhere under his ribs, the vibration spreading rapidly through his chest and down his spine and into the soft places behind his knees. His skin prickles. His breath catches and has to be let out carefully so that it doesn’t sound like anything at all.

Sanji, mercifully, is still talking. “Thyme should feel almost woody when the stems are right. Rosemary’s obvious if you’ve got a nose but tarragon can make a liar out of you.”

“What d’you mean?”

Sanji glances up, visibly pleased that Usopp’s asked the right question. There’s a tiny crease at the corner of his mouth that wasn't there a second ago. “Smells softer than it tastes.”

“Getting philosophical about herbs, hey?”

Sanji goes pink at the ears, the colour starting just below the line of his hair to dust the tops of his ears and down toward his jaw. Usopp is possessed, badly, with the sudden urge to kiss him and has to swallow it down. “Shut up.”

It goes on like that: Usopp trying to convince himself the crush will wear out with familiarity but, instead, familiarity gives it roots. Everytime he steps into the galley now, the air feels thicker and the smells cling longer, like Sanji’s voice has settled somewhere behind his ribs. The accidental touches multiply: knuckles against a wrist when a bundle of herbs is passed over and the warm press of Sanji’s shoulder when they both lean over the same cutting board and the faint heat that radiates off him when he stands close enough to correct Usopp’s grip on a knife. Usopp’s body keeps a meticulous and mutinous record of all of it, from the places Sanji touches and all the places Usopp wishes he would touch. He starts finding reasons to come back, casually and coincidentally, claiming he just happens to be passing through the galley while Sanji’s sorting produce or prepping stock or stripping herbs with those quick, clever hands. The galley always smells different when Sanji’s been working for a while, and Usopp tells himself he’s only there for the questions but it’s been two weeks now and he’s long past trying to fool himself. 

Sometimes, he brings a real question just for kicks: there are enough overlaps between botany and cooking to justify him for at least a week, it turns out. He asks about edible flowers and reservation methods and if certain leaves burn cleaner when dried. He asks which herbs grow best in pots on deck and which need deeper soil, which are admittedly useful things for him to know. Sometimes, he practices the questions in his workshop beforehand so that they sound natural but everytime he steps into the galley his throat goes a little dry, anyway.

Sanji, to his credit, seems to believe him for exactly three and a half days before, one afternoon while he’s hanging bunches of thyme to dry he says: “You know most of this already.”

Usopp freezes in his tracsk, partly because the question’s hit him in his chest and partly because the afternoon light’s catching at Sanji’s hairline and Usopp has to drag his gaze away. “Huh?”

Sanji arches an eyebrow and let it be known that Usopp hates that eyebrow. It contains too much knowledge and also makes something behind his ribs pull tight. “You know plants. You know smell and storage and leaf shape and what dries well and what doesn’t. Better than half the idiots who’ve worked under Zeff, so either you’ve suddenly become very committed to professional development…”

Usopp tries for offense. His arms cross over his chest like armour that doesn’t quite fit. “And what if I have?”

“Or you’ve suddenly become very committed to hanging around.” He moves slowly, deliberately, the way he does when he’s sensing something new – the space between them shrinks until Usopp can smell the thyme on Sanji’s fingers and the faint smoke that always clings to his clothes. Sanji stops just close enough that Usopp has to tilt his chin up to keep eye contact and, here, the air feels charged between them, like the moment before a spark jumps.

Usopp’s pulse is hammering so hard he’s sure Sanji can hear it. His skin feels too tight across his shoulders. He says, too quickly: “That’s ridiculous.”

Sanji’s mouth twitches. “You’re very defensive for someone innocent.

Usopp folds his arms tighter, like the pressure of his own forearms against his ribs can help keep him upright. For one horrible second he thinks Sanji’s going to laugh or, worse, be kind – he can survive mockery, he’s been doing that for years. He’s much less certain about tenderness but the thought of Sanji being gentle with him makes something low in his belly go hot and unsteady. Instead Sanji reaches past him, close enough that his sleeve brushes the outside of Usopp’s arm, and opens the little drawer by the stove. He hands him a sprig of lemongrass. “Here,” he says.

Usopp takes it automatically, feeling their fingers touch for half a second. The contact is nothing, barely skin, but it still sends a bright, stupid spark straight up Usopp’s forearm and into his chest like he’s been struck by something small and electric. He swallows. “Why?”

“Smell.”

The scent hits him all at once, like sunlight if sunlight had veins. It floods his senses so completely that for a moment he forgets to breathe and when he looks up Sanji is watching him with a strange softness underneath his usual expression. The look sneaks somewhere behind Usopp’s ribs and stays there, warm and dangerous.

“See? If you were pretending for my benefit you’d have picked something more believable than herbs. You’re too specific.”

Usopp stares at him, mouth horrifically dry. “W-What did you think I was…”

Sanji shrugs one shoulder, the motion making the collar of his shirt shift to expose the faint line of his collarbone for a second. Usopp’s eyes catch there and refuse to move. “Mostly I thought you were bored or weird.”

“And now?” The question slips out before he can stop it. It hangs in the air between them while Sanji’s expression shifts into something Usopp can’t quite read. 

“Now, I think you’re weird in a more targeted way.” 

Usopp’s laugh comes short and startled and wasy too loud in the quiet galley. The sound bounces off the pots and the warm wood and comes back to him changed. Sanji laughs, too, and the laugh’s worse now than it's the first time because Usopp knows it better. He knows the shape of it, the little break in it, the way it escapes him before polish can arrive and exactly what it does to the room and how it makes Usopp’s chest feel too full and too empty at the same time. 

After that, Usopp gives up on subtlety. He lingers in the galley and lets Sanji hand him chopped leaves to sort, even when he absolutely knows what they are. Everytime their fingers brush he feels it like a livewire under his skin. He sits on the bench and swings one foot while Sanji works and watches everything, logging all of it somewhere deep in his brain, from the way Sanji’s voice drops when he’s explaining something he cares about to the way he pushes his hair back with the back of his wrist when his fingers are oily. A single strand always falls forward again and Usopp’s own fingers always twitch with the stupid and overwhelming urge to reach over and tuck it back. He notices the line between Sanji’s eyebrows when he’s concentrating and feels his own forehead tighten in helpless sympathy. He notices the way Sanji taps the flat of the knife twice against the board before moving to the next task, the small sound becoming something Usopp’s pulse starts to match. He notices the little burn scars on Sanji’s hands, pale and raised against the warmer skin, and has to curl his own fingers into fists so he doesn’t reach out and trace them. He notices the exact pitch of Sanji’s voice when he says Usopp’s name and means it, how it lands softer and warmer, and how that softness travels straight down Usopp’s spine and pools somewhere he tries not to think about. 

He notices how often Sanji feeds people without asking and how he sets aside better cuts for Luffy but pretends not to and he always knows when Chopper’s skipped lunch and grumbles while making tea for Zoro but remembers the ratio he likes without checking and, above all, how his care is built so deep into his hands that he seems not to know anyone can see it. Everytime Usopp watches those hands move – precise and generous and steady – he feels something shift in his own chest, like his ribs are expanding around a feeling too big to name. The crush had begun in laughter but, god, does it grow teeth in tenderness.

One evening, after an hour spent discussing medicinal leaves and whether rosemary smoke can be weaponised, Usopp goes back to his workshop and sits down among his tools, sitting there with a handful of screws in one palm and realising with quiet horror that the crush hasn't fizzled out at all. Now it's not just that Sanji is funny and objectively handsome, but that Sanji says idiot three different ways depending on whether he means move or be serious or i’m fond of you and hate that you can tell and each version lands in a different place inside Usopp’s body. It’s Sanji knowing more about mint than any human being should. 

Usopp groans.  “Oh, this is so much worse.” His hands are shaking a little, maybe, as the full weight of it settles into his bones, from the heat in his face to the restless ache low in his belly and the way his skin still remembers every touch from the day like they’ve been branded there.

For the next few days, he does his absolute best to kill the crush through reason, which doesn’t work at all because it’s like trying to negotiate with a damn storm. Usopp has always believed in the capacity of a good internal monologue to solve almost anything, so he goes for a stroll like he can outrun his own emotions, doing laps of the deck before breakfast. By lap two he’s already lecturing himself, telling himself that this is stupid for a multitude of reasons but the most glaringly obvious one is that Sanji is straight. Not ‘probably straight’ and not ‘straight enough to complicate matters’ and sure as fuck not ‘straight except in the abstract fantasy realm where beautiful cooks fall unexpectedly in love with snipers’ but straight. Full stop, end of sentence. Sanji flirts with women like it’s a spiritual practice and calls every attractive girl sweetheart or angel or some obnoxiously elegant thing and Usopp knows he even means at least half of it. Sanji’s been making heart eyes at waitresses and bartenders and women on docks since the day he stepped onto the Merry, and even if, by some bizarre and frankly unearned miracle, Sanji did like men –

Usopp stops walking for a second because the thought of that hits him like some kind of physical blow. His chest goes tight, heat flooding up his neck and into his face so fast it makes his ears ring. For one dizzy second he imagines Sanji looking at him the way he looks at women but softer, the way he looks when he’s handing someone food he made with his own hands. His fingers curl into fists inside his pockets and he resumes pacing immediately, faster now. The deck feels unsteady under his boots.

even if, he tells himself sternly, there are better options.

Many better options, in fact! Practically an endless line of them! There’s Zoro, who’s broad shouldered and quiet and always looks like he’s wandered out of some fucking romantic legend by accident or something. Usopp pictures them together for half a second and feels something ugly and hot twist behind his ribs: jealousy, sharp and physical, like a hand squeezing around his lungs. There’s Law, if Sanji goes in for the whole dark and brooding disaster type (which he probably does). The thought of Sanji with Law makes Usopp’s jaw clench so hard it hurts. Hell, even Frank has a better chance than Usopp if this ever becomes a numbers game.

Usopp is forced, by the grim fairness of his own mind, to admit that he himself is not exactly at the top of any conventional list. He’s not tragic or cool or particularly smooth or stacked with several thousand muscles. He’s funny, sure, and clever, and charming when he wants to be and handsome under very specific lighting, but Sanji’s taste doesn't seem to revolve around surprisingly good company with an excellent sense of comic timing. He feels, for a moment, almost relieved by this because this argument has weight and logic, which he usually respects. Sanji is straight. Sanji flirts with women like it’s his life’s mission. Sanji has never once looked at any man the way he looks at a beautiful waitress. Usopp can hold that truth in both hands and turn it over until it stops cutting him and for a few bright, foolish seconds he almost believes he’s won – and then Sanji comes up on deck with a tray of little snacks and a cigette tucked behind one ear and sunlight catches him just right and Usopp nearly walks straight into the mast. His pulse, which had been behaving itself for once, throws a whole tantrum about it.

Later, Sanji bends over the table to reach a spoon and all Usopp can focus on is the way the fabric of his shirt pulls across the sharp wings of his shoulder blades and the long curve of his spine and the way his waist narrows only slightly before it disappears into the god awful pants he’s wearing. The sight hits Usopp like a physical shove: his own back tightens in helpless sympathy. Heat crawls up the back of his neck and settles behind his ears. During dinner Sanji laughs at something Robin says and the shape of his throat turns into a matter of urgent personal interest. Usopp watches the way it moves when Sanji swallows and the faint pulse visible just under the skin and then has to look away so fast his neck twinges.

Usopp’s lived his entire life amongst other bodies (including this very specific body!) and has never once had to treat someone else’s forearms like they should be worshipped, but here they are now, lean and strong and dusted with thick dark hair and Usopp’s life is officially over. He stares at the way the muscles shift when Sanji lifts a tray or wipes his hands or reaches for something just out of reach and he wants to scream. There are only so many times a day someone can casually glance at the same person before the glances start adding up and before every look feels like it's pulling the next one into orbit.  He stacks and stacks and stacks images of Sanji, from the way he clicks his tongue once when he’s dissatisfied with a sauce and how he lifts his chin when he’s about to say something mean and how his laughter changes depending on who he’s with – there’s the bright, theatrical one for strangers, the low one for the crew and the raw helpless one that only comes out when he’s truly surprised into joy. Usopp notes how Sanji’s conversations with strangers are all flourish and theatre but his affection for the crew lives lower in his body, in habits instead of lines, like extra portions and a hand on the shoulder and only lighting a cigarette after checking which way the wind’s going so the smoke won’t hit someone in the face.

He notices how Sanji flirts, which is its own problem that he tries not to put too much weight into because god knows Sanji always flirts. He flirts with women, definitely, but also occasionally with others in that same offhand dramatic way he flirts with just about everything. He’s a creature of language and performance, after all, so if he calls Usopp brilliant once while handing him parsley that doesn’t mean anything. If Sanji says there you are from across the deck with that crooked little smile, well. That’s not some kind of confession, even if it does make Usopp’s knees go soft. If Sanji leans in too close to look over his shoulder at a sketch or a gadget or a bomb casing and murmurs not bad, well. That’s not a deliberate act of seduction! It’s just how Sanji exists in the world, too close and too warm and too precise. If Sanji laughs too much at Usopp’s stories, or touches his wrist to get his attention or lets the two of them linger in the galley after everyone else has gone because now it's normal for Usopp to ask complicated questions about plantation while Sanji pretends not to know he already knows half the answers… well. None of that means anything.

Usopp repeats this to himself so often it begins to sound less like reason and more like some kind of tormented prayer. He says it while he works and while he eats and while he lies in his bunk for hours. He says it until the words lose their shape and all that remains is the feeling underneath them: that stubborn, traitorous heat that refuses to be reasoned away.

One evening, while the sky goes orange over the sea and everybody’s between dinner and bed routine, Usopp’s hunched over a half finished pop green casing when Sanji passes behind him and drawls: “Looking cool.”

Usopp’s body spine straightens before he can stop it, fingers tightening around the casing until the metal bites into his palm. He tells himself this is, like, a temporary neurological problem. A trick of the sunset light and the salt air and the fact that he hasn’t slept properly in days.

Sanji pauses, glancing down at the workbench which only brings him closer.  “You might want to dry the paste longer before sealing it, if the humidity stays like this.”

Usopp looks at the little brass hinge and at the wire and at anything Sanji’s mouth a few centimetres away – the soft curve of it and the way it moves around the words and the faint shine where he must have licked his lips a moment ago. Usopp’s own mouth feels dry. He wants, with a sudden, stupid intensity, to turn his head and see if Sanji’s lips would feel as warm as they look. “Right,” he manages. The word comes out rough.

Then Sanji reaches around him, not quite brushing his chest, and taps the side of the casing with one finger. “Here.” The finger’s close enough that Usopp feels the displaced air and close enough that if he leaned forward even a tiny bit they would touch. “Otherwise it’ll misfire.”

Usopp swallows, throat clicking. His face is burning: he can feel the flush spreading down his neck, under his collar, hot and obvious. “R-Right.”

Sanji looks at him, expression almost concerned, and it feels like a hand pressed over his heart. “You’re red.”

Usopp’s soul leaves his body. “It’s hot.”

Sanji glances toward the sunset breeze coming in off the water, mouth moving like he’s fighting a smile. “Interesting theory.”

Usopp wants the sea to rise and take him. He wants the deck to open up beneath his feet. He wants, with a fierce and humiliating clarity, to reach out and grab the front of Sanji’s shirt and pull him back down and find out what that mouth actually tastes like. Sanji, mercifully or not, just snorts and keeps walking and Usopp sits there with the pop green in one hand andh eart still racing. 

That night, he dreams of Sanji's laugh getting too close until the sound vibrates through Usopp’s chest. He dreams of the galley, of crushed herbs and cloying floral scents and Sanji laying him out over the table. He dreams about Sanji's long fingers working him open as that beautiful mouth talks and talks and talks. He wakes up flushed and hard and sticky and mortified, and tells himself to get a fucking grip.

After that, he tries to keep busy. He helps Franky in the workshop until his shoulders ache and his hands are covered in grease and practices aim until his fingers are numb and the targets are nothing but shredded wood. He spends an hour reorganising his seed packets by colour and then by category and then by usefulness, which means he’s in real trouble. He walks laps of the deck until the sun goes down and his legs burn. He tells himself stories out loud – long, ridiculous ones about sea monsters and hidden treasures and impossible escapes – just to fill any possible gaps in his own head so nothing else can sneak in.  

He reminds himself – daily and hourly – that even if the laws of nature cracked and something wild and implausible happened and Sanji did want a man, he wouldn’t pick Usopp. He’d pick someone stronger and cooler and more devastating, someone who can match his energy. Not Usopp, who lies for sport and gets sunburnt in weird patterns and has nearly blown up the deck multiple times. Not Usopp, whose hands are always a little ink stained or grease smudged or trembling from too many late nights with explosives. Not Usopp, who talks too much and laughs too loud and still sometimes trips over his own feet when Sanji smiles at him like that.

He knows this and yet.

And yet.

And yet when Sanji sits beside him at lunch and steals half his rice because Usopp’s day improves so immediately it feels insane.

And yet when Sanji looks over one of his new plant sketches and says, very quiet, these are incredible, Usopp has to spend the next fifteen minutes pretending his heart hasn't become some kind of fucking drum.

And yet when Sanji tosses him an apple from the galley without looking and says his name in that voice that lives under all the performative bullshit, Usopp feels an absurd little thrill like a bell’s rung under water.

His body feels wrung out from the constant war, shoulders tight from clenching everytime Sanji’s near and jaw aching from biting back smiles and chest sore from the way his heart keeps flipping into his throat at the smallest things. He’s tired of fighting something that only seems to grow stronger the harder he pushes against it and tired of waking up half hard from dreams he refuses to remember and tired of the low steady ache that lives behind his ribs now, like a bruise that refuses to fade. 

He makes a different, only slightly better plan: he’ll keep it secret. He won’t be weird about it. He’ll enjoy Sanji’s company without becoming one of those tragic idiots who goes and ruins a friendship by wanting too much from it. It’s still a terrible fucking plan, but it’s all he’s got right now and at dinner that night Sanji reaches across the table to steal the lemon from his plate with a little grin. “You’re staring again.”

Usopp startles so badly he nearly drops his chopstick, face going instantly hot. 

Sanji, the asshole, looks perfectly calm. Usopp watches him squeeze the lemon over his own fish, tracking the flex of his wrist like it's the most important thing in the world before clearing his throat. “I was thinking.”

“Dangerous habit.”

Robin smiles into her wine and Zoro snorts into his sake. The air at the table feels suddenly thicker, charged with the kind of attention Usopp usually tries to avoid. He grimaces and says, with every scrap of dignity he’s got left: “I was thinking you look tired.”

The table goes a little quiet as Sanji looks up, clearly caught by the unexpected sincerity of it. His eyes meet Usopp’s across the plates and glasses and something in them softens, almost invisibly, but Usopp sees it anyway. The corner of his mouth lifts. “I am, a little.”

Usopp nods, throat tight. He wants, with sudden ferocity, to reach across the table and smooth that shadow under the blonde’s eyes away with his thumb. The wanting sits heavy and obvious in his hands, so he keeps them flat on the table instead.

Sanji looks at him another beat too long before saying, very lightly: “How sweet of you to notice.”

The table laughs and the moment breaks and everything resumes, Luffy reaching for seconds and Nami stealing from Zoro’s plate and Franky pouring more wine. Later, lying in his bunk with the ship rocking gently around him, Usopp does his usual nightly dance, walking himself through all his sensible arguments and all the reasons this crush is pointless and all the little truths he keeps trying to use like fucking pruning shears – and knows none of them matter against the simple fact that he likes Sanji anyway.  

x

It’s a beautiful day when Usopp gets well and truly hurt, which is the only thing he really remembers when he’s trying to reconstruct it later. He doesn’t remember the ships or the shouting or the blood or smoke or, really, how it even started – just how blue the sky had been and how calm the sea had been. 

Violence under that much beauty should be impossible, he reckons, but it isn’t impossible at all. It never is, with them – they’re rarely that lucky. 

The pirates – if one can really call them that – come in fast just after noon, their smaller ship skidding across the waves like something built for speed and nothing else. Their captain has apparently built a whole fucking strategy around the assumption that anyone smiling as much as Luffy is has to be stupid and weak, so his first mistake is underestimating Luffy, but his second is underestimating Usopp, who knows plants and pressure and trajectory and timing and had seen the whole mess before anyone else. The scavenger captain splits his fighters into three groups, one to keep Luffy and Zoro occupied in the centre of the deck and one to go after Nami and Robin and Franky at range and one slipping low and mean towards the rudder with crowbars to try and cripple the Sunny. 

Usopp sees the angle and sees, too, the heavy anchor chain coiled where Franky had left it after morning maintenance, clocks the slick patch of deck from a smashed barrel and the way the sunlight turns the spilled liquid into something almost beautiful. He sees how one shot placed properly into the chain’s release latch would send the whole line crashing sideways just as the men hit the puddle, pinning two and taking the others off their feet long enough for Robin to catch the rest.

“Robin!” he shouts, already moving, voice cutting through the noise and Robin glances at him in the furor, understanding immediately. Usopp’s seed round hits exactly where he means it to, the chain spilling in a slide of metal, heavy links whipping across the deck with terrible momentum. Three men go down at once, one with the wind knocked clean out of him and two caught under the whipping weight before they can even turn. Robin’s hands flower from the deck and the mast and the railings all in the same second, pinning the last two scavengers upright like insects mounted for display. The whole sequence takes less than three heartbeats and for a wild heartbeat the whole battle seems to pause around the success of it, long enough for Robin to glance over her shoulder at him and smile proudly and enough for Franky to shout super! loud enough to rattle the rigging and enough for Luffy to yell his name with delight and enough for Usopp to look the other way, just for a second, because Sanji’s launched himself into the air off the rail and the sight of him is too beautiful not to witness.

His leg comes down in a neat arc to catch one of the scavengers under the jaw hard enough that the man leaves the deck completely. He lands on the balls of his feet and pivots into the next strike, quick as laughter and twice as mean, body twisting with that perfect violence that makes Usopp’s chest go tight and his breath catch somewhere behind his ribs. Usopp, ridiculous to the point of self-endangerment, thinks i hope he saw that, pulse kicking hard against his throat as the pride of wanting Sanji to have witnessed something cool pulls at him like a hook set deep and fractures his attention enough to miss the bolt of splintered wood coming at the side of his head.

It’s some broken piece of rigging, kicked loose or thrown or simply made airborne by the general laws of battle and poor luck, and then all Usopp can feel is the impact against his head and shoulder, solid and sickening and white hot. The deck lurches sideways under him and Zoro shouts his name, sharp and urgent, before all the light in the world goes out.

When he wakes, it smells like soup. The scent wraps around him like a hand pressed gently to the back of his neck as he opens one eye oly to regret it immediately. The infirmary ceiling swam above him in an alarming white wash, head throbbing furiously. Pain radiates outward in slow, heavy pulses and he makes a sound somewhere between a groan and a cry, maybe.

“Hey, slow down.”

Usopp turns his head too fast, which is another mistake because the room tips nauseously – he has to wait out in slow blinks and when it finally settles Sanji’s sitting on the chair by the bed with a bowl in one hand and a spoon in the other, one ankle hooked behind the opposite chair leg. He looks a little worn, maybe, hair in his eyes and a nasty bruise high on one cheekbone  but the sheer sight of him hits Usopp like another impact, softer this time but no less dangerous. 

He wheezes once and regrets that, too. “Ow.”

“Excellent choice,” Sanji sighs. “Try juggling next.”

Usopp swallows against the dryness in his throat. The soup smells even better now that he’s waking up, rich and savoury and somehow exactly what his bruised body needs. “What happened?”

Sanji’s mouth cocks a little and the motion pulls at the bruise on his cheekbone. “You fell over dramatically. Chopper patched your head. Luffy wanted to sit on the bed until you woke up and had to be physically removed for, well, everyone’s safety.”

Usopp tries to picture that and finds, to his surprise, that the image comes with relief: everyone alive and everyone intact. The battle won enough that Sanji can sit here making horrible jokes instead of sprinting between triage and the galley. He lets his head sink back against the pillow. “Did I at least look cool before I nearly died?”

Sanji’s expression changes, just a little, something gentler moving under the sarcasm. The spoon in his hand stills for a second. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “Yeah, you looked cool.”

Usopp snorts and the sound yoinks at something in his temple and makes him wince again. “Great, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” The bowl in Sanji’s hand steams quietly between them, the warmth of it seeming to fill the small space.

Usopp eyes it with interest. “What’s that?”

“Soup.”

“For me?”

Sanji looks almost offended at that, and the expression’s familiar and comforting in equal measure and somehow makes Usopp’s chest ache more than his head did. “No, I brought it up here to study it in the light.”

Usopp smiles before he can stop himself, fighting off another grimace.

Sanji shifts forwards in the chair, closer, until Usopp can smell the smoke in his clothes and hair and mouth. “Sit up.”

“I’m injured.”

“Yes, and being terribly brave about it. Sit.”

Usopp grumbles but obeys, the room swaying briefly as he pushes himself up against the pillows. The motion sends a slow, heavy pulse of pain through his temple and down into his shoulder but Sanji’s already there, one hand sliding behind Usopp’s back with care, steadying him easily. The other hand kept the bowl balanced on his own knee as Usopp settles and Usopp’s pulse behaves like an idiot about it, stubborn and alive. The soup does smell incredible, Usopp picking up onion and thyme and something richer underneath. “Chopper tell you I’d wake up wanting food or are you just psychic?”

“I know you.” The answer comes lightly enough that Usopp glances up in surprise, to where Sanji’s already looked away, reaching for the water glass on the side table like he hadn’t said anything at all. The bruise on his cheekbone looks darker from this new angle.

Usopp takes one spoonful and nearly dies on the spot, but for better reasons. The warmth slides down his throat and fixes every problem in his life all at once. “Holy hell. This is insane. It’s just… soup?”

At that, Sanji turns back with genuine affront, his expression cracking something open in the small room. “Excuse me, just soup?”

Usopp holds up his free hand weakly. “I meant that in a worshipful way! Like, wow, can’t believe it’s just soup when it tastes like the one piece, you know? Or whatever the one piece’d taste like.”

He eats a little more under Sanji’s supervision, slowly enough that the dizziness stays mostly at bay. The warmth of it settled through him in stages, bringing him back into his own body with more kindness than he usually allows himself while injured. And beneath that warmth is the dawning realisation that Sanji’s sticking around and clearly had been for some time, sitting by Usopp’s bed and the knowledge is heavy in a way he doesn’t know what to do with. Naturally, he responds to it with self deprecation because it’s often the only armor he has left that fits.

“Well! Good to know I can pull off one cool trick before immediately eating shit. Guess the family talent skipped a generation.” Sanji’s eyebrows pull together, maybe, but Usopp keeps his eyes on the bowl, watching the steam curl up in lazy spirals. “Dad’d probably have laughed himself sick.” 

The words come out easier than they should have, which happens, sometimes. Yasopp slips into conversation without warning, as all old absences do eventually, and at least half of the time it’s mostly joke and only a little bruise. Usopp’s long ago learned to hand over the pain in forms people can laugh at, if they need to – it keeps things moving.

Sanji, however, doesn’t laugh. He leans back in the chair with a little frown, voice borderline contemptuous. “Congratulations on achieving long distance disappointment, I suppose.” The line is casually mean that Usopp laughs despite himself, soup nearly going down the wrong way. Sanji looks pleased about that for one second, the smallest, quietest flicker of satisfaction at the corner of his mouth, before he adds, almost offhand: “Hard to know what’s worse, ignorance or a dungeon. At least the dungeon had mice.”

Usopp stops dead, the spoon hovering halfway to his mouth. To his surprise, the strongest thing he feels is not a gentle curiosity but a stupid, immediate and frankly unbearable desire to know. He doesn’t want these offhand comments or hints, he doesn’t want to piece together a story from patterns, he wants to know Sanji. He wants the actual shape of him and the private history and the things he wants to kick under the table. 

Sanji clearly sees something in his face and misreads it instantly. “It was just a joke.”

“It didn’t sound like one?”

“Then your concussion’s worse than I thought.”

Usopp sets the spoon down very carefully. “You don’t have to tell me. I just…” he makes a helpless little motion with the hand not holding the bowl. “You say stuff like that sometimes.”

Sanji’s face kind of shutters. “And you, what, collect it all somewhere, do you?”

The question should sound mocking, maybe, but to Usopp it lands with something more defensive under it, like Sanji genuinely doesn’t know what to do with the fact that someone might be paying attention to him – not just to his hands or his food or his jokes, but to the little pieces of damage that slip loose between them. 

Usopp feels his face warm because it’s a little too close to home, really. “I don’t collect it,” he says, which is absolutely a lie. “I just… I like listening to you.”

The silence that follows feels fucking enormous, filling the tiny infirmary like a flood, pressing gently against the walls. Sanji looks away first, gaze dropping to the empty space where the bowl had been, clicking his tongue The tension in his shoulders has eased a little by the time he leans forwards enough to take the empty bowl before Usopp can drop it, and for one brief second his fingers brushes the back of Usopp’s hand.

Nothing. Everything.

Sanji stands, balancing the bowl in one hand with an expression Usopp has never seen on him and can’t fucking read. “At any rate, you were brilliant.” 

“Huh?”

“In the fight.” Sanji sounds impatient now, which usually means sincerity’s involved and he's already regretting the exposure of it. His voice is quiet. “That trick with the chain was smart. Robin said it saved her five minutes and at least two idiots.”

Usopp stares at him as the praise settles into him much like the soup had, warm and steady and perfect. His voice croaks a little, even as he tries to wrangle some of his affection into a joke. “Kinda sounds like you’re saying I’m talented?”

“Obviously.” The word comes immediately, striking harder than it should have. It crawls behind Usopp’s heart and glows. He doesn’t know what to say to that. i just needed to hear it from you is too fucking naked and i’ve been trying to impress you all the damn time is worse but i’m so catastrophically into you that this’ll sustain me for months is not an option, so. Sanji seems to understand some piece of it anyway: his expression gentles in that fleeting sideways way Usopp’s become unhealthily attuned to. “You know you matter to us all the time, right? Not just when you nearly kill yourself doing something flashy.”

The words wrap around something raw inside him and hold it gently. Sanji, maybe realising he’s said too much, recoils a little into sarcasm. “Anyway. Stop acting like your only function is getting concussions.”

“Yes, chef.”

“I’m serious.” He lingers for another few seconds, before he says: “Rest” and clicks the door shut behind him. 

Usopp sits there in the infirmary with the taste of soup still warm on his tongue and the imprint of Sanji’s praise moving through him. 

Chopper wastes no time in banning Usopp from anything heroic, stupid or explosive  which turns out to eliminate most of his hobbies. It's humiliating in that awful grinding way that feels designed to test whatever fragile patience he still possesses because he’s not bedridden, exactly, but he’s strapped in place all the same. The crack to his head had been mild enough, Chopper says, that the real danger now is Usopp deciding he feels fine and then doing something unwise with ladders or running or sudden turns or ambition.

The restrictions sit on him like a coat that’s too small and he, naturally, suffers very theatrically about it. He suffers at breakfast, sighing dramatically over his porridge while the crew pretends not to notice and he suffers in the quarters, staring at the ceiling like he’s been exiled from his own life. He can’t fling himself into projects or drills or the workshop and can’t disappear into the mast rigging or spend three hours perfecting a shot sequence until his shoulder burns it all out of him. He’s left with nothing but time, and time is dangerous when he’s recently developed a humiliating crush. The days stretch out like open water, too much space and too little distraction and his body, still healing, feels both too present and too restless. 

He suffers loudest in the galley, which is how he ends up there so often that by the second day Nami starts looking at him over her tea with open amusement, one eyebrow raised like she is watching a slow motion disaster unfold.

“You know,” she drawls one afternoon, voice light but knowing. “Most people recover near a window. Or in the bunk. Or literally anywhere except directly under Sanji’s feet.”

Usopp, who’s sitting at the corner of the galley table with his chin in one hand and a mug of weak tea in the other, snorts. “I’m where the soup is.”

Nami hums. “Ah, the soup. Of course. Not the man making the soup or anything.”

Across the room, Sanji doesn't turn around from the stove but the back of his neck goes pink above the collar which doesn't exactly help Usopp’s problem. The flush on Sanji’s skin makes something low in Usopp’s stomach tighten, but the embarrassment of Nami’s hinting pales in comparison to the joy in hearing Sanji talk once she’s gone.

He talks all the time, obviously: everyone on the ship knows that. He’s always yapping complaints or flirtations or recipes or insults or observations, sure, but there’s a difference between hearing Sanji talk and listening to him. Usopp, injured and idle and doomed, starts learning the difference in ways that feel almost indecent. He learns that Sanji’s voice changes when he talks about fish, discussing texture and temperature and habitat and ocean currents.  He learns that Sanji can talk for five full minutes about anchovies, voice dropping into something lower and more intent. He learns that if you ask the right question about the North Blue Sanji’s whole face shifts like some old private map has been laid gently over his features. The light in his eyes changes and his shoulders settle and the words come slower, more deliberate, like he’s testing them before he lets them out.

“The currents up there are meaner,” he says one evening while deboning something silver and narrow and furious on the cutting board. The knife moves in clean, rhythmic strokes as the fish scales catch the light like tiny mirrors. “Colder too. Fish tastes different when it’s been fighting the sea its whole life.”

Usopp, propped on one elbow at the table, the ache in his head a dull background hum, nods. “You say that like they have personalities.”

Sanji doesn’t even look up. “They do.”

Usopp laughs because Sanji’s mouth twitches everytime he gets that particular laugh out of him, which is also part of the problem. It’d be one thing if Usopp were sitting here mooning quietly while Sanji just. Tolerated his presence. But Sanji seems to like him there. He never says plainly, because god knows Sanji’d rather fling himself overboard than admit to enjoying anything too directly, but the evidence accumulates in so many devastating ways that Usopp’s body keeps firing about it whether he wants it to or not. He brings Usopp tea without asking and nudges the bread basket closer with one wrist while chopping with the other and says things like the light’s making you glow in that low gentle tone that has somehow become more intimate than kindness, the words landing warm against the side of Usopp’s neck, making the fine hairs there stand up. Most of all, he talks. About fish. About market vendors who haggle like pirates and smell like the sea. About herbs and how the right one can turn a dish from ordinary to something that makes people close their eyes on the first bite. About whether the sea in winter changes the taste of lemon peel if you store it wrong. About the way old restaurant kitchens in the North Blue smelled like wet wool and coal, the memory so vivid in his voice that Usopp can almost smell it himself. 

On the fourth day, while Sanji’s clearing scales into a paper wrap, he mutters something vicious under his breath in North Blue and Usopp’s whole body goes alert. It’s not like it’s weird: Sanji slips into North Blue all the time, whenever he’s annoyed or distracted or dedicated to cussing out Zoro, but this time it’s lower and rougher. The syllables slide against one another, thick and textured, carrying the weight of old anger and old places and it makes Usopp feel like somebody’s gone and reached into his chest to pluck at a wire. Heat floods through him in a sudden, shocking wave, low in his belly and then lower still, making his breath catch and his thighs tense against the chair. It's appallingly hot. 

He realises this, unfortunately, in real time. “Wait, what? What’d you say?”

Sanji glances over, the knife pausing in his hand. “That is me insulting a dead mackerel.”

“Yeah, but what did you say?”

“Why?”

Usopp should say that it’s simple curiosity or, like, a sudden interest in linguistics. He should say literally anything other than the truth, which is because i want to hear you do that again until i’m not freaking out about it. The heat’s still there, low and insistent, making his face flush and his pulse slaughter his throat. “I… I’ve always wanted to learn?”

Sanji leans against the bench and the movement makes his shirt pull across his chest for a second before settling again. He looks kind of baffled. “No, you haven’t.”

Usopp scrambles, good hand making some aborted gesture. “I do! I have. Like… cuss words. Or insults. For… Law!”

Sanji blinks at that, like he’s fighting a smirk. It makes sense: Law is blood in the water for Sanji, Usopp’s learned. “You want to learn North Blue swearing so you can… impress Trafalgar Law.”

Usopp, feeling the entire excuse fray as he speaks, squeaks and shakes his head with the passion of a man who has no other options. “No! Not impress, just… uh, insult? Mock? Like, c’mon, imagine how much it’ll piss him off! We can gossip in front of him.”

Sanji studies him long enough to make the whole galley feel warm. “That’s the worst excuse I’ve ever heard.”

“But… not bad enough to refuse?”

“No,” he snorts. “Not bad enough to refuse.”

He sets the fish aside, wiping his hands on the tea towel tucked and coming to the table, dragging the chair around until he’s close enough to angle himself toward Usopp at the corner, knee nearly brushing Usopp’s thigh. His voice has already dropped a little, the way it does when he teaches, focused around one person instead of the whole room. “There are levels, you know. Basic swearing versus regional swearing and your basic, average dock swearing. You’ll embarrass me if you mix them.”

Usopp swallows. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“I would. Frequently.” He starts with something easy, what appears to be a mild insult or a common curse, the kind of thing that can be thrown around Law without starting an international incident. The words roll off Sanji’s tongue in that low, textured cadence.

Usopp repeats it, badly. The sound comes out strangled and apologetic and Sanji just stares at him. “That was… tragic.”

“It sounded right in my head!” He tries it again, slower, but it’s worse somehow.

Sanji actually closes his eyes, eyelashes dark against his cheeks for a second. “Fucking hell.”

“It’s hard!”

“No, you’re making it hard because you pronounce things like you’re apologising to them.”

Usopp tries again and Sanji makes an appalled sound in the back of his throat, almost pained. “No. No. Listen.” He says the phrase one more time, more slowly still, and this time he leans in a little as he does it. The vowel’s flatter than Usopp expected, the end consonant clipped off with precise contempt as his breath ghosts warm across the space between them. Usopp stares at his mouth – which is always a terrible idea because it only leads to Usopp imagining that mouth on him and around him and the way those lips would feel parting against his own and the slide of tongue and the heat of it all. He looks away at once, face warming so fast it feels like the bruise on his shoulder has migrated upward.

“Okay,” he says, voice thinner than he wants. “I can do that.”

“You’re committing violence against my childhood, which… trust me, that’s saying something.”

“It’s not my fault your language is so dramatic!”

Sanji laughs, soft and brief and maddening, warm enough that Usopp almost feels the sound in his own. Then he does something absolutely unforgivable and reaches out, hooking two fingers under Usopp’s chin to turn his face slightly toward him and Usopp just – stops breathing. The touch is light and careful but it's also the first time Sanji has touched his face like this, deliberate and guiding. Sanji’s thumb brushes once, almost absently, along the line of bone and Usopp’s skin lights up under it, heat roaring downwards in a rush. “Your mouth.”

“What about it?” Usopp manages and can hear how thin his voice sounds, breathy and unsteady, like the word’s been dragged out of him.

“You keep swallowing the last sound,” Sanji explains, like this is a normal sentence to say while touching another person’s face. One finger taps lightly beside the corner of Usopp’s mouth, sending a white hot straight through Usopp’s lips, down his throat, straight into the heat already building low in his belly. He can feel the phantom press of it even after the finger lifts. His mouth feels suddenly too sensitive, too aware of every breath and every tiny shift. Usopp tries again, but the word comes out destroyed by the fact that Sanji is still there, He’s close enough that if Usopp leaned forward their mouths would brush and the fantasy hits him hard and fast: Sanji’s mouth on his and the low rough sound Sanji might make if Usopp got the pronunciation right in an entirely different context.

“No.” He shifts his hand, thumb at the line of Usopp’s jaw now, fingers light against his cheek. Steering, almost. “You flatten it because you’re trying to hide the sound. Open more.”

Usopp stares at his mouth instead, and neither of them moves. The galley feels smaller and warmer, the air thick with the scent of whatever is simmering on the stove and the sharper, private scent of Sanji this close. Sanji clears his throat, very softly, not pulling back in the slightest. “Again.”

Usopp does, and this time the word lands closer to right, closer to the way Sanji’s mouth shapes it and Sanji smiles, still so close Usopp feels it rather than sees it. “Less terrible.”

Usopp laughs once, helpless, but the sound comes out shaky. Sanji’s thumb shifts at his jaw, dragging across warm skin against warmer skin, before he seems to come back to himself, standing quickly.“Well,” he says, turning toward the stove with visible determination, the back of his neck pink again. “If you ever say that in front of Law, he’ll either kill you or respect you more. Hard to tell with that guy.”

Usopp sits there with his pulse trying to bleed out through his skin. His mouth still tingles where Sanji’s fingers had been. The heat low in his body hasn't faded. “Can you teach me another one?”

That makes Sanji laugh outright. “Fine, one more. But this one’s useless unless you’re planning to insult a man’s taste in boots which… actually, yeah, insult his boots. That’ll be funny.”

Usopp spends the next ten minutes learning a phrase he will absolutely never use on Law, because it’d require Luffy to save Usopp’s life from Kikoku, probably. They’re both flushed by the end of it, cheeks warm and breathing a little uneven, just enough that when Nami walks into the galley looking for oranges, she takes one glance at Usopp in his chair and Sanji at the stove and smirks. “What’s this?”

Usopp says: “Language lesson.” Sanji says, at exactly the same time: “Nothing.”

Nami’s eyes narrow but she just takes the oranges and leaves with one faintly suspicious hum. When the door shuts behind her, neither of them speaks for a second. The galley feels too quiet, air still carrying the ghost of that closeness. Then Sanji mutters something in North Blue under his breath and Usopp lights up instantly. “No, wait, what’s that one?”

x

Honestly, for his first proper crush, Usopp had hoped for fireworks – or, rather, he’d hoped for the opposite of fireworks, just one clean humiliating burn and a few days of private suffering before the whole stupid thing gutters itself out from lack of oxygen. He’d hoped it's the sort of crush that fed on novelty, just a badly timed revelation that Sanji’s somehow even more alive in private than he’d ever seemed in the broad daylight of the deck.

Instead, over the next few weeks it settles and becomes just another part of his life. He gets used to wanting someone impossible and knowing that there’s nowhere for the wanting to go but deeper inwards. It lives in his chest like a second heartbeat, sometimes sharp when Sanji laughs too close or brushes past him and sometimes softer, like the ghost of fingers under his chin from that language lesson, still warm against his jaw even days later. He carries it the way he carries the lingering ache in his skull: familiar now, just part of the landscape of his body.

Usopp pictures it sometimes, against his will – Sanji with someone else, the easy chemistry, the way those hands might fit together – and the image lands in his gut like a stone. Sometimes he pictures Sanji with him and it’s almost worse for how badly it leaves him aching afterwards. He laughs about it and aches about it and commiserates about it and jerks off about it and doesn’t cry about it, not once, but it sits there like a badly formed scar anyway.  

Even so, knowing that there’s no chance in hell doesn't stop him drifting to the galley. He spends so much time there that even Chopper starts accepting it as part of the recovery plan and Robin smiles over her book when she finds him at the table with tea gone cold and two hours’ worth of attention fixed shamelessly on Sanji discussing the politics of large scale fishing.  Nami’s stopped making jokes about it and has moved into that much crueler territory of just – looking at him with that quiet, knowing judgement.  Only Sanji seems unbothered – he never acts like Usopp’s intruding, never glances up and asks why. He just folds Usopp into the room the way he folds salt into dough. He talks and Usopp listens and, honestly, Usopp doesn’t even care what the topic is anymore. He just likes hearing Sanji think out loud.

All this to say, it’s rare to find him outside the galley but he convinces himself to do some actual work and has locked himself up in there, surrounded by springs and copper wire and a half finished launcher casing when the door bangs open hard enough to rattle the wall. Usopp nearly drops the pliers, a little too loud in the sudden silence.

Sanji is in the doorway looking… frazzled, which is alarming. His hair’s windblown, strands falling across his forehead in a way that makes Usopp’s fingers itch to smooth them back. One side of his collar is turned up and the other tucked wrong, like he shoved a jacket on and then forgot what the fuck a mirror was. His mouth opens. Closes. 

Then he just. Turns around and leaves.

Usopp stares at the empty doorway and gets three whole seconds before Sanji comes back. This time, he plants himself more firmly in the doorway like he’s bullying his own body into staying. His hands flex once at his sides, empty, restless and Usopp has never seen the other man like this. Sanji can be nervous, sure – Usopp’s witnessed flashes of it around women or around certain families as a general subject or during the occasional disaster – but this is different. This is, like, visible disarray. His breathing is a little quick and his ears are bright, bright pink. 

Usopp puts the pliers down properly. “Are you alright, man?”

Sanji blinks. “Yes. No. I dunno.”

Usopp sits there, every instinct in him suddenly alert because this is either very good or very bad. He can’t yet tell which but his body, unhelpfully, decides to assume both – pulse spiking and stomach tightening, the low familiar ache in his chest flaring into something sharper, more hopeful and terrified at once. Sanji runs a hand through his hair.  When he finally speaks, the words are so rushed together they’re almost unintelligible. “D’you want to come have lunch?”

Usopp’s brain stops. He’s heard the words, sure, and understands them from some distant kind of way, before he translates them into every safer possibility available. Lunch means errands. Lunch means carrying things. Lunch means Nami’s busy and Luffy’s useless and Zoro’s asleep so Usopp has been selected as the current least worst option. Lunch means company in the abstract. “Sorry?” he manages intelligently.

Sanji’s mouth tightens. “Lunch. With me.”

Usopp laughs, the sound jumping out too loud in the small workshop. “Right, I got that part, I just –”

Sanji’s shoulders go up. “Forget it.”

Usopp stands so fast he nearly stacks it. “No, wait. What kind of lunch?”

Sanji gives him a look of such withering disbelief that Usopp almost laughs. “The edible kind.”

“No, I mean… like, am I helping with… something?”

“No,” he returns, sharp enough to cut. “Not helping, not carrying, not because everybody else is busy. Just…” He stops, resetting and trying for gentle again with visible effort. The words come out quieter, more careful. “Lunch. With me.”

Usopp’s face burns so fast it feels like the bruise on his shoulder has caught fire. “Oh.”

Sanji rolls his eyes to the ceiling. “Yeah, oh.”

There’s a silence large enough to fall into. Usopp’s heart is still racing even as he says, fumbling: “Oh, uh. Y-Yeah. Okay.” 

The room goes quiet in a completely different way, Sanji’s expression changing so quickly Usopp almost misses the relief. It’s there, though, almost sweet enough to kill with. The pink on his face softens into something warmer. “Well. Good. Obviously.”

Usopp nods because nodding’s easier than trying to fucking talk. His body feels strange, light and heavy at the same time, like he’s standing on the edge of something. “R-Right. Good.”

Sanji lingers for one second more, then says, too casually: “We’re heading out in ten.” Then he disappears again, this time for real, leaving Usopp to stand there in the workshop alone, brain racing over the details: twenty minutes / lunch / ashore / with Sanji / no buffer. His body responds with a full, immediate panic.He looks down at his workshop clothes with their smudged sleeves and the two tiny scorch marks near one cuff from yesterday’s testing and a streak of graphite on one thumb and knows Sanji has seen him disheveled a hundred times but then races to change his shirt anyway. Then he changes it again, twice more, and finally stands in front of the little mirror in the bathroom and has a neat little panic attack about it all.

This is ridiculous, he tries telling himself. He’s going to lunch, not a fucking wedding. Sanji had said lunch in exactly the tone one uses for lunch and there’s no evidence that this means anything except that Sanji wants company and, somehow, chose him. His reflection stares back, eyes too wide and mouth slightly open, the flush still high on his cheekbones. He presses his hand flat against his chest like he can hold his heartbeat in place, but it doesn’t work.

By the time he gets back to the deck his stomach has tied itself into a knot so tight he can feel it in his throat. Sanji’s waiting by the gangplank with one hand in his pocket and his jacket slung open, hair lifted a little by the breeze so that the afternoon light catches in the strands and turns them gold at the edges. His face’s back under control as though the workshop disarray had been imagined, but there is still something unusual in him: an edge of nervousness that shows in the way he shifts his weight. He looks over when Usopp appears, gaze dropping to take in the changed shirt. Usopp dies on the spot, but Sanji says nothing about the outfit. “You took your time.”

“I was busy?”

“Suspicious.”

“Yeah, well, your face is suspicious.” Usopp falls into step beside him down the gangplank in a state very close to dissociation. Even his legs feel like they belong to someone else. He’d assumed – well, he hadn’t really thought clearly enough to call it an assumption but he’d pictured a cafe maybe, or some random noodle place. Instead, three streets into town, Sanji turns down a quieter road towards the edge of the harbour gardens and Usopp finally notices, with dawning disbelief, the basket in his hand. He slows down. “What’s that?”

Sanji glances at the basket like he’s only just remembered it exists. “Thought it’d be easier than a cafe.”

Usopp can barely speak. The world feels big and fuzzy around him. “Because?”

Sanji shrugs with fake carelessness so fucking badly hidden it becomes almost endearing. “I wanted somewhere less noisy.”

Usopp looks at him and the basket and the harbour gardens ahead and very, very carefully doesn't let himself ask why me? He follows the other man into the garden where the grass is bright in the sun and warm under touch. There are white benches and crooked stone paths and one fig tree leaning toward the harbour and Sanji leads him to a patch of shade there, setting the basket down. Sanji unfolds a blanket neatly and, inside the basket, is bread and cheese and olives and sliced tomatoes and cold fish and fruit and two bottles of lemonade. Usopp stares. “This is… you made it all?”

Sanji’s face goes pink again. “Obviously, or we’d just be standing over an empty basket like idiots.”

Usopp laughs helplessly. “I thought you meant, like. Lunch.”

Sanji glares. “This is lunch. Sit down before I decide not to feed you.”

Usopp sits, because what else can he do? The grass is warm against the backs of his legs and the shade moves softly around them, dappled light shifting across Sanji’s hands as he arranges the food.  For a while they just eat, Sanji tearing olives in half with his fingers and making judgmental little noises everytime Usopp reaches for the tomatoes before the fish. It’s so fucking nice that Usopp keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop and for Sanji to reveal the task or the errand or the actually hidden inside all this like a splinter under skin but it doesn’t come. Slowly – very slowly – delight starts pushing back the panic because Sanji is here and because the basket is real and because Sanji made them food and brought him somewhere beautiful and seems, against all logic, to simply want his company in the sunlight.

Usopp can hardly bear it. He also can’t stop smiling. Sanji catches him once and sighs. “You’re doing the strange little face again.”

“What strange little face?” 

“The one where you look happy at me. Disturbing.”

Usopp’s heart practically leaves his chest, slamming against his ribs. It’s not enough to kill the smile, though; he looks down at his bread and chooses his words carefully. “Maybe I just like lunch.”

Sanji’s quiet for one beat too long, the shade moving across his face to soften the sharp lines of it. His voice is soft. “Me too.”

Usopp doesn’t look up right away – he can’t, or he’s going to do something incredibly stupid like blush or kiss him or just outright confess. He sits there instead with the taste of lemon and salt on his tongue, and the impossible, terrifying, wonderful knowledge that this is real. For the first time in weeks the ache in his chest feels less like grief and more like something that might, against all odds, be allowed to hope. 

Sanji talks about the Baratie a little and Zeff a lot, about how he insisted every apprentice learn to sharpen knives before touching one and how he’d stand over them in the kitchen with that permanent scowl, making them do it again and again until the blade sang when it caught the light. He talks about how Carne can identify spices blindfolded, rattling them off by scent alone like reading from a map only he can see and how Patty had once thrown a customer into the sea for insulting the soup, the man’s hat still floating on the waves when they looked out the window.

“I thought he was joking,” Sanji snorts, lying on his side now with his head propped up on one elbow and the remains of their picnic spread between them. The sunlight filters through the fig leaves in shifting patches, catching on the condensation still beading on the lemonade bottles and turning the droplets into tiny little prisms.

“He wasn’t?”

“He absolutely was not. He’s got a mean throw on him.”  

Usopp laughs, the sound coming out warm and easy. “They sound fun.”

Sanji smiles into his lemonade as the breeze moves through the grass around them, carrying the faint salt of the harbour and the warmer, greener scent of the leaves overhead. 

In turn, Usopp tells him a little more about building impossible treehouses that leaned like they were drunk, held together by rope and hope and the occasional stolen nail and about pretending the forest monsters were real until half the village children believed him and started leaving offerings of bread crusts and shiny rocks at the edge of the woods and how Kaya laughed so much when she heard about it that she snorted water. Sanji’s own laugh breaks out of him, warm and bright, and Usopp knows he’d happily spend whole afternoons chasing that laugh. He wants to bottle it. He wants to hear it again and again until it becomes part of the background noise of his days, the way the ship’s hum and the sea’s hush already are.

At some point, Sanji stretches out on the blanket with one arm tucked behind his head to peer up at the fig leaves. His shirt’s ridden up slightly at the waist, revealing a little strip of skin above the waistband of his pants that Usopp’s trying very hard not to stare at. He peels an orange to keep his hands busy, trying to get his fingernails under the rind without mangling it and Sanji watches for a second, then reaches across to take it. He starts slivering the peel in neat, perfect spirals that curl into his lap like ribbons.

Usopp watches the blade and Sanji’s fingers and the way the other man’s eyebrows are drawn together just slightly, like he’s concentrating on something much more complicated than an orange. “And… Kaya. She means a lot to you, right?”

“Yeah?” Usopp blinks, surprised. “I mean, of course. I don’t know what I would’ve done without her.”

Sanji doesn’t look up. The knife keeps moving in clean, precise strokes. “Are you in love with her?”

The question is so fucking unexpected that it takes a second to land. Usopp watches the orange peel curl into Sanji’s lap and then smiles, small and honest. “Nah. I love her, I always will. For a while I thought maybe… maybe we’d get married some day? But it’s not like that.”

Sanji hands a segment of orange back, expression closed off in a way Usopp rarely sees, something shuttered and careful behind his eyes. Usopp thinks desperately for a moment, trying to find the shape of what he wants to say, the words coming to him slower than usual. “I spent years thinking that’s what romantic love was supposed to feel like, y’know? And then I left but she still feels like home. Like family? I’d do anything for her, but it’s… it’s not like that.”

Sanji doesn’t answer for a long time. He keeps his head bowed and eyes locked on the peel in his lap, rolling one piece of it between his fingers over and over, looking like he’s thinking about throwing himself in the ocean. The pink from his ears has crept down to his neck. Usopp can see the way his jaw works, like he’s swallowing something down.

“Yeah,” Sanji says at last, voice low. “I… that makes sense.”

There’s a long silence. The words crowd and crowd against Usopp’s teeth until he can’t take it anymore, heart already doing something stupid and huge in his chest just from being here, just from the way Sanji had said me too like it meant something. He wants – desperately, achingly – to know more, about Sanji and if he ever thinks about romance and if any of this quiet, careful afternoon has anything to do with him. But. He also desperately doesn’t want to know, because if he asks and the answer is anyone but him it’ll break something he’s only just started to let himself feel.

He blurts it out anyway, voice too bright. “What about you? Did you find – uh. Got a… you know. The women.”

Sanji doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, he folds the orange peel neatly into a little spiral, fingers moving like he needs something to do with his hands. The silence stretches long enough that Usopp’s stomach has twisted so badly he thinks he might actually throw up all of that delicious bread, and then Sanji says, very quietly: “Not exactly.”

“No?”

He shakes his head. The pink on his face deepens. He still won’t look at Usopp. “I’ve been… thinking about trying something different. To women.”

The world stops. For one impossible, blazing instant Usopp’s heart does something so enormous it hurts, like it’s trying to crack open his ribs from the inside. The possibility of Sanji being interested in men or just – people – slams into him so completely that for half a second he genuinely can’t breathe. His whole body lights up with it, stupid and helpless and full of something that feels dangerously close to hope and then reason arrives like a bucket of cold water because surely not. Surely! And even if… even if Sanji were interested in men it still wouldn’t be him. Of course it wouldn’t be him. The hope crashes so fast and so hard it leaves him dizzy and crushed, panicking. His chest feels like it’s caving in and his mouth’s already moving before his brain catches up, because he has to fix this, has to make it normal, has to smooth this over before he does something stupid like hope out loud. He swallows. “Oh, like… oh.”

Sanji looks up. “Oh?”

“That’s…” Usopp smiles far too brightly. His face feels hot. His hands are shaking a little around the orange segment. “That’s great!”

Something flickers across Sanji’s face, something small and vulnerable that disappears almost instantly. “So…”

Usopp keeps talking because silence suddenly feels fatal, the words tumbling out too fast and too loud and too desperate. “You should!”

Sanji frowns. “I should?”

“Like, sure! If women aren’t – if you’ve been thinking about other – you know! You should meet guys!” Usopp hears himself speaking from somewhere very far away, like he’s watching someone else ruin everything in real time. “You’re Sanji. You’d have, like…” He laughs, the sound cracking. “A line.”

Sanji is staring now, the orange forgotten in his hand. His ears are burning red.

“You could meet people in ports!” Usopp keeps going, because stopping feels like dying. His voice is getting higher. “Franky probably knows guys. Or we could ask Robin!”

“What’re you –”

“I’m just saying!” His own voice sounds increasingly desperate, like it’s trying to outrun the crushing weight in his chest. “We could find you someone. I mean, imagine. You’d have a – a boyfriend in no time. If that’s what you wanted! And I’m not saying you do!”

The silence feels heavy and awful as Sanji sets the orange down very carefully on the cloth. His fingers linger on it for a second too long, like he needs the anchor. “Right.”

Something inside Usopp clenches so hard he almost makes a sound. He doesn’t understand why, only that suddenly the afternoon feels colder and the sunlight through the leaves seems dimmer and that he’s said something wrong. He doesn’t know what, but he knows Sanji well enough now to recognise that Sanji’s easy warmth has folded away and that the easy way Sanji had been looking at him earlier is gone. Now he’s looking at the harbour instead, jaw tight, the pink on his face no longer just embarrassment but something sharper. He still smiles and still answers questions when Usopp stumbles through them and still even laughs once or twice but it’s thinner now. 

The conversation keeps tripping over itself and Usopp hates it. He starts overthinking every sentence before he says it and stops halfway through stories and laughs too quickly. Everytime he opens his mouth he’s terrified he’s going to say something else that makes Sanji pull further away. The whole afternoon feels like something beautiful with one invisible crack running through it.

Eventually, Usopp can’t stand the silence anymore. “Sorry.”

Sanji glances over, mouth guarded in a way that makes Usopp’s chest ache even worse. “For what?”

“I don’t know.” The worst part is how genuine it is. 

Sanji studies him and his smile is small and tired and awful, frankly. “You don’t have anything to apologise for.”

When they pack the basket away they’re still talking, technically, but the rhythm has changed, like they’re both reaching for words instead of finding them. Walking back through town, they bump shoulders once and usually one of them would joke about it but, now, no-one does. Usopp keeps replaying the conversation in his head.

you should meet guys

we could find you someone

He hopes he hasn’t embarrassed Sanji or made him think he was weird or… anything, really. It’s weird enough that when they reach the Sunny again Sanji lifts the picnic basket with practiced ease and says, lightly enough that only someone paying impossible attention would hear the effort underneath it: “Thanks for coming.”

The next few days are unbearable, in the worst possible way, because they’re tense and awkward and just. Quiet. It gets to the point that Usopp almost wishes the ship would be attacked again because a proper fight, at least, would be something. An explosion has a beginning and an end and he can handle that. Someone’ll shout and something’ll explode and everyone’ll know where to stand.

This quiet is infinitely worse. At first, he thinks Sanji is tired, maybe, or just… overwhelmed by the picnic. Maybe Usopp talked too much and made it weird when he offered to set Sanji up with guys like some fucking idiot, when the truth was he’d been over the whole damn moon for half a second that Sanji might like men and then immediately, viciously crushed by the certainty that it wouldn’t be him.

When Sanji sets his breakfast down without the usual muttered insult about Usopp’s posture or a flick to the back of his head for reaching too early, Usopp tells himself not to overreact and that Sanji’s just busy. When he asks how Usopp’s shoulder is and barely waits for the answer before turning away, Usopp tells himself Sanji has multiple other people to feed. When he spends the afternoon in the galley with the door mostly shut, Usopp tells himself there’s probably a lot of prep to do. When Usopp finally wanders in under the flimsy pretence of needing rosemary and Sanji says third jar on the left instead than telling him he’s blind and making him come closer to identify it by smell – well.

That one hurts.

Usopp stands there with the jar in his hand, staring at the back of Sanji’s head. The galley smells like always, beautiful and warm, but it feels like a completely different planet. The knife moves quickly against the board, closed and final and Usopp can see the tension in Sanji’s shoulders, holding himself like he’s braced for something. He replays the picnic again: the way Sanji had looked when Usopp said you should try guys! and the way Sanji had put the orange down so carefully, the easy warmth being packed up like it had never been there.

Usopp clears his throat. “So.” The silence does not open for him, so he forces himself to continue.  “What’re you making?”

“Dinner.”

“Yeah, I gathered that.” Usopp feels stupid immediately, turning the rosemary jar between his hands, the scent rising sharply. He tries again. “Anything interesting?”

“Not really.”

“Oh. Cool.” He manages about nine seconds before he has to leave, chest awfully tight and stomach doing that low, seasick twist it only gets when something important’s shifted and he doesn’t know how to fix it.

By the second day, it’s not even remotely deniable that Sanji’s acting differently with him. He’s still perfectly capable of shouting at Luffy and still kicks Zoro with gusto and still melts into hearts and flowers whenever Nami or Robin walks into the room. Even those performances feel thinner, though. His temper sits closer to the surface and he smokes more – Usopp catches him at the rail twice in one afternoon, staring out at the sea like he’s trying to outrun something. He disappears between meals and spends long stretches where he can’t be approached without making the approach embarrassingly obvious.

And with Usopp – it’s like the past few weeks never happened. There’s no casual shoulder touches and no tea pushed towards him and no North Blue muttered low enough that Usopp can pretend not to be listening. It’s awful, how much Usopp misses him, and also ridiculous because Sanji is right there. He’s five metres away feet away most of the day and Usopp misses him so badly it feels like seasickness. He misses the jokes and misses Sanji talking just to talk and misses being a part of galley, like his presence there was expected. He misses the way Sanji used to look at him when Usopp said something clever, that quick bright spark of recognition before the insult came down over it.

Now, every interaction feels like approaching a frightened animal or an unexploded weapon, and sometimes both together.

Usopp can’t stop obsessing over it. He lies in his bunk at night and sees the picnic again and again: the fig tree, the sunlight on Sanji’s face when he stretched out on the blanket, the way Sanji had talked so openly and freely and then the crash – the way Usopp had panicked and started offering to find Sanji a boyfriend. He thinks about Sanji with other guys. Some cool, elegant man in port or someone who knows what to do with their hands or someone who isn’t Usopp and the hatred he feels borders on violent. Worse than that, he worries that Sanji might actually do it now because Usopp made it sound like a good idea. 

On the third afternoon, Zoro mentions it. Usopp’s sitting near the mast, pretending to inspect the tension on a trial slingshot band while actually watching Sanji cross the deck carrying a tray. Sanji hands Robin her coffee and passes Nami a glass of something iced and sets Luffy’s snack down with a warning that’s ignored anyway, and then he goes and walks past Usopp without looking at him.

Usopp’s fingers slip on the band. Beside him, Zoro opens his eye. “What did you do?”

Usopp nearly launches the slingshot into the ocean. “Huh?!”

Zoro jerks his chin vaguely after Sanji. “He’s been acting weirder than usual.”

“I didn’t do anything!”

Zoro closes his eye again, settling deeper against the mast. “Don’t need to be a doctor to see somebody kicked a dog. He looks miserable. You look miserable. Figure it out.”

Usopp sits there with his slingshot in his lap and an awful crawling sensation under his skin because Zoro is right: Sanji does look miserable and he is miserable. He sits there until the sun starts to sink, the slingshot band going slack in his hands, and wonders how something that had felt so bright for a few hours could leave him feeling this hollow.

In the evening, he goes to the galley for a coil of kitchen twine and it’s genuine, honestly:  Franky needs it for a temporary seal and the workshop supply’s run out. Usopp could ask someone else, he knows, but some pathetic part of him keeps believing each visit might be the one where Sanji finally turns around and acts normal again.

The galley’s hot with steam that clings to the air like a second skin, thick with the smell of simmering stock and garlic and the faint sweetness of something baking in the oven. Sanji looks busy, moving quickly he gets when he’s juggling too many things at once. Usopp knows he should take the twine and leave but after finding it in the drawer near the pantry, he lingers. The twine feels rough against his fingers and he turns it over and over like it might give him courage, watching the other man move from the stove to the bench.

“You’ve been busy lately,” Usopp forces and the words come out lighter than he feels. 

Sanji stops, just for a second, before he resumes wrapping the meat. “I’m always busy.”

“I know.” Usopp turns the twine over in his hands. “I just mean…”

He doesn’t know how to say it. you don’t talk to me anymore. did i embarrass you? did i make you regret asking me ashore? do you hate me now? What comes out is smaller and stupider. “You’ve been keeping to yourself.”

Sanji’s shoulders tighten. He huffs through his nose, short and exasperated.

“I’m not saying that’s bad,” Usopp adds quickly. “Just, you know. You’re usually…”

“Usually what?” Sanji’s voice is flat, but there’s a thread of pure petulance running through it now, like he’s been holding this in and it’s starting to leak out sideways.

Usopp swallows. “Around.”

Sanij stops what he’s doing and turns, expression controlled enough for most people, but Usopp knows him well enough to see the strain underneath it. “Well,” he says, waving one hand in a vague, irritated circle. “Aapparently I need the time.”

“Oh, uh. For what?”

There’s a pause as Sanji rolls his eyes towards the ceiling like he can’t believe he has to explain this.  “To go find myself a boyfriend, wasn’t that the plan?”

Usopp freezes; the galley seems to contract around them. Steam rises between the stove and ceiling in lazy curls and all he can do is stand there with his heart in his throat. “What?”

Sanji picks up the wrapping paper again, but he doesn’t do anything. He just holds it, looking at Usopp with this exhausted, snarky expression. “You had plenty of suggestions, right? Franky knows people, apparently. Robin might be able to help. Maybe I should just hang a sign at the next port, save everyone the trouble.” The words are clipped and sarcastic and nothing like the careful distance of the last few days.

Usopp’s face goes hot, then cold. He hears the sharpness in his own voice but he can’t pull it back. “What the hell?”

For one bare second, something wounded flashes openly across Sanji’s face, quick and raw, before it gets buried under another layer of whatever expression he’s carting around for public consumption. “Nothing.”

“That’s bullshit.” Usopp puts the twine down on the bench, the heat of the galley suddenly unbearable against his skin. “You’ve barely spoken to me for three days. You won’t even look at me half the time.”

Sanji’s mouth tightens. “I said forget it.”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to forget!”

“Then congratulations,” Sanji snaps, voice jumping higher at the end like he’s personally offended that Usopp doesn’t just magically understand. “You don’t know, so clearly it doesn’t matter.”

“That makes no sense!”

Sanji turns sharply back to the stove, shoulders up around his ears. “Dinner’s in twenty.”

Usopp stands there, stunned by the dismissal. “Sanji, c’mon.”

“It’s fine,” Sanji says quickly, but this time his voice comes quiet and strained, like it’s costing him something awful. He doesn’t look at Usopp again. “I got the message loud and clear. You can… I’m sorry I assumed. Dinner’s in twenty.”

Usopp wants to spin him around, wants to ask what the fuck, wants to dig to the bottom of this before it continues eating them alive, but he knows it won’t get anywhere. Not with Sanji’s shoulders set like that. He gathers the twine again, nauseated by how badly this has turned, and leaves. 

x

The next morning, he’s still carrying the kitchen twine around like it might protect him from his own thoughts when Nami corners him on the deck. She moves fast, leaning against the rail with her arms crossed, one eyebrow already raised like she’s been waiting for him to walk into her trap. “Sit.”

Usopp freezes. “I was just –”

“Sit.”

He sits because he’s learned not to make her ask thrice. Nami stays standing for a moment longer, looking down at him like she’s deciding whether to lecture him or throw him overboard. Then she sighs and drops down beside him. “Even I’m worried now, and I don’t even like getting involved in this kind of thing. But Sanji’s been acting like someone wrecked his favourite pan or whatever and you look like you haven’t slept in months, so. What the hell happened on that date?”

The word hits him like a slap. “Sorry, what – date?”

Nami stares at him and Usopp stares back and the silence stretches so long he can hear his own heartbeat, suddenly thunderous in his ears. He can feel how hot his face is. Nami’s expression shifts into something that can only be described as deeply, personally wounded.  “You cannot be serious.”

“What?” Usopp’s voice cracks. His heart’s already doing that panicked flutter it’s been doing since the picnic, but now it’s galloping. “We didn’t – we never went on a date. It was just lunch. He asked me to lunch. Because he wanted company. Or – or because everyone else was busy? I don’t know. It wasn’t –”

Nami holds up one hand, the look on her face so incredulous it borders on dangerous. “Usopp. The picnic.”

Usopp’s mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. His face is burning so hot he’s surprised steam isn’t coming off his skin.

“But it couldn’t have been a date,” he says and the words come out small and desperate and way too fast. “He’s, you know. We’re friends. And he was probably just being nice. He probably just wanted to talk about Zeff! Or – or he wanted to talk about the thing and I made it weird by offering to set him up and now he’s –”

Nami makes a sound like she's physically restraining herself from strangling him. She takes a slow, deliberate breath and then another and when she speaks again, her voice is very, very patient.  She starts counting on her fingers. “By all accounts, Sanji asked you to lunch. He cooked everything himself. He took you somewhere private and quiet. He fed you. He told you personal things. And now you’ve spent three entire days acting like a sad, sad little man while he got all weird and distant because he thinks you rejected him. That was a date.”

Usopp’s brain is doing something complicated and painful, stuck at the way Sanji had looked when he’d asked if Usopp wanted to come ashore and the way he’d planted himself in the workshop doorway and the way he’d gone quiet and careful after Usopp started offering to find him other men. The way he’d looked at Usopp in the galley last night – exasperated and wounded and petulant all at once – when he threw the picnic back in his face.

Usopp feels like the deck is wobbling under him. “He’s not interested in me,” he says again, weaker this time. “You’re reading this really, really wrong.”

Nami pinches the bridge of her nose so hard it looks painful. “He’s been looking at you like you hung the moon. He lets you hang out in his space for hours. He planned a whole date. And now he’s sulking and smoking and being an asshole because he thinks you don’t want him back.” She drops her hand and looks at him, eyes sharp and fond and deeply pained all at once. “Listen, I cannot watch you two be this stupid for another week.”

Usopp sits there with the twine still in his hands, the morning sun warm on his face, and feels his whole world kind of fracture. The word date spins around and around his head, lapping and overlapping everything except the sheer white noise happening. He thinks he might actually throw up or cry or both: his chest feels like it’s caving in and expanding at the same time. The last three days crash over him in one horrible wave, from the polite distance to missing Sanji so badly it felt insane to how Sanji had looked.

Nami watches his face cycle through approximately seventeen different stages of horror and sighs again, softer this time. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

x

Usopp has faced giants. He’s stood in front of men who could kill him with one hand and lied directly into their faces and has fired impossible shots through impossible drama and has kept moving while his bones felt loose and his teeth tasted like blood. 

He knows what courage is but courage, unfortunately, feels nothing like confidence. Mostly, it feels like nausea.

He opens the galley door with hands that are not quite steady, breath held like he’s about to step onto a battlefield instead of into the familiar warmth of Sanji’s domain. He shuts the door behind him but that feels too deliberate, like he’s trapping them both in here and panic spikes, so he opens it again a crack. Then feels stupid for that, too, and closes it again. Sanji watches this happen from the corner of his eye, a whisk in his hand moving in controlled circles. Pale yellow custard clings to the wires.

Usopp clears his throat. His voice comes out rough. “Are you… still busy?”

“Yes.”

He’d expected that answer but it still knocks half the air out of him. “Right.”

Nami had said to tell the truth. Nami did not say he had to tell it now, in a hot galley while Sanji’s holding a metal implement and looks like he’s one step away from homicide. He can wait. He can make a plan! He can write something down and then burn it and then write a better thing and then fake his own death before delivery. Instead he hears himself ask: “Are you busy later?”

The whisk stops but Sanji doesn’t look at him. “Probably.”

Usopp’s pulse thuds in his throat. He grips the seam of his overalls so tightly his hands sing with the pain. The crow’s nest is the first place that arrives in his mind, high above the ship and private and quiet. It could be the kind of place one might take dessert and talk without Luffy crashing through a wall – the kind of place that sounds alarmingly romantic the second he imagines inviting Sanji there. Usopp’s courage nearly deserts him. He drags it back by force. “Maybe we can have dessert in the crow’s nest? Later?”

Sanji’s hand pauses again and, this time, the silence lasts longer. Usopp can hear the low simmer of something on the stove and the faint hush of the ship around them. He rushes onwards before he can interpret what Sanji’s pause means. “Or not dessert! Tea. Or food. I know dessert is food. I mean something small. Unless you’re hungry, obviously, then something larger but you’d be making it, which feels rude, so I could bring something, except you probably wouldn’t trust anything I make, which is fair –”

“Usopp.” Sanji’s expression’s unreadable except for the hurt still sitting stubbornly under it, like something he hasn’t been able to shake since the picnic. The whisk is held loosely in one hand. “I’m busy, okay?”

Usopp feels himself flinch anyway. “Oh.”

The dismissal hangs there and this is it, then, this is the moment where Usopp should accept that Nami got it wrong or understood one piece and built too much around it. Sanji had been experimenting, maybe. Flirting because he flirts and asking questions because Usopp was there and safe and easy to talk to. Maybe the picnic had been a trial run for wanting men in general. Maybe Usopp really had only been the last available person. The old certainty opens underneath him with terrible familiarity and it takes an insane amount of force to shut it down. 

“Me too,” he blurts, before he has a hope in hell of stopping himself. His heart slams against his ribs so brutally it hurts. He laughs once, breathless and miserable. He’s reached the edge now: there’s nowhere left to retreat without making all of this worse. He does the bravest thing he can think of and tries, anyway. He says it badly but he fucking says it. “I don’t always think about women, either.”

Sanji stares at him as the whole galley goes very quiet. Even the low bubble of the pot on the stove seems to hold its breath. Usopp suddenly cannot feel his hands. Sanji finally sets the whisk down.“What does that mean?”

Usopp’s mouth dries out completely. “It means…” he glances at the door behind him, considering escaping through it at speed, but then Sanji follows his gaze and the hurt on his face tightens into something else, and Usopp panics all over again. “No, wait. I’m not leaving. I just – I mean, yeah. Men, too. Sometimes.” He stands rigidly, waiting for the floor to split open beneath him.

Sanji doesn’t move. His expression has frozen, like he’s afraid any reaction might scare Usopp off, so Usopp feels compelled to keep explaining because silence has always been the place where his worst thoughts breed fastest. “Not only men! I mean, I don’t think? I’ve liked women. Or thought I did. Kaya, sort of, although we covered that. But I’ve also – men. Sometimes. One man. Not only one man ever, necessarily. Just currently one particular –” He bites down on the rest.

Sanji’s eyes sharpen. “One particular man.”

Usopp can hear the question under the statement; he feels heat climb all the way into his scalp. “Yeah. One guy. One… one guy.”

Sanji absorbs this, slowly. He looks away, like he needs somewhere else to put his face while the meaning settles and when he speaks again his voice is quieter. “I see.”

Usopp laughs nervously. “Do you?”

“No.”

“Oh, good. Neither do I.”

That almost earns him a smile, almost. The corner of Sanji’s mouth twitches before it settles back into something more careful. Sanji reaches for the whisk, then seems to think better of it and braces both hands against the bench instead. “And this guy…”

Usopp watches him, heart tripping over itself so hard he feels dizzy. “Yeah, you’d hate him. Real funny guy, you know? Tall and… tall. Really cool. The whole North Blue thing.”

Sanji exhales slowly through his nose. “I swear, if you’re talking about Law –”

Usopp barks a laugh, startled and a little unhinged. “No, definitely – not really my type.”

Sanji studies him carefully. The guarded look has cracked just slightly at the edges. “Which is?”

“Ah, you know. The kind who listens to all my stupid questions and makes me bread and takes me on a –” He can’t make himself say date. The word feels too fragile and too presumptuous and too much like taking something Sanji has not yet handed him.

Sanji saves him from it, though not kindly. The hurt in his voice is sharper now. “Date? Where you then… told me I should find other guys?”

Usopp’s nerves spike so sharply his vision seems to narrow at the edges because, yeah, okay, that’s fair and also the part he’s afraid of. His mind races ahead through every possible humiliation: he could move into the workshop permanently. He could volunteer for lookout until death. He could throw Nami overboard, though she’d just return angrier and somehow cooler. “I mean, I just meant… I want you to be happy? And I didn’t think you could mean me and I panicked and -”

“Why not?” Sanji’s fingers curl tighter against the edge of the bench. “Why wouldn’t I mean you?”

Usopp drags both hands down his face, fingers pressing into his eyes like he can physically hold the panic in. “Because you’re you? You’re cool and you can cook and fight and you know things about the sea I’ve never even thought to ask and everybody likes you, even people who pretend they don’t, and if you wanted someone you could have – anyone. Some terrifyingly handsome waiter in some port who knows how to say the right thing without listing possible romantic rivals like an idiot and I’m me – ”

Sanji’s expression hardens instantly, eyes flashing hot. “If you say something cruel about yourself right now I’ll kick you.”

Usopp’s mouth closes with an audible click as the other man pushes away from the bench. He does not come much closer, but the movement still changes the air between them, making it feel smaller and more charged. “Do you have any idea how…” he stops, exhales sharply through his nose, like he’s trying to find the right words and they keep slipping away from him. “You’re incredible, Usopp. You’re so fucking smart it makes me crazy. You make up entire worlds on the spot and then make people believe in them. You keep going when anyone else would’ve given up. You’re brave in ways that have nothing to do with fighting and everything to do with showing up even when you’re terrified. And you think I wouldn’t want you?”

Usopp’s face is so hot he’s surprised the poor custard isn’t curdling from the radiant heat. His heart is doing something violent and acrobatic behind his ribs, like it’s trying to escape through his throat. He can’t look at Sanji but he also can’t look away and everytime he tries to form a word all he can wring out is a faint, strangled noise.

Sanji just keeps going. “You tell the stupidest stories and I still want to hear every single one. You get this look on your face when you’re about to lie and it’s so obvious and cute that I let you get away with it half the time. Your hands –” He breaks off for half a second, like he’s embarrassed by his own mouth, before pushing through anyway. His ears are pink. “You just. Have good hands. Steady. I watch them sometimes when you’re working on something and it does things to me I’m not proud of.”

Usopp makes another dying sound. His knees feel unreliable.

Sanji keeps talking, voice low and rough and relentless. “You notice things. You notice me. You ask about my home like you actually want to know, not like you’re just being polite. You sat through that whole picnic and even when you were panicking you were still trying to be kind about it. You’re so fucking kind, Usopp. You really think I wouldn’t mean you?” He finally stops, breathing a little harder than before, staring at Usopp like he’s daring him to argue but Usopp’s too busy being gone. His brain has fully left the ship: all that’s left is static and the overwhelming, mortifying realisation that Sanji’s still looking at him like that, like he means every word, and Usopp has absolutely no idea what to do with any of it.

He opens his mouth and closes it and opens it again but nothing comes out except a tiny, helpless: “Oh.”

Sanji’s ears are still pink and mouth tight but there’s something almost shy in the way he’s watching Usopp now, like he’s scared he’s said too much and also like he couldn’t have stopped himself if he tried. His shoulders are still tense, like he’s not quite sure what to do with his hands now that everything has been said out loud. 

“Wow,” Usopp says eventually, the word tumbling out of him. He laughs weakly, the sound cracking right down the middle. “This is…”

Sanji scowls. “Horribly embarrassing?”

“I was going to say nice?”

“It can be both.”

“Yeah, I think it’s both.” Usopp rubs the back of his neck and shifts his weight like the floor has suddenly become uneven. His face is still burning. His heart hasn’t calmed down since Sanji started listing all the reasons he likes him and now it feels like it’s trying to crawl out of his throat. “So. So, uh.”

Sanji looks everywhere except directly at him. “I can kiss women.”

Usopp blinks. “Right. Well, that’s… that’s fun?”

“I’m making a point here.” Sanji looks deeply annoyed with himself, like the words are escaping before he can stop them. “I’ve never… you’re the first guy I’ve ever wanted to kiss.”

Usopp’s stomach flips so suddenly he feels nauseous. “Oh. I’ve never kissed anyone?”

Sanji freezes. “Anyone?”

Usopp shakes his head, suddenly very interested in staring a spot on the floor. “No. I mean, I got close once? With a girl back home. We were, like, twelve and it was awkward and then her mum walked in and I ended up telling a story about a sea monster instead of actually kissing her. So. Yeah. Zero experience.”

Sanji laughs, the sound soft and startled enough that it loosens something inside the room. Usopp smiles helplessly, caught between mortification and the warm, fluttering feeling in his chest.

He crosses the galley in three careful steps, but god does it feel like crossing an ocean. When he stops they’re close enough that he can see the faint scatter of freckles across Sanji’s nose that only appear when he’s been in the sun too long. Sanji smells like vanilla from the custard, warm and sweet, layered over the familiar trace of smoke. The heat from the stove still clings to the air between them. Before Usopp can second guess any of this, Sanji lifts a hand slowly enough that Usopp could pull away if he wanted, and brushes his fingers against the cuff of Usopp’s sleeve like he’s checking – like he’s making sure this is real, like he’s making sure Usopp is still here.

Usopp answers without words: he lets their fingers meet, hands fitting, and feels a bit dazed at the way Sanji’s breath actually catches at the touch. 

“So this is, uh… definitely happening,” Usopp whispers. His voice is shaking. “You can still back out, you know, if you –”

Sanji kisses him, cutting him off entirely and for one perfect, suspended second, the whole world narrows down to the faint taste of sugar on Sanji’s mouth and the way his hand tightens around Usopp’s like he’s afraid Usopp might disappear and the quiet sound of their breathing mixing between them. Usopp’s brain whites out so completely that for a moment he forgets how to exist and all he knows is the warmth of Sanji’s mouth against his and the way Sanji tilts Usopp’s head just slightly to fit them together better and the faint scratch of stubble. Usopp makes a tiny, helpless sound against Sanji’s mouth and immediately wants fifty thousand more kisses. He wants to live in this feeling. He wants to memorise the exact way Sanji’s lips feel, the way his free hand comes up to rest lightly against Usopp’s waist like he’s still checking if this is okay. He wants to kiss Sanji until the sun goes down and comes back up again. He wants to kiss him in the crow’s nest and in the galley and on the deck under the stars and probably in the middle of battle, if he’s being honest with himself right now.

When they finally part Sanji’s forehead stays pressed, both of them breathing a little more ragged than before. Usopp’s eyes are still closed. He’s smiling so hard his cheeks hurt. “Cool,” he whispers.

Sanji snorts, grinding their foreheads together for a second. “Just cool? Wow, not even life changing? Not even –”

“I want to do it again,” Usopp blurts out before he can stop himself. “Like, immediately. A lot. All the time. Is that normal? I feel like I’m being weird but also I don’t care because that was – like, how do people not just do this all the damn —”

Sanji cuts him off with another kiss, warmer and a little surer. Sanji’s hand slides up from Usopp’s waist to cup the side of his neck, thumb brushing gently along his jaw like he’s trying to soothe the frantic energy pouring out of him and Usopp melts into it completely, one hand fisting in the front of Sanji’s shirt without thinking. When they break apart again, Sanji is smiling against his mouth.

“So,” he murmurs, voice teasing. “I guess this kind of complicates finding me a boyfriend, don’t you think?”

Usopp groans, dropping his forehead against Sanji’s shoulder. “Oh my god, I hate you.”

“No, you don’t.”

Usopp laughs into the fabric of Sanji’s shirt, the sound muffled and helpless and full of so much joy he doesn’t know what to do with it. “I really, really don’t.”

Sanji’s arms come around him properly then, pulling him in close and Usopp goes willingly, wrapping his arms around Sanji’s waist and holding on like he never wants to let go. They stay like that for a long moment, just breathing each other in, Usopp’s entire world having shifted on its axis in the most incredible way. Usopp tilts his head and presses a tiny kiss to the side of Sanji’s neck, just because he can, which is simultaneously the most terrifying and exhilarating thing he’s ever done. 

“I’m going to want to do that a lot,” Usopp mumbles against his skin. “Just so you know. Like. All the time. You’ve created a monster.”

Sanji laughs quietly, the sound warm and fond against Usopp’s hair. “You were always a monster.”

Usopp pulls back just enough to look at him, at the way Sanji’s eyes are bright and his smile is crooked and real and Usopp’s pretty sure he’s never been this happy in his whole damn  life. He leans in and kisses Sanji again, slow and sweet and full of everything he doesn’t have words for yet, and Sanji kisses him back like he feels the same way.

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