Stubborn As All Girls Are Stubborn

Sanji learns that the trouble with time loops is that they devour their own hours. Minutes and hours and days bend inward, collapsing until they’re too soft and warped to mean anything at all. And just when they start to stiffen into shape, when the rhythm settles into something that might pass for pattern, some infinitesimal detail tilts, the entire construct inverts and Sanji finds himself dragged back to the beginning, choking on the same stale breath he thought he’d already used up.

He stares up at the hammock above him, fourth or fifth cigarette burning low between his fingers, fifth or eleventh or twentieth loop pressing him flat. He’s seriously considering staying exactly where he is and letting the day rot where it stands when Usopp’s face appears upside down beside him, all sunny grin and wide, wide eyes.

“Hey, Sanji,” Usopp chirps, easy as anything. “You wanna start breakfast, or…? I can do it if you’re feeling rough?”

Sanji groans. Drags the blanket over his head like it might smother reality itself but forces himself up anyway. Forces himself into the shower, where he scrubs until his skin burns, just for the sting of sensation, just to feel anchored to something that hurts in a way he actually understands. He barely hears the rustle before Zoro’s blade finds him through the steam: a kiss of cold steel and hot blood, slit neat from ear to ear.

He wakes again. Same hammock. Same day. Luffy perched above him, howling some godawful tune and beating out a rhythm on the wall with his bare heels. He gets on with the morning, slinks into the galley and tries, again, to hope today will be different.

“Oh, this looks great!” Chopper beams down at the sad little breakfast Sanji’s manages to cobble together. He cocks his head, blinking. “Uh, did you know you have chewing gum in your hair?”

“It’s for later.” It’s only half a joke: the gum came in handy on loop two, right before Luffy got to his femoral artery.

“Oh.” Chopper nods, unconcerned, hooves pressed to his chin. “Well, it’s a lovely breakfast!”

“Yeah, yeah, you say that every morning.” Sanji leans on the bench, fingers digging into the wood like it might anchor him. He picks at the gum, nails scraping hair and scalp, but he knows it’ll be there again when he wakes. He never remembers putting it there.

What he does remember is this: a quiet dinner (sea bass steamed soft, crayfish split to pink shells, butter catching at the corners of lips and fingers) and Robin’s voice drifting over the table, soft stories about old worlds and new ones. Chopper half-asleep with his head in his arms.

Nami, warm and golden, laughing at something he can’t even remember anymore.

He’d fallen asleep where he always does, the hammocks creaking around him in time with the waves, Luffy’s snores rattling the wood. Usopp gently shifting above him like a restless child because he takes hours to fall asleep some nights. Zoro on watch, with Franky not far behind. 

A perfectly nothing night. No blood. No bad sign. No teeth in the dark. And yet here he is: same hammock. Same day. Same goddamn, awful, rotten breath. Over and over, until the hours peel themselves inside out.

He’s lost count of how many times he’s died, at this point. The only mercy is that he rarely makes it past midday, but even that’s just the loop toying with him. Sometimes it takes him while he’s draining eggs for breakfast. Once it waited until dusk, nightfall creeping in slow and gentle, and he’d been stupid enough to believe that maybe – maybe – the crack had finally sealed and he’d be allowed to sleep. 

It’s almost always Zoro, but not enough to trust it as a pattern. Sometimes it’s Luffy’s arms around his chest. Sometimes Franky’s grin, weapons whirring. Sometimes it’s Robin’s soft hush as she covers his eyes, her smile warm as she smothers him down into the carpet. 

Tea on his tongue. Blood on the rug.

“It’s a beautiful morning.” Robin’s a vision when she enters, her face bracketed with her usual warm, calm smile, the one that makes Sanji feel like they can conquer anything together. She potters over to the sink to wash her hands and Sanji tries very, very hard not to remember the last few moments of his life in her hands, the way his lungs had constricted and burned.

He sighs. “It’s always a beautiful morning with you, Robin-swan.” 

Nami’s already perched herself on the bench by the window, hair pinned up, scribbling notes in her logbook with her lips pursed just so. She barely glances up when he brushes past, but she bumps his hip with hers as he goes, a wordless good morning.

Luffy comes flying in to throw himself at the table, legs folded up like a kid, half his torso sprawled across the wood, chin in his palm. “Oi, Sanji! What’s for breakfast? I’m starving!”

“Yeah, you were starving ten minutes ago, too,” Sanji snorts, flicking the ash from his cigarette into the sink. “You’ll live another five if you wait like a civilised captain.”

“Unlikely,” Nami mutters, eyes still on her scribbles.

Usopp’s rummaging through a basket of fruit, holding an apple up like it’s treasure. “Found one that’s not bruised! Miracle of the sea!” He tosses it to Luffy, who catches it with his mouth and almost chokes.

Sanji smiles, real and fond. “Chew, Luffy.”

Zoro drags himself in last, hair still damp, a towel slung over his shoulders. He squints at Sanji’s cigarette, then the frying pan. Then he flops into the seat next to Luffy and says nothing, which is how Sanji knows he’s in a good mood.

Sanji slides past him anyway, too close on purpose, bumping his shoulder roughly just for kicks. “You wash today, Mosshead? I’m impressed.”

Zoro cracks one eye open, grunts: “Fuck off,” without heat. Usually, it earns him a flick of Sanji’s tea towel to the back of the head, sharp enough to make Chopper yelp in protest. Sometimes Sanji mixes it up and gives a lazy kick to Zoro’s ribs, a curse thrown over his shoulder, just to keep himself awake and feel the rhythm change for half a second. He likes to tweak the lines, try out new insults or new shapes for the same old dance.

Nami sighs, pinches the bridge of her nose and says without looking up: “Five minutes in and you two start… honestly, you’re both children.”

Usopp’s already retelling some half-true story about nearly falling overboard last night, arms flailing wide. Sanji lets the chatter wrap around him, the clink of mugs, the warm waft of steam, the faint creak of the Sunny underfoot, the normalcy of it all.

He plates the eggs, lines the toast, fries off the last of the fish because Luffy will eat half anyway. Coffee goes to Nami first then to Zoro, who pretends he doesn’t care but still drinks it black and hot. Luffy tries to snatch the fish early and Sanji whacks his knuckles with the spatula; for one blessed moment it feels like Sunny’s laughing with them, boards humming under their feet. For one blessed moment he lets himself think it’ll be okay, that they can make it through this if he just just feeds them right, keeps them warm, keeps them here. 

Nami complains about the salt barrel being low again. Usopp teases Zoro about snoring so loud he scared a flock of gulls away. Luffy says something about meat, or pastry, mouth half-full and Sanji lets his cigarette burn low as he watches them, horrifically fond.

Zoro smirks, chin propped on his knuckles. “Quit staring at them like a lovesick idiot and sit down.”

Sanji flips him off with two fingers and plates the next round of eggs. “Eat your breakfast, Moss. Or starve.”

He hums to himself as he stacks the plates in the sink afterwards, finding a consistent pleasure in the way the forks clatter in the suds and steam curls off the hot water. His cigarette drowns, hiss lost under Franky’s distant hoot of laughter. 

Luffy’s halfway to the deck already, yelling about fishing. Zoro’s voice rumbles back something sharp. Behind him, the bench creaks and Nami’s voice drifts closer, soft and casual. “Sanji, you missed a mug.”

He laughs under his breath, flicking soap bubbles off his wrist. “Bossy today, huh? I’ll get it, my queen.”

He feels her before he sees her: the warmth at his back, the brush of her hip against his. The smell of her shampoo, orange peel and salt. Her hand settles on his shoulder, feather light. He doesn’t even flinch when the knife slips under his ribs, because why would he?

The sound is a wet hush, his own breath punching out in a soft, stunned grunt. Soap bubbles slide off his knuckles and slip into the sink.

“Nami?” He tries to look back, to catch her eye – maybe she’ll say sorry, maybe she’ll say it’s not me, maybe she won’t say anything at all, but her other hand slides up his chest to keep him still. The blade twists once, neat as a signature. He feels the Sunny hum underfoot as warmth blooms out from the wound, hot, bright, then numb.

He wants to say it’s okay. He wants to say I know it’s not you. But his throat’s full of salt and soap and copper. The bubbles cling to his wrists and Nami leans close until her lips are right by his ear, but he can’t hear the words. Maybe she doesn’t speak at all. He stares down at the dishwater, at his reflection there, cloudy, rippling, gone.

x

Every now and then Sanji will try to explain it. He tells himself it’s worth the trouble, even though he already knows the script by heart by now. The disbelief. The pity. The polite, breakable concern that always turns sharp in the end. He can’t even blame them, because if someone told him this he’d just laugh in their face, too.

Still, every few loops, he makes himself try again. “So, we’re stuck in a time loop.”

Usopp barks a laugh that dies halfway up his throat. “What, like a story? You’ve been reading too many tales, man.”

“I’m serious. We’re stuck. Properly fucked.” He waves the ladle like a knife, broth splattering the galley floor. “I’ve died, over and over and over. Luffy crushed my skull three loops ago. On the damn deck!”

Luffy pauses mid-reach for another egg, the sixth or seventh on his plate, his grin hiccuping into something small and confused. His fingers flex uselessly like he doesn’t know what they’re for. “Sanji, that’s not funny.”

“You’re right! It’s not funny! Something’s wrong. You’re wrong. This ship, you guys,” He sweeps the ladle at all of them, heart hammering so hard he feels it in his teeth. “You’re not you, not all the time, at least. You get, like, possessed or something.”

Robin’s lips part. She tries for her calmest voice. “Sanji, dear, you’re not making sense. Maybe you've been working yourself too hard? You need rest.”

“Don’t mother me, alright? Please don’t do that.” He hurls the ladle back into the pot, echoing off the walls. “There’s a Devil Fruit at work. Or something worse. I know you don’t believe me but I’m telling you the Sunny’s weird, okay? You can’t tell me you don’t notice the weird shit everywhere.”

Silence rolls across the table, heavy enough to smother, nothing except Zoro’s quiet exhale. Sanji’s eyes snag on his, just long enough to confirm that meeting his gaze still feels like touching a stove top every damn time. 

Robin’s chair squeaks against the boards. She rises slowly, shadows pooling at her ankles and he watches it happen, defeat settling in his chest. “Sanji, please. Sit.”

He’s not going to hurt them. He can’t hurt them. Even if he wanted to, she moves too fast for him to flinch, all shadow and hands, fingers hooking under his jaw, clamping over his mouth as he tries to cuss, to breathe. She drags him down, muffling the words in his throat.

Across the table, Usopp props his chin on his palm, gaze distant, like he’s watching a show. “You have some really weird stories, man,” he murmurs, like an afterthought. 

Like an epitaph.

x

There are loops that let him die thinking, let him bleed out slow, counting his breaths, wondering if this is the one where he won’t wake up at all. lf this is the moment the hush finally snaps shut for good.

Others don’t bother with the courtesy and those ones are just steel through the spine, blade at his throat, a bullet blooming warm at the back of his skull. He prefers those, prefers where there’s no time to hope or think or try to plan.

Right now, the kitchen’s a disaster, pots dirty, spice jars scattered like teeth across the counter. A pile of food sweats cold on the chopping block. Sanji scowls at it from his stool, cigarette dripping ash on the floor, notebook open in his lap. Nami’s hunched over the table, with her maps spread across the wood, pretending not to listen.

“Alright. Loop number… ah, fuck it, who cares.” He drags on the cigarette, pages fluttering under his thumb. “Daydream cure? Nope. Tried smacking my head on the mast and all I got was a concussion. Zero results.” He flips through scribbles and half–mad sketches: diagrams of Devil Fruits he’s never tasted, little spirals labelled time loops? and maybe if I stop dying? crossed out in angry red.

Nami glances up, pencil clamped behind her ear. “Sanji, you’re scaring me.”

He snorts. “Scared’s better than dead, darling. We need to find the Devil Fruit bastard doing this and break every bone they have. Before breakfast, preferably.”

Nami rolls her eyes and turns back to her charts. “You need sleep. You’re not making sense anymore.”

“All I do is fall asleep –”

“Wait, wait, wait!” Usopp cuts in from where he’s spread out over one of the dining benches, voice low with that conspiratorial spark he loves so much. He looks loose, languid: happy, and Sanji loves these little moments the most. When the crew is his. “If it’s a time loop maybe it’s cursed? Like, you know, you always read those books about there being a cursed object stuck on the ship. Break the curse, break the loop? I bet Robin’d know.”

Sanji groans, scrubbing a hand through his hair so hard it almost tears out a clump. It gets out the gum, if nothing else. “Great, so what, I gotta find the haunted frying pan? Hell, maybe I need to just sing a magic sea shanty backwards and see where that gets us.”

Usopp looks at him with deadly seriousness, tapping his chin. “Well… you know, sometimes you gotta face your greatest fear. Or regret. Confront the source. Break the pattern.”

Sanji barks a laugh so sharp Nami grimaces at him again, like she’s just waiting for him to lose his shit completely. “Yeah, sure. My biggest fear’s dying over and over and I’m confronting the shit out of that one, thanks. Facing myself? I do that every loop in the mirror. He’s not much help, trust me.”

Usopp leans forward, eyes bright with the thrill of the absurd. “Or maaaaybe it’s true love’s kiss?”

Sanji drags on his smoke so hard the tip flares mean red. He rolls his eyes because this is a well-worn road at this point. His traitorous face always flushes with heat anyway, every damn time. “You always say it’s true love’s kiss, man.”

Usopp bats his lashes, gleeful laughter bubbling up from inside. “Well one day I’ll be right!”

Sanji shoots Nami a dazzling grin, all teeth. “Nami-swan, you heard the man! Maybe if we just –”

“Don’t even think about finishing that sentence or I’ll triple your debt.” Nami’s glare slices his fantasy in half before she goes right back to her maps.

Usopp snickers, eyes glittering. “You know I meant Zoro and I know you know I know –”

“If either of you feels like killing me now’s the time, actually,” Sanji rushes in, clearing his throat because that is a conversation he’d rather die than have. Literally. “Anyway, next theory: we’re stuck in a cosmic glitch. Or we’re all NPCs in someone’s sick bedtime story?”

Nami hums, dry as salt. “God, I hope my coding’s decent.”

Usopp brightens. “Or maybe you kill the right person, loop breaks! Like a sacrifice!”

That thought has been rattling around his skull longer than he’d ever admit, slithering through the seams in the dark when he’s too tired to lie to himself. “Yeah,” he says, voice going quiet. Hard. “Not doing that.”

He waits until the hour’s thin and mean, not quite night, not quite morning, the Sunny’s lamps creaking on their hooks. He leaves his boots in the galley and slips barefoot through hallways he knows by the soles of his feet, past Usopp’s scattered tools, past Chopper’s books to where the map room yawns open. Nami’s desk is drowning in charts, star lines that don’t match the sky anymore. Sanji catches his reflection in the Log Pose and sees a man spat up from the ocean, eyes bruised purple with all the nights he hasn’t slept through. He looks like he’s been trapped here forever. 

Hell, maybe he has.

He holds the Log Pose up to his ear like it might murmur something if he’s gentle enough but it stays stubbornly silent, the needle fixed in its new normal: dead centre, unmoved, unmoving. Not even a tremor. Not even the lie of hope.

“Come on, sweetheart,” he murmurs, thumb brushing the dome like a promise. “Give me something.”

He gets nothing but silence.

At this point he doesn’t even have proper disappointment left in him; god knows he burned through that ages ago, scorched it out in the first dozen loops. He’s already done furious. Done desperate. Done pleading until his throat went raw. None of it has ever made a difference, so what’s the fucking point?

He flips open Nami’s ledger. He normally doesn’t make it this far into the day, by now he’s usually bled out behind the stove or drowned in the sink or gone in some other inventive, horrible way, so this counts as new territory. Exciting, in a bleak sort of way and he lets himself latch onto that as he skims her tidy notes, little constellations of numbers and stars only she can read. Trade winds. Tidal shifts. Names of ports he’s pretty sure don’t even exist.

A page turns. Blank. The next too, until it isn’t. The ink crawls if he looks too long with tiny breakers unfurling on the margin, swallowing each other whole, vanishing back into pulp.

“Shit.” He snaps it shut before the paper can bleed. He’s so fucking tired. For all the times he’s been slammed back into his hammock, it’s never rest. Just more waiting. More burning behind his eyes. It has to add up eventually, doesn’t it?

Even nightmares have to end sometime. Law would say so. Robin would say so. He just has to –

Footsteps. No, hooves.

Chopper’s voice slips through the crack in the door, sweet silk spun over something unknowable. “Sanji? What are you doing awake?”

“Couldn’t sleep.” He hates the way the truth catches on his teeth on the way out. Hates the way relief snarls together with dread in his chest, the way his throat tightens even though it’s Chopper, their sweet Chopper. “Thought I’d tidy up a bit?”

He drifts closer, little arms unfolding in dark shapes across the wall. There's a sad look on his face, something akin to an apology, or a threat. It’s hard to tell, sometimes. 

“You should rest,” he murmurs, soft, worried. “You look so tired.”

He laughs, a scratchy little thing. “Yeah. Guess so.”

Chopper's eyes flick to the Log Pose, then back to him.  “Come back to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

Sanji nods, keeps his hands open and empty, lets Chopper steer him into the hallway, gentle as falling asleep. Somewhere ahead, Wado and Shusui are waiting for him like a promise: throat and chest, perfect unison.

He lets Chopper hold his hand anyway. Lets the hush settle in his own bones, watches the oil and blood spill across the floor.

He tries to keep better count after that one, tries to outrun it, just to see what changes, if anything. Stays in the crow’s nest, smoking every cigarette he’s hoarded. Doesn’t come down for dinner, breakfast, or lunch, or when Luffy’s voice floats on an absent breeze, two toned. Like whispers layered together, intertwined. 

Franky cocks his arm across the deck, ready to fire, and Sanji whines, drags his fingernails down his face. “C’mon, man, I finally worked out the crumb ratio!”

Usopp brings him soup, something floating in it that glows but he drinks it anyway because he figures at least it’ll be painless. He ends up choking on the deck, mouth foaming like a bad punchline, the ship humming under him like an itch he can’t scratch.

He tries to find the pattern. He tries to hide the knives. He tries to lock the galley door. There's no point to any of it: they find him every time, soft voices, soft smiles, eyes that slip black when they think he’s not looking and even when he is. 

He checks every spoon for reflections. He stands with his back to the stove, never the sink. He watches the ceiling beams like they’re going to split open and drop something down. He lights a cigarette to keep his hands busy and snuffs it out on his palm just to feel something other than the bone deep weariness and the unending, undying hypervigilance. 

The sails don’t move and the breeze doesn’t blow and all he can do is die, over and over.

Eggs on the stove. Knife in the block. Steam on the window. Same breakfast, same table, same crew. All teeth and hands and warm voices until they’re not. He knows they’ll do it again. He feeds them anyway, because what the fuck else is he meant to do?

“Luffy,” he snaps, voice cracking sharper than he means it to. “Put it back.”

Luffy’s laugh twinkles as he shoves another fistful of sausage into his mouth like there’s nothing wrong at all. “Ah, Sanji, you’re worrying too much!”

“Can’t imagine why.” Sanji slaps the pot lid a little too hard as he turns back to the bench, hands only shaking a bit, and only a little more when he finds the lemon in his palm has turned black and soft as rot already. Dammit. He just wants to make one fucking lemon posset for Nami. “Forgive me for being a little testy. Must be all the dying going on.”

Luffy tilts his head. shadows swimming on his face like oil on water. It happens, sometimes: Sanji’s learned the difference between the goo just moving around and the goo sinking in, getting in deep enough to turn them against him. It looks like he's got a few minutes, which might give him enough time to find another lemon, if he’s lucky. “Are you okay?” 

Sanji sighs. His eyes sting. “Peachy. I just want you guys safe, alright? I want you all… god, I really fucking hope this is a dream.” 

Luffy’s frown twitches wider, dark pooling at the corner of his mouth like ink. Sanji knows he should bolt, probably, try to get ahead of it but he’s so damn tired. Tired of today. Tired of this today. Growing more and more tired of picking which death to take when they all taste the fucking same.

Luffy hums like a wire strung tight. He scratches his ear, grin splitting wider, eyes blown black now. “If it’s a dream, you just gotta wake up, right?”

Sanji drags on his cigarette, watches the smoke hover limp in the air like it’s too heavy to float. “Yeah, well. I keep trying. Doesn’t stick.”

Luffy hums again and the floor hums with him, that same awful hush beneath the planks. Luffy and the Sunny, synced like breath and pulse, captain and his ship.

Luffy flicks Sanji’s eyebrow curl, playful, gentle, not hard enough to hurt but enough to make him flinch. “Maybe you’re not trying hard enough.”

“Totally normal thing to say.” Sanji tracks the black creeping down the line of Luffy’s jaw like a stain that’s always been there, annoyed that he’s not going to have time to find another lemon after all. “Not creepy at all. Really clears things up.”

He doesn’t register Luffy leaping across the galley, just the fists at his collar, the crack of the bench behind his spine, the dull pop when his neck hits the edge. He doesn’t register anything until he wakes up again, choking on salt and iodine.

x

What he doesn't tell Usopp is that he did try it, four loops in. It's almost embarrassing how quickly he'd caved, finding some thin comfort in knowing Zoro wouldn't remember it the next day.

It was part desperation to find a solution, part fear, part loneliness, part... he doesn't like to think about it too much.

Zoro had glanced up sharply when Sanji had stormed in, hand stilling on Wado’s blade. The whetstone had sat in his lap like always, making that awful scraping sound.

He'd frowned. “What’re you –”

“Changing tactic,” Sanji had snapped, before he'd dragged him up into a kiss. Zoro had gone rigid for a heartbeat, just one, and then he’d moving to pull Sanji in, flush against him, kissing back like it meant something, like it was going to fix something.

For a moment, Sanji had himself have it, finally. The steady heat of Zoro’s hands settling at the small of his back, the rough prickle of green hair under his fingers. The taste of him, the slide of his tongue. Everything he’s been wanting for months.

Years, if he’s honest with himself.

When he'd pulled back, panting, breathless, it had been just in time to see the black gathering thick in the spaces between Zoro’s teeth.

“That was stupid,” Zoro said, brows knit, sounding genuinely thrown, genuinely worried. And he was both of those things, probably, but he was also being actively possessed by some weird, fuck-off sentient goo, so Sanji hadn’t felt particularly obligated to give him an honest answer in the moment.

He'd the rest of the confession under his tongue, leaking out through his eyes instead when Zoro had reached for Wado again.

“Can we just not?” Sanji had choked, voice cracking wide open. “This one fucking time, this one... can we just not?”

Zoro hadn't answered, because that wasn't Zoro, and Sanji – bitter, disappointed, heartbroken – had let the sword carve right through him, like that could ever touch the ache of his stupid, stupid heart.

x

A beam above his head flickers with sunlight, or something pretending to be sunlight. Somewhere past the wall Luffy’s yelling, bright and gleeful.

The Sunny hums at Sanji like she can hear him thinking, soft and smug, but he can’t be bothered to care. He drags himself up and finds clothes, not bothering to fuss with the wrinkles. He hasn’t been hungry in weeks but he’ll cook anyway, because he needs the lie of a routine and the crew will come for him regardless: he might as well feed them before they bare their teeth.

The hallway smells like seawater gone stale, brined death caught under the planks and the kitchen waits, kettle exactly where he left it, hush coiled in the walls. The walls tilt, the air cinching tight around his ribs, and suddenly he just can’t do it. He can’t stand there another minute and pretend this is normal, pretend he’s not just laying out his own last meal over and over again.

His body moves before the thought finishes forming.

He turns on his heel and marches out, almost stumbling with how badly he needs out, heading straight for the crow’s nest, to where there’s no crew, no wind and no waves, the sea flat as oil. The air’s dead as stone. He kicks off hard anyway, smooth as muscle memory, and the Sunny drops away beneath him like a held breath. 

For one flicker of a heartbeat he feels weightless, like it might work. Like the wind might remember it’s supposed to carry him.

Then there’s just… drag. His foot hits empty nothingness; the push back’s gone. He kicks again, harder but the sky’s a wall. The air won’t hold him. There’s no lift, no pocket to catch. His chest aches where it should fill. He drops three metres, his arms windmilling and tries to launch again but there’s no resistance. It’s so still it’s like drowning standing up and his lungs drag at the sky like a fish hauling water through its gills but it’s dry, dry, dry. His vision flickers with stars that aren’t stars, were probably never stars.

He tries to kick again, the motion instinctive, desperate. His lungs convulse with the reflex to gasp, knowing there’s nothing to take in but the constant hum that wants to crawl inside his throat. Below, the Sunny yawns wide with its warped figurehead, mouths where portholes should be, the wood wet with something that shimmers wrong.

He slams onto the deck, knees cracking wood. A wet, sucking gasp drags him back into life and, around him, the crew starts to gather. Wrong-eyed. Wrong-mouthed. Robin’s neck cranes too long.

They don’t move. They just watch. They know. The ship knows.

He knows, even as his vision sparks white behind the eyes, even as his breath drags, shallow and raw, more aware than ever that it doesn’t belong to him anymore.

x 

He decides to behave the next morning. Plates up breakfast like nothing’s ever been wrong and doesn’t mention the loop at all. He even ignores the way the butter is weeping oil that smells faintly rancid under the good garlic he’s used to hide it.

Luffy’s chewing through his third helping like always, cheeks puffed out, grin wide. He pushes his bowl forward. “More, Sanji! Tastes so good!”

Sanji laughs, a sharp little bark he smooths over quick and ladles out more stew, hiding the way he’s already scraping the bottom of the pot for it. The hush shivers at the edges of the table, a pulse under the wood but Sanji ignores it in favour of wiping a stray drop off Luffy’s cheek with his thumb like he’s done a thousand times before. Lies, cheery: “Eat up, Luffy. There’s plenty.”

When it’s quiet he tries the Log Pose again, curled up tight in the crows’ nest like he’s fourteen again and this is all just a bad storm to ride out. Below, Chopper’s idle chatter drifts up the ladder in slow, warm waves. The needle doesn’t twitch, doesn’t even pretend. Just sits there, pointing nowhere, heavy as a stone in a corpse’s pocket.

Outside, the ocean is a flat black mirror, swallowing any hope of stars or moonlight.

He rubs his tired eyes, trying to piece together the patterns in the weather logs, the trade winds, the shifting port names… all the scraps Nami’s jotted down, her cryptic little notes marking journeys only she understands. 

A flicker catches his eye, a subtle shimmer in the crack between the floor and wall of the nest. Heat haze. The gentle sway of the Sunny’s deck bathed in warm sunset light, the laughter of his crew drifting faintly like a half-remembered dream, salt, tangerines. 

Sanji blinks hard, heart thudding. The vision vanishes, replaced by the same endless black void. A trick of his mind? Something else? Something real, hidden just beneath the surface of this endless fucking nightmare?

“Yo, Sanji! You’ve been up here all day!” Franky’s voice booms, pulling him back down to reality or… whatever the hell this is. “Come on down.”

“Yeah, alright,” he murmurs, stuffing his notes and the Log Pose into his pack even though he knows they’ll be gone in the next loop. Nothing ever lasts, nothing ever stays, nothing except the thought that’s lodged in his skull, a worm with teeth chewing through every sane thing he’s ever clung to, leaving everything soft and rotten behind.

He pauses with his palm flat to the bulkhead, fingers splayed, trying to feel the pulse he knows by heart. Her old wooden sway, the honest sounds, the way she used to hum when the wind was good and Luffy was laughing and the sails were full.

All he gets back is the same thick, oily sound, coiled under her skin. Something that’s crawled in and made a nest of her bones, something that might open its eye and swallow him whole.

When he finally forces himself back into the quarters he finds Zoro sprawled out along his bunk. It should be funny, in some sick way, that out of all of them it’s been Zoro who kills him the most. Zoro’s blade at his throat. Zoro’s boot in his ribs. Zoro’s hand on the back of his neck like he’s prey, easy, helpless, already caught.

Sometimes his eyes are that familiar muddy brown. Sometimes they’re slick black, like the loop’s found its favourite puppet. Sometimes they’re both at once, like it can’t decide which version will hurt more.

He wants to kick the bunk now just to hear the other man growl. Wants to grab him by the collar and slam their foreheads together hard enough to leave a mark. Wants to kiss him, again, just to prove there’s still a mouth there, still heat there, still him under whatever this place is turning them into.

Zoro cracks one eye open, lazy, unimpressed. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

Sanji shrugs out of his jacket, thumb brushing the lighter in his pocket like it might spark up something useful inside him. “Do you? Do any of us, anymore?”

Zoro grunts and rolls over, broad back stupidly solid, turning to face the wall like sleep is still something he can trust. Like Sanji is something he can trust.

Sanji sinks down on the edge of the hammock, close enough to feel Zoro’s warmth at his spine, not nearly stupid enough to mistake it for safety. He stares at the floorboards between his boots, watches the shadows pool in the corners, listens to that wrong, slow hush breathing under the planks.

“What if we never get out of here?” he murmurs, voice catching around the truth he’s been shoving down for too many loops. Saying it out loud makes it feel heavier, more real, like he’s helping nail the coffin shut.

Zoro doesn’t answer. His fingers twitch, just once. “You should sleep while you can.”

“You mean before you slice me open again?” Sanji laughs, a dry, brittle sound that scrapes along the beams. “Go for it. We can skip the waiting. That’s always the worst part, you know that? The waiting’s worse than the fucking – the dying.”

Zoro rolls back over to face him this time, eyes dark and brown and his. Sanji needs to believe that much, because if even this isn’t real then nothing is. “You want me to do it?”

The three swords are resting easily beside the bunk. There’s no-one else around: Zoro could do it before Sanji blinks. Before he can drag himself back from the edge and lie to himself again that it’ll be fine, that they’ll get out, this is just another bad night.

Sanji drags shaking hands over his face, trying to hold himself inside his own skin for just one more minute. His mouth opens, voice trembling. “I want –”

I want you real. I want our ship back. I want this to end. I want to believe we make it out.

Whatever the rest of that truth is dies in his throat when the blade slides home. The relief hits so hard he’s almost grateful.

Sometimes dying is the only fucking break this place gives him.

x

The next time he tries to escape he goes straight for the ocean. It feels stupidly simple, so simple it has to work. Maybe if he just gets deep enough, maybe if he lets the current rip him out past the hull, past whatever the Sunny’s become, he’ll drift off like silt in real saltwater. 

He’s not above letting the sea take him. It’s always been kinder than he deserves.

He waits until the ship’s quiet to climb the rail, barefoot on cold planks. For a moment he just stands there, toes curled on the lip of Sunny’s smile, looking down. The water’s black but it’s at least it's moving tonight.

“Fuck you,” he tells the ship, too quiet to echo.

Then he jumps.

The first impact is ice, shocking enough to knock the breath out of him. He kicks for the shadow under the hull, past the figurehead’s teeth. The water doesn’t resist., at first.

Then it does.

It’s like swimming through syrup at first. Thick. It clings to the crooks of his elbows, his hair, the fabric of his pants and he tries to pull but the drag multiplies, hugging him tight. The cold fades into a sick heat that seeps into his joints. He tries to breathe but seawater floods his nose, slick and sweet, stinging his sinuses like sugar turned to rot.

Sanji opens his eyes and sees veins, a nest of black threads, webbed and knotted around the Sunny’s belly. One curls around his ankle, tightens, then enters his pant leg like an eel, winding up his calf.

He panics. He thrashes. The more he thrashes the thicker it gets, threads slipping under his collar, into his mouth. One brushes his teeth like a probing tongue. He tries to bite it out, desperate as his lungs spasm. He tries to scream, maybe, but it’s just bubbles and black strands and no sound at all. He claws at his throat. Another pulse of warmth rolls through the water, like a heartbeat.

The ocean squeezes as the ocean spits him back out, straight through the surface. He breaks it coughing, spluttering, hands slapping at the water like it’s still alive, the way it moves around him in ripples that don’t match the wind.

He drags himself back aboard, palms scraping the rail, and collapses to his knees. The first heave brings up seawater; the second drags a clot of black thread out of his lungs that splatters on the deck, writhes for a heartbeat, then dries into dust. He spits more of it out. Keeps going until his chest is all fire and sandpaper and nothing left.

When he finally looks up he finds the mast towering over him like a spine, all bone and no timber, not his ship. 

Not any ship known to any world.

And if she isn’t real anymore, if the Sunny’s nothing but a painted set for something wearing his crew’s skins then what, exactly, is he still fighting for?

x

The next loop he finds a paring knife and goes straight for the pantry, which is so quiet it’s almost oppressive, a throwback to the old dry store on the Baratie where the rats had chewed through sacks at night. Zeff had caught him there once, curled up behind the rice with a bread knife he was too small to use properly.

Little rat, Zeff had said, boots echoing. Little rat with big teeth.

Now he’s back in the dark, but there’s no Zeff stomping through to knock sense into him. No oil lamp creaking on a hook to keep the shadows at bay. His shirt sticks to his back with sweat, fear, fever. If he closes his eyes he’s ten years old on cold planks, salt stinging the corners of his mouth, stomach twisting so loud he swears the hush learned the tune back then and never forgot.

He braces the knife under his jaw and almost flinches when the tip skips, nicking under his ear, a bright pulse of heat. He remembers the hiss of Zeff’s cleaver through pork belly, how clean that sound is. This isn’t clean. This is butchery.

He wants to believe the Sunny will notice. That she’ll shudder and spit him out, that somewhere beneath this hush is still warm wood, still honest water rocking against her belly. Instead, the door knocks once against the crate. Something slithers behind him, wet and warm, brushing the back of his neck like it cares.

Little rat, it hums, in a voice half his own. Big teeth.

He drags the blade, jagged and probably too fast. The knife skips over cartilage, sticks at the angle of his jaw. He jams the blade deeper, teeth grit against the hot sting. He feels the edge scrape his windpipe, his blood hammering out fast and wet over his knuckles. He wants to scream but it’d be pointless: he knows the hush would just catch the sound in his mouth and tuck it back inside of him.

Zeff’s voice, iron rough, is a boot to the ribs: If you’re gonna die, brat, die on your feet. Not curled up like bait.

It’s wet and awful. He braces his back against the wall, pushes harder. The door smashes inward, Franky’s bulk heaving through, but Sanji’s not here for that fight. He’s here for this, for the way his vision folds into static as the world shrinks to salt and iron and a rat’s heartbeat in the walls.  

When he wakes there’s no galley, no gentle roll of water, no creak of sails overhead. Just stone, cold and slick under his cheek. Rust in his mouth. Iron around his ankle, half-swallowed by black sludge that pulses like a wound that never closes, his childhood all over again.

The dungeon.

His dungeon.

His stomach drops straight through the floor and he’s seven again, lungs burning on every breath, chains grinding his bones, dark so thick it feels like hands around his neck. He scrabbles at the shackle, fingers slipping in the muck, heart punching itself to pieces in his throat. He squeezes his eyes shut just for a second, just to remember what breathing used to feel like, back when the air wasn’t borrowed.

When he opens them the dungeon's gone and he's been slammed back into the quarters with the walls folding around him, static where Sunny's heartbeat should be,

“You need to play fair,” Luffy sighs, perched on Zoro’s hammock like a corpse draped in sunlight that doesn’t exist. His legs swing lazily, tapping the wood that’s never warm. His gaze tracks Sanji with a hunger that’s so patient that Sanji would peel his own skin off just to escape it. “You can’t stay in the game if you don’t play fair.”

Sanji can feel the swell of the ship breathing behind him and the hush that smiles through the floorboards.  His brain is a tray of shattered glass, pieces shifting under his ribs, all the wrong edges cutting together until the shape is obvious and hideous.

“You’re not real.” The words taste like betrayal, but he's so sure it makes him sick. “You’re not… none of this is real.”

Luffy tilts his head. His eyes have no shine at all, just that flat black swell, pupils blown out into pits. “That’s pretty mean, Sanji,” he says mildly. “I don’t say mean things to you.”

Sanji tries to step back, but there’s no back to step into. The door behind him is bone. His hands lift, trembling, useless. “I’m –” alone lodges under his tongue like a fishhook he can’t drag free. Can’t say it out loud and still expect himself to keep moving.

The crew’s never screamed. Never wept. Never helped. Never been here. The Sunny is a stomach digesting him for forty-six endless loops, the ocean its mouth, its tongue, its endless bloodied throat.

It’s not them trapped in here with him, it’s him trapped here. With it.

“You need to play fair,” Luffy says again, hands stretching out and Sanji moves before those fingers can close. He doesn’t think, just twists out of reach, shoulder slamming into the wall as he bolts down the hallway. The Sunny heaves under his feet, boards flexing like muscle, hum surging after him, thick as breath in his ears.

Behind him, Luffy laughs, bright and distant, coming from every wall at once. “You’re not playing fair!”

Sanji runs harder. He doesn’t know why the galley is the only place his brain can still aim for: maybe because it used to mean safety. Work. Purpose. Maybe because if anything of the Sunny is still real, still hers, it’ll be there.

The hallway stretches too long, ribs of the ship bending in, narrowing, trying to catch him. Hands, too many hands, unfurl from the ceiling and walls, Robin’s fingers brushing his shoulders, his hair, the back of his neck as he tears past.

“Please don’t run,” something like Robin murmurs, but the voice comes from the wood, not her mouth.

He staggers into the galley, where’s only sawdust and salt in the air. Nothing left in the barrels but rot. The fruit bowl is a neat little mound of ash. The hush in the walls breathes in, delighted and for a second he just stands there, chest heaving, staring at the empty slots where the knives should be. All those loops he’d wasted thinking he was feeding them, protecting them, dying for them. Letting them gut him and decapitate him and shoot him and strangle him just for this.

“Fuck,” he says, hoarse. It’s not a revelation so much as a bruise he’s been pressing for weeks finally giving way. “Fuck.”

He doesn’t spit a challenge. Doesn’t posture. He just digs his heel into the floor, jaw clenched so tight it aches, and drags his toes along the boards, letting the sparks flicker in the dim like something waking up under his skin.

The rafters split with a wet sound as Luffy spills through the ceiling like a tumour blooming, limbs stretching wrong before snapping back into a shape his brain recognises.

“You’re going to get banned from the game,” Luffy sings, dropping to the table in front of him, ankles swinging. “You gotta stop cheating.”

Franky’s outline looms in the doorway behind him – too big, too blocky – metal knuckles scraping along the beam like a dog’s claws on tile. Robin’s hands peel themselves out of the walls and ceiling, fingers blooming everywhere at once.

Sanji’s throat closes. “Stay away,” he manages, barely more than a breath. 

Luffy pouts, tilting his head. “Mean. You’re being so mean lately.”

Sanji dives forward, slamming his foot into Luffy’s ribs with a crack that should send him flying. Luffy’s torso caves, distorts, then snaps back into place like rubber. He laughs in Sanji’s face, teeth glinting too sharp, no breath and no pain.

Robin’s arms snap toward him, a dozen of them, fingers hooked; Sanji twists through them on instinct, heel catching the edge of the bench. He uses it, shoves off, and this time he doesn’t try to smother the urge to flame. His whole leg ignites, white-hot agony licking up to his hip, and the shock of it nearly knocks him the fuck out of the air. He manages to bring his heel down anyway, the impact shattering the Robin into a spray of black pulp that splatters the tiles and walls.

It’s thick, tarry: not human. Not hers. The pieces crawl for half a second before drying out, flaking away. The Sunny doesn’t shudder. The ship doesn’t scream. Nothing protests because of course it doesn’t. Why would it? 

Luffy grins wider, black swelling under his tongue and Sanji staggers back, fire still chewing at his leg, chest heaving. Every move he makes just confirms it: no blood, no ship, no sky, no family. Just this thing, this hunger, wearing everything he loves like a costume.

“I died for you,” he says, hoarse, more to himself than to them. His vision blurs and he doesn’t know if it’s from pain of his leg or the simple, stupid weight of the truth sinking in, finding purchase at last. “Over and over. For fucking… for what?”

His leg catches fire again, brighter, hotter, wrong, pain spearing up through his shin, raw and detonating. For a second, the panic of his that almost eats him alive and he’s too caught in the shock to see Luffy move, to clock the elastic hands latching around his throat, sliding under his collar, fingers digging in to crush his windpipe. Sanji’s vision fractures at the edges, breath torn to pieces in his chest. He slams his knee up once, twice; flames spill out where they shouldn’t, up his thigh, over his side, so close he can smell his own skin starting to cook.

Luffy reels back, mouth stretched in a silent scream as fire races along his arm and crawls up his jaw. Sanji stumbles away, chest hitching, sweat and tears blurring together. He glances down and sees the skin at his hip to see the skin there gone red, cracked, blistered raw.

Luffy’s gone for a moment, just black pulp smeared across the galley door, a scorched hole where his grin used to be. Robin’s arms drag themselves blindly across the counter, fingers groping like roots looking for new soil.

He can hear the ship – the thing wearing his ship – breathing through the boards. The walls pulse. The floor under his feet sweats salt and warm, rotting tar. The hallway behind him flickers, shimmers, and then splits. Zoro steps out of the crack like he’s been waiting there the whole time: Kitetsu braced low, bandana pulled, grin wide and sharp enough to gut.

Real? Fake? His gut clocks the answer before his brain can try to lie.

“You’re late,” Sanji rasps, voice shredded, a laugh catching on the way out and fracturing into something harsher. “Figures.”

Zoro tips his head, shrugs like it’s nothing, like this is all a joke they’ve told a hundred times. “Don’t you want it, Cook?” The voice frays at the edges, dragging through reality like a knife through wet sand. “Anything to get your hands on me, right?”

He swings when Sanji jumps, sparks shrieking as Sanji’s flaming shin collides with the blade.

The next swing comes in low. Sanji rides the pain, gets under it, his hand snapping up to seize around naked steel. His palm howls, skin splitting, heat tearing through nerve and tendon, as he wrenches it out of Zoro’s grip and hurls it aside. The sword clatters across the boards.

“You’re not him,” he spits, voice cracking. “You’re not any of them.”

Zoro doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t move to pick the sword up. His smirk only stretches, teeth going wrong, too many, too sharp.

Sanji lunges again, knee driving up, flame rolling higher, up his side, up his neck, burning him down to the marrow, eating him alive from the inside out. But it burns them, too; Zoro flinches this time when Sanji’s flaming foot tears through his chest. Skin bubbles and sloughs off in strings of tar, dripping onto the floor with a wet hiss.

Somewhere, the deck heaves. Somewhere, the pantry door splinters into a mouth that hisses back.

Sanji’s momentum carries them both, his feet pounding through the wall, through the ribs of the Sunny-that’s-not. They crash into the sleeping quarters, sheets crawling with veins of black mould that writhe and pulse like they’re breathing.

Zoro grins up at him from the floor, jaw melted and sagging from the fire. “He’d like this part, you know. He’d love to see you burn out.”

Sanji’s lips crack when he snorts, flame licking at the split and catching there. It hurts; it all hurts. “Yeah,” he manages, smoke scraping his throat bloody. “Story of my fucking life.”

He drives his heel down, blazing, until the thing wearing Zoro’s face finally gives. It splits apart into smoke, ash, tar, something that might have been bone and Sanji drops to his knees, panting, fingers digging into the raw burn under his ribs. His vision swarms with stars, but there’s no reset, no merciful snap back to the hammock. Just the mimic slumped against the wall, half sludge, half char, dripping down the planks like someone wrung Zoro out and left him there to rot.

His lungs ache, full of smoke and the scorched chemical reek of his own skin. The beams overhead groan and pop like splintering bone. Under his boots, the floor flexes, a slow ripple of meat-and-wood dragging itself toward him.

He spits blood into it.

“Sanji,” Robin hums, too warm, too kind, from somewhere in the shifting dark. “You don’t look well. Why don’t you rest?”

He barks a laugh that claws his throat bloody. “Not tired yet, Robin-swan.”

(He’s lying. He is so fucking tired.)

Her arms come for him – twenty, thirty, more – crawling out across the walls. One hand clamps onto his shoulder, searing cold. Another snakes around his throat. He kicks up, flame flaring, burning through wrist after wrist until they shriek. The sound’s like nails dragged over glass as the ship buckles around him so hard he almost loses his footing. The hull shudders, a spine cracking.

“You look knackered,” something rasps in Usopp’s voice. “Need a nap?”

Sanji bares his teeth. He brings his heel down; fire roars up his calf, his thigh, too close to bone. Usopp’s shape catches his ankle mid-kick, its palm bubbling and blistering in the heat. Usopp only grins, perfect teeth gleaming white under the scorched tar.

“Fuck you,” Sanji spits. He feels his own skin cooking, the fire eating its way toward the marrow, and doesn’t care. He’d burn himself hollow if it would stop that thing smiling at him like that.

He twists, trying to break its grip, but an arm whips out of the wall and snags his wrist. Another slams across his chest and drives him back into a support beam so hard his ears ring. The goo leans in close, wearing Usopp’s eyes and Usopp’s breath. “Should’ve let us keep killing you easy, man.”

Sanji wheezes a laugh, blood dripping off his chin. “Yeah, well,” he croaks, “Wasn’t exactly a vacation for me.”

A blade flashes in his peripheral and for a split second he thinks, great, more goo, but the cut is clean, too clean. Usopp’s arm hits the deck in one piece, black tar splashing.

“Move, idiot!” Zoro snaps, stepping over Sanji’s feet like he’s stepping over a stray cat. His sword flicks, clearing the blade. “Get your shit together for once.”

Sanji swipes an arm up, fire already cracking up his calf and licking higher. “How about you go fuck yourself, Zoro.” He spits the name like poison. “Or should I say whatever’s wearing Zoro’s skin –”

Zoro’s foot smacks his leg sideways, redirecting the flame into the wall instead of his ribs. The wall screams, boards peeling back like skin blistering open.

“You seriously can’t tell us apart?”  The fury in his voice splinters something in Sanji’s head, even as mimic lurches forward again, tar bubbling like boiling pitch. Zoro meets it easily, jamming his sword up through its gut and pinning it there, black sludge raining down his shoulders and chest. He doesn’t flinch.

“Look at me,” Zoro snarls. “Look.”

Sanji does. Really looks. Sees the way Zoro’s grip tightens on the hilt, the flex in his jaw, the nick on his cheek from a shave he never quite finished, the old scar at the base of his throat. Sees the sweat beading at his temple, blood mixing with tar on his forearm where something caught him earlier.

No black in his teeth. No oil at the corners of his mouth. Just fury, stubborn and stupid and his.

The fire drops from Sanji’s heel like someone cut a string.

“Oh,” he says, tiny, unbelieving, all the air punched out of him. “Oh.”

“Yeah, oh,” Zoro growls, shoulder-checking him out of the way as the mimic slumps, leaking. “Now get your ass up. We gotta move.”

Above them, the beams buckle. Robin’s laughter skitters through the ship like a snapped neck. The floor groans underfoot, swelling like a throat trying to swallow.

A limb bursts from the wall, too many joints, curling for Sanji’s throat. Zoro cleaves through it in one stroke, sticky black ichor spraying the both of them. The fire’s kicked back hard, a hot crack in his chest. He feels the skin split, his own heat turning on him, but the mimic screams, so he drags the flame up through the hollow in his chest and spits it through his heel, point–blank into the mimic’s gut.

Zoro’s already moving, dragging Sanji by the collar when the planks cave inward, the ship gulping at them. He kicks off a wall, dragging them both over the broken gash in the floor with Shusui carving an anchor line. 

They make it three steps past the splintered mouth before the Sunny’s throat opens again – not in the floor this time, but in the walls. A seam peels back like flesh, wet and raw, leaking that inky hush that keeps trying to call itself nakama.

Zoro drags him behind the wreckage of a shattered beam. Sanji can barely stand now; the burn in his chest has gone deep, his lungs rasping like wet bellows. He can taste blood at the back of his teeth, thick and clotted.

Luffy’s voice slithers through the crack in the hull. “Where’re you going, Sanji? You didn’t say goodbye.”

The hush copies the captain’s lilt, sweet and playful. But the shape that crawls out of the seam has too many joints, a slack-jawed grin splitting all the way to an ear. The straw hat drips black like candle wax.

Zoro’s knuckles go white on Shusui’s hilt. Sanji tries to push him back, but his hands are trembling too hard to find purchase. “Don’t –” he coughs, wet, spitting more than smoke. “He’ll take you too.”

“It’s not taking shit,” Zoro mutters, voice low and venomous. But his eyes flick to Sanji’s side, the way Sanji’s shoulders hitch with each ragged breath. The way the spark in his heel keeps guttering out before it can catch.

Luffy laughs before he lunges, faster than Sanji’s seen it move before. Zoro’s blade moves, but so does Luffy’s hand, stretching in ways no bone should. They’re slammed back into the wall, the mimic pressing in with that wide grin.

“Always knew you were soft,” the mimic croons, mouth split over Sanji’s temple, breath reeking of burned rope. “Always knew you’d come back. Over and over. Love your crew, huh?”

Sanji wheezes a laugh. “Not you, though.” His head lolls sideways as Luffy’s fingers burrow against his ribs, and he bites down on a scream when they press deeper. “Not you.”

Zoro’s grip shifts, his free hand locking around Sanji’s nape. “Hey.” He doesn’t shout. Doesn’t bark. “Curls.”

Sanji drags his eyes up. Finds Zoro, in all the roaring static. Real. Zoro’s jaw ticks, something like regret knotted under his skin, before he shifts Shusui’s point. 

One thrust. Quick and kind. 

Mercy, where none has lived for weeks. 

x

He wakes up crammed under the table in the kitchen, limbs twisted, throat raw and burning. Wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist and frowns down at the tar-smear on his skin, the new burns on his tongue. He gags again, emptier this time, scraping his teeth against his palm like he can scrub the taste off.

For a split second – horrifyingly – he wonders if he’s one of them now. If the hush has crawled in and rewired him from the inside out. Has to dig his thumb into his wrist until he feels pain. Has to feel the heat of his own flame, smouldering behind his ribs. 

Around him, the kitchen is half-familiar, half-twisted: cabinets growing teeth, the stove humming like a throat clearing. The smell of burned coffee grounds and iodine, always fucking iodine. 

Sanji breathes through his nose. Counts to ten. It doesn’t help, but it feels like the kind of thing he should be doing and god knows it’s better than focusing his own heartbeat skidding around his ribs like it’s got somewhere better to be.  

Zoro’s propped against the galley door, one boot braced against the frame and all three swords draped across his lap. He’s breathing heavy, shallow, and there’s a smear of dried blood at his jawline that’s definitely not all his.

Sanji’s lungs seize. Relief hits so hard it’s almost nauseating, and then it curdles. He staggers forward, nearly slipping on the warped floor, but instead of grabbing Zoro he slams both hands into his chest and shoves. “Where the fuck have you been?!”

Zoro’s mouth twists like he’s about to say something flippant but then his gaze really sticks, taking in the burns, the shaking hands, the weeks in Sanji’s eyes. “Where do you think? You think you’re the only one getting chewed on by this nightmare? I’ve been busy. You’re welcome, by the way.”

Sanji shoves him again, harder. “Busy doing what? Watching? Counting? How many loops, huh? How many did you just stand there and let me –”

“I thought you knew.” Zoro shoves him back, jaw tight. “You kept throwing yourself at it. Looked like a plan.”

“A plan?” Sanji laughs, ugly and high, breaking halfway. “You thought me getting ripped apart on repeat was a plan?”

Zoro’s lip curls. “What else was I supposed to think, Curls? You die first, you smile about it, you act like you’re doing something noble, yeah, I figured you had some brilliant scheme to go with all that martyr crap. I thought you were handling it.”

The word lands like a punch. The hush creaks under their feet, listening. Sanji’s fingers twist in Zoro’s bloody shirt. “I was handling it, alone. While you’ve been –”

“Dying,” Zoro cuts in, voice dropping low and flat. “Same as you. Difference is I knew what we were dying for.”

Something sharp and mean claws up Sanji’s throat. “Good,” he spits. “Great! Pity it didn’t stick.”

Zoro lunges; Sanji braces for a punch, but Zoro just slams a hand into his chest and pins him to the wall. “Like you can talk! You think I didn’t see you roll over for it? Letting it carve you up over and over so you could pretend you were saving somebody?”

Sanji bares his teeth, but his voice cracks. “I didn’t – I thought –”

“Yeah. You thought,” Zoro bites off. “You thought if you died first, it’d spare the crew. You thought you were shielding them. You thought you were the only one who gave a damn.”

Sanji shoves at his shoulder, but he doesn’t really push him away. “And you’re so fucking smart, huh? How many times did it get you?”

Zoro lets out a sharp, mirthless laugh. “Luffy got me twice. Slippery bastard.” His eyes narrow, pinning Sanji in place. He adds, softer and worse: “You got me every time.”

Sanji’s stomach lurches. “Not me.”

“No shit. You think I don’t know the difference between you and that thing? I knew. I knew, and it still got me, because every time it wore your face I didn’t swing fast enough.”

The words land like a blade laid flat along Sanji’s ribs.

“I let it get close. I kept thinking, ‘Sanji’s got a plan. Sanji knows what he’s doing. Sanji wouldn’t just walk into the monster’s mouth.’” His jaw clenches. “Turns out you would! Turns out you’ve just been throwing yourself into its mouth like scraps, hoping it’d burp our friends back up.”

The hush under the boards swells, pleased, like it understands the fight better than they do.

“You think I wanted it like this?” Sanji manages, hoarse. “You think I liked lying down and letting them – fuck you. I thought maybe I could end it clean. Buy them time to wake up.”

Zoro leans right back into his space, shoulder to shoulder, eyes slit with rage and something worse: fear, maybe, or grief, or both, rotting at the edges of his face. “You keep doing that and it never ends. You hear me? It’s us, you and me. That’s it.”

The hush under the galley floor hums, louder than their breathing, a heartbeat that isn’t Sunny’s at all. Sanji hears it and wants to claw his own ears off. He’s still got both fists twisted in Zoro’s shirt, knuckles aching, seams straining. “So what now, huh? You got some grand plan, moss-for-brains? Or are you just gonna stand here and scream at me until I magically stop being an idiot?”

Zoro shows his teeth, wolfish and used-up, mouth split at the corner from some fight Sanji doesn’t remember. “Yeah, maybe I will. Maybe I’ll chain your stupid neck to the mast so you can’t throw it on the altar again.”

For a second, Sanji wants to hit him. What comes out instead is a sharp, broken sound that sits somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “God, you’re a jerk sometimes.”

“Takes one to know one, Curls.” Zoro’s grip loosens. He doesn’t step back, though. Neither of them does. The space between them is all burnt air and shaking muscles and the hush under the floorboards, listening.

The adrenaline runs out first, draining out of Sanji in one long shudder until his fingers go slack in Zoro’s shirt. The pain in his chest catches up, hot and deep, and his knees almost buckle. Zoro’s hand shoots out on instinct, catching his elbow before he can slide down the wall.

“Careful,” Zoro mutters.

“Don’t,” Sanji says, but there’s no real heat behind it. He’s too tired. Too empty. The fight’s still there, but it’s dulled around the edges by weeks of bleeding and choking and waking up to the same rotten walls, the same rotten air. “Don’t be nice about it.”

Zoro exhales, almost a laugh. “Relax. I’m still mad at you.”

“Good,” Sanji mutters. “Me too.”

There’s a beat where they just breathe, in sync again for the first time in god knows how long. The hush presses in around them, disappointed. Zoro’s the one who looks away first. “I think we should fix the ship first. It’s wrong.”

Sanji barks a sad little laugh. “No shit, genius. It’s not a fucking ship, for starters.”

“Would you shut up for two seconds?” Zoro sighs but it’s frayed, not sharp. His brow knots, like he’s dragging thoughts together he doesn’t quite trust. “I mean it’s wrong-wrong. Like part of it’s touching something else. Sometimes I smell things that don’t belong here. Smoke. Real smoke. Food that isn’t rotted. I hear the sea and for a second it makes sense.”

Sanji’s whole body goes still, right down to the stutter of his pulse.

“I…” His throat works. “There was something. In the crow’s nest. Felt like deja vu but worse. It made me homesick which is fucking insane, because I don’t even know where the hell I’d be homesick for anymore.”

“And?” Zoro pushes, gaze locked onto his face.

“I didn’t check it.” Sanji shakes his head, a bitter smile twisting his mouth. Guilt and regret curl hot under his breastbone. “Didn’t even think to. Just wrote it off as more bullshit. Didn’t trust myself enough to poke it. D’you think it actually means something?”

Zoro’s jaw flexes. When he talks again, his voice is low and cautious, like he’s picking every word up with two fingers. Like he’s afraid of handing Sanji – or handing himself – hope he can’t afford. “I think if there are places this thing doesn’t hold then those are the places it wants us away from. Which means the crow’s nest? That’s our next stop. And there was… something in the aquarium. Every time I’ve gotten close, it…” He flicks Wado toward the floor. “Pushes back. Hard.”

Sanji snorts, but it comes out more like a strangle of air than a joke. “Everything pushes back in here. Surprised you didn’t just stab it, your usual dumbass plan.”

“I did stab it,” Zoro says, indignant. “Didn’t like that. Spat me out somewhere else. Lost a sword that time.”

Despite himself, Sanji lets out a wrecked little huff. “Of course you did.”

The boards under his feet tremble. He leans in anyway, because if he doesn’t focus on planning something, he’s going to fold in half and never get up again. “So you think it’s like… what? A mouth? A door? A window?”

Zoro hums, annoyed but listening. Always listening. “Last time I heard the ocean, the real one. And smoke. Fire. Cooking.” His gaze flicks over Sanji’s shoulder, like he can see some other Sanji in some other galley. “Yours.”

Sanji manages a crooked smirk. “You saying my cooking blew a hole in the universe?”

Zoro doesn’t quite roll his eyes but his mouth twitches like he wants to. “I’m saying maybe we’re bleeding through. Us. You. Whatever’s left of us out there…” His grip tightens on the hilt. “This place hates it.”

The words barely finish leaving his mouth before the ship reacts.

The floor beneath them groans, a living thing drawing breath. The lights overhead flicker, pulsing a hot, sickly orange. The wall to their left warps inward with a deep, tearing creak, like something is shoving against it from the other side, trying to break through.

Zoro exhales, slow. “It knows.”

“Yeah.” Sanji’s voice is flat, scraped raw. “It knows.”

Another pulse thrums underfoot, like a heartbeat. The wall spasms. A groan rolls up from the lower decks – no footsteps, no screams this time. Just pressure. Waiting.

They make it two floors up before the first hallway twists. Not metaphorically: the hallway warps, its floorboards torquing like ribs trying to realign. Zoro catches himself on the wall, Sanji slams his palm into a beam for balance, and the world keeps breathing around them. 

“This is getting worse,” Sanji mutters, voice low and sharp.

Zoro doesn’t answer. He just keeps climbing, focused on their mission. 

The access to the mast isn’t a straight shot. It should be: Sunny’s design was never meant to be confusing, but now every staircase ends in a loop, and the inner walls are growing wet. They squelch underhand. Some of the wood pulses when touched. There are no portholes. It’s like crawling through something’s ribcage, throat, mouth.

Sanji gags quietly once as they pass a hallway that smells like burning hair and seawater.

“Nope,” he says, hoarse.

Zoro shoves a panel open near the chart room. “Up.”

It leads to a vertical crawl shaft, not a real one, not one that’s supposed to exist, not one that Sanji’s ever seen before and he has a moment to wonder what the hell Zoro has been up to all this time, how he’s been using his time wisely. The edges are jagged, uneven, as if the Sunny herself tore this hole open as a trap or a bypass. It smells wrong inside, brine and engine smoke and something coppery underneath.

“You first,” Zoro smirks.

“You’re heavier.”

“I’m the one with the swords.”

“Dick.” Still, Sanji goes. The ladder, or what’s pretending to be a ladder, is rusted through. Nails poke at the soft meat of his hands. His burns throb the farther he climbs. Halfway up, he glances toward the upper shaft and freezes at the flash of sky.

Just once – blue and bright and clean through a crack in the upper wood. It disappears so fast he thinks he imagined it.

But – 

“Hey,” he calls. “I think I saw it.” No answer below. Sanji tilts his head, a spike of fear lancing through him. “Mosshead.”

Nothing. A beat of terror blooms sharp and cold and he yanks himself up another rung, fast. “Zoro!”

“Stop yelling,” Zoro hisses from below. “I’m here.”

Sanji exhales, letting his hand cover his mouth. He doesn’t know what he would’ve done if – “You could have said something, idiot!”

Zoro snorts. “I was listening.”

Something taps above them, once. Twice. Slow and awful, a warning and a threat. Sanji looks up, frantic, and his eyes land on a shimmer, like a jigsaw piece corrected wrong, like light trying to fall correctly and failing. His heart seizes in his chest, panic kicking up in his mouth. “If I Skywalk –”

“No way. It hasn’t worked, I’ve watched you – you’ll die, again, and then we’ll be well and truly screwed.” Zoro’s voice is iron, already fuming, like he can see Sanji’s smashed body on the deck already.

Sanji grits his teeth, frustrated beyond measure because if he could just jump it’d be okay. But the ship knows what he wants and it’d let him believe he can fly just long enough to watch him fall.

So he climbs, until he shoves through the hatch, his shoulders tense, expecting teeth or claws or some grotesque mimicry of crewmates ready to pounce. He stands there a moment, fists clenched, legs ready to flame, but it’s the same circular space they’ve seen a hundred times over. Old crates. A half-buried cushion that used to be Luffy’s napping spot. The single slatted window that looks out over the bow, throwing pale light across the floor.

No warping walls. No grasping limbs. No blood.

Zoro hauls himself up beside him, scowling like he expects something to go wrong just from the act of breathing, and Sanji can’t even blame him, not really. He doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t need to: Zoro’s hackles are raised as well, even as Sanji steps forward to run a careful hand over the wall. It doesn’t pulse or twitch. But when his fingers brush the far edge of the window frame, he stops.

There – just left of the telescope mount – is the faint ripple again. The air around is distorted, almost, like sunlight upon asphalt, and Sanji’s breath catches in his throat because he didn’t imagine it after all. 

Something fractured. Something real, maybe.

“Shit,” he whispers, hoarse. He crosses the room slowly. “That’s it.”

“Maybe,” Zoro mutters. He keeps his distance, watching, like he’s not sure what to trust right now. Like he’s not sure if he can even trust himself, hands atop his swords as if he expects to need them at any given second.

Sanji lifts a hand towards the shimmer, biting his lip and stops.

He’s looking at it, right at it, but he’s also in the hallway outside Zeff’s kitchen. Warm tile under his feet. Soap bucket in hand. Twelve, maybe. Younger. The kind of memory too deep for dates, all sensation: steam in his lungs, the throb in his ribs, the ache in his throat that he doesn’t let himself call love.

He jerks back.

Zoro turns to him sharply. “What’d you see?”

Sanji doesn’t answer, can’t possibly form the words. He swallows it back down and keeps his eyes on the ripple while Zoro inches closer, head tilted and eyes narrowed. 

“It… smells like the kitchen?” He leans closer and sniffs, exaggerated. “Like stew. You’ve cooked it before.”

Sanji doesn’t even fucking know how to feel about that. He gets Zeff and home, the first time he felt safe and wanted, and Zoro gets stew? The kitchen, Sunny’s kitchen? Sanji’s cooking? 

He can’t touch that concept with a ten foot pole right now, or he’s going to lose his mind.

“Maybe it’s… showing us things,” he says instead of asking am I safe to you? am I home to you? “Trying to feel us out.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know!” He snaps, pressing his palms to his thighs. They sting from where they caught the fake Zoro’s sword a loop ago, because nothing fucking heals anymore. If it did, he wouldn’t feel like his whole leg is being edged open with knives. “To distract us? To test us? To bait us? Who the fuck knows what’s going on here anymore. You still think it’s a weak spot?”

Zoro’s breath comes stilted, shallow. He shifts, visibly uncomfortable, his mouth catching on something only his brain can hear. “I think it wants us to think it is.”

“So we break it anyway?” Sanji throws his arms up, vexed, because this could be the right move or the very fucking wrong one, and it’s like they’re doing this on vibes alone. He knows they’ve only made it this far by accident, by dumb luck, or desperation, or the ship letting them, and he can’t help but feel that there's a weight pressing down on the room now, daring them to go further.

“So what d'we do then?” Zoro asks, blunt and flat, like the question has been dragging behind his teeth the whole time. “Smash it? Try to climb through? What if it’s the only good thing left on this bloody ship?”

Sanji crouches down on his heels to peer at the shimmer, jaw clenched. “Then why doesn’t Sunny want us near it?”

“I don’t like that it’s not attacking,” Zoro mutters, pacing back and forth. He pulls and sheaths Wado repeatedly. “Feels like a setup.”

Sanji shifts closer to the seam again, ignoring the way it tugs at his mind. “Okay, well. We can’t protect it. We can’t carry it. So we’ve got three choices: we leave it, we poke it or we destroy it.”

Zoro stops pacing, looking incredulously back at him before folding his arms, finally leaving his sword the hell alone. “We’re really voting on this?”

“We’ve done worse with less, right?” When he stands back up he only wobbles a little from the pain and counts that as some kind of win. 

Zoro doesn’t move for a long time. Then, finally, he steps forward. He draws the dull edge of a Kitetsu – not a full strike, just enough to test it – and brushes the blade’s point along the shimmer, easing out a sound like a bottle cracking under pressure. Like teeth against glass.

The ripple twitches, then stills, and Sanji takes a step back as Zoro tries again, a little harder this time.

The seam pulses. Flares wrong. The temperature shifts into a sudden pressure drop, like the moment before lightning hits. A groan tears through the ship. Low, awful, like timber splitting in half. Like the ship just felt something get torn out of its guts.

Sanji stumbles sideways. “Oh, that did something.”

Zoro readies his swords properly now, Kitetsu and Wado in each hand, Shusui waiting in the wings. He’s scowling. “Guess it’s awake.”

Outside the crow’s nest, something shrieks, like metal twisting into itself. The floor rattles beneath them. They hear footfalls scuttling fast and wrong across the deck below.

Sanji’s chest heaves, and the hush that’s been crawling up the mast finds them with a wet slap of darkness coalescing into Luffy’s grin and Nami’s laugh all twisted together. A hand slithers up the ladder, too many fingers, skin splitting on the rungs.

Zoro moves first and Wado’s edge howls through the confined space, shaving the top off the mimic’s wrist. Black drips onto Sanji’s foot. The mast bucks under the recoil.

“Curls!” Zoro snarls. He plants a boot in Sanji’s back, just enough to shove him closer to the seam. “See if you can burn it open. I’ll hold them off.”

Sanji wants to snap back but the thing that’s wearing Franky’s voice is already crawling up behind Zoro, babbling with that static-laced super! like a broken radio. So instead he takes a jagged breath and digs his thumb into the seam instead. It screams under him, a wet, keening shriek that rattles his teeth. He can feel it trying to seal under his hand. 

Sanji’s burns throb in time with his pulse, too hot, too deep. He can’t think of anything worse than lighting up right now, when every spark feels like it might turn inward and eat him alive but the seam is already trying to knit shut, the shimmer tightening like a scab, and Zoro’s braced against him, shoulder solid at his back, blood and black splashed across his jaw.

He doesn’t have a choice. He pulls fire from his heel, just a flicker, and heat rips up his calf and into his ribs, makes his lungs seize, soot clawing for his throat again… but it works. The flame kisses the seam and the seam shrieks without sound, splitting wider,

“Holy shit,” he gasps, voice shredded, foot sparking again as the hush lashes for his neck. “It’s working?”

Zoro doesn’t answer. He just laughs, a wild, bright sound, his blade flashing too close to Sanji’s ear. Steel hisses through the mimic’s throat and black splatters the mast. Sanji kicks again, fire, pain, his lungs full of bitter air. He drives his heel into the seam, yelling into the wood, into the break, into the Sunny’s stolen ribs.

Something gives with a sound like a bone being cracked open, wind tearing through the crack, cold and clean and real, maybe, bringing with it the taste of salt and something that isn’t rotten. 

The Sunny’s scream rips through the walls like a living thing, like Sunny’s lungs are in the rafters and its heart is buried somewhere deep, furious and wounded. The floor pitches under them. Nails rip free with high, whining shrieks. Something slams into the tower from below, hard enough that splinters spit through the walls, hard enough for the nest to sway. The wood beneath their pulses and twists, trying to curl inward like it’s rejecting them entirely.

Zoro’s already at the hatch, yanking it open but the ladder’s gone.

“What the fuck?,” Sanji breathes, staggering as the crow’s nest pitches sideways. The sky’s the wrong colour outside and the air tastes like salt and static, like fucking iodine all over again.

Zoro’s hand finds a support beam, barely holding. “We have to climb down the mast.”

The crow’s nest lurches again. A board beneath Sanji’s foot shatters, slashing through the bare sole. He stumbles forward and grabs Zoro by instinct. “I can try Skywalk us –”

“I said no!” Zoro snaps, bracing him. “Try it and I’ll cut your legs off.”

“Oh, great plan! Real smart thinking there, idiot!"

The mast below them is warping: still wood, but slithering like muscle, groaning like it’s got vertebrae. Handholds appear where they shouldn’t, vanish when they try to use them. Every nail is hot, every rope coiled too tight. The descent is agony. They don’t climb, they can’t climb: they crawl. They scrabble. Zoro’s hands are raw within seconds. Splinters dig through skin. One of the rigging ropes lashes out, whiplike, and Sanji yanks Zoro down just in time.

Sanji can’t feel his fingers. His burns are screaming. Every time he grips the mast, it tries to pull something out of him.

Below them, the sails are writhing.

“Almost there,” Zoro growls.

“Fuck off, we’re not even halfway –”

THe mast jerks, and Zoro loses grip. He’s falling for a sick second before Sanji lunges, barely catching onto his arm. His shoulder wrenches, but he doesn’t let go.

They swing together, uneven and off-balance, half hanging from one of Sunny’s rigging lines. Sanji’s shoulder feels like it’s been torn half out of the socket, but his fingers won’t let go of Zoro’s wrist. 

Something slithers up the mast toward them.

“Moss!” 

“I see it,” Zoro grits out, twisting, one sword already in hand.

It’s above them now, crawling along the warped wood like it owns it, like a centipede with too many limbs, planks for plates, teeth in the knots, wet ropes for sinew. The sails below writhe like they’re trying to clap them between them.

“Cut me loose if it gets to us,” Sanji starts.

“I’m not cutting you loose, are you stupid –”

“Then throw me,” Sanji snarls, panic and fury tangling in his throat. “Because if it drags us back up we’re both dead and then what the fuck do you think happens next?”

Zoro’s jaw flexes. He doesn’t answer. He just bares his teeth and slashes the line.

They slam into a lower deck beam, the impact cracking through Sanji like someone’s swung a bat into his ribs. Something gives with a sharp, ugly pop and he tastes blood before he feels it. Zoro lands half on top of him, knocks more air out of his lungs, then shoves himself upright with a gasp. “Where – where’d it go?”

It’s right above, clinging to the mast, turning its too-many-joints as if to look down on them. The ship echoes with noise that isn’t noise: Luffy’s voice, too loud and giddy, Usopp’s laugh turned inside out, Chopper’s high worry warped low. It’s everywhere, all around, closing in.

They’re surrounded.

Zoro’s already pushing to his feet, Wado and Shusui out, blades slick with black and red both. He sets himself between Sanji and the worst of it on reflex but Sanji doesn’t move. He can feel the numbers lining up in his head like knives on a rack: no space, no exits. Nowhere to drop that the ship won’t eat. He can’t Skywalk here, he can’t risk full flame or the rope will go, the sails will go, he’ll go.

There’s no winning this one.

“We have to,” he says, hoarse.

Zoro flicks a glance back, confused, still tracking the movement above them, around them. “Have to what?”

Sanji doesn't answer; he's already reached for Kitetsu, spinning her once around his fingers like any other knife he’s learned to love. He doesn’t let himself think long enough to be afraid. He doesn’t let himself remember that the last time Zoro killed him it was mercy.

This time it’s strategy.

Zoro clocks it half a second too late, mouth opening to shout but Sanji’s faster. Just this once. He twists and drives the blade backward, straight into his own gut. The shock is white and all-consuming; it steals his breath before he can even scream. He feels the tip punch out the other side, feels it meet Zoro’s abdomen in a wet, bone-scraping grind.

Zoro makes a sound that’s all surprise and rage, hands clamping down on Sanji’s shoulders like he can stop it, like he can push the steel back in, undo it somehow.

Blood pools fast. Hot. Horribly real. Too real for the loop to ignore. Sanji tries to say sorry, or please, or trust me, but all that comes up is more blood. The world’s already tilting, edges going soft.

He drags in one last breath, rips Kitetsu upward, and lets everything snap to black.

x

This time, when Sanji comes to, the first thing he feels is sunlight.

Warm and golden and gentle across his face. He blinks into it, dazed, confused, until he hears it: Luffy’s laugh, high and loose. Chopper’s small, delighted shout.

“Hey, Sanji,” Nami says softly above him, from where his head’s in her lap, her fingers moving through his hair with gentle, gentle precision. She smiles and it’s so fucking – it looks so real that Sanji’s eyes burn hot immediately. “You’ve been asleep for ages.”

The sky above them is a perfect, endless blue. The deck hums gently under his back, the way it should. His body doesn’t hurt. His skin isn’t burned. His chest doesn’t ache. There’s no blood. No soot.

Just his family, whole.

He scrambles upright too fast, dizzy with the sudden movement, the lack of pain and Nami laughs, bops him lightly on the chin with her fist like she has a thousand–and-one times before. Gives him a second to take in the sight of the crew, splayed around the table, bathed in the warm glow of the sunset outside. “Damn, you must’ve been having some dream. It’s your turn, by the way.”

Sanji’s heart is hammering in his chest, even as his eyes dart between the faces of his crewmembers, laughing and talking energetically, the way they do when the day is good, when the wind is their friend, when there’s nothing to do but bask in each other.

“Imagination isn’t a card offense!” Usopp shrieks, hair half in his eyes because he’s ripped his hair tie out in frustration. “That’s who I am as a person!”

“That’s exactly why it’s a penalty,” Robin counteres serenely, folding her hands under her chin. She’s got her hat on, despite being in her pyjamas, and Sanji wants to slam across the space to squeeze her in his arms, forever and a day.

“I hate this game,” Zoro grumbles, throwing down his cards. “Why’re the numbers all in fish?”

“Fish are part of the theme!” Luffy howls with laughter, from where he’s hanging off the back of the couch upside down, like a feral bat. “Exploding Banana Pirates don’t use numbers!”

“They do now,” Nami mutters, scribbling a plus-five anchovy rule into the margin of the rulebook. “New update just dropped. Better pay attention.”

“Stop updating the game mid-round!” Usopp wails, clutching his growing tower of banana penalties. “This is how civilisations fall!”

Franky salutes Nami from across the floor like a beached cyborg, grin wide and thematic, because he’s probably winning. He always wins, somehow. “Super chaotic game balance there.”

Chopper’s tiny hoof presses against Sanji’s cheek like a stethoscope and Sanji nearly jumps out of his skin, gaping down at him. “Your blood pressure’s going up,” he says helpfully, cheerily, soft and warm and Sanji lets his hand drop down to curl in the reindeer’s fur, just for a moment.

Just for a beat.

He can barely hold back a smile, sleeves dusted with flour from the half–finished cake on the benchtop. His leg doesn’t hurt. His skin’s not burning. He’s happy and whole and he can feel his eyes well up, from the sheer magnitude of loving his friends too much. He croaks, “I mean, I’m playing a banana-based war crime and being medically evaluated at the same time, so cut me some slack, little guy.”

“Ten points to Chopper for battlefield diagnostics!” Luffy announces with glee, flinging a card at Sanji’s face. It hits his nose and flutters to the table, where he reads from it with a trembling voice, hope and relief and something running wild in his gut. His blood sings with how content everyone is, even though he knows.

He knows. He’s not stupid, he’s just… soft.

“‘Instant death unless you sing,’” he reads aloud, and snorts with laughter. “No. Absolutely not. I’m not singing for your sabotage!”

“You don’t want us all to explode, do you?” Chopper asks sweetly, because that’s usually how this game ends. 

Zoro snorts, ruthless as always. The sunset catches the glint of his earrings and for a moment – for a long moment Sanji wants to stay. Can’t imagine leaving. “Explode already. I dare you.”

“Okay!” Luffy crows, and promptly pretends to detonate, the couch creaking violently as he launches himself into the air, howling, arms outstretched. Sanji ducks just in time for Luffy to crash into Zoro, who grabs him by the face with an audible smack and pushes him down like swatting a fly.

“Oh my god,” Sanji laughs, breathless. “You’re all idiots.”

They are, all of them. Big, loud, sticky-handed, rule-breaking, ridiculous idiots. But they’re his and for one long, impossible moment the world holds still around them. Safe. Bright. Exactly the way he’s always wanted to keep them.

He stands up so quickly his knees almost give out, not from pain this time, but from the sheer weight of the love punching at his ribs. Of the knowledge that this is the closest he’s come to peace in… god, he doesn’t even know how long. He steps around the table to get his arms around Luffy’s shoulders and drags him in, burying his face in the mess of hair and straw hat and sun. Breathes in the sweat, the pepper, a hint of sticky marinade clinging to his shirt. The scent he knows better than his own.

Luffy tips his head back and grins up at him, wide and guileless, like Sanji could never do anything wrong. Like the world has never ended. Like it isn’t currently chewing them to pieces.

“I love you guys so, so much,” he manages. It scrapes out of him raw and he holds on as tight as he dares. And then he lets go, of the table and the warmth and the lie – and lets his whole body ignite.

x

There's no warmth greets him this time, no sunshine, no laughter, no phantom crew waiting to wrap him up in soft comfort. Just metal groaning somewhere deep in Sunny’s bones and the dim flicker of emergency lights cycling red, low and mean. 

He jolts awake on a choke, body convulsing, the air around him thick and gritty, even as a cough forces itself out from his chest, tasting like charcoal and copper and the back of his throat peeled raw.

Soot. Smoke.

His lungs ache like he’s swallowed a furnace whole and had it settle in his ribs, alive. He drags in a breath and gags on it.

“Don’t throw up,” he whispers to himself, teeth clenched, desperate. His stomach lurches anyway, dry heaving with the rattle of lungs that haven’t quite caught up with his body yet. He shoves himself upright with one arm, the other still clutched around his middle, and forces air into his body one single fucking molecule at a time.

“Okay,” he rasps, voice cracking halfway through. He blinks, ash clinging to his lashes. The walls feel closer, like the ship’s ribcage has collapsed inward, like he’s woken inside its heart. “Okay. This’s… this’s fine, we’re back. Zoro?”

Last time Zoro had been right here, like they’d woken up together. Or maybe Zoro had found him? “I swear I didn’t think it’d –”

The sentence shatters as he folds into another cough, guilt booting him square in the teeth because he did think this might happen. Every reset now feels like they’re taking a real risk because god knows the ship isn’t trying to keep them together. If anything, it’s prying them apart.

“Fuck,” he mutters, pressing both hands over his face and dragging them down hard enough to sting. His heartbeat is a trapped animal, battering his ribs, but he moves anyway.

He has to. Aquarium. He has to get to the aquarium.

The problem is, the Sunny has rearranged herself while he was busy being dead.

The layout’s unfamiliar again; hallways loop back on themselves, doors open into nothing. Sometimes there are footsteps, too far to follow, too wrong in their rhythm. Sometimes he hears his own voice echoing down the passage ahead, layered with Zeff’s rasp, Judge’s cold snap, his mother’s soft murmur.

Sometimes the lights flicker and the walls breathe.

He grips a railing as he rounds another corner and for a split second the metal pulses under his hand like a vein. He jerks back. His burns scream. Another cough wracks him, soot and ash and something thick coming up. Blood, maybe. He doesn’t look too closely.

By the time he reaches the aquarium there’s a nasty gouge across his ribs from where the wall spat out something sharp, and his knuckles are shredded from punching his way through anything that tried to close on him. The air in here’s wet and caustic, making his lungs burn like he’s been inhaling cleaning chemicals. Iron coats his tongue, mixed with ash and something older, rancid at the edges.

Hell, maybe he is necrotic by now. Nothing would surprise him.

Which is probably why he doesn’t even flinch when he finds Zoro sprawled across the table, grappling with something that looks like Usopp and Chopper got melted down and poured into the same mould.

“You son of a bitch,” Zoro snarls at him, not the monster, trying to haul himself up with one good leg. The other’s bent at a wrong angle. The goo-thing clings to him, hooves and hands and cables of tar. “You stabbed me!”

Sanji’s panting, shoulder hitching with each breath as he limps closer. “Yeah, well, I died too, Mosshead. You think that was fun for me?”

A sound peels out of the ceiling,wet and gurgling and high, like laughter forced through a clogged drain.

“Aw, a lovers’ quarrel,” Fake Zoro oozes out of the wall, draped in dripping black sinew, half-smiling with those same lazy eyes, he pulls himself free of the timber. His voice is syrup-thick and knowing, slipping between Zoro’s tone and something too soft, too sweet, that makes Sanji’s teeth ache. “I liked you better when you were begging for him under your breath.”

Something in Sanji goes white hot. He surges forward, fury burning through pain and exhaustion alike. “Get the fuck out of my head.”

“Too late,” Fake Zoro croons, one ropey arm lashing toward his side. “You left the door open, Cook. Can’t blame me for looking.”

Behind him, Zoro’s still fighting, leg mangled, teeth bared, attention split between the thing on him and the thing wearing his face. “You don’t get to pull shit like that and expect thanks,” he snarls at Sanji, anger raw and unfiltered. “You reset the loop and now we’re worse!”

“I know!” Sanji roars, whirling on Zoro. “I know, alright? I was trying to save you!”

Somewhere overhead, a transponder snail crackles to life, Usopp’s voice cutting through the din: “Sanji, what’s going on down there? We can’t reach you – Zoro, are you –”

Sanji freezes for half a second, ankle almost wrenching on a broken beam.

That’s all the opening Fake Zoro needs. It flickers, half-melting, and lunges, voice silk slick. “You never did say thank you for the kiss.”

“What?!” Zoro’s head snaps around, even while he’s trying to keep Nami off him, blade under her throat, her body melting and re-forming around the steel like wax. His focus slips just enough that one of her claws sinks into his arm.

Fake Zoro grins wider, half his cheek splitting open. “You were so hopeful,” it purrs. “‘Maybe it’s a fairytale,’ you said. ‘Maybe the prince just needs a kiss.’ Thought you’d save us all, didn’t you? And you liked pretending it was him –”

Sanji’s shoulder slams into the mimic and drives it back into the aquarium glass hard enough that the Sunny howls around them. The tank spiderwebs with cracks, a sharp, shivering sound rippling through rotted glass and warped wood alike.

“Shut it,” Sanji hisses between his teeth, breath burning in his lungs. He’s shaking, rage and shame boiling up his throat in equal measure. He can feel Zoro at his back – the real Zoro – a question burning there like a brand, and he refuses to turn around. He’d rather gut this thing. Hell, gut himself all over again.

Anything but see that look on Zoro’s face.

The monster laughs, wet and bubbling. “He’ll never kiss you now,” it singsongs. “You taste like desperation.”

Sanji does what he does best and throws himself into the fight, cuts it off with a brutal kick. This version of Zoro is almost perfect: same stance, same low growl, same dirty bandana tied around a bicep like a promise. But there’s no restraint in its swings, no familiarity, no rhythm.

Sanji tears into it, heel and knee and teeth, ignoring the way every flare of flame feels like it’s peeling his own ribs open from the inside. Tar splatters the deck, the glass, his shoes. The mimic’s form shears apart, reforming, unraveling, until Kitetsu finally bites through its neck and the head hits the floor with a wet slap.

Zoro’s on his feet first, swords up before his knees even finish cracking. Sanji drags himself upright a heartbeat later, ribs screaming, lungs full of chemical heat where the fire’s been chewing at him from the inside. Fake Zoro’s remains writhe for a second, then smear themselves into the planks and vanish.

The ship clearly wants them to bleed for what they took, for that seam ripped wide, that crack torn open like a throat, and it shows its teeth in the shape of their friends.

Luffy’s grin looms out of the dark, all black gums and peeling teeth. Robin’s smile stretches too wide, her eyes all pupil and no light, arms budding from the ceiling beams to claw at Zoro’s shoulders. Franky’s voice rattles through the walls, SSSUUUPER… SSSSUUUPER… until the hush spits him out in a tangled mess of iron and bone.

The thing wearing Robin’s face lunges again, too quick, too fluid, too many hands and Sanji’s foot lashes out on instinct, heel first, throwing Kitetsu back to Zoro. Sparks snap bright across the floor, blue and orange flame surging too big, too close. It licks up the mimic’s front and peels it back, skin and smile and hands sloughing off in a hiss of steam and scorched tar.

The heat from it bites up Sanji's leg all the way to the hip, but he grits his teeth and kicks again until he can open up space between them. He’s shifting his weight to spin back up when his chest just… folds. Like something inside snaps clean in two. He doubles over, coughing, blood and black splattering bright across the floor.

Wado catches Robin’s next swipe, but Zoro’s eyes are on him now, on the ugly, raw burns clawing up his ankle where the heat’s licked under his pants, on the tremor in his knee every time he lands. “What the hell is that?”

“I’m fine.” It grinds out between his teeth, thin and brittle. He tries to straighten, to square up for another swing, but his ribs shudder like something’s tearing with every breath. Zoro’s on him instantly, shoving him back, swords in one hand, the other clamping around Sanji’s arm when he stumbles. 

“You’re – is that fucking soot?” His voice is so close it scrapes down Sanji’s spine, worse than any blade he’s ever swung.

“It’s nothing.”

“You idiot!” Zoro shoves him harder this time, enough to bounce Sanji off the scorched sofa. Franky’s twisted mass twitches its shoulders like it’s about to lunge again, but Zoro’s sword is already leveled past Sanji’s ear, holding the mimic at bay like it barely registers.

“How long?” Zoro snarls. The tip of the blade trembles, just a fraction, like his hands can’t decide whether to cut something or shake Sanji to pieces.

“Since it worked.” Sanji wipes the back of his wrist across his mouth and the smear of black that comes away makes Zoro’s eyes go dark, from angry to deadly. Sanji tries to duck under Zoro’s arm, but the swordsman blocks him, blade braced against the Franky-thing’s bulk, boot planted so Sanji can’t slide past.

“It’s burning you. Are you out of your goddamn mind?!”

“We don’t have anything else,” Sanji snarls back.

The mimic surges but Zoro bats it away, shaving half its jaw off in a slop of black ooze. He doesn’t even look at it. His glare is all for Sanji, like if anyone’s getting carved open next, it’s him. “We have me! There’s two of us in this fight, Curls!”

Sanji laughs, but it tears on the way out, thin and feral. “What are you gonna do, Marimo? Spark up for me? Got secret fire powers tucked under that stupid haramaki?”

“Don’t –” Zoro growls.

Sanji shifts, heel twitching like it wants to light again, but Zoro rams him back into the sofa, pinning him there. Franky shrieks as Zoro’s other sword splits it shoulder to hip, goo form glitching like bad static. The deck shudders under the weight of the boiling mass. The hush wails in a chorus that sounds like Nami, like Usopp, like home being peeled alive.

Sanji’s shoulders jolt against the cushions. He could get free if he really wanted to – he could kick Zoro off, break the hold – but he’d have to light up to do it and he’s not sure what will go first: the ship or his own skin. He sucks in a breath that rattles wrong, hurts wrong. “I can handle it.”

“You’re shit at lying,” Zoro says, voice dropping low and rough. He’s close enough now that their foreheads nearly bump, swords still dripping at his sides, boot braced over Sanji’s ankle so he can’t risk another kick. As if he could really overpower the raw strength in Sanji’s leg. “You think it’s worth it?”

“We need it.” There’s that wild, bare bone desperation in his voice, the kind that wants to chew through steel and run until the horizon gives out. “It hates the fire, it fucking and we need every edge we can get.”

Zoro lets go of his shirt only to yank it higher, baring the charred skin across his ribs. The faint hiss when cold air hits makes Sanji flinch, muscles spasming under the burn, but Zoro doesn’t stop. “Look at this, you’re cooking yourself!”

“Better me than –”

“Don’t.” Zoro ducks his head, low enough that their temples almost brush. “Don’t you say it. Don’t you dare say ‘better me than them.’ We’re not picking that fight yet. Not here.”

For a second, everything else recedes. The hush circles them in the dark, rebuilding stolen faces in the corners of the room. The aquarium glass behind them whines, spiderwebbing. Wado’s edge trembles against Sanji’s hip and he barks out a tiny, wrecked laugh and fumbles a fist into Zoro’s shirt. “You can’t stop me. You know you can’t.”

Zoro does the worst thing, the thing that lodges under Sanji’s ribs like Nami’s knife and refuses to move. He leans in and presses their foreheads together. Just once. Rough. Grounding. Real.

“I don’t give a shit what you think you’re trying to do,” he says, low and fierce. “You don’t leave me on this ship alone. You hear me?”

Sanji’s mouth opens, to snarl, to spit something bitter and mean and terrifyingly honest, but the aquarium saves him. The tank gives with a scream of glass, and then it bursts, hurling a wall of water through the room and swallowing the rest of his words whole.

It crashes into them like a wave, but it’s not water: it’s never been water, not here. It’s cold, though. Thick. Clinging. Black vines ribbon through the air like eels, living, slithering into sleeves, mouths, up their noses. 

Sanji gags as something threads past his tongue. Zoro’s already swinging at it, Wado humming as it slices a vine clean in two, but the ends writhe and split again, doubling like worms.

The floor is gone. The bar stools and counters have been shredded. Chairs float, or sink. Some of the creatures that lived in the aquarium slop across the wreckage: fishlike things with too many eyes, transparent ribs wriggling in the black. One of them is laughing like Chopper, like a bell ringing in the night.

High above, Sanji can see the ripple of light, the shimmer where the world doesn’t quite knit together properly. Embedded in the ceiling, pulsing dimly, like a cyst trying to stay hidden under skin. It’s the only solid thing in this chaos, but it’s fucking unreachable.  The room keeps filling. Fast. The black is rising to their chests, then their shoulders. It grabs at them like hungry fingers, wanting inside.

“Zoro,” Sanji’s breath is stuttering. He can feel it in his lungs already, too cold, too wet, too alive. “I’ve gotta –”

“Shut up.” Zoro clearly knows what he’s going to say, doesn’t even dignify it with a look. He’s too busy scanning the wall, gauging distance to the seam. It’s high, too high.

“We can’t fucking reach it, I need to burn –”

“No.” Zoro snaps it too fast. Too sharp. 

“But we’re gonna drown –” The vines surge and something wraps around Sanji’s wrist. tugs – he kicks free, coughing again, trying not to breathe in. It’s hard to tell what’s solid anymore. Even the walls are starting to drip. The water curls thick and heavy in his throat like rope, slick tendrils twisting deeper the more he struggles. 

He can feel it in his chest, moving, like it’s choosing where to sit, which lung to cling to. It isn’t just suffocating, it’s burrowing, slithering down his throat, curling against his ribs, winding around his spine from the inside out. His hands claw uselessly at his own neck as panic thunders in his chest. The pressure behind his sternum sharpens, pulling backward, like something inside him wants to go back into the flood. He tries to jump into the air, to Skywalk, anything, but slams back down, spitting vines.

Zoro yells through the rising black, “Boost me, now!”

Sanji throws himself forward, just enough stability to get a foot under Zoro’s. He launches him, as hard as he can, as hard as he ever could. Zoro barely catches a chunk of warped piping, slipping, swords sheathed to keep one hand free. 

Sanji tries to follow, tries to catch Zoro’s hand but he’s choking on old blood and rotting kelp and someone else's memories. He tries to light up – desperation first, instinct second – but it’s a sputter, a glow, then nothing. His body seizes with pain even at that small effort. The heat fizzles in his bones. 

“Don’t you dare!” Zoro shouts at him, chest heaving even from where he’s trying to move closer to the seam. 

Sanji doesn’t argue. Can’t. The water’s worming through the spaces between his vertebrae, the tendrils screaming. Not out loud, but in his head. Probably in Zoro’s too.

The seam pulses. The room bends like a throat swallowing, and then Zoro plunges Wado right through the shimmer, right to the hilt, and twists. The seam reacts like a living nerve: a high, shrill screech that’s not sound but pressure, like being inside a dying animal’s skull. The walls shudder. The floor bucks. The not-water convulses, seizes, and collapses inward, ripping back like a breath being sucked into a wound.

Sanji breaches the surface, gasping in a ragged sob, clawing at the floor for purchase, still choking even as the water whips around him, vanishes into nothing.

Zoro lands beside him, coughing hard.

They drag themselves out through the door, dripping, squelching brine across the warped floorboards. Zoro’s limping, arm trembling like it’s still fighting the water’s drag. Sanji’s wheezing salt and smoke, one hand clamped to his ribs from where it was cut by the wall forever ago. What feels like forever ago. 

The hallway lights flicker overhead, popping like bulbs in an old hotel, the hush louder now, more frantic, the Sunny’s pulse crawling behind the walls like something bleeding out. They stop under the staircase, half-hidden from the warped portholes. Zoro shoves his shoulder into the wall and slides down, pulling Sanji with him until they’re a heap of wet limbs and heaving, ragged breathing.

For a moment, neither says it. It’s all there anyway: the black water dripping from the ceiling, the way the floor heaves like a lung beneath them.

Sanji coughs up something dark, soot, spit, blood, and Zoro’s jaw locks so hard his teeth creak. He swipes it off Sanji’s chin with his thumb. Rough. Annoyed. Too careful for it to be anything but real. He growls, voice gone low and ragged. “Keep setting yourself on fire, see how far that gets you.”

Sanji laughs, and it scrapes his throat raw. “It’s working, though.”

“Yeah? And we’re one step closer to it gutting us in our sleep.”

He means the ship but the way he says it twists in Sanji’s gut. Because the ship is gutting them, inch by inch. Loop by loop. They’re carving her open and she’s chewing them right back down. He lets his head tip back against the wood, eyes closing for a beat. “Think we’re doing the right thing?”

Zoro doesn’t answer straight away. Just breathes, shallow and measured, like he’s listening for footsteps that haven’t arrived yet. His knuckles graze Sanji’s knee, steadying them both.

“Who knows? But whatever we’re cutting into? Yeah, I reckon it’s hurting her. Leaving it in’s worse.”

Sanji swallows against the taste of ash. “What if there’s nothing left when we’re done?”

“Then we bury her proper,” Zoro sighs. “Better that than living inside her corpse.”

Sanji makes a sound that fails halfway. He’s so fucking tired. He wants a bed that isn’t alive, a ceiling that doesn’t breathe, knives that are just metal and not contingency plans. His voice is hoarse when he asks, “You ever think maybe we’re the infection?”

Zoro barks out a sour little laugh and shifts around until he’s opposite Sanji, still balanced on the balls of his feet like he’s waiting for the monsters, their crew, to come crashing through the walls. “Take it off.”

Sanji doesn’t move.

Zoro’s eyes narrow. “Shirt. Off.”

Sanji licks dry lips, goes for the cheap shot. “Not even gonna buy me dinner first?”

It lands weak. Too thin, too forced. Zoro clearly hears it for what it is. He just reaches for the hem himself and when Sanji flinches, it’s not bravado. The fabric sticks. Blood and blistered skin have fused together and they both know that peeling it will take half his torso with it.

“Stop, fuck,” Sanji mutters, voice fraying. “Just – just cut it.”

Zoro hesitates for a heartbeat, then lifts Wado like a fillet knife, careful in a way Wado almost never gets to be. One hand stays on Sanji’s shoulder, anchoring him, while the other slices cloth away bit by bit. When it finally comes free Sanji lets out a sound that’s way too close to a sob for his liking.

“Curls,” Zoro breathes, staring in abject horror at the angry, blistered ridges seared across ribs and shoulder. The ugly curls of half-cooked skin down Sanji’s side where the fire’s licked deepest. Parts slick and shiny, too raw to scab, edges going bad at the margins. Damage you don’t walk off. Not really. “How could you let it get this bad?”

“You try patching yourself up in a haunted galley with the ship trying to kill you,” Sanji snaps, scowling as much as he can without triggering a new wave of agony. “Didn’t exactly have time for spa day.”

Zoro doesn’t rise to it. His eyes stay locked on the burns, jaw working. “Shit,” he mutters, rocking back on his heels like he wants to hit something and the only target is currently on fire. He glances around for a medical kit that doesn’t exist. No Chopper. No antiseptic. No bandages. Just warped wood and humming walls. Eventually he swears under his breath, yanks his own shirt off, and tears it in half.

Sanji manages a half-hearted: “Ever heard of germs?” before the first strip of linen hits the wound and he arches off the floor with a strangled noise, every nerve lit up and screaming. His heel lashes out on instinct and he nearly breaks Zoro’s jaw before Zoro pins him down again, arm banded tight across his sternum.

“Breathe,” Zoro growls, steady and close. “Come on, Curls. In. Out.”

Sanji gasps like he’s drowning. For a second he’s sure he’s going to black out. Part of him almost wants to, anything to get out of his own body for a minute. The world narrows to Zoro’s forearm across his chest, the drag of linen against cooked skin, the crackle of the ship muttering around them.

When the worst of it is wrapped, badly, crooked, but better, Zoro’s hand hesitates. Then he reaches up and tucks a blood–stiff strand of hair behind Sanji’s ear, gentle. 

Sanji goes very still. His heart does something awful in his chest, a hopeful little stutter he hates himself for. End of the world, ship from hell, his skin half-charred off, and he’s still hopelessly, horrifically in love.

“No more dying,” Zoro says quietly. The fight’s still in his voice, but it’s wrapped around something softer now. “If we get separated, we’re screwed. You can’t keep burning yourself up.” 

Sanji blinks at him, and for the first time Zoro looks so fucking young it hurts. He wants to smooth his thumb over the crease between his brows, wants to trace the edge of his cheekbone until the world makes sense again.

“Can’t promise anything,” he says tightly, because he can’t. Because he knows he’d light the whole damn ship up if it meant keeping Zoro breathing. “At least they’re not trying to be convincing anymore. I was such an idiot for buying into it.”

Zoro snorts, eyes flashing. “Yeah, well, you’re not the only one who got played. Let you break my neck for a bedtime story once, so we’re both idiots.”

Sanji wants to say we’re not, that he’s the bigger fool for needing Zoro so badly he’d take a copy over nothing at all. Instead he exhales steadily, eyes flicking to the scuffed floor, and lets himself relax for one brief, dangerous second.

Zoro raps his knuckles against the boards, face carefully blank. “So… kissing me, huh?”

Sanji goes still, like getting flash frozen mid-breath. His brain blanks, then stutters. He presses the heel of his palm hard into his thigh like maybe pain will give him something else to latch onto, starts to push himself up, aborts that, does nothing except burn.

“It wasn’t you, actually,” he manages.

Zoro raises an eyebrow. “It’s the thought that counts, Curls.”

Sanji’s voice cracks. “It was Usopp’s dumb theory and I was desperate, okay? I just –  you didn’t –” He cuts himself off with a growl. “Ugh, we’re busy, asshole.”

“Sure,” Zoro’s voice is deadpan but he’s grinning, the absolute bastard, soft around the edges in a way Sanji can’t even look at right now. “Busy saving your sorry ass. Busy killing the Sunny’s nightmares. Busy not kissing me.”

Sanji can’t breathe.

The ship’s ribs creak like they’re laughing along. Heat crawls up the back of his neck, sharp as a burn. He knows his face is red; he can feel it, a hot flush under soot and salt. Humiliation digs its claws in and he reaches for the one blade he always has: cruelty.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Moss,” he sneers. “Next time I’ll kiss the cook instead. Heard he’s better company.”

Zoro’s grin sharpens, a breath of laughter rattling straight through Sanji’s aching ribs. He stands and offers a hand. Sanji ignores it on principle and hauls himself up the wall instead. “Yeah? I heard he’s awful at keeping secrets.”

Sanji throws his hands up, turning toward the next hallway, pointedly ignoring the pain in his side. He’s mortified, sure, but there’s a stubborn, traitorous part of him, too big to ignore, that’s just relieved. Relieved Zoro’s here. Relieved Zoro’s laughing at all.

“I hate you,” he mutters.

Zoro falls into step behind him, blades ready, grin lingering, voice dropping low enough that it burrows under Sanji’s skin like a kinder kind of fire. “Not what your mouth said.”

It lands soft and dangerous, low enough that it feels like it’s meant for the space between them, not the room. Before Sanji can reload another retort, the Sunny groans under them, deep and structural, the sound of something shifting where no hull should shift. Dust sifts from the ceiling. Somewhere far off, wood pops like knuckles.

Reality rushes back in.

Zoro’s grin fades, not gone, just tucked away where it won’t get in the way. He glances toward the warped corridor ahead, jaw tightening. “Upper deck. Before it patches itself.”

Sanji drags in a breath that tastes like old smoke. “Yeah,” he mutters. “Before it decides it doesn’t need us anymore.”

He steps out first, into the next wrong hallway, and Zoro falls into place a half-step behind him, swords whispering at his hip.

This time, they give up on talking.

Every word feels too sharp or too close or too expensive to spend. And the ship is so loud now, wood groaning like it’s being split from the inside, metal grinding against bone, that terrible, constant breathing that doesn’t come from either of them, that anything they say just gets swallowed whole.

They move step by step, breath by breath, picking up speed and intent as the Sunny well and truly begins to panic. The hush that used to lurk is gone and now it spits at them, coughing up malevolence after malevolence from every seam.

The first hallway they hit is already wrong, the floor bowed in the middle like a spine, boards flexing underfoot. Sanji feels the grain trying to twist around his ankles, to hold him there. Zoro’s sword bites down, splitting the plank before it can curl.

They don’t stop.

The next door opens onto a wall of meat disguised as timber, veins pulsing just under the varnish. Hundreds of tiny mouths gape in the knots, whispering Luffy’s laugh, Robin’s sigh, Franky’s SSSUUPER stacked out of rhythm until it’s just noise. Zoro slams the door with his shoulder. Sanji drives his heel into the jamb until the frame cracks and the voices gutter out.

They keep moving.

Stairs stretch when they climb them, treads telescoping away so it feels like they’re running in place. Every time Sanji looks up, the landing is just out of reach, like the ship’s toying with the idea of letting them through. Zoro grabs the rail, snarling, and hauls himself hand-over-hand anyway, dragging both of them up by brute force until the steps snap back into their proper shape with a pained groan.

At some point the hallway fills up with water from nowhere, ankle, shin, knee deep in three heartbeats, dragging at their legs. It tastes like the night Sanji tried to jump overboard: wrong salt, warm, threaded with black threads that coil around his calves. Zoro plants both swords into the wall and carves a channel and the water slams itself into the new gap like it was waiting for a drain.

They slosh through, soaked and swearing, and don’t look back when the gap seals itself behind them. The Sunny throws more at them as they climb: Chopper half grown out of the ceiling, eyes empty,  Nami’s silhouette at the end of the hall, smiling too wide, vanishing whenever they blink and reappearing closer, a transponder snail on the wall that won’t stop screaming Sanji’s name in Usopp’s voice until Zoro cuts it clean in half.

Zoro’s shoulder nudges Sanji left a heartbeat before a beam drops from the ceiling. Sanji’s heel snapping up to clear a clutch of hands from the floor without being asked. He slams a shoulder into the nearest wall to keep upright as the hallway pitches sideways; he can’t tell if they’re moving forward or if the ship is turning underneath them. His lungs ache. Everything stinks like rot and old varnish and blood and fucking iodine. 

Behind him, Zoro’s limping, bleeding from somewhere new. He’s half-carrying one of his swords now, dragging it because his grip’s too tired to lift it. They’re both soaked in sweat and black sludge, and it’s not even their own blood most of the time.

They hit the stairs, or what’s left of them. Half the steps are melted, slick with some kind of sap-like residue that moves if you look at it too long. The wood pulses beneath their feet like it’s sobbing, or maybe retching.

From above: pounding. Thuds. Something heavy and fast. Something waiting.

Zoro catches Sanji’s wrist before he can take the next step. “You hear that?”

Sanji swallows a mean reply. Of course he hears it. It’s all he can hear. He breathes through clenched teeth. “Don’t care. We’re not stopping.”

He kicks upward and the stair beneath his foot splits open, a mouth of splinters and slick gums snapping shut just inches from his ankle. He jerks back. Another mouth opens above them, drooling some oily black filament that sizzles as it hits the floor.

Zoro draws one of his blades in a shaky arc, carving through the edge of the living wood just long enough for them to run. They sprint, scramble, climb, hands slapping against warped rails and twitching banisters as the Sunny throws itself into chaos.

Doors slam open and shut like blinking eyes. Shutters rattle. Nails fire like shrapnel. The whole ship is shedding; layers of reality, of structure, of skin. The crew’s rooms are gone. The galley’s gone. What’s left is a maze of slick walls and undulating hallways, and the only way is up.

“Almost there,” Zoro growls.

Sanji laughs. Sharp, involuntary, just. Fucking exhausted. “You’re lying.”

“Of course I’m lying.”

Something slams into the wall beside them. Not a creature. Just a chunk of the ship itself, shaped vaguely like a limb, writhing and dripping with tar. It blocks the stairs. Sanji doesn’t think: he launches, kicks hard, heel driving through rotted timber and gristle. It shrieks and recoils. “Move!”

They clear the last landing. The ceiling above is cracked open and there’s the sky above, bleeding through in strips of black. The mast looms like a knife jutting through a corpse. They’re so close. 

So, so close. And then the deck itself, just metres away, starts caving in, folding like paper, sealing shut.

“No, no – no!” Sanji bursts forward, grabbing Zoro’s shoulder, yelling into his face, “We’re not fucking dying in the hallway! MOVE!”

Zoro doesn’t hesitate. They run, breaking through what’s left of the hatch until the deck screams.

It doesn’t sound like wood. It doesn’t sound like weather. It doesn’t sound like anything with lungs. It sounds like every loop cracking open at once, dozens of false starts and unfinished deaths, spiraling into a roar that has Sanji clapping his hands over his ears. He hears himself die and die and die – steel, teeth, water, fire – echoed back at him in one endless shriek.

The mast is half-formed, wrapped in muscle and rope. The figurehead heaves like a heart. The sky above has no sun. Just a flat, oppressive white light that pulses without a source. There’s water, maybe. Wind, maybe. The world is collapsing in slow motion and none of it matters because – 

“Luffy.” Zoro says it first. A breath. A prayer.

He’s standing in the centre of the deck. No hat. No shadow. Just his grin, all teeth and wide eyes. His sandals stick wetly to the boards as he tilts his head, voice low and cheerful, the way he’d greet them on any other morning. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

Sanji can’t move. He’s not sure he can breathe. Zoro, though… Zoro steps forward, Wado drawn but low. “That’s not you.”

The thing wearing Luffy shrugs. “Could be. Might be. You don’t get to decide.” He grins wider, and it stretches his face like something being unzipped. “You wanna see something cool?”

Black veins punch up out of the planks like spears, lashing in wild arcs. The mast shatters further above them, chunks of wood and rope raining down. Lines fling themselves like nooses, snapping tight around anything they can catch. Water – if it has ever been water – rises, not from below but from every crevice, seeping out of the hull, soaking the air itself until every breath tastes like drowning.

Sanji hears Zoro shout, maybe a warning, maybe his name, but all he can see is Luffy laughing, arms flailing like he’s still just playing.

It feels like betrayal. It feels like grief.

A spike tears through the deck where he’d been standing half a heartbeat ago. Sanji dodges, grabs Zoro’s arm without thinking, and yanks them both sideways. They slam into what’s left of the rail and go down hard, then scramble behind the shattered bulk of the cannon housing.

The seam pulses somewhere above them, embedded deep in the figurehead, in Sunny’s mouth. It glows like fire behind fog, flickering in and out, like the ship’s jaw is trying to spit it out or swallow it whole.

“We have to go through him,” Zoro pants.

Sanji swallows hard. “It’s not him.”

Zoro meets his eyes. His mouth twists, nothing like the last time, when he’d spat that fact like a curse. This is quieter. Heavier. Tired. “I know,” he says. “But it’s close enough to hurt.”

The thing that used to be Luffy is still smiling, arms stretched wide, inviting them in. The deck shifts under their feet like it wants to rise up and swallow them whole. Sanji pushes his hair out of his eyes, swipes blood from his mouth, and forces his legs to move. “Let’s do this, Mossy.”

They don’t even make it ten steps before Luffy’s on them.

He moves like Luffy should (rubber limbs, joyful chaos) but faster, wrong, too sharp. His first blow stretches clean across the deck, catching Sanji and slamming him sideways into the base of the shattered mast. Zoro shouts his name and barely ducks the second hit, sword flashing up to intercept another arm that whips out like a vine.

“You guys suck now!” The thing in Luffy’s voice howls, bounding across the slanted boards like he’s playing tag. “You used to be fun. Now you’re just boring.”

Zoro blocks again, teeth bared. “You’re not him.”

“Maybe!” Luffy sings, spinning into a kick that nearly takes Zoro’s head off. “Maybe I’m more.”

Sanji lurches upright, ribs shrieking, black coughing out of his lungs in clots. His skin feels too tight, too raw; his head is pounding in time with the ship’s pulse. But he sees Zoro about to be overwhelmed, three limbs stretching, twisting, grabbing,and he moves anyway. His heel connects with what should be a shoulder but Luffy’s body just bends around it, rubber, gum. 

Luffy twists, catches his ankle mid-spin, and slams him face first into the deck. Stars burst across Sanji’s vision on impact, mouth flooding with blood and copper and ash. Somewhere far away he hears Zoro shout his name, a curse, something, and then fingers (ropes? veins?) wrap around his throat.

He claws at them, heels kicking against boards that ripple under him, but it’s not Luffy’s strength he’s fighting.

It’s the Sunny’s.

The whole goddamn ship, wearing their captain’s body like a glove and still – still – Luffy grins down at him, eyes too wide, voice too soft. “Why’d you come this far, huh?”

Sanji chokes, nails digging uselessly into the thing around his neck.

“Thought you’d save someone? Thought you’d be the hero? That’s funny, Sanji. Really funny. You’re always so funny, you know?” Luffy leans in. The grin falters. Almost. “You couldn’t even save me, though, so you might wanna work on that.”

Sanji rolls, gasping, just as the grip loosens. He sucks air past the raw mess in his throat and looks up in time to see Luffy’s fist drive straight into Zoro’s gut, the impact lifting Zoro clean off his feet and hurling him through what’s left of the helm.

Wood detonates. Zoro doesn’t get up.

“Zoro!” Sanji scrambles after him, palms skidding on wet boards. He crawls on hands and knees through splinters and tar. The whole deck is moving now, heaving like a live thing; every plank groans, veins pulsing around their knees like they’re wading through someone’s insides.

Sanji’s vision blurs. His chest feels like it’s caving in on itself, all the air gone thin and sharp. Luffy’s grin splits his face wide open, lit up by whatever apocalyptic shit is happening in the sky, sun and moon colliding, horizon tearing, the whole world burning at the edges.

“Gotcha,” he chirps.

Sanji barely has time for his stomach to drop before Zoro hits him like a cannonball, tackling him sideways as another elastic arm obliterates the space where his head just was. The impact knocks every last breath out of him. Wind shrieks past. The ship lurches so hard the deck skids under them.

Pain lights up Zoro’s face as he jams a fist into his own torn thigh just to keep from screaming. Sanji tries to laugh and only manages a wet, broken hiccup.

“Great. Fucking great,” he gasps. “Get your knee outta my lung!”

“You don’t have a lung left to crush, idiot,” Zoro snaps back, dragging them both upright by sheer spite.

It’s right there, a wound in space. A hole in the dream.

It smells like Nami’s perfume and Franky’s engine grease. It tastes like the first bite of a hot meal after a freezing swim. It sounds like Chopper’s relieved little sigh and Luffy’s laugh echoing down the halls.

It’s everything.

Luffy’s voice drips like oil down the masts, the planks, the back of Sanji’s neck. “You’re not playing very fair again!”

Zoro hacks through one reaching limb, only for two more to lash across his back, hot enough to sear. He doesn’t stop. They can’t stop. Sanji staggers beside him, footwork ragged, breath hitching with every step, his lungs and burns protesting every spark he’s already spent.

“Hey,” Sanji pants, voice shredded. “I think it knows we’re close.”

Zoro spits blood. “Good.”

A scream tears through the rigging, high and frantic. Robin’s voice. Then Usopp’s. Then Chopper’s. Too many voices from too many mouths, echoing down from the sails, up from the hull, out of the snarling creak of timber.

The floor lurches sideways.

Sanji grabs at the nearest rail as they’re pitched toward the starboard wall. Zoro snarls, throws a sword up into the rigging and hauls, yanking them forward as the ship tries to roll them away. His other hand clamps around Sanji’s wrist like a manacle.

( – Sanji swears he smells his mother’s perfume, hears a little girl call Zoro’s name, tastes iodine and salt and Luffy –)

The seam twitches, yawning wider for a heartbeat. The sound of gulls tears through, bright as sunlight against their ears and they move together, like always. Like they’ve been training for this their whole stupid, shared life.

Luffy lunges, rubber grin stretching too far but Zoro meets the swing, blocking the swipe of his arm, bone grinding as he shoves the limb aside. The Robin-thing drops from above, fingers blooming out of walls, floor, Zoro’s bare chest, fingers with teeth, rows of them, big enough to swallow both of them whole.

Zoro reacts on instinct. “Go!”

“You never learn,” Sanji snarls, yanking him up with him instead. “We go together or not at all.”

The figurehead looms ahead, gaping open. A distorted, half-living beast, leering down with warped wood and weeping resin. Something like eyes are hidden in the carved curls of the lion’s mane. The eyeball in its mouth is splitting at the edges like it’s trying to form words.

Zoro’s sword bites into the edge of the maw but the blade barely leaves a scratch so they hit it again. And again. Blade and heel tearing into the throat of the ship that dared to house them. When it screams, it’s not louder than the roar in Sanji’s chest:

i want out i want them back i want us.

The seam splits when they hit it together, peeling with a horrible, wet sound, like a scab being ripped off old flesh. Wado driving deep with that grunt of effort Zoro only makes when he really means it. The deck shudders so violently under their feet that Sanji, insanely, thinks it sounds like laughter and sobbing tangled up together.

Then, like an old wound finally tearing open, light spills through. Warm. Blinding. Salt air. Salt wind. The unmistakable drag of a clean breeze across Sanji’s cheek. It’s so good he almost chokes on it. Luffy’s cry cracks open the hush like a hammer blow. Zoro swears under his breath, stunned.

Sanji laughs, breathless and broken and bright. His chest aches with it. “Zoro, look. Look.”

Zoro’s already staring, eyes wide, jaw slack for half a heartbeat. Beyond the split: blue sky, distant waves, sunlight so sharp it hurts Sanji’s ruined eyes. For a second he thinks he can see a shape out there. The Sunny. Whole. Real. He could cry. He thinks maybe he does. There’s salt on his tongue and for once it isn’t the hush’s. It’s his. And then, like a switch being thrown, the seam closes its eye.

The light snaps to black. The hush lunges.

Sunny bucks, splinters stabbing up into Sanji’s legs as the deck kicks. He stumbles back; Zoro’s hand catches his elbow, but they’re both off-balance, braced for a hit that doesn’t come until it does.

A tendril – no, a whole slab of Sunny’s ribs – warps free of the deck and spears toward them like melted bone. Sanji kicks on instinct, heel first, flame detonating up his leg hot enough to burn the world clean.

Zoro’s shouting something, voice lost in the roar. Steel meets bone with that clean, wet crack Sanji has come to hate. The mimic’s voices swell over them, behind them, through them, Luffy’s laugh, Nami’s hiss, Usopp’s wheeze, all stacked wrong. Mocking. Hungry.

“You shouldn’t peek,” the hush croons, in Sora’s voice, too soft, too knowing. “That’s not for you.”

Sanji’s leg sweeps wide, flame trailing behind it like a comet. It burns him too, licks up his thigh and bites deep into already ruined skin but he doesn’t stop. He can’t stop. He’d rather cook from the inside out than let this thing clamp shut again.

Zoro’s shoulder slams into his, bracing him as they fight back to back. Bone snaps under steel. The deck splinters further. Another tendril whips out, catches Sanji around the ankle, and yanks.

He hits the deck so hard his teeth clack. The breath punches out of him.

“No fire,” Zoro hisses above him, trying to steady his stance on the writhing boards. He looks down, eyes wild and furious and terrified. “You’re done. You light up again and you’re done.”

Sanji’s whole body is shaking, his skin’s gone flat, ugly grey under the soot, sweat pouring off him in rivulets. Every breath hurts. His burns pulse with each heartbeat. That last burst of fire nearly hollowed him out, and this? This will torch what’s left.

“Don’t have a choice,” he gasps.

“You do.” Zoro’s voice cracks like a whip. Loud and furious, but the fury’s wrapped around something rawer. Desperate. “You don’t get to kill yourself to end it. We’ll find another way.”

“There isn’t another way, you fucking dumbass –”

“Wow,” Zoro grunts, grabbing his arm and drags him upright. “You kiss all my goo clones with that mouth?”

Sanji bares his teeth, humiliation and terror tangling into something sharp. He’s halfway to snapping something cruel – because that’s what he does, that’s how he survives – when Zoro grabs a fistful of Sanji’s shirt and kisses him.

Quick. Solid. No hesitation. No mimicry, no wrongness. Just heat and salt and steel and Zoro, so blisteringly real it almost knocks Sanji out more than any hit Luffy’s landed.

For a second, everything quiets.

The ship's still screaming, the deck’s still bucking, something is still roaring in Luffy’s throat but all Sanji can feel is the press of Zoro’s mouth, the rough scrape of stubble, the way one steadying hand fists in the back of his coat like he’s anchoring him as much as the other way around.

“Don’t do it,” Zoro breathes against his skin, the closest he’s ever come to begging. “Sanji. Don’t.”

It’s the worst timing in the world. It’s perfect. It’s too late; it has to be too late because if he lets himself stay in this moment any longer he won’t move at all.

Sanji kicks Zoro loose.

He throws himself forward, every nerve shrieking, and lets the sparks have him. Lets everything in him, pain and stubbornness and the terrible weight he’s been dragging since the first reset roll up into one last strike. He digs down to where the fire lives, to where Zeff’s stove and his mother’s hands and his own stupid heart have always burned, and he pulls.

He drives it into his heel and kicks the heart of the ship straight in the jaw.

The explosion is soundless and, for a moment, there’s nothing but light. It pours from him and around him, searing through the teeth of the figurehead, racing up its jaw, curling into the seam like fingers forcing it open. Every inch of air burns with Sanji’s fire, blue-white, violent, pure.

The Sunny splits, crack ripping down the centreline, hull to mast, and black smoke floods out, tangled with light and something older than memory. The lie that’s held them here finally starts to wail for real, every voice he’s ever loved layered over itself, begging him not to go, not to leave, not to wake up.

Above them, the sky fractures like glass and, for the first time in forty-eight loops, the last lie begins to die.

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