Just my current obsession

“I’m thirsty.”

She considers this for a moment, before pouring. The second cup goes down easier than the first and, by then, the dancing’s spread outwards in widening circles. Strangers catch hands and spin apart, sleeves and skirts flaring. There’s no fixed steps, apparently: just sheer momentum and invitation. A woman in blue dress hooks Sanji’s wrist as she passes and he goes willingly, never needing much encouragement where music and beautiful partners are concerned. He lets her pull him into the turning crowd, matching her steps after half a measure and earning a delighted laugh when he spins her beneath his arm before moving onto the next hand reaching for him.

The night opens around him as the sun well and truly sinks beyond the horizon, lanterns warming his face and music thrumming through the soles of his shoes. The bright percussion of bracelets and cups and voices rising and falling wind through the drums, and he moves from partner to partner without effort, catching hands and releasing them, laughing when an old man dances him backwards with surprising force. Someone presses another drink into his palm between turns, cold and first and then pure spice sliding down his throat. This time, the warmth unfurls low beneath his ribs and spreads outwards in lazy waves but Sanji barely notices. Why would he? The square’s beautiful and the food’s extraordinary and the crew’s happy, wherever they are. His body feels good, here. Better than good, even: light and fluent, running pleasantly through his limbs like he’s just come out of a spar, everything warm and loose and right. His collar’s become too close around his throat so he takes off his tie and keeps dancing, the air touching the damp skin there — the relief of it comes too sharp, almost sweet. The woman opposite him smiles and reaches for his hand again, and this time when her fingers close around his the contact startles him.

Every ridge of her fingertips is suddenly, impossibly distinct against his skin, from the exact temperature of her palm to the tiny catch where a ring presses against his knuckle. The sensation travels up his arm in one bright, electric line and blooms across his chest before he can stop it. He pulls away more quickly than courtesy allows, and the woman blinks at him.

“Sorry, darling,” he says quickly, fixing a fresh smile in place. “Drink’s stronger than it looks.”

She laughs and spins towards someone else, leaving him to stand still in the moving crowd for the first time all evening. Here, the music feels loud and close, the drums feeling like they’re striking against the cage of his ribs. Someone’s laughter passes beside his ear and shivers down the back of his neck likef ingers, the air thick with scent, all sweat and perfume and smoke and skin — every breath he takes feels like it carries too much information. His shirt’s suddenly too present against his chest, the fabric dragging across skin that’s gone oversensitive in the space of a few minutes. He rolls his shoulders, the movement sending another ripple of awareness down his spine. Across the square, Zoro cocks his head at him and, for one breath, the noise of the crowd seems to thin around that single look. The red ribbon around his arm. The cup at his side. The way those dark eyes narrow at him through the shifting bodies.

Sanji’s pulse gives one hard, ugly kick. The fire under his skin tightens low and immediately, pooling somewhere beneath his chest in a way that feels too intimate and knowing. His body reacts before his mind can catch up, skin prickling and breath catching, a slow liquid clench low in his hips that has nothing to do with dancing and everything to do with the way Zoro’s still staring at him. Sanji looks away fast, the first real thread of disquiet slipping coldly beneath all that lush warmth.

The crowd surges between them as the beat strike again and somewhere inside Sanji — low and traitorous and familiar — something answers. He tells himself it’s nothing but a strong drink and good music and the afterglow of an excellent evening. He tells himself he’s fine. He tells himself not to look at Zoro again, and then immediately does, the feeling low in his body giving another deliberate pulse. His jaw tightens.

He turns sharply on his heel, grabbing for the next hand that reaches out and throwing himself back into dancing with more force than grace. If his movements are a little too sharp and his smile is a little too bright and if every brush of fabric against his skin now feels like an argument he’s losing, well. That’s his own problem. He’ll dance until the feeling burns itself out. He’ll drink water. He’ll find something else to put in his mouth that isn’t that damn amber draught. He’ll be fine. The alternative — the slow, creeping realisation that his body’s already choosing sides — is not something he’s willing to look at while the lanterns are swinging overhead and the drums are keeping time with his pulse like they’ve been waiting for this exact moment.

He spins and laughs too loudly at something a stranger says and lets himself be pulled deeper into the crowd and tries, with everything he has, not to feel the way his skin keeps reaching for a gaze that’s still, somehow, following him through the dark. The unease of it comes in degrees, each small wrongness easy enough to excuse until the all gather into something with weight and teeth, until the square tips faintly at Sanji’s feet and the music that had been joyous only minutes before presses against him from every side, sound made almost physical. The beat climbs his bones until his ribs vibrate with it.

drunk, he thinks vaguely.

He turns towards the edge of the dancers, where the crowd’s thickened around him and where bodies wheel beneath the colourful light, all bright cloth and bare arms and faces blurred by motion. Someone brushes his shoulder in passing and the contact sparks through him so sharply he nearly hisses aloud; his skin’s become treacherous, every accidental touch leaving a wake. A passing hand at his back or the sweep of a sleeve against his wrist, or the light pressure of a stranger moving by too closely — it all registers with impossible clarity, each sensation lingering long after the person responsible’s vanished into the dance.

His breath shortens and he realises, suddenly and desperately, that he needs air. Air and water and a quiet street where he can remember how to be a person who doesn’t shake from another body pressed into his. He starts moving towards the perimeter of the square, slipping between dancers with apologies that come out a little too slurred, pulse beating in strange, violent places: at his throat and behind his eyes, low beneath his ribs in a deep, rhythmic clench. The music pursues him all the same, drums and bells and the vibrating cry of strings: what had felt like celebration now feels like appetite. Everywhere he looks there are hands and mouths and bare shoulders shining under the lanterns, bodies offered to the music without shame. His own shirt scrapes across his shirt and sending heat rolling over him again, sudden enough to smear the lanterns into smears of gold. He stops beside a planter overflowing with white flowers to brace one hand against its rim, the relief of its cool surface so immense it’s almost painful. He closes his eyes and breathes, focusing on peppery blossoms and smoke and sugar and sweat and, impossibly, Zoro.

Salt dried against skin. Steal and leather and oil. Sake. The faint clean scent of soap beneath the sweat on a warm evening. The knowledge of him seems lodged somewhere behind Sanji’s teeth; he can feel where Zoro is without looking. That frightens him more than the dizziness, so he forces his gaze to a line of painted masks hanging from a nearby stall, foxes and birds and smiling demons. Their lacquered faces gleam, expressions fixed and knowing, but he watches them until they start to swim.

“Fuck,” he mutters, mouth dry. He pushes away from the planter to find water, making for the nearest stall where clay jugs sit sweating in bowls of crushed ice. The stall owner pours him a cup and he drinks it too quickly, cold water running over his tongue and down his throat. For one beautiful second it helps, before the chill strikes the fire inside him and sharpens it completely. His fingers tighten around the cup. “What’s in the festival drink?”

The stall owner glances up, face creased from the sun. He smiles. “Fruit. Spice. A little spirit. Festival secret.”

Sanji stares at him. Something in the answer feels wrong now, almost rehearsed. The man leans closer across the stall, lowering his voice like he’s sharing a secret. “First time?”

“First time what?” His stomach drops, but the stall owner’s already turned towards another customers, laughing as someone raises two empty cups for refills. He sets his water down, the heat climbing higher and higher until his body feels increasingly less like a body and more like a room in which someone’s lit too many fires. Every breath feeds them. Every sound and scent and brush of fabric or skin seems to make the blaze leap and, through it all and beneath everything else, runs that fixed, unbearable awareness of Zoro.

Sanji risks a glance but the swordsman’s no longer by the fountain, and panic strikes so quickly that Sanji almost mistakes it for relief. His gaze sweeps the crowd, searching for green hair and white shirt and red ribbon and — there, closer now. Zoro’s moving towards him and Sanji’s heart kicks against his ribs with such force it hurts.

no no no no don’t —

Zoro stops in front of him and up close he looks worse and better. The lanterns draw gold across one side of his face and leaves the other in warm shadow, the ribbon around his arm having loosened slightly. His shirt clings faintly at the chest, showing skin Sanji’s seen a thousand times without ever feeling like the sight might kill him. Zoro frowns. “You look like shit.”

Sanji summons a sneer with considerable effort. “Charming.”

“You’re pale.”

“I’m surrounded by idiots. It drains the complexion, you know.”

Zoro ignores that to come even closer and Sanji’s whole body tightens with so much anticipation that the realisation sickens him. “How much did you drink?”

“Three.”

Zoro glances back towards the stall. “That’s it?”

Sanji laughs, but the sound is thin. “I’m touched by your faith in my liver.”

Zoro’s frown deepens and there’s something almost offended in it, like Sanji’s body has broken a rule or something. He lifts a hand and Sanji sees it and does nothing, watching the other man’s palm approach with the stunned stillness of seeing a blow thrown and wanting, impossibly, to know how it’d feel.

Zoro presses the back of his fingers against Sanji’s cheek and the whole world disappears. The crowd and the lanterns and the night air — everything collapses beneath the simple, rough warmth of Zoro’s hand. Sanji’s breath leaves him a single shattered exhale as arousal explodes through his body with such violent immediacy that his knees nearly give. Every nerve turns towards the contact at once, starving and ecstatic and horribly grateful, the touch travelling down his throat, across his chest to settle low and deep with a force so intimate it feels like being opened. He can feel the pulse of it, the way his body throbs in time with his heartbeat, empty and aching and knowing. He wants closer, more, wants Zoro’s hand on his face and his neck and his waist. He wants Zoro’s body between him and the crowd. He wants to press himself against Zoro until there’s no air left between them, to climb inside his ribcage and stay there, to take every inch of offered contact. He wants Zoro’s fingers inside him, thick and sure, wants to ride them until the drug burns out or he breaks apart trying. The want is so enormous it stops feeling like desire completely, like if he doesn’t get it he’s going to die here in this square with everyone watching.

His hand reaches before he can tell it not to, fingers catching briefly at Zoro’s wrist and the touch hones by accident, Zoro turning his palm more fully against Sanji’s cheek like he’s trying to steady him. Sanji almost leans into it — almost. His mouth parts around a breath he doesn’t recognise before the horror returns, cold and absolute, and he tears himself away.

The movement’s so violent his shoulder hits someone passing behind him; the stranger swears, their drink hitting the stone and shattering. Zoro’s hand remains suspended between them. “What the hell?”

Sanji stumbles back another step, cheek burning where Zoro had touched it. He can still feel the exact shape of every finger, the callous on Zoro’s knuckle, the way that single point of contact had detonated through every carefully locked door inside of him. Zoro stares at him, confusion hardening into visible concern that Sanji can’t bear any more than he can stand the fact that one touch had nearly reduced him to something begging and mindless in the middle of a crowded square. The explanation clicks into place with obscene clarity and his stomach churns.

The special drink. The stall owner’s smile.

It’s impossible. Ridiculous. Some lurid story told by sailors after too much rum, or a poison from trashy novels and filthy island folklore. A potion built around the crudest possible joke. And yet his body’s still reaching for Zoro despite the distance, every inch of him strained towards that vanished touch. Some buried, awful part of him has taken all the wanting he’s spent months disciplining into mockery and violence and dragged it into the light until it’s become a bodily need. Until it’s because this — slick and throbbing and so strong he can barely stand upright without swaying towards the one person he’s spent all this fuckint time convincing himself he can’t have.

Zoro takes one step forward, like he’s approaching a skittish animal. “Curls.”

Sanji can hear the other man’s heartbeat, which should not be possible over the music. He imagines that heartbeat against his chest, Zoro splayed under him, opening him degrees while that steady voice says his name — his real name — like it means something. He nearly chokes on the thought. “Don’t.”

Zoro’s expression shifts into something that looks an awful lot like alertness. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

Sanji’s laugh is brittle and strangled. “Can’t hold my liquor.”

“Bullshit.” The certainty of it hits too close; Sanji’s pulse jumps as Zoro reaches for him again, slower this time. “You drink the crew under the table.”

He imagines Zoro saying sanji against his skin while those rough hands hold him open and give him exactly what his body’s screaming for. He nearly folds from it, but the warm crowd presses against them, dancing and laughing and oblivious. He needs to leave. Now. Before Zoro understands. Before Sanji does something unforgivable, like beg. Like drop to his knees in the middle of this square and ask for anything that’d make the ache stop. He turns to go, but Zoro catches his arm and even through cloth the contact detonates, desire flaring so brightly that Sanji’s vision whites at the edges; his hips jerk forwards before he can stop them, a broken sound escaping his throat, and then he jolts so hard he rips free.

For one instant they stare at each other. Zoro’s eyes have gone wide, open in a way that makes Sanji’s chest crack because Sanji knows what he must look like, flushed and breathing fast, every line of his body pulled tight around an impulse he can neither satisfy nor safely name. He can feel how wet he is, how his body’s prepared for something that’s never going to happen, how pathetic and desperate and monstrous it all is and how his stomach churns from it, the disgust and the horror playing tag in his chest and brain.

“Don’t follow me,” he manages, and lets the crowd swallow him. It’s all colour and sweat and music, bodies closing between them like a living wall. Sanji moves fast, using shoulders and turning skirts and lifted arms as cover — he hears Zoro call out once behind him, sharp enough to cut through the drums, but he doesn’t look back. Can’t. Looking back would mean finding him, and Sanji’s never trusted himself less.

A dancer spins past in a dress stitched with mirrored gems, scattering fractured pieces of light across Sanji’s vision. Someone seizes both his hands and tries to pull him into the rhythm but he wrenches away so hard his shoulder cracks. The stranger only laughs, teeth flashing too white beneath the lamps. What had been buoyant before now seems feverish, laughter breaking too sharply and every voice pitched half a note too high, too bright, like glass about to shatter. THe drums have accelerated into something almost punishing, their beat slamming through the square in hard, repeated blows, each one landing somewhere inside Sanji’s body. He pushes through the dancers, towards anywhere, anything but here. He just needs to get away, away from Zoro and away from the drink stall and away from the every warm hand, every perfumed throat, every inch of exposed skin catching gold.

His body disagrees with every direction he chooses: it wants back through the crowds, back to the palm against his cheek and the solid line of Zoro standing close enough to block out the rest of the world. The pull’s physical now, like something inside him had fixed upon Zoro with the brutal certainty of a compass needle and every step taken away drags against it like a hook buried under his breastbone. He stumbles, a man catching him around the waist until Sanji strikes the arm away so hard the man swears. The stranger’s pupils are huge, black nearly swallowing the irises; he’s grinning despite the blow. “Easy,” he says, voice thick with the same fever Sanji can feel crawling under his own skin. “First time?”

Sanji stares at him, but the man’s grin just softens with something approaching sympathy. “Hey, don’t fight it.”

The words turn Sanji’s blood cold. He turns to stare at the square, where pairs have gathered at the edges, pressed together beneath the arches and against the stone walls. Mouths open on mouths and hands moving with heedless intimacy. Some remain clothed enough for decency, but others have clearly abandoned the idea, garments loosened and twisted as fingers slip beneath waistbands and skirts. Near the fountain, three people tangle together in a heap of limbs and laughter, one of them arching back with a gasp that’s somehow louder than the drums. Further down, someone is naked astride someone’s lap on one of the tables while two other kiss over her shoulders, hands roaming, hips rolling in slow, unashamed rhythm. The musicians play louder and the dances move around them as though public abandon is merely another festival custom. Sanji’s stomach roils; everywhere he looks it’s the same, bodies bending towards one another under the lanterns like they’ve been drawn from gravity. The town’s become one enormous room with the doors locked and the air thick with want.

There’s a woman gasping into someone’s neck and the wet sound of kissing nearby. Fabric sliding over skin. Laughter breaking into something lower and throatier. Each noise arrives distinct from the rest, impossibly sharpened across his chest like rough cloth over a burn. Sweat gathers beneath his collar and runs slowly down the hollow of his spine, each drop unbearably clear. Even the movement of air over his arms feels too intimate and the pulse in his body is no longer pleasure, if it ever had been. It’s pain, a deep relentless throbbing that seems to spread outwards until his whole body’s become one continuous ache. He’s understood desires before. He knows attraction and fantasy, knows the sudden drop in the stomach at the sight of someone beautiful. He knows how wanting can make you foolish, but this is not that. This is appetite severed from proportion. It has no beginning or end, no object even except for Zoro — and Zoro has become less of a person in Sanji’s fevered mind than an answer his body keeps begging for. Every thought bends back to Zoro’s hands and mouth and the shape of his throat when he swallows. The red ribbon tied around his arm. The way he’d said spoken, low and careful.

He bites down on the heel of his hand until pain flashes and, for a second, blessedly, it’s the only thing he feels. Then the drink swallows that, too. He needs the Merry, he knows. He needs Nami or Chopper or anyone who can look at him and identify the poison in his blood before he loses the ability to ask.

He turns towards the harbour, or what he thinks is the harbour — the square looks like it’s shifted, maybe. The lanterns swim in smears now, streets open at every side between the buildings and all of them crowded, all of them lined with ribbons and flowers and painted signs that he can’t focus on long enough to read. Which archway had they entered through? They all have the same white flowers but he chooses one anyway, pressing through the resisting crowd, holding his elbows close and his shoulders drawn tight, trying to preserve a small perimeter of air around himself. A woman backs into him, laughing, and the curve of her body fits briefly against his. He recoils so violently he nearly falls, and she looks at him with unfocused, glassy eyes. “Sorry. Oh, you’re burning up.”

“I’m fine.” The lie comes shredded.

She reaches towards his face but Sanji catches her wrist before contact can be made, then drops it just as fast because the desire that burns through him almost sends him gagging. He forces himself onwards, the street narrowing beyond the archway to climb steeply between shuttered shops. After a bit, he realises that the harbour had been downhill, so turns back around. A wave of dizziness spears him in place for a moment, sending him lurching into the wall as he tries to breathe.

in / out / in / out / count

He’s done this in smoke filled kitchens and under gunfire and beneath collapsing ceilings. A body can be managed, he’s learned. Pain can be partitioned and panic can be starved of oxygen until it’s made obedient.

in / out / in / out / count

The scent of someone’s cologne lingers on the wall where they’d leaned before him, all jasmine and wine and skin, and his stomach clenches from the thought. He shoves away, moving downhill this time, or sideways? The streets don’t behave for him, music following from every direction. Smaller gatherings fill every courtyard and lane, couples dancing beneath balconies and groups sharing cups from common bowls. The festival’s spread through the whole town like spilled fire — Sanji passes a doorway and sees shadows moving across a tiled floor, someone moaning low and long. He walks faster, legs feeling rubbery and unreliable beneath him, like every muscle holds too much energy with nowhere to spend it. He wants to run or fight or tear through walls or climb something or do anything violent enough to discharge the feeling.

Cool. He has to look cool. No-one can know. This remains important despite all evidence that the island already knows exactly what’s happening to him, so he fixes his expression into something bored and contemptuous. It lasts until another pulse of heat doubles him over, and then he ducks into an alleyway before anyone can see. The walls rise on either side, cutting off the lantern glow and the darkness should help, it should but it doesn’t. It just makes Zoro easier to imagine — dark green hair and scarred hands, and those brown eyes watching him with quiet, immovable focus. Sanji braces both hands against opposite walls and bows his head between them, body shaking. Sweat cools on his skin and makes him shiver, even while the flames inside of him intensify.

He wants Zoro with a depth that feels terminal, now. It’s not even just sex, although his body translates everything into that brutal throb, slick and empty and clenching around nothing, hips twitching with every heartbeat. He wants containment and pressure and Zoro’s weight, his voice. Zoro holding him still enough that he can stop being pulled apart by every sensation and that’s worse, somehow. Sex can be dismissed as something from the drink but safety? Safety is another beast altogether and he shuts his eyes against it. When he pushes away from the alleyway he nearly walks into a couple pressed together at the entrance. The man has mouth buried at his lover’s throat, eyes open, unfocused, fixed on Sanji over their shoulder. “Lost?”

Sanji steps around them, voice sounding very far away, even to himself. “Harbour.”

He lifts one hand and points vaguely down the lane. “That way.”

“Which way?”

He laughs, the sound crawling over Sanji’s skin. “Whichever way takes you where you’re going.”

Useless. Everyone is useless. He leaves before either of them can touch him, the lane opening into another plaza, centered around a fountain full of candles. The crowd here is quieter, maybe, people reclining on cushions laid across the stones, bodies draped over one another in loose exhausted tangles. Some kiss lazily, but some simply lay together with their eyes closed, breathing in sync. At the fountain’s edge, two are undressing each other with the absorbed seriousness of prayer, hands slow and reverent as they push fabric from shoulders and hips. Sanji’s body reacts so forcefully to the sight he has to grip the nearest lamp post; all he can think about is Zoro’s shirt pushed up, his scarred hands on Sanji’s clothes, his mouth against —

He strikes his own forehead against the post, just once, but hard enough that the impact bursts light behind his eyes but it’s not enough to shake the image of his crewmate. Somebody nearby gasps as he straightens again, blood warming the edge of his forehead where the skin’s split. He tastes copper when it runs near his mouth, the scent entering his sharpened senses and turning nauseatingly vivid.

He needs Chopper. He needs the ship. He needs —

Zoro.

His body corrects the thought with merciless certainty and he laughs, once, the sound thin and breathless and close to breaking. “Where’s the fucking harbour?”

A woman throws her head back from where she’s riding someone, pointing to a dark street sloped between the buildings. “Straight down. Keep the water on your left.”

“What water?”

The fountain beside her is bone dry. She laughs, collapsing back into her partner’s arms and Sanji gives up and leaves.

straight down. water on the left. simple

It’s simple until it’s not, until the road descends sharply and his steps need to grow faster. Walls blur past, the lanterns thinning as the music recedes behind him into a muffled pounding that still manages to match his pulse. At the bottom, the road splits in two but there’s still no water. He stops and looks left, then right, but both roads are dark. The fervor in his body jumps again, worse than before, like distance from the square itself has become an injury. His knees buckle; he catches himself against the corner of a building until he can force himself upright again. He tries, desperately, to keep his brain on the ship, on her mast height and the harbour wind and how many chairs are in the galley, but when he inhales all he can taste is smoke and flowers and people and Zoro, always Zoro. The pull’s become almost directional now, a leash dragging him back uphill. He presses a hand into his sternum like he might be able to tear it out, before he catches onto the sound of footsteps entering the street behind.

He goes still, his body recognising them before his mind does. Relief crashes through him, then dread, and he still can’t bring himself to turn around.

“Curls.” Zoro’s voice spears through him like lightening. Sanji’s fingers dig into the wall, every sensation lighting up at once, the arousal and the ache and the desperate, humiliating need to be touched. The footsteps stop, too close and not close enough and Sanji lets his head sag, shaking harder now. He keeps one hand braced against the wall, the plaster beneath his hand damp and gritty, cool enough to register but not enough to help it. Nothing helps: not water, not distance, not pain. His body’s an instrument tuned to one unbearable note, and Zoro’s voice has made it ring all over again.

“Go away.” His own voice sounds wrong to him, too thin and frayed. Sanji can feel him there with grotesque precision: the warmth of him in the narrow street, the weight of his attention, the scent carried forwards by the night air. His body recognises every part of it and starts to strain backwards before he can stop himself. He pushes harder against the wall. “Didn’t you hear me? Fuck off.”

“No.”

Sanji shuts his eyes, want flooding him so furiously that for one terrible moment he can’t breathe at all. He sees, with hideous clarity, Zoro’s hand returning to his face and Zoro pinning him against the wall, holding him there until every frantic piece of Sanji’s finally stopped trying to escape his own skin. The image nearly does him in; he bites the inside of his mouth until he tastes blood. Then he tears his hand away from the wall and turns to where Zoro’s waiting several paces away, exactly where the street widens beneath a lantern. He’s obeyed the boundary, at least, and his expression’s lost all traces of annoyance. His gaze moves over Sanji with hard, assessing focus — the same look he uses on battlefields when something’s gone bad. Sanji hisses: “I said leave.”

“You look like you’re dying.”

He sneers, cruel. “Maybe I’m having an off night.”

Zoro comes closer, just a little, but Sanji’s body reacts anyway, breath catching and stomach flipping. He steps back, the street narrowing around the distance between them. Zoro’s voice is uncharacteristically uncertain. “Something was in those drinks.”

Sanji smiles with more teeth than humour. “Wow, nothing gets past you, hey.”

“We need to find Chopper.”

“No.” He doesn’t even know why he says it — he’s been trying to find Chopper and home and safety for what feels like a fucking eternity. Excuses pile up at the back of his throat, at the crux of his ribs: because he can barely hold a thought long enough to finish it, because the idea of walking beside Zoro feels more dangerous then the drinks. Because Chopper would look at him and know. “I’m managing.”

Zoro looks him once over again; Sanji can feel the path that gaze like physical contact. “No, you’re not.”

Something in him snaps, some small bright thread that’s been holding him together all damn night. “D’you enjoy this? Following me? Staring? Waiting for me to embarrass myself badly enough for you to feel smug about it?”

Zoro’s face hardens and Sanji thinks finally, because anger is good. He can survive Zoro’s anger. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Go back to the festival. I’m sure half the island’s waiting to fall at your ugly feet.”

“Don’t care.” Sanji’s pulse lurches, but Zoro continues before he can cut in. “I’m not leaving you like this.”

like this, Sanji thinks bitterly, and knows the other man means burning and shaky and unrecognisable, needy enough that the mere sight of Zoro makes every rational thought collapse inwards. His shame rises so fast he thinks he might vomit. “You’re not responsible for me.”

“You’re crew.” The answer comes without hesitation, which somehow hurts more than disagreement would have. Sanji glares at the dark fork int he road and the smudged lanterns and the distant glow of the festival high between rooftops, red and gold like an open furnace. His mind seizes, suddenly, upon the simplest solution: someone else. That’s all. The island’s full of willing people, full of bodies already yielding to the pull. He doesn’t need Zoro. Doesn’t need to turn this into something intimate or catastrophic. He can make it anonymous and physical and finished. He can burn it out and get himself under control and then return to the ship and never speak of it again. What else would solve a bodily problem but other bodies?

The idea brings such immediate, desperate relief that Sanji nearly laughs. He pushes away from the wall and stumbles back, towards noise and hands and anyone who isn’t the one person he actually wants. The main square receives him like a mouth, swallowing the world beyond. The crowd’s lost the pretense of orderly dancing now, bodies moving in dense rolling clusters, everyone shining with sweat and drink and feverish delight. The air itself has thickened, all perfume and smoke and the unmistakable musk of sex, and hands catch at Sanji as soon as he enters it. A stranger pulls him into a turn while someone else laughs against his shoulders, fingers sliding over the bare skin at his forearm and lingering. Every touch hurts. Every touch promises relief. None give it, so he keeps moving.

He smiles, because smiling’s easier than explaining his expression. He lets the music take his weight and lets the crowd push him further from the road, dancing harder and meaner and rougher. A woman in a skirt and nothing else presses into him, her dark hair braided with copper wire and mouth painted red. Her pupils are wide, but not as wide as some of the others’, and Sanji hopes — desperately — that she has enough understanding to know the night without being completely lost inside of it. She smirks at Sanji, easy and familiar, and finally there’s something he knows how to do. He crosses towards her through the throng of dancers, arranging his face into the usual lines of amusement and interest and effortless admiration.

“Darling.” He lifts her hand. “You look criminally neglected.”

Her laugh is warm. “And you look like trouble.”

The proximity brings a rush of scent, all wine and orange blossoms and warmth. His body reacts immediately, though not with the same devastating recognition it gave Zoro. This is broader, easier, more diffuse. Just hunger responding to the possibility of touch. Her hand settles at his chest and his breath hitches, trying to laugh with her when she chuckles, her fingers moving lightly over his shirt. The sensation’s sharp enough to make his eyes close for half a second. “Poor thing,” she murmurs.

He leans down and kisses her before she can say anything else and for one hot, blazing second relief tears straight through him. His body surges towards the contact like a locked door’s finally been. opened, hands finding her waist while hers come up around his neck. The crowd pushes close and loud around them, but the pressure inside Sanji’s skull eases by one precious degree. He kisses her harder, desire shifting just enough that it finds a direction, sensation concentrated at mouth and hands instead of clawing through every inch of him. He can survive this, he knows. He’s done it before. He’s buried truths in the bodies of others. He can finish this. Make it simple.

Her fingers slip into his hair and he shudders, the woman smiling against his mouth before she pulls him closer. It works and it works and it works, right up until the relief begins to drain away, slowly at first, like a room tilting beneath him. The kiss continues but something inside him goes cold and wrong, the word arriving with a sickening clarity. He tries, really: he changes the angle and tightens his grip at her waist and, still, the deeper ache returns but worse, even as her hands start unbuttoning his shirt. Cool air touches his chest before her palm follows, sliding over bare skin; Sanji’s stomach turns over even as he arches into the contact. He keeps kissing her anyway, letting her hands roam, telling himself over and over that this is better than the alternative. She tugs his shirt open wider, mouth moving to her throat as she finds the waistband of his pants, and then Zoro’s hand closes over his upper arm and Sanji’s yanked back so fast he nearly falls. The woman’s hands slip off him and before he can even turn Zoro’s stepped between them like a wall, plainly furious. “We’re leaving.”

Sanji’s heart slams into his ribs. “No —”

Zoro’s grip tightens. He snaps: “You’re drugged out of your mind.”

The woman behind them makes a small sound — surprise, maybe, or protest — but Zoro doesn’t give her room to speak. He starts walking, still holding Sanji’s arm, even as Sanji tries to plant his feet and twist free. He moves through the crowd like it’s not even there, shoulders set and expression carved from stone. Sanji’s face burns, shame and fury crashing through him so hard he can barely see straight. “Let me go —”

“No.”

“I said —”

“I heard you.” Zoro doesn’t slow down. “And I’m still not letting you fuck some stranger in the middle of an orgy while you’re so out of it you can’t tell if you even want it or not.”

“Oh, right,” Sanji sneers, even as his feet stumble badly from the effort of trying to keep up with Zoro’s pace while the world blurs badly at the corners. “That bothers you, huh?”

Zoro’s grip tightens, a flash of something crossing his face. “What bothers me is you trying to do something you’ll hate yourself for tomorrow.”

The accuracy is so pointed Sanji’s mouth goes dry. “You don’t know what I’ll hate.”

“Yeah, I do.” He pulls Sanji through the thinning edge of the crowd and into the quieter streets beyond the main square again, moving with that same certainty he uses when the deck’s tilting and everyone else is sliding. The music and laughter and moans fade behind them as the lanterns start thinning, the air cooling slightly although it does nothing for the fever still roaring under Sanji’s skin. Zoro’s voice stays flat. “We’re going back to the ship and we’re going to wait this out.”

Sanji laughs once, ugly and breathless. “Oh, you’re the boss of me now?”

“You’re sure as hell not.”

The words land like a slap — Sanji’s steps falter and, for a moment, the drink and the shame and the sheer exhaustion of fighting his own body aligning into something almost like clarity. Then the hook in him yanks, hard, and he stops walking so abruptly Zoro’s grip tugs him forwards a step before the swordsman can catch himself. Sanji uses the momentum, spinning to grab the front of Zoro’s shirt with both hands and slamming him back into the nearest wall. He drives his knee up — Zoro blocks it, but Sanji uses the shift in weight to twist one wrist free to swing at Zoro’s face, wild and desperate. The other man catches that hand, too, slamming both wrists up again, leaning his full weight in to keep him there. Sanji bucks and fights, feverish and uncoordinated, coming apart at the seams.

Zoro plants his feet and stares him down with his eyes narrowed and his jaw tight, frustration rapidly curdling into something sharper. “We’re going back to the ship.”

He swings a kick, a messy strike aimed at the other man’s ribcage that doesn’t get close. “You’re not taking me anywhere. You’re not handling me like I’m some fucking problem you have to solve. I can do this myself, so get the fuck out of my way before —”

Zoro moves, fast, one hand clamping over Sanji’s mouth to shut him up. “There is something wrong with you. With both of us. I’m trying to get you home.”

Sanji twists and bites down on the side of Zoro’s hand hard enough to break skin, blood welling hot and immediate between his teeth. He doesn’t let go until Zoro snarls and shoves at him, twisting just enough that the next kick Sanji throws glances off his hip instead. His counter’s cleaner but no less brutal, catching Sanji by the front of his open shirt to slam him harder into the wall, head cracking stone before Sanji drives an elbow into the other man’s throat. Zoro chokes, eyes watering, and answers by headbutting Sanji square in the face. Cartilage crunches, blood bursting in a stream down Sanji’s lip and painting his chin, nose well and truly broken. He laughs through it anyway, wet and vicious and unhinged, and spits red.

“That’s more like it,” he snaps. “Quit holding back like I’m fragile.”

They smash into the wall in a tangle of limbs, Zoro taking the worst of the landing as Sanji’s knee finds his ribs. One hand gets around the swordsman’s neck, blood from Sanji’s nose dripping badly as they grapple for long, ugly seconds, trading short cruel strikes that leave both of them marked. Sanji’s knee catches Zoro’s eyebrow and splits it clean, but Zoro sinks his teeth into Sanji’s shoulder until the skin gives. Sanji tries to headbutt him but Zoro tips into it instead, catching Sanji’s mouth in a rough, messy kiss. Sanji freezes for one split heartbeat, before he groans and kisses Zoro back, harder, just teeth and blood and pure, desperate want, hips rolling down immediately to draw a broken, rough sound from Zoro.

He tears his mouth away from Sanji’s only to drag it down the side of his throat, biting hard enough to sting, kissing down the overheated skin of Sanji’s chest; Sanji’s head falls back against the wall with a thud, breath punched out of him as Zoro’s hands find his belt with clumsy, urgent fingers. Unlike the woman in the square it works, the relief hitting like a breaking fever, instant and vicious and overwhelming. Where the stranger’s kiss had only made the drink angrier, this is like a full bodied unclenching that rips through Sanji so hard his knees almost buckle with it, like the throb finally has somewhere to go. It’s not the useless radiation of the drink but a spreading liquid relief that makes his entire body sing, so intense he almost comes from that alone, from the sheer rightness of it. The way his body recognises Zoro’s mouth like it’s been waiting years for exactly this and he shudders with it, arching into the air, the pleasure so sharp and specific it blanks everything else out — the alleyway and the blood and the fight and the war for control until there’s only this, only the devastating relief that pours through him in waves that keep building and climbing and threatening to pull him under completely.

And then Zoro drops to his knees and Sanji’s eyes catch on the glint of his earrings, on the soft curve of his ear, of his hands smoothing over Sanji’s hips, scarred and broad and so achingly familiar that the panic cuts through at last, the visceral terror of being this exposed — this out of control — hitting somewhere tight and mean.

He slams both palms into Zoro’s shoulders and shove him back, Zoro hitting the wall with a startled grunt, breathing like he’s run marathons. For a moment he just stares at Sanji, interrupted lust written plainly across his face, before his expression falls apart completely. “I didn’t mean —”

“Yeah,” Sanji rasps, body jerking into an awful termor, fever roaring back with a vengeance, sharper for having been briefly answered, furious at being denied. He tries six times to do his belt and gives up, heat behind his navel knifing through him eagerly. He catches himself against the wall again, the alleyway swimming around him. “I know.”

Zoro stays on his knees, horror etched in every inch of him. “Curls —”

“S’fine,” he manages, pushing himself free a little. He takes a few staggered steps before the world blurs again, knees well and truly giving out this time.

“Wait,” Zoro says, sounding a million islands away. “Just. Sanji. Just stop for a second.”

He doesn’t wait for Sanji to cooperate — he gets an arm under the other man and starts walking, half dragging him. The want hits like a second drug, even as the world swims around him; his skin feels like it’s trying to crawl off his bone, everything too loud and too hot and too present. Every place Zoro’s skin touches his sends fresh, humiliating signals through him, body trying to lean into the solid line of the other man’s side even as his mind screams at it to stop.

“Get off me,” he manages, tasting blood from the back of his teeth. He tries to shove free but his arms barely work. His boots catch on a loose stone and he stumbles a bit, but Zoro adjusts his grip and keeps going. The lack of choice makes something ugly twist in Sanji’s chest. “I don’t want —”

Zoro freezes, arm snapping rigid and for a second the only sound’s both of them breathing in contrast, Sanji’s shallow and uneven and Zoro’s carefully controlled. He adjusts his grip to have less contact, to be more clinical, one hand staying under Sanji’s shoulders only as much as required to keep him from hitting the ground and the rest of him held at a deliberate, pointed distance. The guilt’s almost tangible, sitting in the way his fingers flex once and then go carefully loose. “I’m not going to do that again. I’m just getting you somewhere safer than the street floor. That’s it.”

Sanji’s head droops forward, grinding his teeth at the way the other man’s clearly punishing himself for the alleyway, and also at the way that punishment’s taking the form of this careful space that makes the whole thing feel even more exposed. He doesn’t have the strength to argue further, though, so Zoro keeps walking and keeps every point of contact strictly necessary. He doesn’t look at Sanji again, scanning the town around them as they clear the worst of the streets, the noise starting to fade behind him as the roads grow narrower and darker and less decorated.

They turn another corner and then another, trying to find the streets that should lead them back to the harbour, but it’s like the town is twisted or unrecognisable or just — convoluted, maybe. All Sanji can see is ribbons and lanterns and temporary stalls blocking routes that should be clear, everything unfamiliar and muddy. Zoro stops at an intersection that looks wrong, eyes narrowed, before choosing a direction with a frustrated huff. Sanji laughs under his breath, mean. “Lost, Moss? Can’t even find the ship. Some rescue.”

“Keep talking and I’ll leave you at the next corner.”

“Yeah? Do it, asshole.”

Zoro doesn’t. He keeps walking, hauling Sanji’s weight with his expression carved into something complicated. Sanji’s focus narrows down to how much he hates the simple fact that his body no longer feels like it’s his to command. The ability to control what his body does and what it feels and what it’s allowed has been the lodestone he’s built his life around — every technique and smile and everytime he’s swallowed something down to turn into a joke or a barrier or a perfectly timed kick — all of it is the same refusal to give anyone else space to decide what he does. And now his heart no longer listens. Now, his skin no longer listens. Now, he’s losing the same war over and over again. He tries to pull away again but his legs give out; Zoro adjusts his grip and keeps walking, very carefully not holding him any closer.

“The woman in the town.” Zoro pauses, the silence between his words heavy. “When you kissed her. Did it… help?”

Sanji’s first instinct is to lie, the falsehood arriving fully formed, as smooth as any of the careful performances he’s spent years perfecting. yes. it helped. it took the edge off. it was fine. For a second he almost lets it out, something to put distance between what’d happened and now, and then another rush of heat soars through him, leaving him briefly breathless. The truth comes out instead, the words feeling dangerous even as he shapes them, knowing he won’t be able to take them back. “Made it worse. She wasn’t…” he has to stop. Has to — “Not the right person.”

“Was —” Zoro cuts himself off physically; Sanji can see him biting down on the inside of his mouth, head shaking sharply. He keeps walking even as the streets seem to fold in on themselves, the festival ribbons still hung in streams from the balconies. Every turn that should open onto the water instead spills them into another lane or a wide square that looks almost — but not quite — like one they’ve already crossed. There are still people dotted about, bodies tangled in doorways or pressed against walls, the air still heavy with the smell of spilled liquor and sex and the sea they can’t seem to fucking find. Zoro’s jaw tightens everytime they pass another couple or throuple or more, and Sanji keeps his head down and his mouth shut.

Zoro tries one more turn and then another but the harbour refuses to appear; Sanji can almost feel how frustrated he is, bleeding through the space between them in controlled spikes. After the next failed intersection Zoro just stops and exhales through his nose, before spinning on his heels to change direction. There’s a shopfront, maybe: it’s dark and solid and blessedly empty, and he shoulders the door open with his free side, kicking it shut behind them to essentially dump Sanji onto the floor. He stands over the blonde for a moment, still breathing too hard and still holding himself like someone who doesn’t trust his own hands, before he steps back and puts clear space between them.

“Where the fuck are we?” Sanji manages, blinking against the minimal light coming through the arched window. The shop’s circular and icy; he can’t tell what it sells in this dim but he can hear the sea very close somehow. None of it makes sense.

Zoro sinks down to the floor on the opposite side, back flat against the wall and arms folded tight across his chest. “Town’s a maze. We’re not getting back to the ship ‘til this shit wears off.”

Sanji lets his body loosen with an unhappy groan as a residual pulse of fire moves through him, concentrated low in his belly. When Zoro speaks again he keeps it brief but measured, like he’s testing each word before releasing it. “You need water? Food?”

Sanji snorts, grinding his forehead into the ground, bitterness rising easy and mean because he knows what he needs and also knows he’d rather set himself on fire than ask for it. It would be so easy to open his mouth and let the want become a request and he's so far gone that the asking feels, for a few dangerous seconds, like the only remaining door left, but he’d rather eat ground glass than beg Zoro to fuck him. He'd never forgive himself, not for the surrender of control and not for the way it'd hand Zoro the irreversible poof that the drink has hollowed him out so thoroughly he can no longer keep the need inside his own skin. The humiliation of it would outlive the fever and the night; he'd hear the sound of his own voice begging for the rest of his life. More than that: he’d rather throw himself into the damn ocean than put Zoro in that position. Zoro, who values agency the way other men value breath and who would be forced to refuse and carry the weight of that while Sanji shakes apart in front of him, or accept and carry the weight of having crossed a line with contaminated permission.

The question surfaces before he can decide if he even wants the answer. “Did you have any?”

Zoro doesn’t pretend not to understand. “One.”

Sanji closes his eyes, the knowledge settling into his chest like another bruise on top of all the others. The floor’s uneven under his cheek and he maps it deliberately to distract himself, from the shallow concave worn smooth by years of footwork to the thin crack that begins under his elbow and runs in a crooked seam towards the centre of the room. He thinks about the air’s smells layered over the faint scent of his own dried blood. Outside, the sea keeps up its steady indifferent rhythm: a low rush as water climbs the rocks and then a brief, held silence before a heavier pull as it withdraws. Somewhere above them, something is ticking and settling and, louder than that, he can hear Zoro’s breathing being perfectly measured.

Nothing works: the salt smell keeps sliding sideways into the memory of skin and the crash of the waves keeps matching the remembered roll of Zoro’s tongue, the way it had opened him up and given the first real relief of the whole night. Everytime Sanji manages to hold his focus on a sight or sound or taste for more than a few seconds the alleyway returns to him in sharp, unwelcome detail, from the scrape of Zoro’s knees against the ground to the sound he’d made. He tries again, stubbornly, glaring at the window to track the exact shape of the light coming through it and the way it falls across the opposite wall. He lists everything he can see under his breath, soundless, a private inventory meant to keep his mind pinned to the present.

floor. crack. window. waves. mouth. dust. skin. salt. hands.

His breath catches hard, flush ramping another degree until it shifts into a low, insistent burn that makes the empty ache feel new and greedy. He can still feel the ghost of it with humiliating clarity: the exact wetness and pressure of Zoro’s mouth and the devastating rightness of being touched by the one person his body’s been screaming for. The knowledge of how easily it could’ve continued sits in him like a trap. If he hadn’t panicked. If he hadn’t shoved. If he’d just kept his hands on Zoro for a few seconds, another minute, long enough to come on Zoro’s tongue with no panic to save him and no — he cuts the thought off with pure, savage effort but the damage is done; he has to lock his hips down, jaw tight and breath shallow, stone floor leaching surface heat from his skin while the deeper one keeps climbing, stubborn and focused and entirely uninterested in his attempts to starve it of attention. He stares at the crack in the floor until his eyes burn. He tries to follow it with his gaze but the room smears around him. Nothing is louder than Zoro’s mouth and with each flare of memory comes the want, so precise and awful it makes his hands fist and his breath snag and makes the name beat against the inside of his skull in time with his uneven heart.

zoro zoro zoro zoro zorozorozorozorozoro —

He can’t stand how cleanly his mind’s narrowed to it and how everything has been stripped away until the only thing remaining is the solid, breathing presence two metres to his right and the way his body keeps trying to arch towards it. Zoro shifts and even the sound of fabric against the ground is too loud, the schk registering like a touch.

“You’re still here,” he rasps at some point, barely recognising his own voice. “Can’t leave me alone to die in peace.”

Zoro makes a sound somewhere to his left or his right or everywhere or nowhere. “You’re not dying.”

He laughs, short and cracked, but the movement hurts too much so he presses his forehead harder against the floor instead, trying to ration his breath. He feels like he’s dying, body failing in such specific and irreversible ways. His heart’s no longer racing; it’s become a ferocious, arrhythmic assault against the inside of his ribs, slamming so hard he can feel the impact in his teeth, in the tips of his fingers, in the hollow of his throat. Every beat arrives too late or too early, breathing around it a battle each time. Too deep and the next surge makes his vision tunnel, but too shallow and the fever climbs higher, desire pooling in his chest until he’s sure something vital’s about to cook from the inside out. The fever is the worst of it all — sweat pours off him in continuous sheets, soaking the remains of his shirt and running into his eyes, dripping onto the stone beneath his cheek.

At this point, death would be a mercy.

He can track the fever moving through him in waves, radiating outwards from his chest in heavy waves, molten weight being poured through the centre of him. It moves along the underside of his ribs and down through the soft tissue of his lower belly, heavy in his muscle and organ and bone, making everything it touches feel swollen and overfull. When the waves intensify it’s like the heat presses against the limits of his skin from within, body too small for whatever’s generating inside of it, pooling between his hips and sending thinner filaments of warmth licking down the insides of his thighs with every skipped heartbeat. There are moments — brief, fleeting — where he thinks the burn will push his temperature past the point of survival and he’ll die here on the stone, cooked from the inside while still fully conscious for every second of it.

The sensory overload is almost worse: every nerve feels alight to the point where even the brush of his own shirt against his chest is unbearable. The texture of the floor registers as grit and pressure in cloying detail and he changes position again and again, rolling onto his back and then onto his side again, knees drawn up towards his chest and forehead pressed hard into the floor like he can ground himself through sheer pressure alone. He wants, badly, to touch himself, body screaming for friction or pressure or any form of release that might interrupt the overload, even just for a few seconds. His hand scratches down his own hip without thought from his brain, until he can anchor it still against the floor, brutal enough his knuckles throb. Worse than that, he wants to touch Zoro, wants to close the distance, wants to put his shaking hands on the other man’s chest and feel the solid, living breath of him. He wants to stop fighting for five fucking seconds, the need so strong his hips shift in aborted movements he can’t fully suppress, whole body throbbing so bad it borders on pain.

In the borderline delirium of it all the logic of undressing is simple and desperate, because if he can just get his clothes off then maybe the heat will have somewhere to go. Maybe the buzzing under his skin will quiet and maybe he can stand the next few minutes without feeling like he’s burning alive. He fumbles at the remaining buttons of his shirt, cooler air touching his chest enough for that a single second it feels like relief. His movements are clumsy and urgent as he finds his belt, still curled on his side, the need to be free from fabric almost animal in its intensity, everything touching him a new form of torment.

Zoro’s hand closes around wrist, the contact sending an involuntary jolt through Sanji’s already worn nerves. His head snaps up, fever making Zoro’s face swim for a second before it settles. “Don’t.”

Sanji tries to yank free, but the effort makes his heart stumble dangerously in his chest. “I’m burning up, I can’t — it’s too much, I can’t — my skin —”

“I know.” Zoro’s grip stays firm. “Just… don’t.”

Sanji’s fevered mind struggles to process the words, thoughts reduced to fragments, all fire and want and fabric and control and the solid presence of Zoro’s fingers against his pulse. He can’t quite hold onto why Zoro’s stopping him, reason slipping away everytime he reaches for it, brain too full of the roaring in his eyes and the heavy radiation of warmth from his core and the way even this single point of contact is way, way too much — but he can recognise the tone. Zoro never asks like that, not in this quiet, strained register, something raw enough that it feels like a second touch. He searches Zoro’s face like he’s trying to make the expression hold still long enough to understand it, the fight draining out of his arm in a slow, reluctant surrender. He lets his hand drop back to the stone, shirt open and belt fastened and tries not to think about it.

“Reckon the others have it this bad?”

Zoro’s quiet for a few seconds, before releasing him. “You drank the most, I think. Saw Franky and Robin for a sec, before I found you again. I’m surprised you didn’t clock them, they weren’t exactly subtle once it turned into —” he makes a vague, tired gesture. “All that.”

Sanji lets out a humourless breath that might’ve been a laugh in another life, the information settling into the mess of thoughts without offering any real comfort. He digs his fingers into his thighs, nails biting skin while he waits for another roll of fervency to crest. The words almost die on their way out. “At least they’re together, I guess. Nice for them.”

Zoro falls silent, knuckles hovering over the floor like he’s afraid to let them touch. When he finally knocks it’s softer, one dull tape before another. “There was… the owner. Said it amplifies what’s there.” He clears his throat. “So. Makes sense that they'd... that everyone'd pair off with whoever they...”

The implication lands between them like a dropped sword and Sanji recoils, involuntary in a sharp flinch of his shoulders, whole body curling tighter in on itself. Breath snarls in his throat; he can feel the muscles in his legs lock, the lingering tremor turning the recoil into a full bodied spasm that pins him down. He stares at the floor and refuses to give Zoro the satisfaction of seeing his face, but the shame pulses hot enough to paint the dark red because Zoro has never been stupid. Zoro’s one of the most consistently emotionally intelligent people Sanji’s met.

Zoro can put this together, has put this together. He’s seen straight through silk shirts and cigarette and every dizzying deflection of charm, right down to the raw hungry pulse beneath Sanji’s skin.

“Right,” Sanji says, eventually. “Great. Perfect. That’s — fucking brilliant.”

It’s so fucking stupid how it feels awful, really: his eyes prick hot suddenly, wet and traitorous at the idea that this is how it’s going to go. After everything the sea has taken from him and after every secret he’s managed to keep nailed down, this is how it slips: an alchemist's shortcut and Zoro’s stubborn honesty.

A boot scuffs near his head before stilling. Zoro doesn’t move closer but the weight of his presence presses in anyway, awkward and guilty and brittle with secondhand embarrassment. “That’s why I shouldn’t have...” he stops and restarts, voice rougher. “I knew you weren’t in your right mind. I still —”

Sanji laughs, cracked and mean and wrong. “Oh, save it. You don’t have to dress it up. I know how pathetic I was being. Must’ve been a real test of your principles.”

“That’s not what I’m —”

“It is, though,” Sanji keeps his tone light even as his hands shake. He can’t let the other interpretation land because god knows if he lets himself believe Zoro had wanted it — him, wanted him — he’s going to move. He’s going to crawl across the floor and grind down until the friction finally shut his body up or drop to his own knees or spread Zoro open — the images stack on top of each other so fast he feels dizzy with him, wanting it so badly his teeth ache. He makes it ugly instead: it’s the only way to survive it. “You got carried away, it happens. You drank it, too. End of story.”

He can feel Zoro staring at him in the dark, can practically feel the incredulity buried there. It makes the urge to close the distance almost unbearable and he has to physically shut his eyes against it. The only other option seems to be riding Zoro’s face until he can’t think and until it feels so good he’ll never forgive himself, so. He stays mean and self deprecating and exactly where he is, murdering each fantasy as it comes and waiting for Zoro to stop talking.

“You’re not listening.” He’s clearly trying to keep his frustration reined in and is only partly winning. “I’m saying I messed up, that’s on me. And you keep twisting it into some story instead of hearing what I’m actually telling you, which —”

“Because it’s the only version that makes sense,” Sanji snaps. “The drink made it worse, end of —”

“That’s not —” Zoro cuts himself off, visibly locking the anger down. When he speaks again he’s flatter and controlled and somehow more dangerous for it. “You’re deliberately misunderstanding me so you don’t have to deal with the possibility that I wanted you. And that I still crossed a line I don’t cross. Those two things can be true at the same time, Sanji.”

The use of his name is an error: Sanji’s whole body clenches, the ache between his legs pulsing so hard he has to bite the inside of his cheek and for one terrifying second the fantasy that comes is almost gentle, soft — Zoro saying his name like that in a bed somewhere, on the Merry, looking at him with that same intensity and not stopping this time. Sanji wants it so badly the meanness is the only thing keeping from begging. He turns his face further into the ground. “Then stop talking. If both things can be true, stop talking. I can’t —” the admission comes too close to the surface so he buries it under something worse. “Either shut up or leave. Those are the options.”

The night doesn’t improve, after that. It just… stretches, time losing its shape in the cold dark of the store as the drink rewrites him moment by moment into something that does not listen. He stops being able to tell whether minutes or hours are passing — there’s only the next throb of arousal and the next and the next, each one denser than the last, leaving him swollen and overfull and desperately empty at the same time. His heart’s given up any pretense of a rhythm, hands locked to his thighs in the only anchor he has left. His fingers alternate between numb and throbbing from the pressure and when the waves peak particularly hard he digs in harder, using the dull pain of his fingernails as a counterpoint to the lush, awful ache between his legs. His pants are soaked, he knows; he can feel it in a distant sense, but he’s long past the point of being embarrassed about it. At some point he starts chewing at the collar of his own shirt like he can gnaw the fever off, before giving up on that as well, biting down on the inside of his arms until fresh blood settles into the groove of his teeth.

Zoro stays where he is, quiet, but everytime he shifts Sanji feels it like someone dragging teeth down his spine and everytime his breathing changes the want spikes, brutal. It’s become single minded to the point of delirium, desire turned into sheer fixation. Sanji’s feverish brain keeps supplying the same images in relentless rotation, Zoro’s bloodied mouth in the alleyway and the way his hands had felt while pinning Sanji’s wrist, and the sound he’d made when they’d kissed. Each time, Sanji comes back to himself with his hips rocking into nothing and his hands aching from how hard he’s gripping himself and the regret rising just as hot and useless as the need, as the fury at being trapped and helpless.

At some point, his body arches despite his best effort, mouth opening around a desperate sound he can’t quite stifle in time and he bites down too hard on his own fingers, too afraid of what else might come out.

At some point, the night narrows and time stops arriving in minutes and instead in relentless pulses. Sanji surfaces every now and then, briefly aware of the floor under him, before the next wave drags him under.

At some point, all he can hear is the frayed sound of his own breathing as it grows shorter and less controlled. He can feel the shape of words in his mouth but he can no longer tell what they are: sometimes it feels like he’s answering questions no-one has asked and sometimes it feels like he’s begging. The distinction stops mattering: the fever and the want and the exhaustion burn the edges off everything until there’s only the next pulse and the next and the next.

At some point, he loses sense of Zoro completely, unable to tell whether the quiet presence across from him is even real.

At some point, the last clear sensation is the ground under his face and the blood from his own mouth and the deep, endless pull inside of him before that dissolves, too, and the silence that’s been waiting settles fully over him, finally, finally, finally.

x

He surfaces slowly, consciousness returning in fragments and sensation, from the rough rock under his cheek to the bright morning light filtering through the window. He’s disoriented at first, unable to place any of it: his body feels heavy and wrong, like it’s been taken apart and reassembled by someone else, someone with hands far clumsier and misshapen than his own.

And then the night lands at once, a full bodied recollection that makes his stomach turn, hard: the festival and the drinks and Zoro’s mouth and the long, feverish hours of white knuckling and the absolute certainty of dying by inches.

He pushes himself on shaking arms, every single muscle protesting, only to find that he’s alone in the shop. His head throbs, fever broken — it’s impossible to believe how hot he’d felt only a few hours ago, how his core had been a furnace and every breath a negotiation with a heart that seemed determined to kick its way out. Now, there’s only a bone deep exhaustion, body wrongly quiet. His shirt’s hung open, stiff with dried sweat and blood to match the blood caked onto his face and under his nails and in a dark, cracked patch on the floor. He thinks, briefly, that he might genuinely vomit from the sheer contrast of it, from being so far gone he’d lost language and time set against this, now, memory moving badly through him.

The alleyway and the world reduced to touch and breath and the mouth he’s wanted for so long in such secret, vicious little ways that wanting it openly felt like humiliation. His own hand fisted in Zoro’s shirt. Zoro saying his name and then saying it again, differently. The impossible relief of being touched, and the cold horror that came immediately on its heels. He squeezes his eyes shut, but that only sharpens the images rising like bile, his hands on Zoro and his voice and his body reaching out and Zoro’s face. He can’t remember Zoro looking disgusted, is the problem. He can remember restraint and alarm and the way the other man had held himself back with such visible effort that Sanji’d wanted to peel his own skin off rather than think about what that meant.

The hours after come back in hotter fragments: the dark shifting around them and Zoro’s voice blunt and uselessly steady and Sanji’s body burning and burning and burning, every nerve converted into a demand he hadn’t consented to make.

“Fuck,” he mutters, anger cutting through the same like a blade through rope; he’s furious, suddenly, at Zoro for not being here right now and himself for needing anyone to stay. He’s furious at the island and its streets and the stall owner and at whatever part of him had answered the drink so eagerly, so traitorously. Most of all, he’s angry that he can still feel the shape of Zoro’s hands on his hips and that the memory hurts and comforts him in equal measure.

The anger gets him moving, at least, because god knows he can’t sit there in the aftermath of himself all day. He needs motion and smoke and air and water and to put fifteen thousand kilometres between his body and the shape it’d made on the floor next to Zoro. His hands shake as he fixes his clothes, wiping at his face with the heel of his hand until the dried blood cracks and sharp pain sparks across his mouth. That, at least, makes sense.

Outside, the morning is so fucking normal it’s obscene. The town’s calm, all pale gold light, gentle and forgiving. The paper streams and lanterns still sag. between buildings with their coloured paper torn in places, but undeniably present. There’s no panic or shame or evidence, even, that the whole island had cracked itself open the night before and spilled its worst hungers into the streets. People seem to have fallen asleep wherever, in doorways and on benches or on the steps leading up to the town hall. Some are naked and some are half dressed, limbs tangled together carelessly and heads pillowed on stomachs. Sanji stops in the middle of the street, stomach turning over as he watches a woman in an open robe sweep broken glass from the front of her restaurant, humming easily as she works. She waves at him, mouth turning up into a brief, joyful little smile before she continues.

His hands curl at his sides; for them, maybe, the morning after is an embarrassment or a laugh or a missing shoe or a stranger's name forgotten over coffee, or maybe it’s none of those things at all. Maybe it’s a comfort or just. Perfectly normal. For him, though, it feels like waking up after his body’s been used to tell the truth without him after years of making himself unreadable. Years of turning hunger into manners and fear into flirtation and tenderness into performance and longing into smoke and one night — one stupid fucking night — has dragged something private and helpless out of him in front of the one person he can least afford to lose control around.

Within a few steps he’s moving faster and then faster still, cutting through the waking streets with his head down as the buildings thing. He fully expects the town to fight him again, some stupid panicked part of him almost bracing for the same four corners to repeat under different lanterns, but instead the harbour appears within minutes.

The beach is narrow and stony, water calm enough to look cruel, after everything. He kicks off his shoes and walks straight in, water hitting like a blade driven clean between his ribs, cold enough to punch every scrap of air from his lungs. His whole body seizes around it, nerves flaring so forcibly that for one blessed second there’s no room for memory or Zoro or shame. He staggers a little but keeps going, the sand shifting under his feet as water climbs his calves and knees and thighs — by the time it reaches his waist his breath’s coming in sharp, broken pulls and finally a sensation with edges, with borders. Something that belongs to the world. Something with a cause he can name.

The water touches his chest and then his shoulders, shirt dragging heavily against him as he lets the sea close around his collarbones, the chill of it finding every overheated place the night had left behind to sink into his muscles and the tender hinge of his jaw, pressing against him from all sides with none of the fever’s intimacy. It wants nothing and asks nothing and doesn’t give a fuck what he says or who he reaches for and the relief of it comes so suddenly it’s almost grief. He stays there long enough for his teeth to click together and for his lips to go numb, for his wet clothes to feel like another skin altogether, his, his, his.

x

The Merry’s exactly where he saw her last, figurehead bright in the sun. The ease of it feels insulting, almost. Had the town really been so impossible last night? Had the streets truly shifted and knotted and turned them around until he and Zoro had been forced to cut their losses? Or had the drink just made every path feel like a trap, own bodies so loud they couldn’t read the world correctly?

On deck, everything seems normal enough. Chopper’s sorting through bandages with his tongue caught between his teeth, pausing only to give Sanji a distracted wave. Usopp and Nami are arguing about something, but nothing serious enough to break the grin from Usopp’s face. Nami’s got her legs tucked under her and both hands wrapped around a coffee, rolling her eyes affectionately until she clocks Sanji and her posture shifts. Sanji can feel her assessment like fingers against a bruise. “Well, well. Look who finally decided to show up.”

Usopp’s face does something delighted. “Wow, man. You look… so, so great and so, so normal and not wet at all. You just, uh, took a dip in full fit, hey?”

“And Zoro didn’t come home last night either,” Nami continues smugly, tipping her cup towards Sanji. “Funny how that works.”

For a moment, Sanji doesn’t move, flushing so explosively it feels almost like the fever returning. Usopp makes a strangled sound, mostly laugh and partly cough, ducking his face down into his hands. Nami’s grin lasts one beat before it falters, the teasing dropping out of her expression with terrifying speed. “Sanji?”

He can’t answer; his throat works around nothing, before he whirls on his heel and makes for the bathroom. He knows he’s walking too fast, nearly slipping on the last stair and slamming the door behind him with more force than necessary. The mirror above the sink reflects a stranger back at him: face pale and mouth swollen, blood still dark near the edge of his hairline. He scrabbles at the buttons, tearing them free until he peels the soaked shirt off him, kicking it away. His hands shake worse as he moves lower, fumbling over the familiar motions like undressing’s a skill he’s forgotten. The more skin he exposes the worse he feels and by the time he steeps into the shower he’s shivering. He braces his hands against the wall to let the water strike the back of his neck until his scalp goes numb.

The first pass of soap is practical, really, just enough to get any remaining blood off along with the salt from the ocean. Then he scrubs harder, under his nails and along his wrists and behind his ears, down the shape of his throat where his skin feels too sensitive, then harder across his chest and ribs and stomach and hips. He moves with increasing urgency, cloth dragging over already tender skin until it wilts. He washes his hair twice, fingernails raking hard along his scalp, pausing only to spit water from his mouth and then scrubbing his face until the skin around his mouth throbs while he just tries to breathe.

in / out / in / out / count

After, he avoids the mirror and dresses slowly, grimacing at the fabric brushing against the raw spots and then worse again as he pulls the binder too tight, testing the expansion of his ribs: a hard line drawn, a body made narrow enough to manage. His next breath hitches halfway, but he doesn’t adjust it — he buttons his shirt with hands that have finally steadied, each piece putting him further from the shower and the shop and the night. By the time he reaches for his tie, the mirror shows him something almost familiar.

Pale and red eyed and blotchy and swollen, but dressed and his by restraint, if not gentleness, cook and flirt and idiot and crewmate.

In the galley, he stands inside the door for as long as it takes him to catch his breath again, inhale stopping a fraction too early, before he dives back into the work. It’s saved him before: work is just sequence and timing and movement, proof that his hands still obey him and his body can be made useful and that the world can be broken down into hunger and portions. Rice needs washing and fish needs reheating and god knows the coffee needs refreshing, because whoever made it (Usopp, probably) had either panicked or just possessed no respect for balance.

He measures automatically, giving Luffy three portions and two to Zoro’s shitty face, and Chopper’s smaller bowl with Nami and Usopp’s one. He sets some aside for Franky and Robin, who haven’t returnd yet, and adamantly does not think about how Zoro hasn’t either.

good, he tells himself forcefully, let him wander into the sea. let him get lost for the next decade. Let him disappear so that Sanji never has to find out what the other man remembers.

let him come back, says something smaller and much worse.

He slams the rice scoop down, going still as footsteps cross the deck above, too heavy for Nami and definitely not Zoro, because Zoro’s tread has a particular dragged heel laziness that somehow still carries threat. These steps come with no caution whatsoever, so Sanji doesn’t even flinch when Luffy drops down with his usual lack of ceremony. “Hey!”

“Out.”

Luffy pouts. “But I’m hungry.”

“You’re always hungry.”

“Yeah!” Luffy starts digging around anyway and, usually, this is where Sanji would kick him. This time, though, Sanji just continues washing the rice and Luffy pauses. It’s the problem with him, really: he can hear changes in a room the way other people hear cannon fire. “What’s wrong?”

Sanji stares at the bench and considers not answering at all, but he knows there’s no point in that. Luffy would drag it out of him one way or another. He sighs. “Last night. Did you… notice anything weird?”

The words taste fucking ridiculous as soon as he asks them, like he’s asking about a stray cat or a misplaced saucepan and nothing something being peeled out of him.

Luffy swallows the scrap of fish he’s stolen and hums. “Weird how?”

Sanji’s throat tightens, kind of, already wishing he hadn’t asked. “I dunno. The town. The drinks.”

“Oh.” Luffy sounds almost relieved to have a subject he can recognise. “Yeah, the drinks were bad. Didn’t smell right. Plus, everybody kept taking all the food, so I came back. Zoro had you, though.”

Sanji stops breathing, just for a beat. “What?”

“You and Zoro.” Luffy shrugs. “I saw him go after you.”

Sanji’s stomach drops so fast he feels briefly weightless, imagining it suddenly from outside himself: his own stumbling exit and Zoro following, the two of them disappearing into the dark mess of the town.

Behind him, Luffy shifts. “Sanji?”

“I’m cooking.”

“You’re just holding rice?”

He looks down at the scoop clenched in his hand, rice scattered across the bench. “I’m cooking,” he repeats, sharper.

Luffy doesn’t retreat, which checks out. God knows he can be distracted by meat and treasure and beetles and clouds shaped like animals and the sound of someone saying his name two islands away, but when he decides not to move he becomes a cliff. “He went after you, so I figured it was okay. He was with you.”

Something spiked and awful surges behind Sanji’s eyes and he turns before he can stop himself, finding Luffy watching him with an expression that almost hurts to look at. It’s that deep bellied way he has sometimes — the way he can look at someone and see the whole shape of them, without bothering with whatever defenses have been forged. Sanji wants to say it wasn’t okay and wants to say the person i needed safety from was myself and wants to say never assume that again and also thank you for assuming it.

Instead, he washes the rice for the third time. “Breakfast in thirty.”

Luffy lingers just long enough to nick another bit of fish, before pausing at the door. “If you want me to punch someone later tell me.”

Sanji’s mouth twists. “That your solution to everything?”

Luffy grins. “Nah, sometimes I kick.”

Despite the ache in his chest and the shortness of his breath and all the raw, red places under his clothes, Sanji almost smiles. He listens to Luffy’s footsteps travel back outside, already shouting something at Usopp, and then he gets back to it, feeling the weight of his favourite knife settle into his palm, a tool that only asks to be held correctly. He measures miso without needing to look, paste dissolving beneath his hand to cloud the water in swirls. He peels daikon and trims it neatly, setting the blade until the first slice falls clean. He knows this — his body knows this. His right hand moves with measured certainty, rounds of daikon gathering on the cutting board in a translucent fan. The binder resists every breath, but the rhythm of it gives him something to work around, if nothing else. He warms a pan and adds oil and reheats the fish, adjusting it away from the hottest point of the stovetop and, for the first time after waking, his hands turn steady.

He’s plating when he clocks Zoro’s weight shifting through the ship, the same tread Sanji’s heard a hundred times by now, crossing the deck before dawn and wandering the wrong direction towards the galley, familiar enough to recognise even in Sanji’s sleep. Now, the sound moves through him like a hand closing around his throat.

He doesn’t turn around when the door opens, thinking coward at himself with such immediate venom that it almost steadies him again.

“Curls.” It’s rougher than usual, maybe. Dragged low over exhaustion and something else, something scraped nearly bare. He’s carrying a small brown package in one hand as he stops a careful distance from the bench, like proximity itself is a weapon he’s refusing to draw. “I went to get food.”

Zoro looks awful, is Sanji’s first coherent thought. Like he’s dragged himself through the morning by force. He’s in the same clothes as last night, rumpled and stained, one sleeve torn near the shoulder. There’s a cut crossed across his forehead and several smaller ones scatted amongst bruises, dried blood partly cleaned and badly ignored. His mouth is drawn tight, eyes more bloodshot than Sanji had expected and less guarded than he can bear. It’s the way he looks when he’s trying not to show pain and succeeding only because most people don’t know him well enough to see the effort. Sanji knows him well enough, though.

“Congrats on discovering bakeries.” It comes out too flat to be cruel and too tired to be an insult. He focuses on the spoon scraping softly against the pot so that he doesn’t remember the catastrophic edge they’d nearly fallen over together and how his body had gone loose with it, grateful in a way that still makes shame flare hot beneath his skin, wanting with such violent simplicity that it’d felt like being erased. He moves the spoon in a slow circle, the soup assembling itself by habit. The hurt of it is still there, but the first clean flare of anger’s long since cooled, tangled amongst everything else. Earlier, on the shop floor, absence had looked like abandonment because shame had made everything monstrous, but Zoro’s here, now, and if he’s honest — if he’s honest, he knows better than to think the worst.

Zoro gets lost. Zoro sleeps through alarms and forgets directions and treats injuries like they’re minor inconveniences. He can be brash and rude and stubborn and cruel, sometimes, because he thinks honesty’s a weapon and a tool, and clearly no-one’s ever explained the difference to him. Zoro doesn’t abandon his crew. He does not leave people behind, not if he can still stand. Not if he has to crawl. Not if the cost of staying is still written all over his face in exhaustion and blood and in the wrecked set of his shoulders.

“I didn’t want to wake you,” Zoro says slowly and, this time, Sanji can hear what sits under it: i didn’t know if you could stand seeing me there. i didn’t know if i would make it worse. i didn’t know what else to do. It’s such a stupid, Zoro shaped kind of care that for one terrible second he almost laughs or cries or turns around to ask the question burning a hole through the back of his teeth — did you mean it?

He stirs the soup again, frowning. “Yeah. I — thanks.”

“Can we talk about —”

“No.” Sanji cuts it off before it can start, heart sinking at the way the other man’s poster shifts: a minute settling of weight, like he’d been expecting the blow and had still failed to brace himself properly. He fights for the words, because he can’t have this conversation right now, not with everything still so fresh and his skin still raw — but he can’t keep letting the wrong accusation stand in the air between them, either. “Not… now.”

Zoro holds still; Sanji can feel the shape of the concession between them, a door wedged open. “Alright.”

His throat tightens again, worse than before. “Go let Chopper look at your face.”

“Bossy.”

“Yeah? Keep bleeding in my kitchen and I’ll finish the job.” The old rhythm flickers, faint and damaged but alive enough to cast light, and Zoro’s expression settles into something more familiar. Finally, he crosses only far enough to set the package down the far end of the bench, as distant from Sanji as the galley allows.

“Later, then.” He doesn’t say anything else beyond that acceptance of the one boundary Sanji’s managed to say aloud. He pauses only briefly when he opens the door, long enough that for one impossible second Sanji thinks he might turn back — wants him to turn back. Then he goes, closing the door carefully behind him until that familiar weight recedes into the noise of the ship, and Sanji stands there alone with his hand locked tightly around the spoon.

His knees threaten to give out, just a little, so he catches himself on the bench with his shoulders hunched. The binder resists the next breath but he takes it anyway, shallow and painful. He stares at the package of bread until his vision blurs and tells himself, fiercely and without success, that this changes nothing.

x

Breakfast’s loud in the way the crew’s always loud, completely and indecently and with no respect for anyone’s nervous system. Luffy declares the fish the best he’s ever eaten, which would be sweet if he doesn’t say that every single time. Usopp slaps a hand over his own plate when Luffy starts poaching, lecturing the captain on maritime meal law with such confidence that both Chopper and Luffy believe him without question. Nami kicks Zoro at some point and then lies badly about it, the smell of miso and fish sitting heavy in the air.

Sanji hovers at the edge of the table with a serving platter in one hand and is grateful for how normal it feels, in the end. Nobody stops and stare at him like like the night’s still visible on hi skin. They don’t demand an explanation about the state of his mouth or the stiffness in his shoulders — they just accept plates from his hands and complain about portions and reach for seconds and fold him back into the blessed ritual of being needed. He’s not an idiot: he knows Nami’s curating careful space where questions might’ve gone but never do and how hard Usopp’s working to fill the room with harmless nonsense until the silence has nowhere to settle.

They know enough to know they don’t know everything, and love Sanji enough not to dig.

In turn, he performs beautifully. He refills bowls and smacks Luffy’s hand away from the serving plate and counters Usopp’s claims about fictitious subpoints and pours Nami fresh tea before she asks. he slides the honey towards Chopper because the reindeer always likes it better in the second cup of tea than the first. Action helps; it always has. It gives him a place to put his hands, which feels absurdly important at a time where his body still feels overbright in places, too aware of itself even beneath the clean clothes. The places he’d scrubbed too hard prickle under his shirt whenever he moves, wrists remembering Zoro’s grip and mouth remembering Zoro’s taste and thighs aching with exhaustion and something older and worse, something he refuses to name at the table where his captain’s trying to fit an entire fish into his mouth.

Here, at least, his body has tasks.

Zoro stays at the other end, as far from Sanji’s usual path as the seating allows without making a whole spectacle of it. He’s bathed and changed clothes, and the cut over his eyebrow has been given a dutiful little stitch by Chopper's steady hooves. His hair’s still damp, eyes still shadowed and there’s a tightness at the corner of his mouth whenever someone laughs too loud, but he’s here.

He only looks at Sanji once, so quickly that Sanji almost thinks he’s imagined it if not for the lock at the base of his spine and warmth under his skin. He turns before he can think better of it, refilling Nami’s rice with a trilling comment about how beautiful her hair looks.

He knows, in theory and in his soul, that the thing between them hasn’t retreated but has only changed shape: last night it had been heat and panic and bodily betrayal until wanting and needing and fearing had become indistinguishable, but this morning it’s something else entirely. Everytime Sanji sets a plate down he knows exactly where Zoro is and everytime Zoro shifts, Sanji can feel it in the room. When Luffy reaches across the table and nearly knocks Zoro’s cup over, Zoro catches it before it falls and Sanji’s eyes dart to this hand on reflex, the way he’s been doing for months, and breakfast slowly spends itself. Bowls empty and cups coop and conversation loosens, and the crew starts to drift apart again, pulled back towards chores and naps and trouble. Luffy goes first, carrying a piece of bread in his mouth and shouting something about fishing, with Usopp and Chopper hot on his heels. Nami lingers long enough to place her cup and plate neatly near the sink.

“Thank you, Sanji,” she says quietly, like it’s any other morning, like gratitude can be gentle without becoming pity.

He inclines his head. “Anything for you, Nami-swan.”

Nami’s smile deepens by a fraction before she leaves. “Don’t overdo it.”

He scoffs, weakly but there. “When have I ever?”

“Oh, that’s why I’m saying it.” Then she’s gone, too, and the room quietens in layers. The voices thin and footsteps disappear and the deck above resumes its full, separate life, muffled and bright.

Sanji keeps his hands busy, collecting plates and cups, stacking them with more care than necessary and giving Zoro all the time in the world to leave.

He doesn’t, though, and Sanji feels the silence gathering behind him, less sharp then before. He hesitates only briefly before reaching for the other man’s plate. “Your cut’s ugly.”

Zoro’s mouth twitches, but his eyes stay tired. “Yours, too.”

Sanji’s hand tightens around the plate, words threatening to open something. He carries the plates over to the sink and runs the tap, letting water run over his hands and soap slip between his fingers. He starts scrubbing, listening to Zoro’s chair scrape back against the floor. After a while, Zoro’s boots shift across the floorboards and, for a second, Sanji considers telling him to leave. He could say get out or fuck off and Zoro would go, probably. That’s the horrible certainty of it: Zoro’d leave if Sanji told him to. He wouldn't argue. He’d take the boundary like a promise and walk outside and leave Sanji with exactly what he’s asked for because he always has.

The plates lie half submerged in the sink, pale edges knocking softly whenever the ship shifts, swallowed almost at once by the hush of water from the tap. Sanji keeps his hands under the water for a bit and it feels good, almost. It slides under his knuckles and loosens oil from the porcelain and softens the sting where soap finds all the places he’s already punished too thoroughly. His wrists are red. His collarbones burn beneath his shirt. His hands move on autopilot, again and again, not turning around because he doesn’t need to, not really. He can read the smallest fracture in Zoro from sound alone, the way he’s always been able to count Zoro’s injuries without looking. A scrape in the breath means bruised ribs or a cut pulled open. A pause before stepping means bad weight on one leg. A shifted shoulder means stiffness or soreness or hidden strain. Zoro’s spent so long treating his body like equipment that Sanji’s learned, without meaning to, to listen for every place it fails.

Now, he hears the careful way Zoro takes the tea towel from its hook. For a while, neither of them speaks. Sanji washes and Zoro dries and their world hums gently around them. Above deck, the crew continues in muffled bursts of life but it sounds distant and soft, like there’s been a blanket placed between them and the morning. Whenever Sanji passes a clean plate across Zoro takes it by the edge, the empty space where they might’ve touched remaining there for a beat, vivid as a wound. The thought of Zoro’s hand against his wrist again, even gently, even with warning, even with permission, makes nausea rise under his tongue. There's no logic or fairness to it: Zoro’s hands have always helped keem him safe, in one way or another. Zoro’s hands have always tugged him out of the. line of fire or pinned him down before disaster or held jagged wounds together until help arrived. Zoro’s hands had been careful when Sanji had been feverish and out of himself and asking for every wrong thing in the wrong way, and yet.

And yet.

His skin can’t bear the idea of being known by touch, not today. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not longer than either of them wants to admit. It occurs to him, suddenly, that maybe the distance isn’t just for him. Maybe Zoro can’t stand to be touched right now, either. It had been easy, in the worst moments, to feel alone inside the violation of it all, like the drink had singled him out and pried him open and made a spectacle of his wanting alone and in some parts it even makes sense: Sanji had drunk double. He’d been the one feverish and shaking, who’d been unable to tell where the drink ended and he began but Zoro —

Zoro had kissed him first.

Zoro had reached first.

Zoro had admitted, in that wrecked honest voice, to wanting it in some way.

The idea that the wanting might have gone both ways makes it worse and more intimate and more tangled, harder to assign neatly to the drink and therefore impossible to discard. It’d be easier, probably, if the town had created something false and ridiculous that they could laugh about later, if either of them ever became cruel enough. It had taken something real and private — something neither of them had chosen to hand over yet — and dragged it into the open by the throat.

Worse, he can’t imagine ever being able to explain it. He can say i was drugged. it made me desperate. it was bad. but how can he ever verbalise the specific, layered violation of it? The way the drink had reached inside the most private architecture of his self and turn the lights on without his say. How can he say my body stopped belonging to me without the words collapsing into something smaller and harsher? Every available phrase feels too clinical or too raw, too much focus on how the night had rhymed with the long, private work of making his body answer to him and look like him and move like him. It lives in the same place, somehow — the sensation of being a passenger inside his own nerves and watching his own body perform wants and response and hungers and reaching for a veto that simply was not there.

He doesn’t know how to put that in sentences. He doesn’t know how to say when it took over it felt like being locked inside a body that wouldn’t listen to me again without reducing either experience into a metaphor the other doesn’t deserve. He doesn’t know how to admit that the worst part had not been the arousal itself but the absolute removal of the ability to refuse it. He doesn’t know how to explain that he spent the night white knuckling not only against desire but against the older, deeper terror of being rewritten from the inside without.

He picks up another plate because his hands need to keep moving and wonders if he’ll be able to stomach Zoro touching him or whether the first attempt will send him back into the bright panic of the the morning. He wonders if Zoro will flinch, too.

Zoro clears his throat. “You’re going to scrub that pattern off that one.”

On another other morning, Sanji would snap back automatically, make up a joke about Zoro being unable to identify a pattern if it grew three swords and introduced itself. Instead, the words startle a small, cracked sound out of him — the beginning of a laugh, if he doesn’t strangle it back. “Shut up.”

Zoro’s mouth does something at the edge of Sanji’s vision and it’s not a smile, not quite, but it’s something.

When the last plate is stacked Sanji pulls the plug and watches the water drain in a slow spiral, watching a single grain of rice caught until the last of the water tugs it under. Then he braces his hands against the bench, feeling the way his chest pulls, and waits.

Zoro takes a breath. “Now?”

For a moment Sanji doesn’t answer. His body’s still a country after invasion, every border guarded and every road uncertain and there is no fucking part of him that feels brave enough or ready enough or clean enough or safe enough to turn around, but.

But.

If this remains only what the drink made of them, it will rot. If the night stole their choices, then whatever happens next has to begin with choosing, even if it’s only this.

He tries to speak but his voice is almost absorbed by the quiet, so he clears his throat and tries and tries again. “Yeah, okay. Now.”

x

sorry but if y'all think the two most paranoid-about-self-control-and-agency-and-repression idiots are fuckin in this situation, well. <3