stef

He manages five whole minutes and half a plate of food before the scene starts replaying in his head on a loop, the way Sanji’s face had gone blank for that one second. The way his mouth tightened. The way his cheeks flushed, high and quick, not like when he flirts, but like he’d been caught naked in an open doorway.

pretty, Zoro thinks later, on the dark deck with his swords propped beside him and the sky full of stars. He said it once and his whole body feels like he’s hanging off the edge of something. His stomach does that slow, horrible drop like he missed a step sparring and is only now registering the ground coming up, and he thinks, crystal-clear and stupid as hell: oh.

He tells himself he’s imagining whatever’s happening because it’s both safer and easier to file under life being weird and move on. Hell, his whole life has been about not letting his head get in the way: see, decide then move. Feelings are usually just noise between him and the next cut, really. 

The next week, though, it happens again. Nothing special, just the Sunny cutting steady through calm water, the air soft and lazy. Zoro’s halfway across the deck heading for the mast when Sanji comes the other way, tray in one hand, cigarette in his mouth, shirt loose at the collar. He brushes Zoro’s shoulder on the way past, a deliberate bump, the faint catch of cotton and warm skin underneath and drawls: “Watch where you’re going, handsome,” like he’s said it a hundred times before. 

Zoro feels the compliment like a hand around his throat. His tongue gets there before his brain. “Eyes on your feet, pretty,” he shoots back, sharp as a reflex.

Sanji stops just long enough for Zoro to see that flick, that internal flinch, surprise hitting first and getting buried under performance a second later before he laughs. It’s bright and sharp and pitched just a little too high. “Oh, we’re still doing this, how cute. Did you pick up a flirting guidebook in some village?”  

His tone says game. point to you, mosshead, let’s see what you do with it.

His eyes say: what the hell are you doing?

Zoro has no idea which one he’s supposed to answer. Worse: he has no idea why that uncertainty makes his blood sing. All he knows is that he wants to take Sanji’s thumb between his teeth just to see what sound the cook makes. Wants to slide over the ground, push him against the rail, put his hands on his hips and – he scowls and keeps walking, like his stomach didn’t just do something awful and swoopy and like the back of his neck isn’t hot.

The problem, though, is that the pattern keeps bloody repeating.

Sanji leans over him at breakfast to steal the pickles off his plate, the open collar of his shirt brushing Zoro’s shoulder, and Zoro’s brain notes, clinically, collarbones. The line of them. The way they stand out when he laughs and the faint shadow at his throat where stubble didn’t quite shave clean.

Sanji ties his hair back on a hot day, fingers raking through blonde that’s gone too long and Zoro’s hand twitches with a stupid, violent urge to do it for him. Just grab the hair, twist it in his hands, pull his head far back enough to kiss up the line of Sanji’s throat. 

Sanji kicks a cannonball in half showing off for Luffy a few weeks later, the muscles in his legs bunching and releasing under skin and Zoro’s brain offers, unwelcome and vivid: those could crush your skull, pin you down, pin you open and that’s when he decides he’s actually going insane.

When Sanji’s laugh does that low, involuntary dip that curls in Zoro’s gut, he tells himself it’s annoyance. When his chest does that tight, ugly thing seeing Sanji flirting with a random waitress, he blames indigestion. When he catches himself watching Sanji’s hands while he chops, mesmerised by the speed and the scars and the effortless precision he mutters curses under his breath like they’re an insult instead of a prayer. He pushes harder in training. Adds laps. Spars more. Sleeps less.

He’d rather be exhausted than sit still long enough to notice that he’s started tracking Sanji on instinct.

There’s a moment – late, quiet, Nami’s map room lamplight bleeding under the door – when it finally clicks in a way he can’t dodge anumore. He’s on the lawn deck, doing push-ups under the stars because if he stops moving his brain might catch up. The door to the galley clicks open and Sanji steps out, cigarette tip flaring orange in the dark, swimming in a loose shirt and soft pants, hair down and shoulders relaxed in that particular way they only are when he thinks no-one’s watching. He inhales, throat working with the drag, tendons shifting under thin skin. Smoke curls out past his lips in a thin stream, then catches the breeze and wraps back, ghosting over the angle of his jaw, dissolving into the dark. 

“If you stare any harder, Moss, you’ll give the moon a complex,” he drawls, not turning his head.

Zoro jerks his gaze sideways so fast his neck clicks, heat prickling up the back of it. “I’m not staring.”

Sanji taps ash into the sea. “Ah, just glaring at the stars. Very intimidating. I’m sure they’re terrified.”

Zoro scowls at the horizon until his eyes sting with the same horrified clarity as the day he first realised not all mountains are climbable. It hits him all at once, that this isn’t just wow, those legs are flexible or hey, my idiot crewmate is weirdly competent, that’s hot.

This is wanting to put a hand on that tired shoulder and leave it there, wanting to hear Sanji’s laugh aimed solely at him, soft and unarmoured. Wanting to be the reason the lines around his eyes ease at the end of a long day. Wanting to kiss him so bad his teeth ache.

First time in his life he actually likes someone – really likes them, stupid, sticky, want-to-know-what-your-face-looks-like-when-you’re-sleeping likes – and of course it’s the chef with the mouth like a knife and a past full of ghosts and a flirty disaster of a public persona. Of course it’s the walking red flag who flings himself into danger for strangers and then limps alone to the sink to wash the blood off his hands. Of course it’s the one guy on this ship who is absolutely, one hundred percent, unquestionably not going to be a possibility.

“The fuck’s wrong with me?” Zoro mutters into the grass, banging out another set until his arms shake. He tells himself it’s a phase, a weird patch, a side effect of near-death experiences and shared trauma and too many late night conversations and that if he ignores it surely it’ll get bored and go away.

The next morning, though, Sanji slides a cup of tea in front of him without comment and Zoro has the absolutely suicidal urge to lean in, to close the gap between them and see what happens when Sanji’s mouth is against his, when that thigh tightens around him because of something other than a kick. 

“Try this,” Sanji says a few days later, a spoon appearing in front of Zoro’s face like a threat. Whatever’s on it is thick and glossy, dark brown with a sheen of fat. Steam curls off the surface, carrying up garlic and wine and something sharp and green.

“No,” Zoro says automatically. “I’m not your poison tester.”

Sanji’s eyes narrow like Zoro has insulted his ancestors. “If I wanted to poison you I’d use something more subtle than a bearnaise, you uncultured stump. Open your mouth.” The front of his shirt brushes Zoro’s forearm and the cook’s wrist bumps his knuckles on the bench, a brief hot slide of skin on skin that Zoro feels all the way to his shoulder.

“Open,” her repeats, voice pitched low in a way that hits Zoro somewhere stupid. “Before I pour it in your ear instead.”

Zoro could shove the spoon away or walk out or lean on instinct and turn it into a fight. Instead, his jaw unlocks and the spoon slides over his tongue. His mouth reacts before his brain can catch up, his tongue pressing up to chase it, teeth closing around the metal.

Sanji watches his mouth like he’s the one being fed. “You’re supposed to taste, not fall in love with the spoon,” he mutters, but it comes out tight.

Zoro jerks back so fast he almost bites the damn thing. “It’s… fine,” he manages, heat creeping up his neck. “Too much green shit.”

“That green shit is tarragon,” Sanji snaps. “And you licked the spoon.”

“Did not.”

Sanji’s lips curve, sharp. “Sure. The spoon just moaned on its own.”

Zoro grabs the sake with more force than necessary, just to have something to hold that isn’t Sanji’s stare. The sauce’s still thick on his tongue and his mouth keeps wanting to move, to chase the taste like it’s not about the food at all.

It only gets worse weeks later, when Sanji walks up the gangplank with Nami, both of them carrying bags heavy with the clink of bottles and the smell of spices. He’s laughing, head tipped back, teeth flashing white while Nami bats at his arm. There’s a smear of red on his shirt, low on the side where the fabric pulls when he walks. Old enough to be drying but dark enough that Zoro’s stomach drops right through him. He’s halfway down the steps before he realises he’s moving. “What happened?”

Three heads swivel before Nami sighs. “Relax, guard dog.”

“It’s nothing,” Sanji says at the same time. “Idiot at the market thought he could snatch Nami-swan’s purse. I disabused him of the notion. We got a discount!”

“He had a knife,” Nami adds, amused. “Sanji kindly kicked it out of his hand, but not before –”

“It’s nothing,” Sanji cuts in, looking pleased. “I’ve had mosquito bites worse than this.”

Zoro’s hand closes around his elbow without asking him, feeling the muscles jump under his fingers. Sanji’s stride stutters for half a second. The cotton under his hand’s stiff where the blood’s starting to tack and the smear sits there, an ugly mouth over the curve of his ribs.

“Chopper should look at it,” Zoro hears himself say. 

“It’s fine.”

“It’s bleeding.”

Sanji twists, trying to yank his arm back. “Then stop staring at my side like that. You’re not subtle, you know that?”

Zoro’s jaw grinds. He wants to say you’re not allowed to bleed without me there. He wants to say the sight of it makes his vision go white at the edges. Instead he drops his hand like he’s been burned. “Whatever. Get it on the floor and you know Usopp’ll make you mop it.”

Sanji scoffs, nostrils flaring, and stalks off toward the kitchen. Zoro tells himself his hands are clenched because blood means danger and that’s all this is.

They do end up mopping, ironically, the next day when the sea’s all hammered gold and shattered blue. It’s deck chores hour, aka the part of the day Nami has marked out on her charts as labour from idiots (mandatory).

“Swab,” she’d said, flicking a list in their faces. “Tie down the barrels, coil the ropes. And if either of you chips a single plank with your macho training, I’m docking your dessert for a week.”

So now there’s a mop in Zoro’s hand instead of a sword and he’s offended at how much the bucket weighs. “Water’s heavier than it looks,” he grumbles, hefting it.

Sanji rolls his eyes like he’s been personally wounded. He’s barefoot, pants rolled to mid-calf, shirt sleeves hitched up. Foam and seawater lick at his ankles as he skims a brush over the deck with lazy competence and the sun’s painting his hair a ridiculous bright gold. Zoro has to force himself to focus on not fumbling the damn bucket because all his brain can picture is dropping to his knees right here, mouthing the stretch of Sanji’s legs until the weight of his hands drop heavy into Zoro’s hair.

“That’s because you filled it all the way, dumbass,” Sanji snips. “You don’t need to train your deltoids while you’re mopping. You just need the floor to stop smelling like Luffy’s socks.”

“I thought cooks liked full buckets. More water, less work.” 

Sanji makes a strangled noise. “That’s not – do you even understand how anything works in this world? That’s not how cleaning, or buckets, or basic physics –” He cuts himself off with a huff. “Nevermind. Of course you don’t.”

Zoro smirks. “I understand how to swing.”

“Yeah, we’ve all noticed,” Sanji mutters but there’s a flicker of amusement at the corner of his mouth.

They fall into a rhythm despite themselves, Zoro sloshing the mop in wide, careless arcs while Sanji follows in his wake, his mop working in firm, efficient strokes that actually get the seawater and dirt out of the wood instead of just moving it around. It’s stupidly domestic and if Zoro thinks about it too hard, his brain does something weird and hot in his chest, so he doesn’t think about it. He just moves.

“Missed a spot,” Sanji says eventually, toeing at a smear of something suspicious near the rail.

“Luffy,” Zoro says darkly and cuts himself off as his foot skids and the mop slides. The bucket sloshes awfully and water arcs exactly where he doesn’t want it to go, straight at Sanji. It hits mid-thigh, splashing up his shirt and making him squeal like a boiled kettle.

“You absolute cabbage!” He splutters, staring down at himself in outrage. “Do you have a concussion right now? Did a seagull drop you on your head as a baby?! You’re supposed to move with the water, not wrestle it.”

Zoro glances down at the path he’s mopped, chaotic swirls and drag marks and overlaps where he’s gone back over the same patch because he bloody forgot what he’d already done. He nods at the clean, neat arc of boards Sanji’s done. “You move with water, I move with blood.”

“That’s the worst line I’ve ever heard,” Sanji says flatly. “Do not ever say that to a woman.”

“I wasn’t talking to a woman,” Zoro points out and there’s a beat – very small, very sharp – where the air changes and he doesn’t really think about the next words before they’re out. “I was talking to you.”

Sanji goes very still before he looks up, slow, like he’s wary there’s a punch coming. His hair’s fallen in his eyes a little and there’s a droplet hanging from his jaw, catching the light. He looks stupid, frankly, and Zoro still wants to kiss him so, so badly. Can picture it, almost: the way Sanji’s hair would feel between his fingers, the way his mouth would open.

“Congratulations,” Sanji says finally. “You’ve discovered how pronouns work.”

Zoro’s mouth quirks. He props the mop against his shoulder, slouch-lazy. “You move with water,” he says again, nodding at Sanji’s bare, wet feet, the easy way he shifts his balance with the sway of the deck. “You cook like it, you fight like it.”

Sanji squints. “You writing poetry at me, Mossy? Go on, then. Enlighten me. Tell me more about my elemental prowess, oh great swordsman.” He’s expecting a joke: Zoro can see it in the angle of his mouth, in the way his hand shifts on the mop handle like he’s ready to flick water in Zoro’s face if this gets too earnest.

Zoro scratches at his chin with the heel of his hand, suddenly aware that his pulse’s too loud in his ears. “You’re just… good at… moving around people. Around the ship. Around the plates in your hands. Like the deck’s something you decided to dance with instead of fall off.”

Sanji blinks and for that single second his expression goes open, vulnerable, like someone just took a knife to the laces holding him together. Then he snaps it shut, fast. “Careful,” he warns, whacking the mop against the rail to dislodge a stubborn bit of grit. “Talk like that and I’ll start thinking you actually watch me when I walk.”

Zoro’s mouth runs ahead of him, says: “I do,” and there’s no fucking way he can miss the way Sanji’s whole posture freezes, changes.

The mop squeaks against the board. Sanji stares at him, eyes too wide, colour high in his face. “You –”

“Obviously,” Zoro barrels on, because god knows stopping now would be even worse. “You stomp around like a wounded flamingo when you’re pissed off. Kinda hard to ignore.” 

Sanji’s mouth opens, then twists. He lets out a short, startled bark of laughter that sounds like it clawed its way up past something else. “A wounded flamingo. That’s the best you could come up with?”

Zoro shrugs, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Could’ve said giraffe. You’ve got the legs for it.”

Sanji actually chokes. “Why’re you – you don’t just say that to a man, you absolute chunk of driftwood!”

“Why not?” Zoro smirks. “You’re the one always yelling about your beautiful legs. Thought you’d be happy someone noticed.”

“I say that to women! To lovely, kind, undeservingly subjected-to-your-presence ladies. Not to you.”

Zoro scoffs. “Rude. I can appreciate a good pair of legs.”

Sanji looks like he’s seconds from spontaneous combustion. His ears, Zoro notes distantly, have gone bright red, even as he stabs the mop at the deck. “We’re mopping, Moss. There’s nothing romantic about algae.”

“Didn’t say there was,” Zoro says easily. “Just saying you’re good at moving. And you’ve got nice legs.”

Sanji makes a strangled noise, drops the brush in the bucket with a splash before straightening up so fast the world might as well have lit a fuse under him. “I need a smoke and to never hear your voice again for at least fifteen minutes.”

Zoro keeps mopping, jaw tight to keep the grin from breaking loose. His chest feels like he just ran laps with Luffy on his back and after mopping they end up sparring because there’s nothing better to do, and because they’re both horrifically allergic to being still. They start with kicks against the flat of sword blades and banter sharp enough to sting but not quite draw blood. 

It devolves fast, the way it always does, footwork tangling and timing slipping from controlled patterns into something messier. Sanji closes distance to get inside his guard and Zoro lets him, keeping his swords sheathed a heartbeat too long which Sanji takes full advantage of. The neat lines of their training fall apart into shoves and grabs and the occasional half-pulled punch. Zoro sweeps for Sanji’s leg, a clean textbook hook behind the ankle and Sanji goes with it, because of course he does, twisting his hips mid-fall. His heel catches the back of Zoro’s knee on the way down and yanks. They hit the lawn together, hard enough that the impact punches a grunt out of both of them.

For once, Zoro doesn’t manage to roll away clean: he ends up half on top of Sanji, one forearm braced in the grass by Sanji’s head, the other hand splayed uselessly on his waist. One knee slots, disastrously, between Sanji’s thighs. Their ribs are so flush together that Zoro can feel the rise and fall of Sanji’s chest against his own, quick and sharp. Sanji’s breath catches, hands fisting in Zoro’s collar with bruising force, knuckles jamming against his collarbone like he’s either about to shove him off or haul him closer and hasn’t decided which. His voice is not steady: it’s all teeth and adrenaline and something else that curls low and hot. “At least buy me dinner first.”

Zoro’s mouth goes dry.

“You already make me dinner,” he hears himself say, which is definitely not a safe answer. His hips are suddenly very, very aware of where they are and every fibre of training he’s ever had starts screaming emergency orders up his spine: don’t move, don’t press, don’t you dare.

Sanji’s pupils are so wide the blue has shrunk back to storm-dark rings around black and from this close Zoro can see himself reflected there – tiny, warped, hovering on the edge of something he doesn’t have a name for. This should be where the game ends, the part where he rolls off with a scoff, tosses an insult over his shoulder, resets the board. This is where Sanji should swear, shove him away, pretend none of it landed.

we could just kiss, Zoro thinks, raw as an open wound and he’s not sure if the thought belongs to him or to some other, hungrier version of himself that only shows up when Sanji’s too close.

Sanji looks like he’s thinking the same thing, his gaze dropping fast to Zoro’s mouth, then snaps back up like he got caught. There’s a bright, terrified look in his eyes, a kind of reckless want strangled halfway into self-defence and Zoro’s heart lurches violently as he thinks: oh. he wants this too.

Then Sanji shoves him, hard, and he nearly falls the fuck over, saved only by years of training. 

“Are you –”

“Your guard’s sloppy,” Sanji says, rough, too sharp. His mask drops back into place: disdain, boredom, irritation, all painted on quick and messy over the rawness underneath. “You always leave your left side open when you’re distracted.”

Cowardice and care collide in Zoro’s chest so hard it almost makes him nauseous until he can’t even bring himself to respond. They peel away in opposite directions, like magnets flipped to the wrong poles. The air between them feels too thin; the rest of the deck feels too wide. Zoro’s ribs ache like he took the fall wrong.

coward, he thinks savagely, stalking to the far side of the lawn and dropping into push-up position like his muscles did something wrong and need punishment. what, you’ll throw yourself in front of a yonko without blinking but you can’t move your stupid mouth a few centimetres?

He drops, presses up, drops again. The image keeps replaying anyway, Sanji under him, jaw tight, eyes caught between come on and don’t you dare. The way his fingers had clenched in Zoro’s shirt like he’d needed an anchor.

He waits until the heat’s so heavy on the ship he could cut it, before he goes to where the galley feels like the inside of someone’s mouth: wet, hot, full of breath and spice. The window is cracked but the breeze that squeezes through is absolutely useless, warm as exhale. The stove’s a damn wall of flame and Sanji’s right in the middle of it, right where Zoro knew he’d be.

Still barefoot, pants slung low on his hips, steam rolling around him and catching in his hair. He’s got one foot braced on the oven door, body bent low as he peers into the back of the lower rack, checking on something. The hem of his shirt rides up, baring a strip of skin and the top of a tattoo Zoro’s only ever caught glimpses of.

Heat punches through him so fast he actually sways for a second.

“You staring at my ass or do you need something, Moss?”

Zoro’s tongue feels thick. “Water,” he manages. He grabs the glass and brushes past Sanji toward the sink, close enough that the heat rolling off the other man grazes his side. His brain helpfully catalogues the damp weight of Sanji’s hair, the smell of sweat and garlic and smoke, the exact curve of his hipbones visible.

“Don’t drip on my floor,” Sanji says, turning a pan, flame licking the sides. “I just cleaned.”

“I can tell,” Zoro forces himself to say, even though he can’t tell shit. His heart’s beating a tattoo against his ribs, his mouth. “You’ve always been good with your hands.”

Sanji goes still for half a second before he straightens, slow, his spine rolling up vertebra by vertebra. His profile cuts sharp in the heavy light, all cheekbones and eyelashes, the small smear of flour near the corner of his mouth that Zoro suddenly, violently wants to lick off. “You growing a praise kink, Moss?” 

Zoro watches the line of Sanji’s throat when he talks, watches his mouth shape the words and he just – he can’t pretend, anymore. He’s tired, he’s hot, he’s been circling this for weeks, months, waiting for it to make sense, wishing he’d just fucking kissed Sanji three hours ago on the lawn because he knows, now, that Sanji would’ve let him.  “Maybe I just like what I’m looking at.”

It’s the clearest, most honest thing he’s said all day, in two fucking months, and it hangs in the air between the sizzle of oil and the thud of his heart. 

Sanji’s eyes cut to him, sharp. “You like my hands that much, huh?” Testing. Daring.

Zoro’s pulse roars in his ears as he steps closer, just half a pace, but enough that the heat of the stove and the heat of Sanji mix together into one suffocating band across his front. “Maybe I do.”

There’s a brief, wild flare in Sanji’s gaze, like a door cracked in a house that’s supposed to stay locked. Shock and want and fear, all tangled, all there and Zoro thinks: oh, thank god. The thought hits like stepping off solid ground and finding out you’ve been over the drop the whole time. Vertigo. Heat. Something greedy uncurls low in his gut, stretching claws. 

He does the stupidest thing he’s done since swearing his life to a rubber idiot in a pirate hat and he commits. Leans in, close enough that if either of them breathes wrong there won’t be room for air between them at all and for one single beautiful second Sanji’s whole body lists toward Zoro in turn, like gravity recalibrated, the almost-inevitable lean of someone whose body’s already answered a question their mouth hasn’t dared form.

Zoro feels the answer in himself, too – a snap, a click, like something finally dropping into the groove it was carved for. Then everything slams shut and Sanji jerks back like the air between them turned to live flame. He hisses and turns away so fast his hair whips his cheek, grabbing the nearest pan as the pressure in the room snaps like a rope.

“Wow,” he snaps, tone landing sideways, brittle. “Try flirting with some poor villager first before you come for the cook, yeah?”

Zoro’s brain stutters. “I wasn’t –”

“Relax, Moss.” Sanji doesn’t give him the angle. He’s already moving, words coming quick and sharp, like he’s throwing them at his own feet to keep from slipping. “You’ll give yourself a nosebleed if you keep trying to think and talk at the same time.”

He reaches for the salt, for the spoon, for anything that isn’t Zoro. The pan hisses as he tosses something in harder than he needs to. “Drink your water, go hit something, go fuck someone, go get – whatever this is out of your system.”

Zoro frowns, heat burning up the back of his neck. Embarrassment, anger, and something softer and uglier, all twisted together. “Wait –”

“Dinner’s in an hour,” Sanji cuts across, still not looking at him. “I don’t have time to babysit you while you work out whether you’re joking or not.”

It’s flat and awful and slices so neatly what just happened into a category Zoro sure as hell didn’t put it in and wasn’t even aware of: a joke. A stumble. An inconvenience. The implication curls inside the words like a hook: you don’t know what you’re doing. this doesn’t count. this isn’t real to you.

Zoro’s grip tightens around the glass until a crack spiders, instinct roaring up to lunge, to grab his shoulder, to spin him and to snarl say that while you’re looking at me. But the image of that split-second flinch – Sanji’s body running from the moment like it burned him – hits just as hard.

“I’m not joking,” he says before he can stop himself, rough and unguarded.

Sanji’s shoulders twitch but he still doesn’t turn. “Could’ve fooled me. Now get out of my galley. You’re in the way.”

That’s it. No kick, no raised pan, no storm. Just a wall dropped between them so clean and fast Zoro can almost hear his own skull ring from the impact. He stands there a heartbeat too long, glass in his fist, the back of his neck burning. The galley feels suddenly too bright, too hot, every clatter of metal magnified.

He’s bared something, he realises. However clumsily, however small, and Sanji’s response has been to slam the door on it so hard the frame shakes. “I said I wasn’t joking.”

For a long moment, Sanji doesn’t move. Then he lets out a single, sharp sound that technically counts as a laugh and has absolutely no warmth in it. “Sure.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means,” Sanji says, finally cutting him a quick, slanted look. “You’ve never taken anything seriously in your life except your swords and Luffy and I’m not stupid enough to think I’m suddenly the third thing on that very short list because you went and got heatstroke in the kitchen.”

It hits harder than the tone. The words slot into something raw under Zoro’s ribs. “I wasn’t –”

“Look,” Sanji barrels right over him. “You don’t have to do… whatever the fuck that was again. I get it, all right? You were bored, you saw an opening, you were lonely or horny, whatever.”

Zoro jerks like something bit him. “That’s not what –”

“It’s fine,” Sanji cuts over him faster now, words turning inward like blades. “I’ve been the opening act before. You don’t owe me a follow-up performance.” His shadow flares and collapses with the roll of the ship. “No need to make it weird.”

“You’re making it weird,” Zoro snaps before he can stop himself. “You’re acting like I set you on fire.”

“That’s ‘cause you’re playing with matches you don’t know how to hold!”

Zoro stares at him, anger flaring clean and bright, right in line with the incredulity. “You flirt with anything that moves. You shove it in my face every damn day how easy this is for you, and the second I –”

“That’s me, Mosshead,” Sanji bites out. “That’s my mess. I know how to clean it up. You using that on me is different.”

“Using what?” Zoro snaps. “My mouth? My eyes? What’s the problem, here, because this has been going on for weeks now and I know you thought about it on the deck, we both –”

“Don’t,” Sanji says, sharp as a knife. “Don’t rewrite it like that.”

“I don’t have to rewrite it,” Zoro growls. “You leaned in too. You think I didn’t feel you breathing on my mouth? You think I imagined that?”

Sanji’s jaw locks hard enough that Zoro hears his teeth click. For a second the truth of it flares right across his face – guilty, wanting, caught – and then it’s gone, slammed behind something meaner. He barks a laugh that sounds like scraping metal. “So, what, I slip up and you thought hey, the cook flirts with everyone, he won’t mind if I use him to see if I like the feel of it?”

The accusation hooks into the exact place he doesn’t want it to and Zoro feels it catch under old scar tissue and just fucking tear. He grits his teeth, hisses: “Maybe I wanted to see what happened if I stopped pretending I don’t notice you, ever think of that?”

Sanji’s laugh this time is softer, worse. “Don’t say things like that, not to me. Pick someone else. I can’t afford you screwing around with me because you’ve decided you’re bored of fighting with just swords.” 

The way he says afford lands with horrible clarity and Zoro sees it then, all of it: the exact shape of his panic, the ugly script running behind his eyes. Not that he doesn’t want this but that this isn’t even real – and if it’s not real then it’s a trap. Another test. Another way to prove he was stupid for wanting anything in the first place.

“You think I’d…” Zoro actually has to stop, because his stomach roils. “You think I’d do that to you?”

Sanji’s mouth twists, old habit, old hurt. “Why wouldn’t you?” he says, almost mild, and somehow that’s worse than a shout. “Everybody else has.”

The world tilts under Zoro’s feet and he has to put the glass down before he shatters it completely. “You think I’d work up to saying that shit if I didn’t mean it? You think I like feeling like this? My brain’s a bloody mess, my training’s shot to hell. I look at you and my first instinct is to fight and my second is to fucking kneel and I don’t know what to do with that except tell you, and now you’re acting like it’s a damn joke?”

Sanji’s staring at him like Zoro’s just peeled his own skin off and handed it over. He says, slowly: “I’m going to stand here and hand you a knife and ask you to see how deep you can cut before you get bored.”

“That’s not what I –”

“You looked at me like you wanted something you’d realised you could have,” Sanji talks over him again, voice fraying. “Don’t think I missed that. I know that look, I’ve seen it on people who walked away two days later once they realised I’m not as easy as they thought.” He laughs once, harsh. 

“Then what the hell am I supposed to do?” Zoro demands. “Pretend I don’t want you? Pretend the galley never happened? Pretend my brain doesn’t go sideways every time you breathe near me? I know you’re not easy, I don’t want you because you’re easy, asshole, I want you because –”

“Stop,” Sanji snarls, stepping back so sharply he cuts the distance like a blade. “Just. Leave it alone. Go back to bitching about my smoking and stop – stop looking at me like I’m something you’re thinking about keeping.”

“Because you are,” Zoro snaps and the admission hits him as it comes out; he feels it land in his own chest as hard as it hits the air. “You leaned in, Curls, you wanted it too. Don’t pin that only on me because it scares you.”

Sanji’s voice goes cool and dead. “You’re good with swords, you’re shit with hearts. Don’t practice on mine.”

Before Zoro can answer, before he can say that he’s not fucking practicing Sanji’s already got a foot on the ladder, already climbing, and Zoro’s gut drops at the retreat. He doesn’t look down.

Zoro stands there with his fingers dug into the bench so hard his knuckles ache, watching his own breath plume in front of him in little white bursts. He stares up at the ceiling for a long, long moment, chest gone horrifically tight, like someone wrapped bandages around it too hard.

He’d always thought, before today, that the worst outcome was Sanji not wanting him. And now he knows there’s something far worse: Sanji wanting him so badly he’d rather carve himself open than admit Zoro might actually be serious. The pit in Zoro’s stomach doesn’t feel like rejection. It feels like standing at the bottom of a collapsed training ground, looking up at a cliff he didn’t even fucking know was there. He drags in a breath and goes back to the lawn, because right now the only thing he knows how to do with wanting this bad is swing until his muscles scream louder than his heart.

x

For the next two days, Zoro lives in his own skull. The Sunny moves the way she always does but something in her rhythm’s off, like a song played half a beat too slow. The horizon feels wrong, meals feel wrong. Hell, even breathing feels wrong.

Sanji is… fine. He isn’t louder. He isn’t quieter. He isn’t putting on some big dramatic show. He doesn’t slam plates like they insulted his mother and he doesn’t flirt extra with Nami or Robin. He’s just smooth and cool and professional. Polite, like Zoro’s a customer he vaguely recognises and not the idiot he’s been yelling at across tables for years.

Breakfast’s the first test and Zoro walks into the galley like he’s stepping into an arena, with  his shoulders squared and jaw braced for impact. The smell hits him first, waffles burning just a little around the edges in that way that always makes Luffy go feral. The rest of the crew is a blur around him, Luffy hovering like a starving seagull and Usopp whining about how early it is, Chopper standing on his seat to stir something in his little mug. Nami coolly ignoring all of them as she plots their incoming destination. 

Sanji stands at the stove with a tea towel tucked into the waist of his pants, moving with that easy, knife-singing grace: pan tilt, wrist flick, plate slide, all sharp efficiency and zero wasted motion. For a heartbeat, Zoro’s memory lies to him and he half-expects the usual: Sanji turning just enough to shoot him a smirk, some bullshit like ah, good morning, seaweed-brain, i see you’ve crawled out of the swamp. Maybe a casual kick into the back leg of his chair just for fun. Instead, Sanji glances over once, quick and flat, eyes skimming over Zoro like he’s checking for fire or spilled soup.

“Food’s ready,” he says. To the room. To everyone. To no-one in particular.

Zoro drops into his usual chair and the ship hums her good mornings the way she always does under his boots. His swords rest against the table leg like they always do. A plate appears in front of him as if by invisible hand, rice steamed just right and eggs soft but not runny, fish seared in a way that makes the skin crackle when he pokes it with his chopsticks. There’s even the pile of greens he’s learned not to complain about because Sanji will only double them out of spite.

“Thanks,” he mutters, because something in him refuses to let that silence sit. There’s a noncommittal hum, not even directed at him because Sanji’s attention is on Luffy’s overflowing plate like Zoro’s chair’s just an empty space. The spot where their stupid morning routine usually lives – the barbed hello, the snap about table manners, the automatic, easy fighting – feels like someone’s ripped out a floorboard and left a hole.

Luffy frowns, blinking between the two of them. “Zoro didn’t even say something rude yet.”

“Eat your food, captain,” Sanji replies, light and bright. “Before I decide you’re on a diet.”

Everyone laughs. Even Luffy, because there’s food in front of him and Zoro’s jaw aches with the effort of not grinding his teeth. He shovels rice into his mouth and it tastes amazing and it tastes like nothing. He watches the way Sanji’s shoulders move, easy and fluid, none of the tiny hitch he’s used to seeing when Zoro mouths off. Afterwards, he throws himself at training like it’s a life raft because this part has always been simple. Move or fall, swing or get cut. The sun climbs up the sky, brutal and white, until the air shimmers against the deck and the lawn turns into a hot, green blur under his feet.

Sweat stings his eyes, runs down his back in itchy trails, soaks the cloth at his waistband. The muscles in his shoulders burn, that good, cleansing ache that usually clears his head but today his thoughts cling like wet clothes. Wado whistles through hot air, ghosts of opponents in every arc. Instead of faceless enemies, though, his stupid brain keeps pasting in Sanji: Sanji in the galley, eyes blown wide. Sanji saying why wouldn’t you, everybody else has in that casual voice that hid a fracture line down the middle.

He changes stance so the old ache in his side flares, the ghosts of Mihawk’s strike and every wound since singing under the strain. Forces his focus down into his feet, into the feel of the deck under his soles, the give of the boards, the singing line of his swords in motion and then he thinks about the way Sanji’s expression had shifted and his next swing goes a hair off-centre. It would’ve cost him skin in a real fight. 

“Shit,” he breathes, teeth grinding. 

you’re good with swords, you’re shit with hearts.

“Fair,” he pants, under his breath. “Didn’t sign up for this part.”

When lunch is called, he nearly stays put but skipping food would be stupid. Not going would feel like losing something he doesn’t want to admit he’s fighting for, so he goes as the others crowd in, the noise bouncing off the walls. Sanji moves through it like he always does, weaving between hands and plates, a blur of sharp elbows and sharper tongue when Luffy grabs early.

Every bite is exactly what his muscles need and he can feel the strength soaking in, that heavy, grounded satisfaction. His brain sits in the corner with its arms crossed, glaring at the wall. Food’s always been one of the ways Sanji taken care of them. Taken care of him, quietly and stubbornly, with that furious insistence that everyone be full. 

Now it feels like being tended by a stranger with Sanji’s hands.

That night, sleep doesn’t come so he lies on the deck with his arms folded under his head, staring up at a scatter of stars the light glow can’t quite erase. In the distance, Brook’s violin sighs a slow melody and Usopp laughs from where he’s losing badly at cards with Nami. 

Zoro closes his eye but that just makes it worse: the reel plays over and over in his brain, just Sanji’s eyes going huge when Zoro leaned in. Sanji’s voice cracking on afford.

He flips onto his side, restless and for the first time in a long life defined by sharp choices, he doesn’t fucking know what move comes next. He could walk back into the galley and pretend none of it happened, sure. Go back to insults and glares and the endless, stupid war over who’s more useless and bury the want deep enough that even he forgets the shape of it. He could stop listening for footsteps that always sound different from everyone else’s. Stop tracking Sanji’s position on the ship the way he tracks his swords, stop feeling the galley door like a pressure point in the air. He’s good at that, at cutting things off, at shutting doors and never opening them again. He’s been doing it since Kuina fell and never got back up, since Mihawk’s blade carved a new map into his chest. 

You put the pain in a box, you put the box somewhere deep, you train until your muscles forget how to do anything but obey. He could shove this in there too and go back to what they had because at least he knows that terrain, every rut and pothole.

He turns the idea over in his head like a sword he’s not sure he wants to draw. On one side: relief. No more late night reels of everything he said wrong, everything he didn’t say at all. No more wondering if Sanji’s silence is anger or fear or both knotted together. On the other: an emptiness so big it makes his throat hurt. He tries to imagine watching Sanji put that flirting to real use and watching him fall asleep on someone else’s shoulder in some smoky bar, building some other life on some other deck. Walking away because yeah, it was messy, yeah, they hurt each other, yeah, it was easier to shrug and say guess it wasn’t meant to be.

His stomach lurches. His fingers dig into the grass until the blades crease against his knuckles. He’s been in fights he knew he couldn’t win and stayed anyway, because walking away felt worse than losing.

He likes him, he wants him. Not just his mouth or his hands or the way his hips move – though, god, those too – but the temper and the tenderness and the way he pretends not to care while feeding everyone like it’s a religion.

The thought of standing at the rail, shoulder-to-shoulder, and knowing what he knows now – that Sanji flinched from him not because he didn’t want it, but because he did and that terrified him – makes Zoro’s chest ache in a way he doesn’t have words for.

He drags a hand over his face and wants to tell himself to shut up, that it’s just a stupid crush and it’ll pass, that he’s watched people on islands fall in love with a smile and forget each other by the next port but fuck if his chest doesn’t feel like that. His chest feels like something got lodged there, sharp and bright and heavy, and every breath scrapes past it. He tries to picture it gone, waking up one day and realising that he doesn’t give a shit who cooks breakfast, who leans on the rail at night, who lights their stupid cigarettes with stupid long-fingered hands. The idea leaves him oddly hollow. Like imagining losing a sword and pretending he wouldn’t notice the shift in his stance.

He knows, intrinsically, this isn’t just heat. Heat, he could run off with push-ups and extra laps around the deck, he could sweat it out, laugh it off. This is the way Sanji’s laugh hits him in the ribs and the way it physically irritates him when Sanji doesn’t sit down to eat. The way he’d rather take a kick than let Sanji keep standing in front of an enemy.

Whatever happens next – whether they fix this or break worse – he’s already crossed some invisible line inside himself and there’s no damn version of the future where Sanji’s just the cook again. He’s never going to be just a loudmouth, just a sparring partner, just a guy he bickers with over chores.

so this is heartbreak, he thinks, vaguely disgusted and almost fucking laughs at how stupid it is, how awful it is.

He tries, once, to corner Sanji the next day and it’s not the kind of smart, planned out talk that Nami would tell him to try. He just… sees Sanji coming out of the pantry with a crate of onions and his body moves before his brain can veto it.

“I’ll take that,” he says, stepping into his path. “You’ll wreck your back.”

The hallway’s narrow enough that Sanji has to stop or plow right through him. He stops, one curled eyebrow jerking up. “You saying I’m weak?” 

“I’m saying you cook for eight idiots three times a day. Your arms are already overworked. Give me the crate.”

Sanji’s mouth curves, in something thin and edged, like a knife laid flat. “You flirting or picking a fight? Hard to tell with you.”

Zoro’s heart does that stupid uneven thing again, tripping over itself just because they’re standing too close in a too-small space. “Both, apparently.”

Something raw flashes across Sanji’s face – not the usual irritation, not lazy mockery but something unguarded, like Zoro’s just kicked open a door he hadn’t even seen and behind it there’s fire.

“Cute,” he says, the word too sharp to be anything but a cut. “You rehearse that?” He shifts his weight and slides around Zoro like he’s sidestepping a rock in the road, precise and practiced, no contact. The crate passes a breath from Zoro’s chest. The smell of raw onion and cigarette smoke and Sanji’s soaked-in soap follows him, a brief, dizzying wave. Then he’s gone, disappearing through the galley door without a backward glance and the air rushes back in around Zoro like someone took a boot off his chest.

His fists ache with how hard he’s clenching them around nothing. The words pile up behind his teeth – i wasn’t rehearsing, you asshole, i’m improvising, i’ve never wanted anything like this before, i’m doing this without a map – and go absolutely nowhere. He stands in the empty hallway a beat too long, listening to the muted thud of the crate hitting the table.

Then he does the only thing he knows how to do when his head is dangerous: he goes to the lawn, draws his swords, and carves his frustration into the air until his shoulders scream.

x

The second day is objectively worse.

The first day hurt, sure, but the second one starts to feel like a new normal trying to settle over the ship and that’s the part that makes Zoro’s skin crawl. Sanji feeds them on time, every time. Plates appear, perfect as ever, meat cooked to the right bleeding shade, vegetables sliced so even it’s almost insulting.

He scrubs pans until they shine, stacks plates with geometric neatness, sweeps the galley floor in lines so straight Zoro’s eye twitches. He smokes on the figurehead at odd hours, one hand braced on Sunny’s mane, silhouette knifed against sky and sea.  He does not look at Zoro, not once. Not accidentally when passing a cup. Not when Zoro dumps a bucket of fish by the sink. Not across the table when Luffy does something so stupid it usually makes them both yell in unison.

It’s like Zoro’s been edited out of his peripheral vision and he knows everyone can feel it. Robin watches the space between them with that unreadable little curve at the corner of her mouth, eyes soft and sharp all at once, like she’s reading a sad book ahead of the rest of them. Usopp squints back and forth like he’s lining up a shot on two skittish animals and can’t decide which one is more likely to bolt. Brook plays louder. Franky tinkers noisily. The ship herself seems to creak more.

Luffy just looks… offended. Confused and low-key betrayed that his favourite channel seems to have been cancelled without his consent. At one point, as Zoro stretches on the lawn, Chopper tiptoes up, hooves muffled in the grass.

“Did you guys have a fight?” he whispers, big eyes even bigger, like Zoro might snap in half if he speaks at normal volume.

Zoro’s first instinct is to reassure him with no, of course not, this is just how we are. Instead, he hears himself say: “Something like that.”

Chopper’s little face crumples. “Are you going to make up?” 

Zoro exhales, slowly.  “Working on it.”

“Okay,” Chopper says. Then, fierce as he gets, eyes suddenly blazing. “You better.” He stomps off, as much as someone that small can stomp and Zoro tips his head back and squints at the sky. 

Working on it is generous. Mostly, he’s thinking. Testing words the way he tests new combinations of strikes. Any phrases he comes up with clang against his teeth when he mouths them silently, too big for his mouth and too heavy in his chest. He can’t imagine saying them without choking, without his voice betraying him.

He’s not good at this? Fine. He wasn’t good with three swords at first either. He bled for that until the grip felt natural, until the balance stopped feeling wrong and he’ll do the same here because he keeps circling the same conclusion like a ship tacking into wind it doesn’t quite want to face.

That if they weren’t so fucked up they’d be good. They already fight like two halves in the battlefield, already balance the crew, perfect mirrors. Sanji wouldn’t hold back in the way he loves: he’d turn the same obsessive attentiveness he uses on his ingredients onto Zoro, needling him, arguing him back into his body when he wanders too far into his own head. He’d hold Zoro to his word, drag him out of his own bullshit, refuse to let him hide behind training and booze and i’m fine. Zoro wouldn’t let Sanji starve himself to keep everyone else full. He’d drag him away from the stove. He’d physically remove the knife from his hand if he had to, dump him in a chair, lean on his shoulders until he sat still. He’d make him rest, make him admit he’s been hurt. Hold the line when Sanji’s instinct is to sprint straight off the nearest cliff for someone else’s sake.

They already do half of that by accident. If they could just pull the poison out from underneath it – the fear, the scripts, the old scars – they’d be fucking devastating. The thought is dizzying. It’s also… hopeful, which is almost worse.

He spins his swords one more time, feeling the resistance in his sore muscles, the catch and release of old scar tissue. Then he plants them in the grass and leans on the hilts, breath rough in his throat, sweat cooling on his spine.

“Figures,” he mutters. “First time I want something that isn’t a fight it’s the most complicated thing on the damn sea.” The wind slides past his ears, blissfully unaware that his ribs are busy trying to rearrange themselves around a blonde idiot who won’t look at him.

“Brooding doesn’t suit you, Mr Swordsman.” Robin’s voice comes from just behind his shoulder, calm and amused and Zoro doesn’t startle, exactly, because he’s a trained warrior and master of his surroundings, but his hand does jump back to Wado before he recognises her shadow on the deck.

“Don’t sneak up on people,” he mutters, letting go of the hilt.

“I walked over here,” Robin says mildly, coming to lean on the rail beside him. The sea wind ruffles her hair as she tucks a strand behind her ear with a gloved hand. “You were simply… elsewhere.”

“Yeah, well.” He rolls one stiff shoulder. “Had stuff on my mind.”

“Mmm.” She looks out over the water. “Blonde? Long legs? Terrible language?”

Zoro chokes on absolutely nothing. “I – what! Are you spying on me now?”

“I don’t need to spy.” Her mouth curves. “You’re both quite loud.”

Heat crawls up the back of his neck, under the collar of his shirt. “We’re not – it’s just –” He stops, because there’s no word ready. Friends is wrong. Enemies is wrong. Rivals fits only if you ignore the way his stomach drops when Sanji laughs with him instead of at him.

Robin’s eyes stay on the horizon. “May I ask you a question?”

“You’re gonna even if I say no,” he mutters.

“Correct.” Her eyelashes lower. “What, precisely, do you think you’re doing?”

He snorts. “Sparring. Eating. Sleeping. Getting lost. Same as always.”

She actually laughs, a soft, low sound that fits the night. “With Sanji. What are you doing with him?”

His first instinct is to say arguing. His second is to say training. The third is just jumping overboard and letting the sea sort it out. What comes out, dragged up from somewhere he doesn’t like looking at, is: “Making a mess of it.”

Robin’s profile tilts, birdlike. “That, I’ve observed.”

He exhales through his nose, slow. There’s a part of him that wants to tell her that she’s misinterpreting this but he knows there’s no point. The whole damn crew has been forced tro watch this farce unfold, so there’s no sense in lying. There’s a smaller part of him that feels almost… grateful, maybe, to let the cut bleed a little. “I’m not… good at this,” he admits and the confession feels like pulling teeth without a sword. “Whatever this is.”

“Wanting someone?” she asks, not unkindly.

His jaw tightens. His hand curls on the rail until old scars tug. “Yeah. That.”

“Inconvenient when the enemy is internal, isn’t it?”

“I’d rather fight a hundred Marines,” he mutters. “Or a Sea King. At least you can stab those.”

Her eyes soften, dark and sharp all at once. “May I say something he would never tell you himself?”

He grunts something that means go ahead, because god knows he’s already in too deep to pretend he doesn’t want to hear it.

“He is… careful about where he puts his heart. He’ll throw his body into danger for a stranger on the street, but his feelings?” She shakes her head, earrings glinting in the lantern glow. “Those he hides. Under flirting. Under jokes. Under that awful suit.”

Zoro stares at the distant line where sky meets sea and thinks of Sanji leaning on the rail, blowing smoke and saying ladies in that lazy, sing-song voice. Thinks of that same voice gone raw in the kitchen after Thriller Bark. Thinks of a cigarette burning down between tight fingers everytime’s Sanji’s shoulders shaken and he’s pretended it was from the cold. His chest feels tight. “I know,” he says quietly.

“I think you do.” A second, spectral hand appears and pats his knuckles once before dissolving, a ghost of comfort. “And I think that’s why you’re so scared.”

“I’m not scared,” he lies, immediately.

Robin’s mouth curves, amused. “Of course not. You’re terrified.”

He scowls at the waves. Somewhere below, the Sunny’s figurehead cuts through a swell with a soft hum and the night presses close, thick with all the things he hasn’t said. “You think I’m gonna hurt him.”

“I think,” Robin replies, steady as bedrock.“That you already have, many times over. And that he’s hurt you back just as equally. And that you are both somehow still standing, which is… promising.”

The memories come in a rush, uninvited: Sanji’s voice, hoarse from smoke and yelling, snarling that he didn’t need a babysitter. His own retort, sharp and ugly, then stop fighting like you want to die. Sanji’s bleak, shuttered face after Thriller Bark, eyes flicking over his bandages and then away, spitting out do what you want, just don’t drag us down on a night when everyone was too tired to notice the way it cut. Sanji limp in his arms, blood and rain and broken bones on a cold, hungry island, and Zoro’s own heart trying to tear out of his ribs because if he dies if he dies if he dies –

He swallows hard. The taste of iron is phantom but sharp. “He deserves somebody who knows what they’re doing,” he mutters. “Not… me. Not some idiot who doesn’t even know how to talk.”

Robin tilts her head. “You know how to talk to him.”

He snorts. “Yeah. To fight.”

“To tell him to eat, to sit down. To stop bleeding on the floor and let Chopper work. To stop pretending he’s fine when he clearly isn’t.” Her gaze skates over him, gauging, weighing. “Tell me, Zoro. How many other people on this ship does he obey on the first command?”

He opens his mouth to argue, then shuts it as images shuffle in his mind, lining up with sickening clarity: Sanji barking at Luffy, being ignored until he bribes him with food. Sanji waving off Usopp’s fussing, batting his hands away with a muttered excuse. Sanji arguing with Nami over course changes and rationing, losing more often than not but never quietly. Sanji, jaw clenched, lowering himself onto a chair because Zoro said sit down, eyes blazing but body obeying anyway.

Robin hums, like she’s just watched a piece slide into place on a board. “You already have a language. It’s just… sharp. You may need to learn the softer version.”

“I don’t do soft,” he says, knee-jerk, and it comes out almost a snarl. Soft gets you killed. Soft is the moment you flinch and the blade comes through.

“You didn’t,” she corrects gently. “Until now.”

He thinks of the word pretty catching in his throat and coming out anyway, hanging between them in the galley air like a drawn sword. Thinks of the way Sanji froze, mask gone for half a heartbeat, like he hadn’t decided yet whether to fall or fly. The sea wind stings his eye. “And if I fuck it up?” 

It’s the first time he’s said anything this close to the truth out loud. The first time he’s admitted – to anyone other than his own idiot reflection – that this is real, that it matters, that he’s scared in ways he doesn’t have words for. The question hangs between them, heavy, more terrifying than any challenge he’s ever shouted across a battlefield. Robin’s answer, when it comes, is soft enough the waves almost steal it away. “Then you apologise. You try again. You fight for it, instead of around it.”

The horizon’s just a line until he stares at it long enough that it starts to crawl. Black sea, black sky, a smear of dying orange where the sun went down. The ship’s wake hisses softly behind them, foam catching what little light’s left. The air’s cool enough now that sweat dries on his spine in itchy patches.

“How do you… know?” he asks finally. The word scrapes on the way out, like it doesn’t want to be spoken. “When it’s worth it. To say it out loud.”

Robin’s quiet for a moment. He can feel her there without looking, steady and unbothered by the sway, hair lifting in the wind like seaweed. When she speaks her voice has that far-off quality, like she’s explaining a constellation to someone who’s never looked up before. “When the regret of not saying it starts to feel heavier than the fear of losing it.”

regret / fear / losing run laps in his brain, all words he hates. All weights he’s already bloody carrying, banded around his ribs like extra training belts no-one can see. The thought of adding more feels impossible. The thought of not adding this one feels worse. He manages: “And you think I’m there already?” 

“I think you wouldn’t be standing out here trying to glare a hole in the sky if you weren’t.”

He snorts, sharp and humourless, and finally looks down at his hands, at the knuckles, busted and healed and busted again. The rope burns. The thin white line crossing his left thumb from some forgotten knife slip. Hands that know how to catch sword-hilts and broken crewmates and falling comrades. Hands that absolutely do not know how to hold something as stupid and fragile as this. “This is going to be a disaster.”

“Oh, undoubtedly,” Robin agrees, perfectly serene. “You’re both terrible at this, but at least you’ll be terrible together.”

Something awful and warm curls under his ribs, tight and hot, like the first breath after a near miss. The idea of it – of being bad at this thing with Sanji instead of alone – terrifies him in a completely different flavour than battle does. He runs a rough hand through his hair, fingers catching on knots, a physical distraction from the panic crawling just under his skin.

“I don’t know how to start,” he says, the admission dragged out of him like a blade from bone. “Just walk in and say hey, cook, I want you, please stop biting my head off and bite my –”

Robin’s shoulders shake once, very slightly. “Colourful, but perhaps a touch… advanced for a first draft?”

He grimaces, staring hard at the dark water. His heart’s pounding like he’s about to jump off the mast instead of just talk. His palms are damp on the rail and his stomach’s doing this horrible swooping thing he associates with the moment before a fight, not after. “I’ve never – I don’t… say things. Not like that. What if I open my stupid mouth and it comes out wrong again? What if he laughs? What if he still thinks I’m just messing with him?”

Robin doesn’t rush to fill the silence. The waves do that, slow and relentless, knocking against the hull in a familiar heartbeat. “You walk into storms you can’t see the end of. You step into fights you know you might not walk out of.”

“That’s different. That stuff that I know how to do.”

“And this,” Robin says gently. “You’ll have to learn.”

x

Unfortunately for everyone, before Zoro can get his shit together they get absolutely battered by some bounty hunter bastard with a devil fruit that makes the air go thick as tar. It feels like trying to breathe through wool, like gravity has hands and every single one of them is on Zoro’s shoulders. Everytime he tries to move the weight slams him back down, pinning him to the deck like an insect on a collector’s board.

Sanji cuts through it, a half-blur in the downpour, coat snapping, hair plastered to his forehead. Lightning keeps catching on the arcs of his kicks, making him look like something the storm coughed up and then lost control of. He’s the only damn thing on the deck that seems to remember how to move.

It goes badly and then it goes worse, which is pretty typical for them.

The bounty hunter’s power finally falters under a combination of sheer Luffy strength and tactical Nami until finally the pressure vanishes all at once – Zoro lurches forward, body suddenly his again. The timing’s shitty: he’s mid-step when one of the enemy grunts, panicked and sloppy, swings wild. Steel bites deep along his left arm, shoulder to wrist. Pain flares so hot his fingers go numb, Wado dropping to clang against the deck. He switches grip, keeps fighting with the others because it’s either that or watch someone else take the hit meant for him, and the world narrows to the usual red and muscle memory. By the time it’s done, by the time the last bastard hits the water and the storm staggers off to harass some other idiot ocean, Zoro’s left arm feels like it’s been peeled open and rehung wrong.

It’s not deep enough to kill him but it’s deep enough that when Chopper rips the shredded sleeve away he squawks something high and furious, hooves already bloody. Deep enough that Sanji, standing one step back and to the side, looks at the gash like someone’s snapped his favourite knife in half and left the pieces on the floor.

They patch him up in the infirmary, Chopper stitching as fast as his hooves can go, Nami swearing about carelessness, Robin quietly handing over rolls of bandage. Sanji moves like a ghost along the edges, getting clean towels before Chopper can ask, bracing Zoro’s shoulder when he has to sit up, saying absolutely nothing. He gets a sling for all his troubles and a stern lecture, and tries very hard not to seek out Sanji’s tight gaze.

They still eat afterward because that’s what they do, because bodies need fuel and because Luffy’s somehow still hungry. The yelling from Usopp and Chopper is sharp and stupid and comforting in its own way: you’re an idiot, you scared us, don’t do that again. The storm noise fades into a steady, exhausted hush.

One-by-one, the crew bleeds off into their beds and hammocks but Zoro can’t fucking sleep. The stitches in his arm throb with every beat of his heart, the sling pulls when he shifts and the infirmary bed has never been the most comfortable. Chopper told him to lie on his right side but his body keeps trying to roll out of habit and his brain’s a mess of replayed sword arcs and what-ifs and the memory of Sanji’s face when he first saw the cut.

He lasts ten minutes staring at the ceiling before he gives up, slipping out of the bed to pad barefoot to the galley, using his good hand to push open the door. He finds Sanji exactly where he half-expects: at the bench, one hip cocked as he dices herbs. Sanji speaks to him without turning around. “You’re supposed to be lying down.”

“And you’re supposed to be off your feet. We’re both shitty patients.”

“You fought like you were trying to die,” Sanji says finally, voice casual in the way knives are casual on a table. Laid down, not put away.

Zoro shrugs, then regrets it as the motion tugs his stitches. “You kicked like you were trying to stop me. Seems even.”

Sanji flicks ash into the sink, the ember swinging away and vanishing. “You’re not funny.”

“You were scared.”

“I was pissed,” Sanji snaps. “You can’t swing a sword with one arm, idiot. You try that shit again and I’ll knock your ass out myself.”

“I knew it’d be okay.” He means it as a weird, sideways compliment: you came through, i saw you but it lands wrong, earnest. “You’ve always got my back.”

Sanji spins on him like the ship’s tilted, losing the careful slouch until suddenly all that focus is on Zoro, pinned sharp and bright. His eyes are too clear in the dim, the whites standing out against the smudged shadows under them. “You think that’s funny? You think this is a game?”

Zoro’s back hits the door and he realises, belatedly, that Sanji’s walked him backwards with nothing but volume and fury. If this were anyone else Zoro’s body would already be moving, chin tucked, weight shifted, angles calculated. He’d be shrugging the arm off, stepping sideways, making room. With Sanji, he stands very, very still.

“I told you to knock it off.” 

“I would if you didn’t have it so fucking wrong,” he scowls and, god, his voice doesn’t even sound like his; it’s rough and a little raw and he doesn’t know if it’s from injury or exhaustion or the past few days of hell. “You think I’m messing with you for fun.”

“What else am I supposed to think? You don’t do whatever the fuck you think this is. So yeah, I’m waiting. For the part where you get bored and take the knife out.” 

Ten centimetres, that’s all it would take to turn this into something else. Ten centimetres forward and they’re kissing. we could do it, the unhelpful part of Zoro’s brain whispers again, feral and hopeful. we could shut him up by showing him, just once. just show him you’re not waiting to cut.

His heart’s beating so hard it hurts. His palm itches with the need to come up, to slide into the hair at the nape of Sanji’s neck, to pull him in until there’s no room left for doubt but when his fingers curl Sanji’s shoulders twitch, his weight shifting to the balls of his feet. It’s small, but Zoro’s spent enough time reading him in fights to catch it: he’s not bracing for a kiss, he’s bracing for a blow, every muscle in him going visibly tight in that specific, awful way that says i knew it, i knew it, here it comes, just get it over with.

It feels like slamming his own brakes on in the middle of a charge and his instincts scream with the whiplash of it.

“I don’t want to swing at you, Curls,” he says because that’s the only thing that feels true enough to wedge into the moment. “But I don’t know how to convince you.”

Sanji’s mouth opens, then closes. The anger that had been bristling along his shoulders drains out in a slow, ugly collapse, leaving something thinner behind. He looks… younger, for a second, like there’s less distance between now and a childhood that trained him to read every kindness as a countdown. He beelines back to the cutting board and resumes what he was doing, furious and clearly done with this conversation. “Just. Cut it out. It’s really fucking –” 

“I really fucking like you.” His fingers curl and uncurl at his sides. His palms feel slick. He wants a sword in his hand, god, he wants anything but this bare, stupid skin. “I like you so, so much.”

The effect is physical: the knife stops mid-fall, suspended over a half-minced pile of herbs. Little green flecks cling stubbornly to steel and knuckle, bright against the pale of Sanji’s fingers. The air changes. Thins. The heat from the stove suddenly feels heavier, pressing against the back of Zoro’s neck.  For one long, stretched-out heartbeat, nobody breathes. Then Sanji asks, very quietly: “What’d you just say?”

Zoro can hear his own pulse in his ears. It’s everywhere: throat, temples, fingertips. His ribs feel too tight for it. The words he’s been carrying around for days, weeks, months feel huge and stupid in his mouth. Wrong-sized. Like trying to push a boulder through his teeth.

Robin’s voice ghosts up from somewhere: when the regret of not saying it starts to feel heavier than the fear of losing it.

“I’m serious about you,” he forces out. “About… wanting this. It’s not a joke for me.”

The knife comes down, carefully, deliberately. Sanji sets it on the board with a precision that looks like violence turned inward until the blade rings once against the wood, a tiny, clear note. Sanji’s hand stays braced on the handle a moment too long. His knuckles are white. “Right. Of course.”

“I mean it,” Zoro says but the words feel pathetic, clumsy, small. Like offering a single brick when the house’s already on fire.

“Sure you do,” Sanji bites out, leaning his hips back against the bench like he needs a solid wall at his spine, arms crossing. The heat of the stove has flushed his throat and sweat beads in the hollow at the base of his neck, catching the light. He looks awful. He looks beautiful. It makes something in Zoro’s chest twist hard enough he wants to punch himself. “I told you, if you’re lonely go find some other soul.”

Zoro’s temper, wired close to the surface at the best of times, rears its head. “What do you want, Sanji? You want a speech? You want a poem?  I’m telling you I want you, isn’t that what you –”

“No,” Sanji spits and that stops him. The word is so sharp it might as well have teeth. There’s something underneath it too, something naked and furious and terrified, that yanks the rest of his retort sideways. “What I want is for you to stop acting like this is some extension of training. Like you can just decide to be ‘in’ the way you decide to switch to a different stance.”

The galley holds its breath around them.

Zoro stands there, hands empty, wanting his swords with an almost physical ache. To have weight he understands. All this talking feels like fighting in the dark with no guard up, every strike landing. He’s never felt more stupid, or more exposed, or more fucking young but he takes a step closer anyway, the galley floor complaining under his foot with a long, splintered creak that sounds like a warning. Heat from the stove rolls over his shins in slow waves, like there’s just not enough room in here for all the air and all the words. 

“I’m not –” he starts but Sanji’s eye contact hits like a blow, so bright in the light, glassy at the edges like someone’s been squeezing them from the inside. His jaw’s locked so viciously Zoro can see the knot of muscle jumping, tic-tic-tic in the hinge. 

He says, low: “You’re gonna get tired. You push and push and push and when it stops being interesting, you move on. You pick a new weight to lift. A new enemy. A new mountain to scream at.” His laugh is a small sound but it might as well be a bottle smashed against Zoro’s ribs. Mean and self-directed in a way that makes Zoro’s stomach twist.

“What are you on about, I haven’t moved on from my goal in years,” Zoro growls, harsher than he meant. “I don’t just get fucking bored and wander off –”

“Oh, spare me,” Sanji snaps, peeling himself off the bench to close the last of the distance between them in two sharp steps.His hand comes up and jabs two fingers into Zoro’s chest, right between ribs, small but precise, thudding straight through muscle into bone. “You can obsess over your stupid swords and still get bored of people, you know. They’re messier. Less useful. And you – you like useful. You like clear. You like things you can win against and that’s not me.” His voice drops on that last word, aimed low and soft and right under the guard Zoro didn’t realise he’d dropped. 

It finds home like a badly-blocked blow, wrong angle, too close, no time to brace and Zoro rocks back half a step, foot sole skidding on old grease he’d never have slipped on in any other fight. It feels like Sanji’s angry hand just shoved him off the line he’d planted so carefully. “You’re not – ” he starts, late, scrambling for something – anything – to grab onto.

“What?” Sanji steamrolls.There’s colour high in his cheeks now, ugly and beautiful. “Not messy? Not unclear? What am I, then? A fun new challenge? You gonna notch me on your belt and go oh yeah, tried the cook too, he screamed real pretty?” The mockery in his voice makes Zoro’s guts cramp. “Is that the plan?”

Zoro’s chest goes cold, like seawater poured straight under the breastbone. His heart feels like it’s trying to curl away from the words but has nowhere to fucking go. His voice comes out so low it barely clears his teeth. “Screw you, that’s not –”

“You don’t know,” Sanji snarls. “That’s the whole issue, isn’t it? You don’t fucking know. You came in here to try it on and see how it feels and when it doesn’t fit, when it gets hard, when I get… hard to handle, you’ll just shrug and call it quits.”

His hands are shaking; Zoro sees it everywhere now that he’s close, in the way the tendons stand out along the backs of his fingers, in the minute tremor that runs through his wrists, in the twitch at the corner of his mouth, like it wants to curl down and he’s forcing it sideways instead.

“Newsflash, swordsman,” Sanji says. The word swordsman breaks in the middle like a bone, crack running straight through Zoro. “I am not your practice run.”

It’s worse than any kick Zoro’s ever taken from him, worse than broken ribs and airless lungs and blood in his teeth. All his usual responses try to surge up – throw the insult back, bark something ugly, show his teeth and turn this into a fight he knows how to lose or win – but they slam straight into the look in Sanji’s eyes and die there. Because there’s anger, yeah. Rage, sharp and bright, the kind they both know how to ride but layered under it is something older, tired in the way scars are tired. The look of someone who has already run this scene in his head, alone, in the dark: the confession, the recoil, the shrug, the empty doorway. Someone rehearsing disaster so it won’t surprise him as much when it comes. He’s not just braced for a hit, he’s completely leaning into it.

Zoro feels the wind go out of him like a sword driven too deep into a training post. “I know what I feel. I’m not… experimenting on you.”

Sanji’s mouth twists. “Sure.” His gaze flicks away for a second, down and to the side, like he can’t hold the eye contact with that much skin exposed. When he drags it back up, there’s something in place again, crooked and ill-fitting, but there. The familiar armour, thrown on over fresh bruises. “And when you wake up and realise I’m too fucked up and we got too carried away, are you gonna take it back? Tell me it was just a mood? Just the adrenaline? Just the sea messing with your head?”

Zoro wants to say: no, it’s you, it’s been you, i haven’t had a clean breath in months because of you, but the words jam somewhere between his tongue and his teeth. The anger in Sanji’s face gives him no angle, no place to put them that won’t sound like begging.

“Get out,” Sanji says.

“What?”

“You heard me.” The wild heat is gone, replaced by something something colder, like the dregs in the bottom of a burnt pan. “Get out of my galley. We dock tomorrow and I can’t afford to waste my prep time on whatever this’s supposed to be.”

“That’s it?” Zoro demands, the anger finding teeth again. It lurches up in a hot, hopeless wave, desperately looking for somewhere to land that isn’t his own ribs. “I tell you I’m serious and you just call me a liar and kick me out?”

Sanji’s chin comes up, light shivering on the wet thread gathering at the corner of his eyes, threatening and not quite falling. “Yeah, that’s it.”

The worst part is that Zoro can see the crack straight down the middle of him, the way one half is all sharp edges, braced and vicious and throwing knives because that script is safe. He knows how to survive being the bastard. If he gets the first cut in, he gets to say see? told you when it all bleeds out. The other half is… wrecked. Quietly. Deep under the surface, existing in the slight wobble when he pulls his hand back and the way his fingers want to curl toward his own stomach, protective, before he forces them flat again. In the flicker of something like guilt that passes over his face so fast Zoro almost thinks he imagined it.

He doesn’t know how to talk to both halves at once. His body’s still in fight mode, muscles coiled with bolts of adrenaline waiting for somewhere to go. Every instinct he’s honed since childhood screams move, swing, break something, don’t just stand there and take it.

But there’s nothing in this room he can cut that won’t just turn more of Sanji’s fears into truth.

Sanji’s fingers twitch again in the direction of the door. His mouth’s a hard, thin line, like he’s holding the rest of what he could say behind his teeth and it’s costing him. “I said get out,” he grinds, lower now, like he’s running out of voice.

For one long, deranged second, Zoro thinks he might disobey, might step forward instead of back. Put his hand over Sanji’s where it’s curled into a fist and something stupid like hit me if you have to but i’m not walking away from this.

He doesn’t, though. He doesn’t know if it’s cowardice or self-preservation or just – the need to not push him further into whatever edge he’s standing on. They all stack in the same direction anyway. He puts his hand on the frame to steady himself, the wood rough under his palm, worn smooth in places by years of other hands that didn’t fuck it up like this. Behind him, he hears Sanji drag in a breath that sounds like it hurts.

He doesn’t look back and when the door latch clicks it sounds, in his ears, exactly like a blade being sheathed just a fraction too late.

x

They make port the next morning like nothing’s wrong. The sky’s offensively blue, the harbour all bright paint and shouting vendors and gulls already circling for fries that haven’t been dropped yet. The town already smells like too many people smashed up against too little waterfront and everyone’s buzzing. 

Luffy’s halfway over the rail before the anchor’s settled, yelling about arcades and asking if they have that game where he hits the hammer and it goes DING! Usopp’s giving him a frantic lecture about not getting scammed whereas Nami’s doing a mental conversion to local currency and humming in a way that means this island’s economy is about to be gently looted.

Chopper keeps running back and forth between his little bag and the gangplank, chanting, “Money, stethoscope, hat, money, snacks!” Brook’s tuning his guitar, already composing a ballad about love on the high seas that Zoro really doesn’t want to think too hard about right now.

Sanji moves through the whirlwind like nothing happened last night. His hair’s tied back neat, fresh shirt, tie still loose like he hasn’t fully committed to the costume yet. He’s got a cigarette at the corner of his mouth and a pen behind his ear while he juggles three conversations at once: arguing with Nami about budget, telling Luffy he’s not allowed to eat rock-candy from strangers, threatening Usopp’s life if he buys more fireworks.

He doesn’t look at Zoro once. Everytime Zoro’s orbit takes him near the galley, his body does this stupid little feeling, like it wants to turn of its own accord, muscle stronger than sense. He’s more frustrated than usual because he can’t even distract himself with anything useful. He can’t do shit with his arm in a sling, can’t shoulder a crate or tie off a line. Can’t sharpen Wado, even though he desperately needs something to do with his hands.

Practice run.

Not for the first time he wishes people were more like swords and then immediately hates himself for thinking it, because that’s exactly the kind of thing Sanji accused him of.

“Zoro.” Robin’s voice’s soft at his elbow. “Nami would like you to come and pretend to be intimidating when we meet the mayor.”

He snorts despite himself. “I’m very good at that.”

“So I’ve been told.” She studies him for a heartbeat. “Perhaps you could consider what you hope to do before you’re standing in front of him.”

To anyone else it’d sound like she’s talking about the mayor but he knows better, and he hates how useful her advice is, so much so that he doesn’t even get any words out around it. Just grunts ineloquently at her until she leaves him to it. 

What he hopes to do. Well, he has no fucking idea about that but he knows what he wants. He wants Sanji alone, somewhere that isn’t the galley or the bar or anywhere on this ship. Somewhere with a door they can shut that doesn’t come with a pile of knives and a lifetime of kitchen ghosts. He wants to say all the things he mangled last night, but better, cleaner, without his temper driving.

He wants – to his own horror – a plan which is insane within itself because Zoro’s never planned a conversation in his life. He’s always been the guy who walks into a fight, measures it once and lets the body do what it’s trained to do. Feelings have never needed strategies. They’ve been background noise at best and, at worst, something he shaved off like splinters to keep the blade true.

Now the noise has a face and a voice and hands that smell like citrus and smoke and it’s fucking up everything.

He tells himself that’s why he finds himself back in the cabin, sitting on his bunk with a scrap of paper on his knee, stolen from Nami’s spare chart stack, creased and smudged with someone else’s route half-visible under his own chicken scratches. There’s a stub of pencil in his good hand that feels so unfamiliar he keeps wanting to chuck it. 

He stares at the blank section for a long time and tries to list reasons this isn’t a joke but everytime he tries to write his mind goes white. What, exactly, is he supposed to put there? Nice legs? Good cook? Looks stupidly hot with his hair down and his shirt off sweating over the stove? 

He presses the pencil harder until the tip threatens to snap, forces his shoulders down and tries again, writes: you make me and then has to stop because… what? He makes Zoro laugh? Want to punch something? Want to stay? Want to hold on? All of the above? None of that sounds like something you can put in front of Sanji without him lighting it on fire.

He scribbles over the half-formed word until it’s just a black knot on the page and tries another tack, writes: you take care of everyone. 

That one at least feels solid, all the evidence of Sanji cooking himself bloody on days he’s wounded just so Luffy gets seconds, shoving food in Zoro’s hands after a bad fight with a grunt, patching up broken plates and broken tempers and broken routines without ever dropping the joke. He adds: you make me stop being an idiot. 

The pencil stalls again, half from him getting stuck and half from the awkwardness of doing this one-handed. He could list skills, sure, all the ways Sanji’s good with kids and good with knives, the way he can kick a sea king’s head off its shoulders. He could list stupid little things like the way Sanji hums North Blue tunes when he thinks no-one’s listening, or the way he still keeps his lighters lined up like soldiers as some old habit from a place he doesn’t talk about, or the way he looks at the sea on quiet mornings like he’s trying to apologise for something.

None of it feels like enough, or maybe it feels like too much? Zoro’s fought men three times his size, monsters with teeth longer than his forearm, warlords who could snap bones with a thought. He’s lost blood and sleep and pieces of himself and never felt this stupidly fucking outmatched.

He’s trying to write down why he likes someone and it’s beating his damn ass.

He thinks about before, about a younger version of himself in a nowhere dojo, all edges and anger, too focused on blades and ghosts to notice anyone’s hands lingering on his except to correct a grip. About that one drunk, fumbling encounter behind a shitty village bar that mostly convinced him sex was noisy and boring. About how easy it’s always been to want a fight and how weirdly, shockingly hard it is to want a person.

He scratches you’re the first person i before his hand stops again. The first person he what? 

First person he can’t stop thinking about. First person who makes him want to come back. First person he’s more scared of hurting than he is of dying. First person whose mouth he wants on his, more than he wants a clean win.

The pencil hovers over the page. His throat feels tight. The bunk creaks when he shifts his weight, the sound ridiculously loud in the empty room. Outside, he can hear Luffy yelling something about giant pretzels against Chopper squealing and Nami’s exasperated smack.

Zoro presses the pencil down and the tip snaps clean off.

“Fuck,” he mutters and glares at the paper and its messy, half written letters. At the ugly black blob where he’d tried to cross a feeling out and just made it larger. It looks like his own brain on a page, just half thoughts and scratched out instincts and nothing clean enough to hand to someone else.

What, exactly, was he going to do? March into the bar, slam this pathetic scrap down and go see, look, bullet points? Sanji would set it on fire and use it to light his cigarette. Despite himself, the corner of Zoro’s mouth twitches because it’s so painfully stupidly easy to imagine that exact scene that it almost feels like it’s already happened.

He folds the paper anyway until it’s a small, crumpled square and shoves it into the pocket inside his haramaki where he usually keeps important things. He tells himself it’s just so it doesn’t clutter Nami’s ship with his trash.

Hope is a stupid fucking word, one that’s always felt flimsy and untrained. He’s never liked it. You either do the thing or you don’t; hope is what people say when they don’t plan to get back up. But it’s all he’s got right now, so he leans his head back against the wall and stares up at the patched wood of the ceiling, to where Usopp’s drawn little constellation dots up there in chalk. One of them looks like a sword if you squint.

“Okay,” he mutters, to the wood, to his swords, to himself. “We do this.”

Step one: show up. Not hover in alleys like some kind of weird, one-handed, swordy ghost. Actually be there. Sit at the bar where Sanji can see him. Step two: don’t get into a fight, no matter what happens or what Sanji says. Step three: when – if – Sanji gives him even a sliver of quiet, say something that isn’t you’re mine or i’m serious dropped like a bomb. 

It feels like lining up for a fight where the opponent is half him and half every bastard who ever taught Sanji that affection is a trap and he hates it but he also can’t not do it. His hand goes unconsciously to his chest, fingers pressing against the spot where Sanji jabbed him last night, to where the ghost of the touch is still there if he looks for it. The words are, too.

He pushes himself off the bunk, floor solid under his feet, the Sunny’s sway slower than normal, like she’s trying to steady him, too.  Outside, Nami yells his name and Luffy’s already hollering about the first bar they’re going to hit. There’s the clatter of Franky’s tools, the soft, sliding step of Robin’s sandals on wood.

Zoro grabs his swords and steps out into the light, into the noise, into whatever the hell tonight is going to be with no poem, no speech, just a list of half-finished reasons in his pocket and the ugly, terrifying certainty that for the first time in his life, he cares way more about one man’s face in a crowd than any opponent he’s ever drawn a blade on.

It feels like shit but it’s the only stance he’s got.

x

The town hits them like a slap. Heat, first. Heavy and sticky, crawling under Zoro’s shirt and then, worse, under the thick material of the sling. The late afternoon sun has baked the stone streets till they radiate and the air over the harbour shimmers. It smells like frying oil and spilled beer, grilled fish and exhaust, salt and too many bodies.

Luffy loves it immediately.

“There!” he yells, pointing at three different food stalls at once. “And look, giant pretzels!”

“Pick one!” Nami snaps, catching him by the back of the vest. “We are doing this in stages, not feeding your stomach in parallel universes.”

Usopp is already narrating the expedition like some kind of travel guide, waving his hands around and saying: “And to the left we have the famous boardwalk, known for its terrifying seagulls and overpriced cocktails!”

Chopper’s trotting in little circles at Zoro’s heel, hooves click-clacking on stone. “Do you think they have ice cream? O-or churros? Or ice cream on churros? Is that a thing? It should be a thing.” 

Robin walks beside him, hands loosely linked behind her back, absorbing everything with that quiet, lethal interest she has. Sanji’s at the front with Nami, of course, cigarette trailing smoke, and hands deep in his pockets, moving like the town only exists to give him somewhere to walk.

Zoro watches the way his shoulders move, unable to help it. He catalogues everything: no limp, so the bruise he took last island isn’t bothering him, tension in the right shoulder, probably from lugging barrels, hair tied back but already fraying in the humidity, jaw tight, mouth sucked in around the filter.

He hasn’t looked at Zoro since they came down the gangplank.

Zoro opens his mouth, then shuts it. Robin’s voice nudges the back of his skull: know what you hope to do. He’d hoped, vaguely, to get Sanji alone, somewhere neutralish, away from knives. Maybe offer to carry groceries like some idiot in a romance novel and then… talk.

So far his plan consists of: follow, sweat, try not to stare.

“Hey, Moss.” Zoro’s head snaps up before he can stop it, stupidly hopeful, before he realises the cook’s talking over his shoulder without turning. “We’re hitting a bar first so the captain doesn’t eat the town. Try not to get lost in a straight line.”

“Funny,” Zoro mutters. “You practising your stand-up routine for when you get fired as cook?”

Sanji snorts smoke. “They’d sooner toss the swordsman, especially when he’s only got one working arm.”

It’s the usual rhythm, the usual swing but normally, there’s a beat after where Sanji glances back, makes sure Zoro’s heard him properly, his eyes lit with that special brand of go on, take a swing he reserves for Zoro alone.

Today he doesn’t look back, not once, until they reach the bar that Nami eventually bullies everyone into. It’s all low ceilings and heavy beams, the air thick with smoke and fried food. There’s a long wooden bar scuffed by a hundred years of elbows and spilled drinks, lanterns hanging at uneven intervals. A jukebox in the corner is, frankly, strangling some East Blue jig.

Sanji’s eyes do a quick sweep as they walk in, clocking the lighting, the exits, the quality of glassware, the quality of clientele. Zoro can practically see the judgement meter tick before he decrees: “I’ve seen worse. Sit.”

Luffy doesn’t need telling twice. He launches himself into a booth like a human cannonball, nearly taking Usopp out at the knees. Nami slides in opposite and Chopper scrambles up between them, eyes going comically wide at the menu.

“Well,” Usopp slaps Zoro’s back and grins. “I’ll hold Luff as long as I can but once Sanji starts feeding him it’s every pirate for themselves.”

Sanji’s already off, talking to the bartender, what he’s always been good at. Smile just this side of polite, eyes engaged, hands expressive but never threatening. In a blink he’s charmed the harried woman behind the bar into handing over a battered notepad and the privilege of helping with orders if you want the kitchen.

“Can’t stay out of the galley for five minutes,” Zoro mutters, drifting closer.

“Someone has to make sure they don’t poison you,” Sanji says, without looking at him. “What’re you doing here?”

Zoro watches his own hand move, almost like it belongs to someone else, reaching out to nudge the spare notepad. “Figured I could help carry plates. Scare off anyone who looks like they’re about to dine and dash.”

It’s nothing. A dumb, offhand offer yet his heart’s pounding like he’s just picked yet another fight with Mihawk.

For one infinitesimal moment Sanji goes still before that lazy, razor smile slides across his face, the one that means Zoro’s just stepped somewhere he doesn’t know the shape of. “Aw, you trying to impress me? Gonna be my little waiter bodyguard?”

The words are mocking but the tone… isn’t, quite. There’s teeth in there, yeah, but there’s something else, too. An edge Zoro is starting to recognise as panic dressed up as play. He holds his ground. “I’m good at carrying things, might as well.”

Sanji’s gaze flicks up, finally meeting his and it’s all there in that split-second, lit up ugly in the bar’s cheap yellow light: the bone-deep exhaustion, the tight, coiled wariness, the wild nothing-good-survives look he gets right before a fight he thinks he’s going to lose. “Yeah, thing is, love, you’re a terrible waiter. You glare at people when you’re sober, you threaten them when you’re drunk, and you’d eat half the food before it hits the table. Besides, you better rest that arm.”

Love lands like broken glass in Zoro’s ribs, casual and automatic, the same word he’s heard thrown at a thousand strangers. It’s never, ever cut like this before. “I don’t –”

Sanji spins away on the ball of one foot, all brisk and back to business. “Sit down, drink. Try not to start any fights before dessert.”

He’s gone before the sentence finishes, pivoting toward the fryers, snapping at the bartender about oil temperature and god, do you actually serve frozen chips in this establishment? The overhead lights halo him in greasy gold, smoke curling around his head like a crown. Zoro’s left standing at the end of the bar with his hand empty and his chest full of shrapnel, feeling like someone slammed a door on him without ever touching the handle.

He hears, faintly, Robin’s voice: what do you think you’re doing?

Right now? Right now he has no fucking clue. He goes to the table because there’s nowhere else to go that isn’t making a scene and the crew tries, at first, to pretend nothing’s wrong. To keep the energy bobbing on the surface.

Usopp launches into a story with both hands. “And then I said oi! and the guy’s face – you should’ve seen it, he looked like his soul left through his nostrils!”

Nami drinks and watches everything with hurricane eyes, the way she does when she’s already calculated ten possible disasters and is waiting to see which one hits. Zoro laughs where he’s supposed to, the short, punched-out version, throwing in a barked comment when someone looks at him expectantly. He sips his drink. His ears stay tuned to the bar like they’ve grown a mind of their own, to where Sanji’s in his element and not, all at once. He moves like a man playing himself half a dozen drinks ahead on fast-forward, banter coming bright and polished, edges too sharp, tossed like knives to an audience that doesn’t know they’re ducking. He twirls the notepad between his fingers and leans over the bar to read a label, shirt pulling tight over his back. He tucks a stray strand of hair behind his ear with hands that have plated two hundred meals under fire.

A girl in a red dress laughs too loud at something he says and he flashes her a grin that could strip paint, teeth bright in the dim. Zoro’s hand tightens around his glass until the condensation squeaks under his fingers, counting backward from ten like someone once told him was good for bloodlust. Forces his fingers to loosen. 

Sanji swings by with their first round of snacks, setting a mountain of some unidentifiable fried glory down in front of Luffy and a small, meticulously balanced plate of actually edible things appears in front of Chopper. Nami gets a drink that looks like it crawled directly out of an expensive cocktail menu, complete with garnish and a little curl of citrus and that somehow looks exactly like her.

“Oi,” Zoro says, because apparently he enjoys getting kicked in the teeth. “Thought you said I couldn’t carry plates. You’re triple stacking.”

Sanji gives him a glance as fast and sharp as a flicked blade. He uses the kind of tone that makes strangers feel special and makes Zoro feel like he’s standing in a blast freezer. “Unlike some people I know my limits.”

He’s gone again before Zoro can prise his tongue off the roof of his mouth and Usopp leans in the moment Sanji’s out of earshot, whisper-hissing like a leaking kettle. “Okay, what is going on? Why’s Sanji acting like you murdered his favourite apron?”

Zoro’s jaw works as he feels every muscle in his face trying to seize up at once. He could shrug. He could grunt nothing and let them label this another weird Sanji mood and go back to their drinks. Instead, he hears himself say: “I told him something. He didn’t like it.”

Nami’s gaze snaps to him, sharp but he ignores her and takes another drink, feeling it hit his stomach and fizz on top of something already burning there.

He tries again: the next time Sanji swings past, tray balanced on one palm, pen between his teeth, Zoro half-rises before he can stop himself. “Want a hand? I could –”

“I’ve got it,” Sanji cuts in, not missing a beat. To anyone else it’d sound smooth and efficient, professional, even, but to Zoro it sounds like a slammed gate. His eyes flash a warning, quick and cold: drop it or i’ll make a scene you can’t back away from.

Zoro sits back down like someone’s cut his strings, face too hot. The bar noise tilts around him, goes weird and echoing, the clink of glass sharp as steel on steel and the jukebox too thin and far away. Every burst of laughter from Sanji’s end of the room lands like a hit he can’t parry.

The girl in the red dress blushes as dark as her clothes when Sanji tilts her chin with two fingers to hear her better over the noise.  Zoro watches the way her hand lands on Sanji’s forearm, his own fingers curling in on themselves until his knuckles ache. 

“There he goes,” Usopp mutters, trying for joking and missing by a good fucking mile. “Our boy in his natural habitat.”

Chopper’s nose wrinkles. “But he was just yelling earlier…”

“Don’t worry about it, Chopper,” Nami says, voice tight enough to cut. “Adult disaster. Finish your juice.”

Zoro honks out something like agreement, throat too narrow for actual words. His brain keeps trying to shove this into the old box: Sanji flirts, that’s what he does. White noise. Background habit. He’s spent years letting it bounce right off him like foam off a hull. But the difference isn’t in the what, it’s in the how. It’s in the way Sanji glances at him, so quick it’d never register to anyone who doesn’t know how fast he can check a battle map and go back to smiling. Like checking a mirror to see how bad the bruise is.

oh, Zoro thinks, something in his chest going tight, realising that this isn’t just an everyday act, this is an act aimed at him. Every laugh he pulls out of the girl is a probe, every compliment and gush of flattery thrown across the bar is a feeler: are you going to flinch? are you going to storm over? are you going to prove i was right about you?

He presses his good palm flat, feeling the sticky ring where someone’s drink sweated out and wasn’t wiped up. “The girl’s gonna sprain something flipping her hair like that,” he says when Sanji drifts close enough to deliver Luffy’s thirds. “You gonna give her a massage too?”

Sanji’s smile clicks into place like a blade sliding home. “If she asks nicely. I’m very good with my hands.”

“Good for her,” Zoro mutters, because what the fuck else can he say? What else can he do?

Sanji’s eyes flash and for half a heartbeat something ugly-and-hurt-and-weirdly-impressed cuts through his expression. He steps up his game, starts working the room and it’s brutal, how good he is. Clinically impressive, if Zoro pulls back far enough in his head. Sanji makes time for everyone: the girl in red, the bartender, a guy at the far end with half a sleeve of ink and a grin like broken glass, a middle-aged woman in a sun hat, a trio of backpackers with sand still on their shoes. Compliments tossed like grenades. Kisses blown. Fingers brushing wrists, shoulders, the small of a back. He laughs, leans, flirts like he’s trying to wear his own tongue out. In ten minutes, he’s turned the whole bar into a mirror maze and all of it’s angled one single way.

By the fourth lap even Luffy’s gone quiet, chewing around a mouthful of meat, eyebrows squished together in a puzzled frown. Usopp leans in, whispering: “Okay, I’m not crazy, right? This is… more than usual.”

Nami’s mouth is a white-knuckled line, never one to pull punches. “He’s being an asshole.”

Zoro can feel them all orbiting the fault line, pretending not to stare, giving space while being acutely aware of every inch of it and it makes him feel exposed, stupid… and weirdly anchored, like there’s a railing at his back he can lean on if he has to. He doesn't want to lean back, though. He wants to fucking swing. Every part of him is built for it: he’s hurt, he hits back. He feels cornered, he bites, breaks ribs, smashes jaws. This pressure in his chest, this sick, burning fizz under his sternum… that’s usually when he puts his hand on a hilt and everything makes sense again but there’s no goddamn blade for this.

The wooden chair creaks under his thigh every time his weight shifts, drink sweating in his hand until the condensation slicks his fingers, the glass sliding just enough that he has to adjust his grip again and again. The bar gets louder, meaner, rowdier. Lanterns come up as daylight bleeds out and the air goes thicker still. Someone starts a card game that someone else loses, their chair scraping loud enough to make Zoro’s shoulders jump before laughter washes over it.

Sanji ends up behind the bar at some point, fully adopted by the staff now, shaking cocktails like he’s auditioning for some trashy show. Bottles flip, ice rattles, metal shakers flash in arcs under the dim lights. His tie’s gone now and the top few buttons of his shirt are undone, skin at his throat flushed from the effort and heat, wild and gorgeous and completely out of reach.

A woman at the bar with her hair up in a messy knot, calls loud enough for Zoro to hear: “You should come home with me, sugar.”

Sanji laughs but he doesn’t say no and Zoro feels something in his chest seize, like someone’s poured ice water into him and then lit it from underneath. His vision tunnels slightly. The edges of the room go blurred but the centre – Sanji, the woman, the bar – stays sharp as knives.

He looks down into his glass, at where the amber liquid shivers, tiny ripples betraying the shake in his fingers and knows he could get up. He could march over there, drag Sanji away by the wrist or the shirt or the throat and snarl something possessive and ugly. He could make a scene that every asshole in this bar would remember. He could watch Sanji bare his teeth and there it is at him, satisfied. Or he can sit here and let Sanji walk out on his arm with someone else just to prove a point to himself, let that image burn into his brain until he’s old and broken, knowing he stayed still for it. Knowing he let it happen because he can’t bear to cage him.

He hates that those are the only two options his panic can see. 

The woman laughs again, high and delighted as Sanji leans in to say something Zoro can’t catch over the swell of music and voices. She swats his arm, pressing closer, his hand finding the small of her back, easy and practised, fingers splayed and Zoro’s lungs feel like they’re pulling air through glass.

Usopp’s hand lands on his arm, warm and tight. “You… you okay, man?”

He tries to say fine but what comes out is: “He’s doing this on purpose,” and it’s not a question.

Usopp’s face twists. “I’m the sniper, not a therapist, but… yeah, kinda looks like it. You don’t have to sit through it, you know.”

He’s never felt this helpless. He’s stood under a giant shadow and offered his life up as payment, he’s watched blood fill his boots, he’s walked into fights he knew he couldn’t win because the alternative was so much worse and none of that felt like this. None of that felt like sitting still while someone he wants more than oxygen kicks his heart around a room to see if he’ll scream. He watches Sanji throw his head back and laugh at something the woman whispers in his ear and thinks: if i get through this, if i keep sitting here, if i walk out at the end of the night and i’m still in… that has to mean something, right? that has to be proof. for him. for me.

“I can’t win,” he mutters, mostly to the wet ring his glass has left on the table. “If I drag him out then I prove him right and if I sit here he gets to say I don’t care what he does.”

Nami’s voice cuts in, sharp and immediate, like she’s been dying to say something. “Or – and hear me out – you could tell him that.” Her eyes are blazing, all storm and snapped patience, but the anger isn’t pointed at him. It’s all aimed at the idiot behind the bar. “You don’t have to sit here and bleed quietly to prove a point.”

Zoro forces a ragged almost-laugh that feels like it snags on his ribs on the way out. “Right.”

“I’m serious, you don’t have to just wait around for him to – you don’t need to be here.”

At the bar, the woman in red leans in, mouth near Sanji’s ear. He throws his head back and laughs, throat a clean white line in the warm light, her hand on his bicep and fingers stroking the rolled-up sleeve like she owns that strip of skin.

Zoro’s pushes his chair back, legs scraping the sticky floor, a small, raw sound that only their table seems to hear. “I’m gonna –” he tries but his brain blanks. Go over there and what? Tell half a bar that Sanji’s hurting him? Drag him into an alley and let rage do the talking? Walk back to the ship and put an ocean between them before he does something he can’t take back?

The doors at the front bang as more people push in, letting in a puff of cooler air that dies instantly against the heat. Behind the bar, Sanji wipes his hands on a towel and says something to the bartender that makes the guy laugh and clap him on the back. Sanji reaches behind him, unknotting the borrowed apron in one clean pull. When he steps out from behind the bar the woman in red slides off her seat to fall into step beside him like she’d been waiting for that cue all night and Sanji’s eyes hit Zoro standing there half-risen, hand empty, jaw tight. His fingers flex on the woman’s shoulder when he says it and the message under it is so loud Zoro almost hears it as words: are you still stupid enough to want this? are you finished playing? still serious?

Something inside Zoro gives, like a fault line finally deciding, under all that pressure, to shift. A crack running through rock, too deep to see, suddenly widening. His vision sharpens and blurs at the same time, one part of his brain cataloguing details with battle clarity: the exact red of the woman’s dress, the pattern of footprints across the floor, the way Sanji’s shoulders have gone too straight, like he’s holding himself up by habit alone. The rest of him feels like he’s been hit by a wave he didn’t see coming. His heart flails, stupid and heavy with there’s that awful, humiliating prickling heat on his face and he wants – more than he’s ever wanted a sword or a win or a bottle – to not do this in front of his crew. 

“I’m getting some air,” he hears himself say. No-one stops him, and the heat slams into him again outside like a wall, all thick tropical night, wet air, fish and petrol from the harbour. His feet find the Sunny by instinct, the way they always do when his head’s a mess. The sky above’s a dark velvet strip, stars drowned out by city glow. He breathes shallow at first, then deeper as the sea’s rhythm forces his lungs to match it until, little by little, the white-hot urge to go back and tear the bar apart by the foundations settles into something heavier. Not calmer. Just… denser, like a weight he’s braced under instead of a blow he’s trying to dodge.

The Sunny’s a dark shape against the water by the time he gets there, the lantern at the end of the pier flickering like it’s thinking about giving up. Franky’s tinkering away at the rail, sparks violent against the dark night and the light plays over his forearms, over the familiar lines of tattoos and scars.

“You’re back early,” he grins, killing the grinder before Zoro can hope to escape unseen. His voice’s casual, but it lands too neatly to be an accident. “Thought you were going to drown yourself in cheap beer and worse decisions.”

Zoro snorts, but it comes out thin. He drops down to sit with his back against the rail, one knee up, one leg stretched out. His arm’s throbbing a little but he’s almost grateful for it: it gives him something concrete to focus on. The reflection of the port lights fractures on the swell, yellow and white broken into a thousand pieces. “Needed to get out of there.”

Franky wipes his hands on a rag, considering him. “Hot date go bad?” he asks, too light to be anything but a probe.

Zoro’s mouth twists. “Something like that.”

“Sanji,” Franky hums, not a question.

Zoro’s jaw clenches so hard his teeth click. “The whole crew get all psychic now or what?”

Franky snorts. “You two are about as subtle as a cannon in a teacup, bro. Talk.” 

Zoro bristles. “Not a kid.”

“No,” Franky says. “You’re a grown man sitting on the deck in the dark avoiding everyone. Bet your crush spent the evening trying to see how many knives he could throw at your heart without technically breaking crew rules, so. If you wanna talk...”

Zoro flinches, the wording hitting a little too close for comfort. “How d’you even –”

Franky taps his temple. “I’ve got eyes, bro, and a mirror. You think Robin and I got together by not recognising self-destructive idiots when we see them?” He shoves his tools aside to drop down beside Zoro, a heavy thunk of metal and muscle, back against the rail, legs stretched out. For a minute, they just sit there. Breathing. Listening to the sea.

“He flirted with someone,” Zoro says finally, staring at his good hand. “Hell, everyone. Hard. On purpose. Just to… piss me off.” He doesn’t say hurt me because that’s a little too close, right now..

Franky moves to sprawl on a coil of rope like it’s a beanbag, the smell of salt and oil and cola familiar and weirdly comforting. “And?”

“And… nothing,” Zoro snaps, the word grating. “I’m not going to tell him who he can flirt with, I’m not his owner.”

Franky snorts, a sharp, metallic sound. “Relax, bro, nobody’s asking you to slap a collar on him.”

“He’s free to do whatever he wants,” Zoro pushes, louder, angrier. If he keeps talking maybe he won’t think. “That’s the whole point. If I start telling him don’t talk to her, don’t touch him, I’m just –”

The night seems to lean in on the pause, the harbour glow wrapping the chrome of Franky’s arm in a sickly halo to throw a smear of light over Zoro’s knuckles where they move to clamp his swords. The blue in Franky’s goggles catches a reflection of Zoro’s face: jaw locked, eyes too bright.

“Okay,” he says at last. “Sure. You don’t get to dictate his targets. But that’s not what you’re pissed about and you know it.”

Zoro’s fingers curl harder over Wado until his palm aches, until the lacquer bites into callous. “What I’m pissed about is irrelevant,” he grinds out. Every fucking word feels like he’s chewing glass. “He wants me to tell him to piss off and I’m not giving him that out.”

“Bro,” Franky sighs and it manages to hit like a thrown wrench, no softness, just blunt steel. “What you feel is the only relevant thing in this whole mess.”

Zoro glares at the harbour like he can cut it in half with his eye, the lights smearing when his vision stings; he blinks hard, furious at himself for the wet. “He’s trying to make me prove him right. That I’ll tell him to cut it out or that I’ll walk, that it’s a game, that I’m – not serious. That’s all this is. He wants me to throw the punch first so he doesn’t have to.”

“And you? You wanna hit him? Right now?”

Zoro pictures it before he can stop himself: Sanji’s shirt knotted in his fist, back slamming into brick, both of them snarling, finally giving this pressure somewhere to go. His stomach lurches and he shoves the image away like it burns.

“Yeah,” he says and the honesty hurts more than any bruise. “But not like that.”

Franky hums, low and considering. “Here’s the thing, you’re right, you don’t own him. You don’t get to tell him not to flirt if you’re not solid yet.” He shakes his head, metal plates whispering and clicking. “But if you’re saying he was flirting that hard… man, that’s using your face as a target and another person as a weapon.”

Zoro’s shoulders twitch like the words physically impact him. Something inside his chest gives an ugly, warning creak. “I can take it.”

“Yeah, congrats, you can tank emotional damage, super macho. That’s not the flex you think it is.”

Zoro bristles harder, teeth baring. “What, you want me to cry about it? Tell him to stop? He’ll hear that as not to look at anyone else and we’re not – we’re not together, he doesn’t owe me shit. Then I’m just –”

Franky cuts across him, sharp as a snapped cable. “You’re not listening.” He leans in and thumps a big hand into Zoro’s chest, right over the raised knot of scars – Thriller Bark, Mihawk, god-knows-what-else – a palm landing on everything Zoro has already survived. “There’s a difference between ‘you can’t do this’ and ‘you don’t get to do it like that’, you know?”

Zoro stares at him, breath snagging. “It’s the same –”

“No. It. Isn’t.” His thumb digs harder into Zoro’s sternum, right where that old Mihawk scar splits him. “If you tell him he’s not allowed to talk to anyone, sure, that’s fucked but if you tell him that you’re not signing up to be fuckin’ stabbed every night ‘til he gets his shit together then that’s not a cage, man. That’s info. That’s you drawing a line in the sand so he knows where it starts hurting.”

The image makes something ugly twist in Zoro’s gut because he’s good with lines. He’s spent his whole life on them – edges of blades, boundaries of fights, the one thin cut between victory and death. He’s just never thought to draw one on himself and to hand it to someone else.  His throat works around a dry swallow. “He’ll still hear it wrong, that’s what he does. Twists everything into the worst version. He’ll decide I’m controlling him and bolt.”

Franky scoffs, unimpressed. “Yeah, probs, at least the first few times. He’s trained for that. But if you never say it then all he sees is you sitting there and he fills the silence with every shit story he’s already lived.”

Zoro shuts his eye because it’s too easy to imagine Sanji somewhere inside his own head, stacking nights like this into proof. Tight certainty that of course this is how it goes, of course no-one stays, of course wanting is just a prelude to loss. He clenches his jaw.  “So, what, I’m supposed to walk in there and go hey, cook, that was shit, don’t use other people to prove to yourself you’re unlovable and then throw the damn shards at me?” It sounds pathetic in his own ears, too big and too raw, like he’s turned his ribs inside out and written HELP in blood on them.

Franky barks a laugh, sharp and bright in the dark. “Well, maybe not with those exact words, you’re no poet.” He shifts, plates creaking, then settles again with his forearms hooked over the rail, gaze going out where the harbour lights smear themselves flat on the black water. “When Robin and me started this, she made two things very clear. One: if I tried to cage her she’d break my fingers and two: if I pretended her shit didn’t affect me she’d break the other fingers.”

Despite everything, Zoro snorts. “Sounds like her.”

“Yeah.” Franky’s mouth crooks. “Super romantic, right? Point is, she didn’t want a jailer. She wanted a partner who’d tell her when she was punching low while she was busy trying not to flinch high. You want him, right?” 

The answer’s so obvious it makes Zoro’s teeth ache but saying it out loud still feels like dragging a blade sideways through his chest. “Yeah. I do.”

“Then you don’t get to stand there like a scarecrow and let him hurl knives at you forever. You’re not being noble, you’re just letting him reenact all his worst shit with you in the villain role.” The words hit like a kick, right under the ribs. Zoro’s breath stutters and for a second he’s back at the bar: Sanji’s arm wrapped around someone else’s shoulders, that grin like a snarl turned inside out, eyes checking – always checking – to see if Zoro’s flinching the way he expects him to. The way other people have.

His stomach twists. “It’s the only thing I know how to do. Stand there and take it. Swing back or leave. That’s it, that’s the whole list.”

Fight. Endure. Walk away. Swordsman solutions, all of them and none of them built for this.

Franky’s mouth twists. He taps Zoro’s chest again, lighter this time, knuckles ringing softly on old scar tissue. “Then add something, bro. You’re good at commitment, you’ll crawl through hell for a promise. Use that. But stop confusing staying with being a punching bag. You can be here and tell him to stop aiming for your heart.”

Zoro stares out over the rail as the ship settles around them with a gentle hum, a living thing. The ropes fidget in their pulleys and a seagull shrieks somewhere in the dark, thin and obnoxious. He says, slowly: “I tell him that and he still decides I’m too much or that he’s right about me, or that I’ll get bored and walk –”

“Then he does,” Franky interrupts, blunt as a brick to the face. “And it’ll suck. It’ll suck worse than any sword in the gut but at least you won’t spend the rest of your life wondering if you lost him because you never showed him where it hurt.”

The line lands with the weight of a good stance. Ugly, but solid. Heavy in the right places and Zoro inhales, forcing it slow. He’s taken blades that missed his heart by a breath. He’s stood in blood and fire and war and torture andthought, this is fine, this is what i’m for. He has never willingly stepped closer to something that could break him this quietly.

“I don’t know how to… talk like that,” he admits and the confession feels worse than saying he’s scared. “I open my mouth and it turns into a fight or a joke or nothing.”

Franky shrugs, big shoulders rolling. “So say it the way you fight. You’re a swordsman, bro. You know what happens when you split your stance. Make it an easy combo even you can remember.”

Zoro rolls his eye. “You’re a terrible motivational speaker.”

“Lucky for you I’m a great shipwright and I know rot when I smell it. You let this fester, it’s gonna eat through the hull.” He pushes himself up with a grin, plates clanking, then looks down at Zoro, all ridiculous pompadour and naked sincerity. 

Zoro’s hand flexes on the hilt of Wado without thinking, fingers tightening around familiar leather. The sword shouldn’t be any help: it has nothing to say about this kind of wound. It’s a comfort all the same, warm and familiar and constant. 

Franky jerks his chin at him. “Pick your fight, bro. You wanna fight him? Fight his fear, not with punches but with facts. You’re still here, you keep being here. And you stop pretending it doesn’t hurt when he kicks.” He turns, clanking toward the hatch, humming some off-key tune that doesn’t match the weight of what he just dropped.

Zoro stays where he is, the harbour lights shimmering on the black surface of the sea, breaking and reforming with every ripple. The Sunny breathes under him, old wood and strong lines, steady and patient, always trusting them to get their shit together eventually. He thinks of Sanji in that doorway, arm flung around someone else’s waist, eyes cutting to him like a dare and a plea all at once: prove me right, prove me wrong, just don’t leave me in the maybe.

He thinks of his own fingers shaking around a glass. Of walking out instead of walking toward and the terror doesn’t go anywhere, not exactly. It just settles lower, a cold knot at the base of his spine, new in a way nothing else has ever been. There’s no enemy to cut down, no clear win condition, no training regime that guarantees a result. Just his own stupid heart throwing itself at someone who might decide not to catch it. Someone who already tried to drop it once just to see if he’d flinch.

He knows it’ll be worth it if he can just convince Sanji. He can see flashes of it already: the way Sanji looks at him in the aquarium bar light sometimes, soft, or laughing on the deck after a fight, or the soft, unguarded moments half-asleep after a long watch. He can imagine, just barely, a version of his life where that warmth isn’t something he has to pretend he doesn’t want.

He tips his head back, lets his eye fall closed and lets the Sunny rock him. The knot in his chest doesn’t vanish, it can’t – but slowly, slowly, it shifts, learning the shape of this new weight it’s chosen to carry.

x

He doesn’t remember falling asleep. Last thing he remembers was being on his back, eye fixed on a strip of stars he can see between mast and sail and telling them in his head like an idiot: i’m in, i’m not going anywhere, i’m in. At some point the stars had smeared into one long, silver blur, and now there’s light pressing at his eyelids like someone’s put the sun on dim and set it right on his face. 

His spine feels like it’s been used to test the quality of every plank on the deck, old wounds lighting up one by one, shoulder scars whining, the line across his stomach a dull, angry throb. His arm is fucking aching. Something jabs him hard in the ribs.

“Oi. Mosshead.” The voice knifes through the cotton in his skull. He grunts and tries to roll away from it, cheek scraping against rough wood. His body feels heavy and dry, like he napped under a kiln. Unfortunately, the voice moves with him. “Up.”

Fingers hook in the front of his shirt and yank and Zoro’s eye snaps open on reflex, pupil shrinking against a wash of sky. There’s the mast, ropes, the curve of sail, a seagull circling and, right in front of him, way too close, is Sanji. “What the –”

“Not here,” Sanji grinds out and then he’s hauling Zoro upright, dragging him off the deck in a series of graceless lurches. His grip is all knuckles and tendon, bunched fabric cutting into Zoro’s sternum.

Zoro’s brain claws for purchase. “S’Luffy okay?” he rasps, because it’s the first question it can grab. 

Sanji doesn’t answer. Doesn’t even look at him properly. “On your feet.” The words are sharp, but beneath them there’s an edge he can’t place, like Sanji’s already had three arguments before breakfast and now he’s coming for the fourth. Zoro’s body obeys before his thoughts catch up, muscle memory moving until his boots find the planks properly, every joint complaining on the way. His head swims, slow and queasy, before settling.

Sanji doesn’t let go of his shirt. He takes off across the deck with Zoro in tow, long strides eating the distances and Zoro stumbles after him, his good hand coming up to clamp around Sanji’s wrist more for balance than to break free. 

The Sunny’s still in that early hour hush where everything feels thinner. The air’s cool, the heat of the day not bitten in yet. Somewhere forward, Luffy laughs, bright and big, familiar and then the sound cuts off mid-peal like someone dropped a curtain over it.

They pass the mast and in the span of a heartbeat, Zoro catches the whole tableau in a series of sharp, humiliating snapshots: Luffy and Usopp on the lawn, half-way through some ridiculous stretching routine. Luffy’s arms are up over his head, mouth open on what was probably going to be a shout. Usopp’s bent double, fingertips brushing his toes and both of them are frozen, staring, eyes huge.

Brook’s at the far rail, bony shoulders hunched like he’s inspecting his bow and his whole posture screams i am not looking, this is none of my business. The second Zoro’s gaze hits them, every single one of them looks away in the exact same too-fast way. Heat crawls up the back of his neck as the memory of last night – Sanji’s back at the bar, the fingernails tracing his arm, the way Zoro’s own drink tasted like ash in his mouth – flickers. The fact that he ended that night face-down on the deck, too tired to even find his hammock, suddenly feels… obvious.

He opens his mouth, probably to throw some half-baked line but doesn’t get very far because  Sanji plants one foot on the rail and then the world drops out from under them. The first step of Skywalk always feels wrong to Zoro. He’s a swordsman: his body understands solid things like deck and dirt and stone and does not understand Sanji’s trick of kicking nothing and having it hold. His stomach lurches as the Sunny falls away, shrinking beneath them, wind slamming into them from the side and grabbing at his open shirt, tearing the last tatters of sleep from his head.

His hand shoots out on survival instinct alone, fingers locking around Sanji’s sleeve even as the other man’s leg drives down into air that somehow doesn’t give. The Sunny shrinks on every beat: lawn a smudge of green, deck a strip of pale, masts like matchsticks. Seagulls wheel and scream, somewhere on their eye-level now instead of above. They jolt past the top of the main mast, past the crow’s nest where he usually naps and for one surreal second, he’s looking down at his own favourite sleeping spot before Sanji angles them down.

“Brace,” he grunts and Zoro barely has time to bend his knees before boots slam onto the mast’s sail, the narrow beam of wood.  From below it’s just a thin line of wood against the sky, part of the rigging geometry his brain files under ship things. Up here, it’s barely the width of his foot and the mast rises at his side like a vertical wall and he’s got one fucking good arm for balance, so. 

Sanji steps back just enough to plant his boots like he’s setting himself for a fight, one hand hooking around a line overhead, effortless, body owning the precarious balance like he was born in mid-air.

i live up here, his stance says. this is mine. 

Zoro swallows, throat dry as he risks a glance down. The deck’s a long drop away, dotted with their tiny crew, all pretending very badly that they aren’t craning their necks. The wind up here tugs at his shirt, fingers the sweat at the back of his neck, makes his eye sting. His skin feels flayed and too thin as he drags his gaze back to Sanji.

Sanji looks like shit and it’s not battlefield-shit or the familiar pattern of burns and cuts and that exhausted, wired grin that means we almost died again, what a laugh. This is smaller and nastier. It’s in the way the skin under his eyes is shadowed and swollen, the way his mouth is pulled tight, colour leeched from his lips. In the restless twitch of his fingers, the bare, empty space where a cigarette should be. He looks like a man whose nerves have been stripped out and left to hum in the wind, all the insulation burned away.

The absence of smoke hits Zoro hardest and he realises, stupidly, that he’s been using the exact brand of Sanji’s bad habit as a barometer his whole time on the ship. No cigarette: busy. Two in a row: stressed. Three, lit off the same filter: danger.

Right now, nothing. Just the faint, raw mark at his throat where he’s been rubbing, and eyes so sharp and red-rimmed they look like they could cut. His voice comes out rough and hoarse, like he argued with the night until it broke and then kept going with the sunrise. “Say whatever you’re going to say.”

The spar creaks under them. The mast hums. His palm is slick against the wood with sweat and his instincts are all crossed wires: one part of him wants to snap back and another wants to shut up and listen because Sanji’s hair is coming half out of its tie and he only looks like this when he’s about to do something truly, irreversibly stupid.

He reaches for the only safe thing in arm’s length. “You kidnapped me off my own ship.”

“You slept on the deck like a kicked dog, you forfeited your right to complain.”

The comparison lands harder than Zoro expects and something low and humiliating twists in his gut – the memory of cold planks under his spine, of staring up at the sky thinking stay put, stay here, don’t chase him, prove you mean it until exhaustion won. He turns his face away, out toward the split horizon of sea and sky, letting the sting burn through him because if he looks at Sanji right now he’s not sure what will come out first: the anger, or the part that wants to point out the other man’s the one who did the kicking. 

Franky’s voice is in his skull like a hand on his shoulder: you’re allowed to say it hurt. He sets his jaw and says, straight as he can: “You were cruel last night.”

Sanji flinches and then, because he’s Sanji, he slams straight into attack, every consonant sharpened to a point. “So do it, then. This is the part you tell me you’re done, tell me I’m a fucking nightmare, that you’re not signing up for this. Tell me to piss off and save yourself all the – all the trouble.”

“No. That’s the fucking problem.” He’s desperate to pace, to move, but there’s nowhere to go that isn’t straight down. “You hurt me. You looked right at me, like you were daring to say something and I wanted to drag you out by your stupid shirt and start a fight in the middle of the bar. It was cruel and it was – I hated every fucking second of it, but I’m still here. That part isn’t changing, Curls, no matter how shitty you get.”

Sanji stares at him like the words have come in a language he’s only ever seen written down and never heard out loud. His eyes are wide, pupils blown in the hard morning light. For a second the wind actually seems to miss its cue and everything almost holds, like the Sunny herself is waiting to hear if Zoro takes it back. “What?” 

“I’m still in,” Zoro says and the wind tears straight back in through the sentence, ripping it off his tongue to shred it, but he keeps going, forcing each word out like it weighs as much as a sword. “I still want you. I’m not gonna pretend last night was nothing just to make it easier on you or say I didn’t hate every second of watching you do that.”

He can hear the way his voice goes to shit, then – rough, frayed, wrong for anything except yelling orders or cursing an enemy. Every confession he’s ever made before this has been about pain you can point at, at a broken bone or a deep cut. This isn’t like that: there’s no clean slice. It’s everywhere at once, under his ribs, under his tongue, running down his spine like someone replaced it with bare wire. “But if it takes fifty more rounds of you trying to scare me off before your stupid brain believes I mean it…” He shrugs, a jagged, helpless movement that feels like it might shake his heart loose. His arm throbs in time with it. “Then I guess I’m fighting fifty rounds.”

Sanji’s mouth opens and shuts. He looks half-feral, cornered animal and crashing wave all at once. Each syllable has to fight its way past his teeth. “You can’t just say that. You can’t say you’ll stay after –”

“I’m not promising I’ll sit there quiet while you knife me on purpose,” Zoro cuts in and that, at least, comes easier. Anger gives the words a shape that fits his mouth better. His voice sharpens and steadies. “If you pull that shit again, I’m not walking out nicely next time. Next time I’ll cut that bullshit down – I’m not going to be your practice run for self-destruction.” He makes himself stop there, makes himself hold the line instead of rolling straight into a fight. The mast’s solid at his back, rough and scuffed and he presses his palm flatter against it until the splinters bite his skin. 

There’s a small, precise twist at the corner of Sanji’s mouth, a jump of muscle in his jaw, his eyes shuttering for half a heartbeat like the words found old damage and pushed. “I know. I know you’re not.”

Zoro goes on, because if he stops now he’s going to either choke or laugh or swing and none of those are the truth. “You don’t want me? Fine, say it. Say the words. Then I’ll deal, I’ll get out of your way and you can flirt with every idiot with a pulse from here to the end of the world and it won’t be my business.” His voice drops on the last bit, rough as rope burn. “But as long as that’s not true you don’t get to shove me away and then act surprised when I come back.”

Sanji’s throat works; Zoro can see the way his skin pulls tight over the tendon like he’s trying to swallow something that won’t go down as he looks away, over Zoro’s shoulder toward the thin scrap of horizon. The world feels stupidly wide and stupidly exposed and up here there’s nowhere to look that isn’t straight through the middle of this. He says, voice weak: “I brought you up here so I wouldn’t have to watch everyone else watch you leave. Figured if you told me to fuck off up here, at least I wouldn’t have to see Nami’s pity face. Or Luffy’s.”

Zoro’s chest tightens. “You sound pretty sure that I’d be done.”

“Of course I was! I picked a fight with you on purpose in a room full of your favourite idiots, then shoved it in your face when you didn’t bite. Who stays after that? That’s not… that’s not what people do.” He worries his lip between his teeth hard enough that a bright, angry mark blooms, fingers twitching at his sides, clearly restless for their usual props: knife, lighter, cigarette, excuse. 

Zoro thinks of stories Sanji’s never told properly, of what Robin hinted at, what Nami never says. The way Sanji’s shoulders still flinch when someone slams a door too hard. His hand clenches against the mast. “Yeah, well. I keep saying I’m not them.”

Sanji lets out a shaky breath that wants to be a scoff and doesn’t quite make it. “Yeah, say it another hundred times and I might finally believe you.” He lets go of the rope to step closer, the mast at Zoro’s back immovable. The air between them gets hotter, narrower, filled with smoke and the faint sting of cheap soap and too much coffee sweating out of skin that hasn’t seen proper sleep. He’s so close Zoro can see the way his collarbone jumps under his skin when he swallows.

“I know I was cruel,” he says and this time the word lands with weight – not a weapon but a sentence. “In the galley. At the bar. I watched you sit there and…” He trails off, eyes cutting away, pained. “You looked like someone had nailed your feet to the floor and started throwing rocks and I just kept – it was easier to act like you were playing.”

His eyes flick up, collide with Zoro’s then skid away again like they touched something too bright. “Because if you’re not playing, if you really – if you mean all of this then any step I take is real and I… and I always fuck it up, Zoro. So yeah, I tried to get you to prove me right. I wanted you to drag me out and scream so I could – so it’d be easier.” 

“I mean it,” Zoro says because he needs the truth like he needs his feet under him. “I’m not going to stop wanting you because you’re a mess, but wanting you doesn’t mean I’m going to stand there forever and let you kick my ribs until they give.” His throat’s thick again. He pushes through it anyway, words dragging over the raw places. “You want to flirt, fine, whatever, go flirt. You want to tell me this is too much and you don’t want me like that, say it, and I’ll deal. I’ll hate it, but I’ll deal. But don’t use other people to prove I’m lying and don’t use me to prove you’re doomed.”

Sanji swallows so hard the sound is audible over the wind, a tiny, ugly click. The gulls, the harbour, the slow, steady breath of the Sunny: all of it blurs to static at the edges of Zoro’s hearing. His heart’s too loud in his ears. His pulse feels like it’s beating in his tongue.

“You’re asking me,” Sanji says slowly, “To believe that someone can want me and not break me. Or get bored. Or – or to realise I’m too much and… and leave. To trust that it’s not some passing – ”

The inhale hurts. The exhale is worse; it burns with how slowly Zoro’s controlling it. “I’m asking you to watch what I do, not what your head’s screaming I will do. Yeah, I don’t know what comes next or how to do this right, but I know that wanting you feels bigger than anything I've ever survived, so big it scares me sometimes. I know it’s going to be hard as hell but I want you everywhere, all the damn time, as long as we’re still breathing. Until Luffy gets his crown and we fuck off into whatever comes next. I used to think I’d die young and happy because I’d – I’d get the title, right? But when I think about what happens after all that… all I see now is you. And I don’t know how to want anything else anymore.” 

The confession feels like taking his own ribs in both hands and prying them open. There’s no going back once it’s out there; he can’t unsay it, can’t sheath it. It sits in the air between them like a drawn blade, bright and terrifying and real. His eye burns and there’s nothing to blame it on this time, not smoke or sea spray, just him.

Sanji’s expression crumples. Not in the dramatic, theatrical way he plays for strangers or  the battle-grimace Zoro’s seen a hundred times. It’s smaller and worse: the way his eyebrows pinch, the way his mouth goes soft and unguarded, the way his eyes go wide and hurt. His hand moves between them, ridiculous and hovering, fingers spread and knuckles rough, scars across the back like little white islands. His voice cracks. He swallows, tries again. “You’re crying?”

“Don’t make a big deal out of it,” Zoro growls but it comes out weaker than he’d like. He swipes the tear away with the heel of his hand so hard he probably drags the skin red. “It’s a one-time thing.”

Sanji’s eyes are locked on Zoro’s face, on the damp track at the edge of his cheekbone. The wind keeps trying to steal the evidence, drying skin too fast, but Sanji looks like he’s already branded it onto the inside of his skull. He looks like someone took all the careful seams he keeps himself stitched together with and ripped them out one-by-one. “After that. After me. After all that shit in the bar. You still want… you still want this?”

Zoro snorts. It comes out more like a broken exhale. “You think that’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me?”

Sanji flinches like he’s been called an idiot in front of a crowd.

“It’s up there,” Zoro adds quickly, because he can’t quite stop himself. “Don’t get too cocky.”

A startled, wet laugh hiccups out of Sanji, like his body didn’t check in with his brain first. It scrapes his throat on the way. Then, very carefully, like he’s approaching a wild animal or an open flame, he closes the distance properly, fingers curling into the front of Zoro’s shirt at the edge of his sling, right over his heart. The grip’s too tight, like he’s only half-convinced Zoro won’t disappear if he lets go. The other hand comes up slower and trembles only once before the backs of his fingers make contact with Zoro’s jaw, barely a brush. A question mark instead of a touch.

“I don’t know how to not freak out,” he admits, voice thin and shredded. Zoro leans in to catch every word. “I don’t know how to do this without wanting to kick everything in reach, including you. Especially you.”

Zoro’s own voice isn’t much better. “No shit.”

Sanji’s mouth twists. “I’m scared I’ll wanna bolt when it gets hard. I’m scared I’m going to want to pick a fight just to see if you’ll walk. Just to… prove I was right about you before you prove I was wrong about us.” There it is, naked in the space between them: the core rot, the old script, the part of him that thinks it’s safer to set the house on fire than wait to see if it burns down on its own.

Zoro meets his gaze, holding it steady. “Yeah? I’m scared we’ll waste years not doing this. If you pick a fight I’m going to tell you it’s shitty and we’ll figure it out. And if you want out then you’re going to have to say it straight, Curls. None of this half-shoving bullshit.”

Sanji’s grip on Zoro’s shirt tightens again, hauling the fabric closer to his ribs. His teeth close on the next words like he’s genuinely afraid it might kill him if he lets it escape. His eyes dart away for half a heartbeat, down to Zoro’s mouth, to his own knuckles, anywhere but the open air he’s supposed to fill.

Zoro could say it for him – the urge is there, to reach in and drag it out, to make this easier but he doesn’t, knows he can’t. Sanji drags in a shaky breath, shoulders hunching like he’s bracing for impact, then wrenches the word up out of his chest with both hands. “I want you, too,” he gets out. It sounds like a confession held under water too long. His mouth twists, helpless. “I’ve wanted you for so long it makes me sick.”

Something in Zoro unknots so fast it leaves him dizzy, air rushing out of him like he’s been punched.

“Then fucking say that next time,” he manages, because if he doesn’t layer something stupid over the moment he’s going to start crying again. “Preferably before you start making out with the whole bar.”

For a second, neither of them moves and then Sanji just – yanks. There’s nothing graceful about it: he hauls Zoro in like he’s been dying to do it for his entire life and only just gotten permission, boots skidding on the narrow spar. Zoro’s hand slams back against the mast to keep them both from tipping into the sky as Sanji’s mouth meets his before it finds the back of Sanji’s neck and settles there, palm broad, fingers threading into wind-tangled hair. He feels the jump of Sanji’s pulse under his thumb, the way his spine arches a fraction, pressing closer instead of flinching away and it feels like stepping off the mast altogether, like stepping off the edge of the world. Bright and golden and so fucking real his eye burns all over again.

Sanji’s hand fists tighter in his shirt, knuckles grinding into bone as the kiss breaks on a ragged drag of air, Sanji only just letting their mouths part far enough to bump his forehead against Zoro’s. 

“I don’t know how to do this either,” he goes on, like he has to say all the worst parts before they can trick him later. “Running’s the only pattern I’ve got.”

Zoro pulls back just enough to see his eyes and there’s terror in them, yeah, but there’s something else too. Something like awe, jagged and reluctant. Like he’s afraid to look at the thing he wanted in case it turns out to be a mirage.

“Lucky I’m good at staying, then. The only reason I’d leave is if you don’t want me anymore. Not that you don’t trust it or that you’re scared. That you don’t want me, those exact words.”

Sanji flinches like that phrase’s dug its fingers under old scar tissue. “I’m not gonna say that,” he mutters, sounding almost offended. The fear’s still there, but now it’s threaded through with stubbornness, with something like horror at the idea.

Zoro smirks. “Saves us both time, then.”

Sanji exhales, long and uneven, like he’s been holding his breath since the bar and only just remembered how. Then he leans in and presses a quick, almost startled kiss to the corner of Zoro’s mouth. It’s nothing, barely there. Just a brush of chapped lips but it still feels like a test of gravity all the same, like he’s checking if the world will end if he does something gentle.

“Don’t fall,” he murmurs against Zoro’s skin.

“You first,” Zoro says.

“Already did,” Sanji mumbles through another kiss and Zoro’s heart lurches up into his throat. The words immediately start rearranging furniture in his chest, knocking old defenses off the shelves, shoving stubborn fears into corners, pinning something bright right in the middle of the room. His hand tightens at the back of Sanji’s neck, thumb pressing once, firm, grounding, like he’s pinning the words in place so they can’t wriggle out of existence later and pretend they were never said.

“Good,” he says, a little rough. “Now we climb back down.”

Sanji lets out a laugh that’s a little wrecked and a lot real. It shivers through the space between them, warm and disbelieving. “Hope you know I’m not carrying your heavy ass if you slip.”

“Yeah you are,” Zoro grins.

Sanji glares at him, but it’s soft at the edges now, frayed with something almost shy. “Cocky bastard.” He shifts his grip, finally loosening his hold on Zoro’s shirt just enough to get a hand on the rope above them again. His fingers brush Zoro’s collarbone on the way and it sends a little electric shock along Zoro’s nerves, stupid and immediate.

The descent is a series of small, stupid faiths: foot on wood, hand on rope, wind grabbing at their clothes, Sanji keeping careful hold of Zoro, who navigates the rigging one-handed, slow and careful and mindful of his bad arm. Halfway down, Zoro feels it: not fear, exactly and not the dizzy, hollow panic from the bar or the sharp-edge dread from last night in the galley. Something quieter, heavier, like the moment during a fight when everything drops into place and for a few perfect seconds he knows exactly where his feet belong, where his blade should be, what he’s willing to take.

They swing down the last stretch in a blur of practiced motion and sheer stubborn luck, landing on the deck in a jolt of knees and boots and rope slapping wood. Sanji’s still got a fist in Zoro’s shirt when they straighten before his hand slides down to hook into his haramaki instead.

“Don’t tell the others I dragged you up there to confess like a twelve-year-old on a roof,” he mutters.

“Too late,” Zoro smirks and tips his chin toward the rest of the deck, to where they are absolutely caught.

Luffy’s staring with round, shining eyes and Usopp’s frozen mid-gesture. Franky is doing a truly terrible job of pretending he was just checking a bolt. Robin has her book open upside down.  For a beat, no-one moves. Then Luffy punches the air so hard he almost falls over. “YOU DID IT! YOU’RE KISSING NOW!”

“We are not kissing,” Sanji snaps automatically, ears going scarlet.

“Yet,” Usopp mutters.

Nami just lifts her drink in their direction, eyes glinting. “About time. Now stop traumatising Chopper and go sulk somewhere else like normal people.”

Chopper wails: “I wasn’t traumatised! I’m so happy!” and promptly bursts into noisy, delighted tears. 

Sanji groans, scrubbing his other hand over his face. “I hate it here.” 

Zoro looks at him, at the way Sanji’s growing smile is too bright, too careful, like hope he doesn’t quite trust yet. He shifts just enough that their shoulders touch, solid and unassuming, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. “I like you here.”

Sanji stills and for a moment he looks like he might laugh it off or pull away, and then he doesn’t. Instead, he eases back, slow and deliberate, until their weight settles together. a tiny adjustment that says i’m here, i’m not running, i’m not ready, i am i am i am.

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