shlieut

“Yeah, no shit.”

Usopp looks between them, delighted in the way people are when they don’t have to live inside the thing they’re enjoying from outside. Nami claps once. “Wonderful, wonderful. Get the hell in.”

The seating arrangement is a war that briefly threatens to become a constitutional crisis: Luffy wants shotgun but because Nami’s driving she claims executive privilege. Usopp gets carsick if he sits too far back but also insists on controlling the music at least part of the time and Sanji flatout refuses to sit behind Zoro, claiming ‘his whole aura is hostile’. Zoro says he’d rather walk than sit directly next to Sanji for hours, which is a lie so transparent even he can hear how fake it sounds. In the end, Nami imposes order with the same cold decisiveness she probably uses in hostage negotiations: she drives, Luffy gets front passenger for exactly one hour, Usopp and Zoro get lumped in the middle row and Sanji’s left in the back with the snacks. They’ll all share the responsibility of preventing Luffy from distracting the driver into catastrophe.

This would be fine — totally fine! — if Sanji knew how to sit still, but he doesn’t. No-one in the car knows how to sit still except Zoro, who can do it for hours on end if left alone with enough road and minimal conversation, but Sanji in particular seems fucking incapable of it. He leans between their seats and offers opinions on every bakery and servo they pass, he critiques the playlist with withering comments while also singing along to the choruses and, at one point, he kicks the back of Usopp’s seat in retaliation for a snack theft and nearly starts a battlefield over the chips.

The morning broadens around them as they leave the city, giving way in layers: first the traffic, then thinner suburbs, then stretches of road flanked by scrub and gum trees and glimpses of water flashing silver through the green. The sky’s absurdly blue already, one of those spring mornings so sharp and clean looking it’s amost unreal. Usopp falls half asleep against the window half an hour in but Luffy remains offensively awake. Nami hums to herself with one hand on the wheel and Sanji, having exhausted outrage over the playlist, moves on to roasting the idea of road trip snacks in general.

“Trail mix isn’t food,” he announces from the back seat, “It’s just… gravel. With branding.”

“It has nuts,” Luffy points out magnanimously.

“It has disappointment.”

Zoro, who has spent the last forty minutes pretending not to be aware of Sanji’s knee occasionally pressing the back of his seat from where he’s folded in the row behind them, scowls. “You packed three different kinds of chips.”

“Because unlike whoever bought this garbage,” Sanji sneers, rustling a bag with contempt, “I understand texture.”

Usopp wakes just enough to mumble: “I bought that.”

Sanji twists to look at him over the seat. “Then I’m glad you’re conscious for the feedback.”

Family, Zoro thinks dimly, is a suspicious phrase people use to excuse the fact that your friends have become impossible to imagine life without and also can humiliate you on a cellular level without warning. By the time they reach their first destination — a shark and ray reserve — the sun’s fully up and the parking lot smells like sea salt and sunscreen. The building itself’s lower and less impressive than Zoro had expected, attached to a stretch of boardwalk and netted enclosures with a few faded informational signs out front featuring sharks rendered in some kind of friendly educational style.

Luffy is immediately thrilled. “Sharks!”

“Wow,” Usopp says dryly, stepping out of the car and stretching like the long drive hasn’t touched him. “At the shark place? Famous if true.”

Zoro slams his door shut, rolls one shoulder and stops dead because something in Sanji’s expression has shifted, this brightness clicking on behind his eyes like someone’s gone and flipped a hidden switch. It’s not the usual performative charm he deploys like a weapon, all smirks and flourishes and perfectly timed compliments, but something stripped right down, something Zoro rarely sees on him outside of 3am snack runs and those fuzzy moments where they’ve both had too much beer.

Nami shades her eyes, glances at the big entrance sign, then back at Sanji, and grins . “Bit excited there, bud?”

“About sharks?” Sanji blinks, like it hadn’t even occured to him that he looks plainly thrilled. “Obviously. They’re one of the oldest surviving vertebrate lineages on the planet, you know. They were here before half the bones in your body decided to show up.”

Luffy makes a delighted noise that’s half a gasp and half a war cry. “Whoa! That’s really cool!”

Sanji visibly tries to reel it back in but it’s already too late: Zoro suddenly can’t look anywhere else, not because sharks themselves are riveting. They’re what? Teeth, cartilage, ocean? Fine, good for them. It’s Sanji, the way his whole face has opened up, the way he’s gesturing as they walk toward the entrance, hands cutting through the air with quick little movements. His voice has picked up speed, losing that lazy drawl in favour of something sharper and more animated. He’s not really looking at any of them anymore; his gaze keeps drifting towards the signs and towards the chance to talk about something he clearly loves.

Inside, the reflections from the water wrap around them in cool, filtered light and that unmistakable mineral tang of saltwater, mixed with the low constant hum of filtration systems working somewhere behind the walls. The tanks aren’t tanks but ponds, almost, great stretches of water that go to their ankles where stingrays glide with serene indifference.

Luffy immediately bolts ahead and has to be yanked back before he can just. Jump in. He gets directed to where to change his shoes and how to rinse his feet by the very, very patient attendant. Sanji helps him without hesitation, all exasperated big brother energy. “They’re not here for your entertainment, Luffy. They’re living animals.”

“Uh, they’re literally here for our entertainment,” Usopp points out but he follows the attendant’s guidance and pretty soon he’s in the water alongside Nami and Luffy, biting down a shriek whenever a stingray brushes over his feet.

Zoro hangs back on dry land, content to watch Luffy experience about seventeen different emotions and all of them underpinned with sheer, vivid wonder. Sanji stays back as well, oddly, mouth twisting into a little smile at their friends’ antics and, after a while, he just starts… talking. He tells Zoro about the electroreceptors in rays that let them sense the faint electrical fields of hidden prey, about the branding problem with shark tourism, about media fearmongering and humanity’s inability to respect anything ‘that doesn’t flatter our own self-image’. Nami folds her arms, quietly smug, and catches Zoro’s eye over Sanji’s bent head. She mouths oh, he’s gone.

She’s right — Sanji’s more present than Zoro has seen him in weeks, all of him gathered and focused, attention narrowed to a bright, burning point. He talks with his hands, fingers shaping the concepts in the air and eyebrows drawing together. He says pelagic the way other people say home which is to say naturally and comfortably, like the word’s lived in his mouth for years. When he explains countershading to Nami his voice drops into something low and intent, almost intimate. Truthfully, Zoro doesn’t catch half the actual content at first. He catches the cadence instead, the animation, the way Sanji’s shoulders relax, tension bleeding out as he stops performing the version of himself he usually offers the world and simply is. It’s catastrophically attractive and not just because the sunlight catches the gold in his hair and turns it unfair in every possible direction. In the sense that Zoro feels himself being pulled, helplessly, inevitably, toward the light. He starts lingering when the others drift on, staying near whichever creature’s captured Sanji’s attention. At first he asks questions just to keep the flow going. “What’s that one?”

Sanji doesn’t even glance over. “Wobbegong.”

“Fake.”

Sanji turns, looking personally offended. “It’s really not? It’s a carpet shark, seaweed-brain.”

Zoro steps closer to the glass and stares at the mottled, rug-like creature half-buried in the sand. “Looks like a rug.”

“Yes,” Sanji says, real wonder breaking through despite himself. “That’s the entire point.” And then he’s off again, talking faster about ambush predation and the evolutionary brilliance of camouflage, on the heels of the flattened morphology that lets carpet sharks disappear against the seafloor. By the time they’re at the main shark enclosure Zoro’s stopped pretending the questions are random. It’s a massive outdoor tank with signs everywhere pleading with visitors not to scream or run through the water or drop human food. Sunlight filters down through the water in shifting green veils as the sharks glide with that ancient, unhurried grace, bodies moving like they have all the time in the world because they know exactly where they sit on the food chain.

Luffy whispers: “Whoa.”

Zoro looks at Sanji instead of the sharks, staring down through the water with an expression that suggests he’s standing in the presence of something he has loved for a very long time and still finds new ways to be moved by it.

Nami sidles up beside Zoro. “D’you wanna know how obvious you’re being or do you want it to be a surprise?”

“I’m looking at the sharks.”

She hums with blatant disbelief and drifts away before he can threaten to throw her into the ray pool. Sanji, thankfully, misses the entire exchange because he’s deep in the middle of passionately defending sharks to Usopp. “Most bites are exploratory or mistaken identity or the result of idiots getting too close in poor visibility.”

“Exploratory bite’s a fuckin’ horrible phrase,” Usopp mutters. “Sounds like they’re sampling us like wine.”

Sanji shoots him a withering look. “Usopp, if a shark actually meant to eat you, you wouldn’t be standing here complaining about terminology.”

Zoro, still mostly tuned to the way Sanji is speaking rather than the words themselves, rolls his shoulders again. “So what, they just get bad press?”

Sanji turns on him so quickly there’s almost a smile breaking through the indignation. “Exactly! Humans kill tens of millions of sharks a year… more, maybe? You’ve got finning and bycatch and overfishing, not to mention habitat destruction. But one surfer gets nipped in murky water and suddenly the entire ocean’s evil.” He keeps going, about ecosystems and apex predators and trophic cascades, whatever the hell that is, about how fear is often just ignorance with a better publicist and god knows what else as the others eventually peel off, Luffy distracted by feeding the sharks and then by gift shop plushes. Usopp’s lured away by a display involving venomous sea creatures and the opportunity to pretend he’s braver than he is. Nami, after one long look between Sanji and Zoro that makes Zoro want to fake his own death, says she’s going to find her water bottle and vanishes.

Light wavers bluish green across Sanji’s cheekbone when he glances down, the hum of the filtration system filling the pauses between his sentences. Zoro licks his lips. “How d’you know all this?”

Sanji shrugs, but it’s not casual. “I read.”

“No shit.”

Sanji snorts. “And documentaries. And articles. And… ” He breaks off, clearly wrong footed by the need to summarise. “I don’t know. I just always liked the sea.” Liked is such an inadequate word for what Zoro’s looking at that he nearly says so. It’s not like it’s the first time he’s noticed that Sanji tends to love through defence, with food, with people and, apparently, with fish too. He gets protective and exacting and a little angry, like admiration alone isn’t enough; whatever he loves must also be shielded from stupidity, from mistreatment, from easy bad narratives. It always does something weirdly painful to Zoro’s chest.

He sighs. “Tell me the one about how they can smell blood from oceans away.”

Sanji immediately rolls his eyes. “That’s exaggerated.”

“But not fake.”

“God, you’re annoying.” But, because Zoro asked and because this has become the easiest thing in the world all at once, he tells him anyway and by the time they leave the place Zoro knows more than he did about electroreception and shark nurseries and stingray barbs, and why fish is often too broad a category to be useful in casual conversation. More importantly, he knows exactly what face Sanji makes when he is talking about something he loves enough to forget to posture and that, unfortunately, is going to make the rest of the trip much harder to survive.

x

The drive from the shark place to the beach should, by all rights, feel like a cooldown, a nice little breather. Zoro’s already lived through the worst of the morning: the slow, devastating realiseation that Sanji talking about sharks, animated and unguarded, is apparently one of the most attractive things a human being can do in broad daylight without getting arrested. He’s had time to adjust, to shove this new data somewhere safer inside his chest. Time to remind himself that he’s survived years of this exact brand of self-inflicted torture.

The problem, though, is that once Sanji starts talking about the things he loves he stops being careful in all the tiny little ways Zoro has spent years silently begging him to stop being careful. He drops the cool, amused mask he keeps polished for strangers and half their friends and stops wrapping every strong opinion in sarcasm. He just goes thought-to-mouth with almost no filter, voice shifting pitch and speed, like he’s building the entire ocean between them in real time.

Zoro’s… not really built to survive that on repeat in one day. Hell, who could?

They pile back into the car with damp brochures sticking to fingers and gift shop souveniers already shedding glitter on the floor mats, sun angling hotter across the road. Luffy’s acquired a plush stingray and named it Flat Steve before his seatbelt even clicks. Sanji slides in last, carrying the paper bag of fried calamari he’d refused to share at the aquarium exit. He drops into the back seat, knees knocking the back of Zoro’s seat once, casual and thoughtless.

Zoro, who is trying very hard to sit like a normal person and not twist halfway around just to chase the line of Sanji’s throat in his peripheral view, manages: “What’d you get?”

Sanji pauses. “Calamari.”

“From the gift shop?”

Sanji leans forward between the seats, visibly offended. “What, because I care about marine life you think I’ve suddenly gone vegetarian? I’m not a monster.”

Usopp, still faintly pink from laughing himself stupid when Nami stumbled in the water, snorts. “That feels species-selective.”

“It is species-selective. I’m not an idiot.” Then he drops back into his seat, and the car fills with the mingled smells of salt, fried batter, strong coffee and sunscreen warming on skin. Nami pulls out of the lot toward the beach, the road curving along stretches of coastal scrub and low bushland, flashing occasional glimpses of blue ocean through the trees. She drives one handed and utterly relaxed, her window cracked just enough for warm sea air to ribbon in whenever Luffy or Usopp start fighting over the air conditioning. Zoro stares out his window and tries, for a solid ten minutes, to be a normal person.

He answers when spoken to and watches the scrub roll by and doesn’t think too hard about the fact that Sanji’s right behind him in those stupid fucking mirrored sunglasses. The plan collapses the second Sanji starts talking again, answering some question Usopp asked that Zoro didn’t even hear because he was too busy trying to figure out the tune Luffy’s been humming.

“The ocean isn’t one thing,” Sanji sighs, one foot braced against the back of Zoro’s seat as he leans forward. “It changes, right? You’ve got these gradual shifts, temperature gradients, current systems, salinity layers, whole ecosystem structures stacking on top of each other like —”

Usopp, ever the chaos agent, interrupts. “Can an ocean have too much salt?”

Sanji gives a little one shouldered shrug, the kind that says he’s only getting started. “Depends what you’re asking, really. Most marine species are tuned to a pretty narrow range but currents and upwelling do a lot of the heavy lifting. It’s not static.”

Zoro glances back to where Sanji’s pushing his sunglasses up into his hair, sunlight flashing through the window. He’s talking with one hand twisted in his hair, twirling it absently. “It’s not one big identical blue body of water. There’s different species distributions, different temperature bands, different reef systems, different everything depending on latitude, on season, on depth, you know? Push far enough north and everything starts shifting hard. Warmer water, more tropical species, massive reef complexes. That’s why the reef’s such a big deal — it’s this living gradient, this —”

Luffy glances at him in the rearview mirror. “You’re talking about it like it’s your favourite place.”

Sanji scoffs. “I’m talking about it like it’s the single most important ecosystem on the planet and the rest of you should be on your knees thanking me for the free education.”

“You should charge,” Usopp suggests wickedly.

Zoro opens his mouth before his brain can stop him. “So if you went far enough north what changes first?”

Sanji’s gaze snaps to him through the gap between the seats. “Depends where exactly,” he answers immediately, leaning so far forward Zoro can see the flush high on his cheekbones and the way his eyes have gone bright and focused. “Currents, season, exact coastline, whether you’re measuring temperature or species diversity or visibility or nutrient load… everything stacks. You get these transition zones where cold water species drop off and tropical ones take over. The thermocline shifts. Plankton blooms change.”

Zoro listens with a level of concentration he has never once devoted to marine science in his life because the problem with carrying a crush for three straight years is that it teaches you the exact shape of your own stupidity in excruciating detail. Zoro knows, logically, that he’s currently in a car full of his friends on a bright, beautiful day, driving towards a beach where sand and salt water are waiting. All available evidence says he should be enjoying this in a broad, uncomplicated, group hang kind of way but his brain is busy running some kind of private low grade fever.

Actually, no: the problem with carrying with a crush for three years straight is that it stops becoming a simple crush and shifts into something deeper than the casual desire he’s nursed since the first time Sanji called him mosshead and meant it like an insult and a promise at the same time. Deeper than the constant background hum of i want him that’s lived under his ribs for thirty-six fucking months and counting. It’s the ground giving way, it’s the awareness that what he’s been calling a crush has quietly and mercilessly grown roots, wrapping around vital organs while he wasn’t looking. It’s about wanting this — Sanji lit up and talking and trusting them enough to be this openly fierce and soft in the same breath.

It’s about wanting to be the person Sanji turns to when the passion spills over and, worse, it’s about the terrifying possibility that Zoro’s probably been in love with him for longer than he’s willing to admit and this trip is only making that truth more and more impossible to ignore.

The beach, when they finally arrive, is one of those broad bright stretches that look fake in photos, all white sand and low surf, dunes with scrub and tufts of grass and a few families staked under beach tents, along with some teenagers already half-buried in sand and bad, bad decisions. The local shopfronts are visible from the parking lot, painted in shades of blue so faded it circles back into charm. They unload the car in the sort of cheerful logistical disaster that only works because they all know each other too well to mind. Towels come out first, then sunscreen, then the esky, then a bag full of snacks that Luffy immediately tries to claim before Nami stops him with a hand to the forehead and a level of authority that suggests she’s rehearsed for this exact mutiny her whole damn life. Usopp gets stuck carrying the umbrella and chairs and a plastic bag of god knows what because he made the mistake of looking available.

The sun’s climbed into that rich whitish gold afternoon light that makes the whole coast look overdesigned, the sand hot on top and cool underneath where their feet sink in. The surf’s gentle enough for Luffy to declare it swimmable, so Nami lays out towels with the grave, ritual precision of someone establishing territory in hostile lands. “Anyone who gets sand on my towel can rack off.”

“Everything’s sand,” Usopp says.

“Okay? Then be less sandy?”

Luffy’s already in the water before anyone has fully finished setting up, one second kicking off his shoes and the next he’s halfway to New Zealand, probably, arms windmilling. Usopp spends a full five minutes on sunscreen application for himself and Nami, muttering about the UV index. Sanji hauls the esky into place, straightens up and squints toward the shops. “I’ll go get lunch before the line gets stupid.”

Without looking up from arranging her sandals just so, Nami says: “Zoro can go with you.”

Zoro glares at her but she doesn’t look back, the coward. He should be annoyed or object on principle or at least make some token complaint about involuntary labour but he sighs. “Yeah, fine.”

Sanji’s mouth quirks. “Eager.”

“Shut up.”

“Make me.” The line lands like it always does, half a joke and half a challenge and all old electric familiarity. Zoro has to look at the ocean before his face does anything unfortunate. Family, he thinks as he falls into step beside Sanji, is just another word for having people in your life who can weaponise your obviousness with the efficiency of trained snipers.

The path off the beach is warm underfoot, a packed trail through low bushes and trees, the ocean opening up behind them all at once, vast and bright, white rip at the shore and deep cobalt farther out, sunlight shattered across the surface in a thousand hard pieces. The wind’s stronger up here, lifting the loose hem of Sanji’s shirt and Zoro tries very, very hard not to notice. He fails anyway, because his brain’s a fucking traitor that catalogues details whether he consents or not: the easy, balanced way Sanji walks on sand like he was born to it, the clean line of his shoulders under the shirt flapping in the breeze, the tiny crease that appears at the corner of his mouth when he’s thinking hard about food. It’s embarrassing, but Zoro’s long since accepted that his body will keep betraying him around Sanji with the loyalty of a mutinous dog and that his only real defenses are, what? Face management and the occasional silent prayer that today won’t be the day he does something irreversibly stupid.

The fish and chip shop sits at the edge of the beach access road, loaded with umbrellas that have clearly lost multiple fights with the wind. There’s a line, just long enough to justify Sanji’s sudden sense of urgency. They join the queue anyway, and for a minute the mood feels oddly easy which is… something, because even when they’re perfectly calm the tension’s always there between them anyway, humming like live current in a wall. It’s baseline now, mostly survivable and so damn familiar that Zoro sometimes forgets other people don’t carry this much charge through ordinary conversation.

Sanji pushes his sunglasses up into his hair and scans the menu with narrow eyed suspicion, like the board might be lying to him. Without looking away from the menu, he drawls: “If you stare any harder, Moss, I’ll start charging.”

Zoro snorts, aiming for casual and landing somewhere near strangled. “Thought you like attention.”

“Depends how stupid the next sentence out of your mouth is.”

Zoro forces his gaze up to the board, pretending the listed options are suddenly fascinating. “What’s the good thing here?”

Sanji turns to look at him, something immediate and automatic in his expression, some reflexive readiness that does unfairly warm things to Zoro’s stomach. “Depends what you want.”

“Fish?”

“Wow, that narrows it down dramatically.” Sanji snorts and folds his arms, the motion pulling his shirt a little tighter across his chest. “If the fish is actually fresh then grilled snapper. If it’s questionable, hide behind batter and pray. Whiting’s usually reliable, flathead if they’re not overcooking it.”

Zoro nods like this is purely practical information and not, apparently, a form of courtship engineered by some sadistic god who enjoys watching him suffer. They shuffle forward one step, the paper menu stand wobbling in the breeze. Behind them a kid starts wailing because his ice cream’s melted too far down his arm and, also, weren’t his parents listening when he said he needed the toilet five minutes ago?

Sanji glances sideways. “You ready for the tournament next weekend?”

Zoro blinks. “What?”

“Next weekend, right? Or did I mix it up with the one after?”

“Next weekend,” Zoro confirms, voice rougher than he wants it to be.

Sanji nods once, satisfied. “You fix that footwork issue?”

Zoro frowns, casting his mind back to their last spar at the gym, when he’d buckled just a second earlier than he’d planned, giving Sanji the opening to deck him halfway to Sunday. “Working on it.”

Sanji makes a low, noncommittal sound. “Mm. You always say that when you’re pretending something’s fine.”

Zoro stares at him, words scraping out before he has a hope in hell of fixing them into something less startled. “Since when do you pay attemtion to what I say?”

Sanji shrugs one shoulder like it’s nothing, like he isn’t currently prying Zoro’s ribcage open with casual little questions in the middle of a sunny afternoon. “You’re loud about your hobbies.”

“Kendo isn’t a hobby.”

“Sure. Your extremely intense sword club is a sacred calling, my mistake.” When they reach the counter the kid taking orders looks about nineteen and is clearly unprepared for Sanji’s standards, which becomes obvious in under three seconds. Sanji narrows his eyes. “What species is your flake, exactly?”

The kid blinks. “Uh…”

“You don’t know?”

“It’s… shark?”

“Yes, darling, I can read the board.”

Zoro turns away and laughs into his fist while Sanji politely interrogates the poor teenager on species and sourcing and batter consistency and oil quality with cheerful menace. He asks, innocently: “What’s flake again?”

Sanji whips around with immediate outrage. “Don’t start.”

“What?”

“You know exactly what.”

“I’m learning.”

“You’re baiting me.”

The teenager wisely stays silent as Zoro widens his eye. “Can’t a man want to know where his lunch comes from?”

Sanji stares at him before exhaling through his nose, surrendering not because he has to but because he clearly wants the excuse to keep talking. And so, while they wait for the food, Zoro gets another full lecture about fish naming conventions and public ignorance as a market force and why consumers should demand species transparency and how sustainability starts with refusing to treat seafood as anonymous white flesh. He doesn’t care; he’d listen to Sanji explain anything at this point. Fish. Renters’ rights. The proper way to polish cutlery. The blood supply of a spoon, whatever.

By the time they head back down the sandy path with warm paper parcels and cold drinks and enough chips to keep Luffy from turning feral, Sanji’s still talking, loose and comfortable, the way he does when he’s forgotten he’s supposed to ration out the parts of himself that usually stay private. His voice has that easy rhythm now, words tumbling out with the loose continuity of someone’s who has stopped performing caution. “And if you collapse local predator populations,” he explains, stepping neatly around a half-buried pram wheel, “You don’t just lose the predators, you skew the whole damn system. Species distribution shifts, breeding patterns get thrown off, algal growth explodes in some places and dies in others if you’re looking at reef structures —”

Zoro grunts. “What’s algal growth?”

Sanji glances sideways at him again and there’s definitely suspicion there now, sharp, like he’s turning a puzzle piece over in his mind and realising it might fit a picture he wasn’t expecting. “You’ve been unusually interested in fish today.” His tone is light, sure, but there’s weight behind it. Observation. Testing, even.

Zoro’s pulse kicks hard, one ugly lurch against his ribs. He’s been counting on the ocean and the lunch logistics and the noise of their friends to postpone this exact moment of scrutiny until at least later. He inhales, short and harsh. “Maybe I like hearing you talk about them.”

Sanji stops walking so abruptly Zoro only just manages to plant his feet without crashing into him. The beach stretches bright and wide around them, midday sun bouncing off the water in glittering shards. The rest of the group’s further down the sand now, Nami and Usopp already staking out the towels while Sanji looks at him over the tops of his sunnies before he slowly pushes them up onto his head. For one impossible second his expression’s unreadable, blue eyes narrowed against the glare, mouth parted like he’s caught between several possible responses.

This is it. Zoro could say it right now, the words already half-formed behind his teeth: i like hearing you talk because it’s you. because when you light up like that i can’t look away, because i’ve been carrying this for years and it feels too big to keep swallowing down now. because i want you.  He could lean in and close the small distance the path allows, taste the salt on Sanji’s mouth, the faint trace of coffee , and finally do what he’s been fantasising about since Luffy first dragged them into each other’s orbit. Just the two of them, sand under their feet, lunch forgotten between them while he kisses Sanji like he means it, like he’s been meaning it for years.

His gaze drops, unbidden, to Sanji’s mouth and the possibility hangs there, bright and terrifying. Zoro can feel the pull in his chest like gravity shifting, every nerve screaming at him to stop thinking and do something before the moment collapses under its own weight before the old fear crashes in — years of careful distance, of turning every almost into banter, of convincing himself that wanting Sanji this badly was survivable as long as he never said it out loud. What if he’s wrong? What if this brighter, softer Sanji is just the road trip version and next week they go back to circling each other with insults and sideways glances? What if he ruins the fragile thing they already have?

He swallows hard, the words dying in his throat. The kiss stays imaginary. “Wasn’t that weird.”

Sanji’s mouth twitches, like he knows exactly how close they just came to tipping over an edge. “You asked the guy at the shop if squid count as fish.”

“I wanted to know.”

“No, you didn’t.”

Zoro exhales once through his nose, the almost moment filed away for later mortification and jerks his chin toward the others. “C’mon. Before Luffy eats through the bag.”

That gets Sanji moving again, but the look lingers at the edges of his expression, all sharpened attention, a new kind of awareness that makes the hair on the back of Zoro’s neck stand up. Like Sanji is suddenly cataloging every odd question, every lingering glance, every awkward deflection, and starting to add them up into a picture that makes Zoro’s stomach twist with equal parts dread and stupid, desperate hope. When they finally rejoin their friends Nami takes one look at the two of them and raises a single, perfectly arched eyebrow. Usopp sees the same thing and pulls a face like a man who’s just caught the scent of some excellent and possibly explosive gossip.

Zoro refuses to meet either of their eyes, so they spread lunch out over paper and towels and the little striped umbrella shade. Luffy descends on the chips like a seagull while Nami steals the best potato scallop, unrepentent and by the time they get back in the car the whole group has gone softer around the edges the way it happens sometimes after a good stop. Not everytime: plenty of outings with this lot end in sunburn and arguments and somebody spilling something sticky enough to change the resale value of the vehicle, but this one settles into them nicely. Sharks, lunch, saltwater, sun — something about the sequence has taken the louder corners off everybody’s mood.

The beach stays behind them in flashes of white through the trees as Nami pulls back onto the road, Luffy damp and blissful with Flat Steve tucked under one arm. Usopp has gone pleasantly floppy in the way he always does after food and sun, one knee drawn up, mouth still moving now and then whenever he wakes enough to contribute something before losing the thread. The music’s dropped lower, Nami switching to one of her own playlists, full of guitar lines and steady drums and long breathing spaces between lyrics wide enough for road noise, drowsiness and the kind of dangerous, spiraling thoughts that could wreck a man if he let them.

Somewhere after the servo stop just outside town, the seating arrangement shifts without anyone formally planning it. Luffy nicks a lurid blue sports drink while Nami fetches different snacks. Usopp uses the opportunity to reorganise the chaotic scatter of bags and carefully restore order, When they all climb back in, Sanji, armed with a paper bag of something sweet he claims is for later but will absolutely be declared communal property by sunset, drops straight into the seat beside Zoro like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Zoro, who’d been halfway through fastening his seatbelt, nearly fumbles the damn buckle entirely. His heart slams once, hard, against his ribs like it’s trying to punch its way out because he knows Sanji could’ve taken the window seat or could’ve have climbed into the back with Usopp or could’ve done literally anything else except slide in beside him, close enough that Zoro can already feel the faint heat rolling off his arm.

“What’s wrong with you?” Sanji snorts, “You look like I just decked you in the face.”

“You sat down,” Zoro mutters, the words coming out raw and stupid before he can stop it.

Sanji smirks, clearly bemused. “That’s generally how this works, moss-for-brains.”

Zoro turns his glare to the window instead, jaw locked so tight it aches, pretending the passing scrub is suddenly the most fascinating landscape on earth while his pulse thunders in his ears. From the rearview mirror, Nami’s eyes meet his for a split second and there it is, that bright amusement she gets whenever she senses someone else’s private emotional disaster is about to entertain her for the next hundred kilometres.

The road opens wider ahead, long ribbons of coastal highway unspooling in alternating bands of bright sun and dappled shadow. Bushland presses close on one side; occasional glittering glimpses of the ocean appear on the other, silver blue and flattening toward the horizon. The car hums steadily beneath them, air conditioning finally settling from desperate necessity into something kinder and cooler.

Sanji cracks one of the coffees and hands it over without looking, like it’s automatic, and Zoro takes it without thinking, hyper aware of how sitting in the same row collapses the entire world down to the small, electric radius of Sanji’s body beside him. The faint heat radiating from his arm through the thin layers of shirt, the line of his thigh angled just close enough that every subtle sway or turn of the road threatens contact  — and Zoro’s brain is already mapping every possible point of impact like it’s a tactical briefing. The smell of him is sharper here, impossible to ignore, all salt from the beach and sunscreen and the iced coffee he’s drinking. There should be some kind of legal waiver for the way Zoro’s heart’s currently trying to claw its way out of his chest.

“They absolutely do,” Usopp’s insisting from the back. “You saw how they coordinated around those chips like a tactical unit.”

“That’s not organised crime,” Nami snorts, dry and immediate. “That’s basic opportunism with wings.”

“Same thing.”

“No. Different overheads. Different… risk profiles? Sanji, back me up here.”

“Bird mafia,” Luffy declares from the front before punctuating it with enthusiastic machine-gun noises aimed at the window.

Usopp shrieks, scandalised. “Luffy! Don’t shoot the gulls!”

“No, no,” Luffy laughs. “Metaphorically.”

“There is nothing metaphorical about the way you said ‘pew pew pew,’” Nami mutters but her disdain’s interrupted by Luffy’s phone going off and the way Luffy immediately scrabbles for it, nearly dropping poor Flat Steve out the window.

Nami groans. “Put him on speaker so we don’t have to suffer through this twice.”

Law’s voice fills the car instantly, cool and dry and clearly already exhausted by whatever chaos he can hear bleeding through the line. “Why is it always this loud when you answer?”

“We’re on a road trip!” Luffy announces proudly.

There’s a long pause before, with the heavy silence of a man staring up at the sky and seeing only future migraines, Law exhales. “You’re on a what?”

“A road trip,” Nami clarifies. “Down the coast.”

“With all of you?”

“Yes.”

Zoro can practically feel Law mentally reconsidering every life choice he’s made since he met them. “What happened to the group holiday we planned next month?”

Usopp leans forward between the seats. “This is separate! This is a… let’s say a preliminary chaos event.”

“Oh, that’s reassuring.”

Luffy’s grinning at the phone like Law can see the expression. “We’ll be back in a few days. You should come meet us.”

“Absolutely not.” There’s another stilted pause before Law adopts a tone that’d probably sound indifferent to a stranger, but reads as completely horrifyingly transparent to anyone who’s ever watched Law stand within a metre of Luffy. “Where are you right now?”

Nami gives the town name and Law makes a thoughtful noise that is Not interested, obviously. He’s definitely not calculating distances or mentally checking his own schedule. Not a single soul in the car is fooled except maybe Luffy, whose smile is so bright and pleased it feels almost private.

Sanji shifts slightly beside Zoro, close enough that their shoulders brush, grining. “Disgusting.”

“Shut up,” Luffy says on pure instinct, then immediately brightens again. “Traffy says he might come for dinner.”

“He did not say it like that,” Usopp points out warily, “He’s also, like. Still here.”

“He means it like that,” Luffy replies confidently.

Law sighs through the speaker with long suffering resignation. Nami mutes the call just long enough to say, dry as dust: “See? This is what it looks like when people are obvious.” She’s looking at the road when she says it and no-one answers, but Zoro would like to die all the same.

Usopp coughs suspiciously into his fist. Sanji, somehow, remains focused on mocking Law and Luffy instead of noticing the way the entire car’s muttering about layered subtext. After Law ends the call the mood settles again, softer still. The coastal road stretches ahead like it has all the time in the world, the music low and warm, everyone sun tired and salt crusted enough that sharp edges have blurred into something almost fond. Luffy has started nodding off in the front seat with Flat Steve tucked under his chin like a security blanket while Usopp drifts in and out of consciousness, occasionally surfacing long enough to point vaguely out the window and mumble: “That tree looks cool,” before sinking back under. Nami drives with the same steady, unbothered competence, occasionally drumming lightly against her thigh in time with the music. Every so often her eyes flick to the rearview mirror, and when they catch Zoro’s, they linger just a fraction too long.

Zoro looks resolutely out the window, jaw tight, pretending the passing scenery is suddenly riveting. Beside him, Sanji keeps talking for a while longer about drifts through his sun drowsy brain. He rants briefly and with genuine feeling about someone’s mullet and complains about the slow death of proper sandwiches in this country. He asks Nami whether the next stop might actually have decent coffee and pokes Usopp (who may or may not be awake) to confirm if he actually bought that novelty fudge two towns ago or just claimed he did. Then, because the universe has clearly decided Zoro hasn’t suffered enough for one day, Sanji turns toward him and asks, voice lazy and warm: “You competing in white or navy?”

Zoro looks over, confused. “Uh. Either?”

“You’ve got a better cut in navy. Cleaner line across the shoulders.”

The words land low and strange in Zoro’s chest, the idea that Sanji’s noticed the line of his body in different uniforms enough to have formed an opinion about it. He frowns. “You sound invested.”

Sanji shrugs one shoulder, easy. “You’re the one doing all the work. Might as well not look stupid while you’re at it.”

Every casual remark from Sanji today feels like it’s been quietly dismantling the careful compartments Zoro’s kept this thing in. He looks down at his own broad hands, at the empty lemonade bottle in his lap, at the small scratch on one knuckle from helping drive the beach umbrella stake earlier. Anywhere except directly at Sanji, because if he does he might say something stupidly honest. The music shifts to something even softer, the road smooths out and the car fills with that particular communal quiet that only happens among people who know each other so well that silence doesn’t feel like work. Beside him, finally, Sanji winds down, posture loosening by degrees until his head tips back once against the seat, then forward, then sideways as he fights sleep on principle. THe car takes one long, easy bend in the road and Sanji’s shoulder brushes his before settling against him properly, warm and solid and catastrophically light all at once.

Zoro doesn’t move and, before he knows it, ten minutes have passed and Sanji’s body has gone loose in that rare, unconscious way it never does when he’s awake, all the usual sharp edges melted away. Mouth softened and forehead smooth, heavy and warm. Zoro stays there, frozen, with one hand white-knuckling on his own thigh, experiencing the purest, stupidest, most terrifying happiness of his entire adult life while his brain has a nice little spiral.

Nami says, very quietly: “Zoro.”

He nearly jumps out of his skin. “Don’t,” he hisses instantly, the only available response when his entire nervous system’s already on red alert.

“I said your name.” When she speaks this time it is in a furious stage whisper honed by years of yelling at idiots in dangerous situations without technically raising her voice. “You have to tell him.”

For one second he genuinely thinks he might’ve hallucinated the sentence from sheer stress. He whispers back, hoarse with disbelief: “Are you nuts?”

Nami’s shoulders move in the smallest possible shrug. “Look at this.”

Zoro specifically doesn’t look down because if he actually lets himself focus on Sanji’s head resting on his shoulder he’ll have to strangle something, and it’ll probably be Sanji. “Yeah, thanks, I can see.”

Nami snorts, voice clipped with the force of someone trying not to physically shake sense into him. “People don’t just fall asleep on people they hate, Zoro.”

“He doesn’t hate me,” he says blankly because that, at least, he knows to be true. They might bicker and fight and trip each other up and cause mayhem but they’ve been in the same friendship group for years now.

Nami’s expression in the mirror does something deeply offensive, halfway between exasperation and fondness. “Why won’t you tell him?”

“Because —” He glances at Sanji despite himself and drops his voice even lower. “Because I’m not doing that on a fucking road trip.”

Nami makes a tiny sound of pure incredulity. “Why?”

Zoro stares at her, a thousand reasons on his tongue but none of them feel good enough once dragged into the light. He thinks about how if he tells Sanji and it goes badly, they still have days left in this car, booked accommodation and the long road home to survive. Conversely, if it goes well he might actually die on impact and then what? If he says it out loud then the thing leaves the safe, contained space inside his chest and enters the real world. He can’t, not while some part of him’s still convinced that naming it will shatter the exact fragile shape of what they already have.

Nami waits through the silence before she says, softly and with deadly accuracy: “Because you’re chicken.”

Zoro looks away to the window where the coast flashes by in blue strips, gum trees, and white fences. His reflection in the glass looks as miserable and cornered as he feels. “No shit.”

There’s no point lying to Nami when she’s this close to the bone; she’d only get meaner. “He’s literally asleep on you.”

“That doesn’t mean he wants — anything.”

“No,” Nami allows. “But it’s not nothing.”

He exhales through his nose, careful not to disturb the sleeping man against him or the ruckus going on inside his own skull. “He dates women.”

Nami’s eyebrows lift in the mirror with pure, unimpressed patience and the weary acknowledgment that this is the hill Zoro has chosen to die on after everything. She checks the side mirror, smoothly overtakes a slower car, quiet just long enough that Zoro starts to hope she might actually let it drop. “So? You know bisexuality exists, right?”

He can’t respond to that without waking Sanji through sheer force of humiliation. His ears feel hot, chest is too tight. The weird feeling that’s been simmering all day surges higher because Nami’s dragging things into the open that he’s spent years keeping locked down. She keeps going anyway, because there’s blood in the water and she’s never been one to ignore it when a friend is drowning in his own stupidity.

“Seriously, your entire strategy was… what, exactly? Assume he’s straight until proven otherwise and suffer to death? In my car?”

Zoro’s jaw tightens so hard it aches. “When you say it like that —”

“When I say it accurately?” Nami’s voice softens, threading careful reason through the quiet car. “Listen… he’s been different lately, you know he has. I’m not saying he’s definitely into you, but I am saying he might not react as negatively as you’re convinced he will. He might… he might surprise you. He hasn’t dated anyone in months, Zoro. And the way he looks at you when he thinks no-one’s watching? That’s not just being pissed at you anymore. It hasn’t been for a while.”

Zoro stares at the passing coastline, all blue water and white sand while his heart tries to beat its way out of his chest. Sanji’s head is still warm and heavy on his shoulder, breaths slow and even and the panic’s still there, loud and vicious, but Nami’s words have cracked something open. A sliver of terrifying hope slipping through the fear, wider than before. “Yeah? What if you’re wrong?”

Nami’s voice is steady. “And what if I’m right?”

Zoro doesn’t answer, can’t quite find the words, but for the first time all day, the spiral feels a little less like a free fall and a little more like standing on solid ground, terrifying and uncertain, but may not entirely doomed.

x

By the time they reach the Entrance the day’s gone honeyed gold around the edges.

The road drops them into town past water and boats and low strips of shops painted in cheerful weathered colours, the kind of touristy place that looks almost too quaint until you’re actually in it and realise it’s also chaotic as hell.

It is, Zoro thinks as Nami parallel parks with murder in her eyes, much busier than a place this cute has any right to be.

Usopp leans between the seats to peer out at the waterfront. “Ugh. Why are there so many pelicans?”

Down by the water’s edge a small crowd has gathered around several impressively large pelicans and one suspiciously cheerful volunteer in a branded polo shirt holding a bait bucket. Sanji, who has gone quietly intent in exactly the way he does around anything with fins or feathers, is already halfway out of the car by the time Zoro gets his door open.

“C’mon,” he says brightly, “If one of you idiots scares a pelican on purpose I’m pushing you into the water.”

Luffy’s grin broadens dangerously. “What if the pelican scares me first?”

“That’ll be justice.”

The group moves with that loose, unplanned cohesion that only comes after years of ending up in the same places on purpose. Nami falls naturally to the front because she’s the only one who can cut through a crowd without becoming part of the problem, Luffy slightly left while Usopp lingers near Zoro, half from friendship and half because he trusts Zoro to physically intervene if a bird half the size of a person attempts violence. Sanji drifts ahead and then back and then ahead again, always somehow oriented toward the water like a compass needle.

Zoro’s attention keeps snagging on him anyway, Nami’s words flashing through him in fragments, refusing to settle, urging him to tell Sanji. To kiss him. At least do something. Surely three years is enough, for god’s sake.

The pelicans are absurd, big and ancient-looking, with the kind of deliberate patience that suggests they know full well humans will gather, coo, point and eventually hand over fish. Luffy, predictably, loves them. He listens with starry eyes as the volunteer starts talking through facts about pelican throat pouches and cooperative feeding and their protected status.

Zoro, standing close enough to feel the warmth coming off Sanji in the cooling afternoon air, guesses wildly. “You… like birds, too?”

Sanji’s mouth curves into a small, private smile, brief and real enough to catch and hold. “You’re learning, Moss. It’s almost cute.”

The words land like a spark against dry tinder; Zoro’s stomach flips.

The feeding itself is ridiculous and loud and weirdly graceful all at once. Beaks snapping, wings shifting, fish flashing silver in the volunteer’s hands. Luffy laughs like he’s at a fireworks show, absolutely delighted and bamboozled and in awe of all of it. Sanji watches all of it with his arms folded and his whole face open in those tiny involuntary ways. By the time they cross from the waterfront over toward the amusement park, the tension in Zoro has gone from a private ache to an active storm. The park itself is exactly the kind of thing a tourist town would build half out of nostalgia and half out of optimism: bright painted fencing, lights already coming on even though the sun hasn’t fully set, rides for children and rides for teenagers pretending not to be terrified, stalls full of overpriced games and at the centre of it all a ferris wheel turning slow and white against the darkening sky.

Nami, walking just ahead, glances back at him once and then jerks her head at the ferris wheel, her expression sweet whicjh is how he knows she is absolutely engineering something.

The group mills for a while through the smaller stalls. Luffy wins a plush octopus through sheer probability and cheating but Zoro’s present for almost none of it — all he can think about is ferris wheel and how the way the closer the evening gets the more every interaction with Sanji is starting to feel like prelude. At the ferris wheel, he catches one look at Nami’s face and realises he needs to step in, right now, or she’s going to strongarm into something in front of the whole fucking group.

Zoro turns to Sanji, heart kicking up. “Scared, Curls?”

Sanji snorts. “Of a ferris wheel? Are you projecting? Aw, you need someone to hold your hand?” The flirtation is light and teasing, the kind Sanji tosses out without thinking, probably, but it still lands straight in Zoro’s chest and twists. The uncertainty that he’s imagining all of this burns hotter than ever.

He points at the loading gate before he can overthink it. “C’mon, then.”

“This is the worst invite I’ve ever had.” Sanji mutters but there’s no real bite in it. Instead, his gaze lingers a second longer, something unreadable flickering behind the usual sharpness before he shrugs. “Fine. Wouldn’t want the big bad swordsman looking weak in front of the pelicans.”

Zoro’s pulse spikes so hard he feels it in his teeth. Usopp, from behind them, makes a noise so obviously gleeful that Zoro doesn’t have to turn to know exactly what his face looks like. Nami says, with angelic innocence: “How sweet. Have fun!”

Zoro flips her off without looking and then that’s it, they’re in the gondola together, just the two of them, the wheel beginning its slow, inexorable ascent into the twilight as the park drops away slowly beneath them.

For the first few seconds, neither of them says much. The town spreads out in widening perspective, all  strings of lights along the waterfront and the dark ribbon of road they came in on, the park glowing below like somebody spilled a carnival and decided to keep it. Beyond all of that is the water, vast and dim, holding the very last edges of the sky. Sanji sits with one arm slung over the back of the bench and a knee angled toward the middle with the sort of ease Zoro has learned is only partly natural and partly performed out of long habit,  a shield that’s become comfortable enough to wear without thinking.

Zoro should say something, he thinks. A flirt. A test. A line cast out over strange water to see what moves underneath it. He’s going to tell Sanji if it kills him and if Sanji rejects him, well. Zoro will just have to suck it up and deal with it. He’s survived worse, maybe. Surely. He’ll go back to the house he shares with Luffy and Ace and keep training, keep existing in the same space, keep calling him names like nothing ever happened. He’s had three years of practice swallowing this feeling, god knows he can swallow one more permanent version. He tries very hard not to hope, though, because hope is dangerous. Hope makes the fall worse. He claers his throat anyway. “You’ve been talking about stuff all day.”

Sanji laughs once, surprised. “Okay?”

“I… noticed.”

“Is this your attempt at conversation, Moss?”

Zoro glares at the darkening view outside rather than admit he deserves that. Besides the embarrassment, though, there’s something else, something soft, because Sanji’s tone isn’t cutting tonight. Still rude, yes  — he’d probably become physically ill if he let an insult free sentence live too long in mixed company. But there’s a low, unwary warmth to it, this time.

“I like hearing about the sea,” he says quietly. From up here, the town seems less busy, the pier just a dark suggestion by the water now. The ocean beyond is one huge breathing shape under the bruising sky and Sanji stares out at it for a few minutes before finally speaking.

“Zeff thinks I should just stick with cooking.” The sentence lands strangely, not because it’s shocking but because it isn’t. Sanji talks about cooking all the damn time, lives in it. He loves it with the same precision and intensity he applies to any other subject that gets his full attention, but here, right now, his tone’s too stilted for a casual mention. Some instinct in Zoro,  rare and almost always correct, tells him not to rush the silence here. Sure enough, after a few minutes Sanji exhales and continues. “He’s not pushy. Just… he thinks I’d be good enough to really do something with it, you know? Like I could actually make something of myself if I stopped fucking around with side interests.” The self-deprecation is quiet, almost offhand, but it hits Zoro all the same.

“You would,” he says at once, the words out before he can weigh them.

Sanji glances at him, something so unguarded in the look that Zoro has to grip the edge of the seat with one hand just to stay inside his own body. “At cooking? Obviously, idiot. But I keep thinking about switching or adding or… I don’t really know.”

The wheel carries them up farther, then pauses briefly to load passengers below. Their gondola sways once in the wind and settles and Zoro’s confession — his bright, frightened plan to kiss him, to test the waters, do something — slides sideways and then drops clean out of reach.

“I love cooking,” Sanji continues quietly, frustration in it now not with Zoro but with himself and the whole architecture of wanting more than one future. “I love feeding people and I know I’m good at it. I like making something and watching somebody’s face change when they taste it and realise it’s exactly what they wanted. But then I… I think about the ocean and it feels like I’m already halfway somewhere else.” He laughs under his breath, small and rough. “It’s stupid.”

“No,” Zoro says immediately, sharper than he intends, instinctive and automatic, the same way he’s always called Sanji out when he turns that knife on himself. He can’t help it; he never could. “It’s not stupid.”

Sanji doesn’t seem to hear him, or maybe he does and just keeps going because he’s finally in motion and not stopping now. “It’s just… I don’t know. It gets under my skin, always has. Since I was a kid, before the Baratie. Before anything, really.” His hand lifts in a useless little gesture towards the world below, like somewhere out there is the right shape of the feeling.

Zoro keeps absolutely still.

“Then Zeff taught me fish,” Sanji says, mouth curving faintly. “Not like textbooks but real, actual fish. Freshness, species, how to handle them, what people ruin by being stupid. And then I just kept reading. Now I’m twenty-two and trying to decide if I wanna spend the rest of my life in kitchens or in labs or on boats or some combination of all three and every option feels like giving up the others.”

Zoro had been prepared, vaguely, for soft. For a confessional mood, maybe. For some smaller opening he could answer with the thing he’s been building in his chest all day. He wasn’t prepared for this precise kind of intimacy: Sanji placing his future in the space between them and trusting Zoro not to mishandle it. The kiss he had imagined suddenly feels so small, something taken rather than something answered properly. He keeps his voice careful. “You don’t have to give either one up.”

Sanji snorts softly. “That sounds fake.”

“I’m serious.”

“Well, that’s worrying.”

“I mean it.”Sanji goes still in that tiny listening way he has when something matters and he hasn’t yet decided whether to trust it and Zoro hesitates, knowing full well that words are not his best tools. He tries his best, anyway. “You love food, you love the sea. Those aren’t opposite things.”

Sanji glances over at him, impossible to read all at once. Tired and soft, guarded only by habit. Wanting, maybe, though not in the way Zoro had been planning for. Wanting to be seen and understood and taken seriously.

“You don’t talk about cooking like it’s just work. You talk about it like…” He searches for the shape and almost laughs at himself for trying. “Like it matters morally or something. And the fish stuff? That’s the same. Different language, maybe, but same thing. You’d be good at either. Probably both, you’re insane enough to do it properly.”

The last line makes Sanji laugh, for real this time. “Cheers, big ears,” he says dryly, “Very touching.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Unfortunately.” He’s smiling now, though, and not with that knife edged one he uses when he’s deflecting praise because receiving it cleanly would expose too much and Zoro — who had come up here ready to blow his own life up by force if necessary, ready to resign himself to rejection and just deal with it — sits across from him in the swinging dark and tries to figure out where the hell they’re meant to go next. For a minute they just sit there, suspended over lights and water and the whole ridiculous glowing coast until Sanji tips his head back against the window and looks outward. “It’s pretty from up here.”

Zoro looks at him instead of the sea and says the only thing he can say that still feels honest inside all the wanting he’s swallowed for later. “Yeah, it is.”

x

The Airbnb’s luxurious only in the way holiday houses sometimes are by accident: generous rooms, a decent back verandah, mismatched lamps and overwashed towels and, most importantly, a pool.

Usopp, who is carrying in two bags and Flat Steve at the same time, nearly trips over the threshold with glee while Sanji disappears in the kitchen, already identifying its weak points and storage flaws and stove capacity. Zoro follows more slowly, bag over one shoulder and skin still holding the long warm ache of the day.

The place arranges itself around them in minutes, one of the things Zoro likes best about this group and one of the things he’d never say out loud without being physically coerced: they’re extremely good at making temporary places feel inhabited. Bags get dropped in corners, music comes on low from somebody’s phone. Nami claims the best room for her and Usopp and no-one bothers challenging it because life’s short and, truthfully, none of them have a death wish. Luffy runs through the bedrooms while Usopp discovers a stack of old board games in a cupboard and gasps.

Sanji opens the fridge, looks inside and makes a face of such immediate offense that Zoro laughs before he can stop himself. “The hell kind of fruit bowl is this?”

Usopp pokes his head into the kitchen. “Bad fruit bowl?”

“Indefensible fruit bowl. Criminal, even.” Sanji leans one hip against the bench with a bowl full of peaches in his hands and grins. “You lot still got room?”

The response comes in a ragged, overlapping chorus of yes and it becomes, in minutes, a whole production. Sanji slices the peaches into clean, soft halves while Luffy hovers nearby like a starving ghost and gets his hand slapped away twice for trying to steal one raw before they migrate the operation out to the little gas barbecue out the back. The pool’s glowing in a clean rectangle of impossible blue and, beyond the fence, the neighbourhood’s quiet, other houses occupied, other groups drifting through their own versions of the evening, everyone briefly convinced life is simpler near the sea.

Zoro ends up at the barbecue because god knows he always ends up wherever Sanji is if no-one actively prevents it. He grabs the tongs when Sanji needs them, adjusts the flame when it’s asked and tries very hard not to stare at the way Sanji’s shoulders move under his shirt while he brushes the cut peaches with melted butter and sugar and lays them down on the barbeque. The smell of the sugar melting hits almost immediately, so sweet it’s nearly acrid and Luffy makes a noise no human being should make in public. “Whoa.”

“You’ve said that about eight times today,” Nami scoffs, appearing on the verandah with a glass of wine in hand and all the serenity of having finally reached the stage of the trip where the group is fed and housed and thus not in mortal danger. Probably.

“That’s because life is whoa!”

“Life is peaches,” Usopp says dreamily, perched on the railing.

Sanji points at him with the tongs like he’s awarding a medal. “Finally, some intelligence in this house.”

They eat the peaches standing up on the verandah or sitting in the mismatched outdoor chairs around the glass table, chortling over the little cartoon fish on the cork coasters that have clearly been picked up from some bargain tourist bin. There’s nothing to serve them with, because none of them had the foresight to pick up ice cream but the first bite’s so delicious it doesn’t even matter. It’s just warm peach collapsing under teeth, the edges caramelised and sugar gone dark and sticky. Luffy nearly cries about it, until the conversation slides in the aimless, perfect way only tired groups can manage after a full day together. Usopp starts complaining about the poetry slam he signed up for next month and then clearly regrets confessing it because now Luffy wants to know whether poetry slams involve actual hitting.

“Emotionally,” Nami remarks dryly. It’s fair: she’s probably the one that’s had to listen to Usopp practice the most.

“That sounds… worse.”

“It is worse,” Usopp bemoans. “Last time someone read a piece about their ex and the whole room started crying. I’m not prepared for that level of commitment.”

Sanji licks a streak of peach off the back of his thumb. “D’you have a poem ready?”

Usopp groans. “Parts of one? Does that count?”

That kicks off another round of overlapping nonsense and, in the middle of it, Nami’s phone lights up. She glances at the screen and answers on speaker without asking. “You surviving without us?”

Robin’s calm, amused voice fills the night. “The silence is suspicious. How’s the chaos level?”

“Peach-induced delirium,” Sanji calls out.

“I’m jealous,” Robin says, and they can all hear the smile in her voice. “I found the most charming little wine bar.”

Franky’s voice suddenly booms through the speaker in the background. “Yo! We’re going to some karaoke spot down the road later! Tell Sanji I found a place that does grilled octopus. We’re doing this again next month!”

Sanji laughs. “Tell him I’m not cooking for him if he sends karaoke voice notes to chat.”

It’s stupid and easy and full of the low, constant affection. Robin and Franky discuss more of their day until Luffy points at the pool with his spoon and hopeful eyes. Somehow — through momentum, through poor collective judgment, through the simple fact that all of them are a little buzzed and a little softened by the day and also unwilling to be the one boring person in the room — ten minutes later they’re all changing into whatever counts as swimwear and meeting by the pool under the little outdoor lights.

The water’s delicious warm, a nice little slap that steals the breath for half a second and wakes every nerve like a live current running straight through the body. Luffy cannonballs so hard the splash reaches the verandah railing and nearly takes out a potted plant; the wave he creates probably registers on some distant seismic monitor. Zoro dives cleanly from the side, letting the water close over his head in one long, silent rush. For a single perfect second everything goes still beneath the surface, jsut a muffled world and blue light and the pressure of water against skin and muscle. He opens his eye to see the others above him as broken luminous shapes: kicking legs, flailing arms, a hand slicing through the glow like a blade. He surfaces into noise and chlorinated night and the immediate impact of Luffy slamming into his back with all the grace of a dropped fridge. Usopp, once fully dragged in, discovers he can’t resist retaliatory splashing and declares total war, wielding a pool noodle like a bloody lance. And Sanji…

Sanji’s gold where the sun didn’t reach him and dark where it did, leaner than Zoro remembers until the body’s actually in front of him again,  all long clean lines and quiet muscle that only shows when the usual layers of clothing are stripped away. His hair darkens immediately with water, curling at the ends in a way that should be illegal, like something tailored to ruin Zoro’s entire life in one slow motion glance. Thankfully, Zoro’s staring is disrupted by getting absolutely slammed by Luffy, never one to miss an opening. He dunks Luffy back in retaliation, holding him down just long enough for a dramatic bubble scream before he’s shoved by Sanji hard enough to send him backward into the deeper end. He comes up spluttering laughter and chlorine. “Asshole!”

“You started breathing near me!” Sanji fires back, grin sharp and bright, water streaming down his face in rivulets that catch the lights like liquid sunshine.

“That’s not a move!”

“It is if I say it is!”

Luffy crashes into both of them from the side, some type of guided missile, nearly taking all three under and sending water everywhere. Nami yells from the shallows and Usopp, clinging to the edge with one arm while somehow keeping Flat Steve dry under the other, provides commentary like some kind of deranged sports announcer: “And there goes the mossy one, ladies and theybies —  oh no, he’s down! The curly brow has him in a headlock! This is unprecedented! The crowd’s losing their minds!”

Wrestling in water is nothing but contact, forearms sliding against forearms and hands gripping shoulders and a knee knocking against his thigh underwater where no-one can see. Sanji grabs the back of Zoro’s neck to shove him under while laughing low in his throat, letting go before it turns into anything real and each point of contact goes through Zoro like a livewire straight to the spine. At one point Luffy gets both arms wrapped around Sanji’s waist from behind and starts trying to drag him toward the deep end and Sanji tries to jostle him off to no avail. “Let go of me!”

“Join me in the trench!”

“There’s no trench!”

“There can be if we believe hard enough!”

Zoro catches Luffy under one arm and hauls him sideways with enough force to break the hold so that Sanji can twist free, spinning with the momentum and a laugh, before colliding straight into Zoro, an accident, nothing except for how Zoro feels every bit of it. Sanji’s hand lands on his shoulder first to steady himself, fingers splaying warm and firm against wet skin, other hand catching at Zoro’s side under the water and Zoro nearly loses the next five seconds of his life to that alone. The press of Sanji’s chest against his own, the slide of bare skin on bare skin, the way Sanji’s breath catches for half a heartbeat. Sanji’s mouth open on half a breath, half a laugh, his eyes bright from the lights and from the adrenaline, from whatever vicious joy he takes in fighting for fun. This is where Zoro should move, he knows that. He shove the other man away, say something insulting, turn the collision back into stupid horseplay before the air between them changes temperature and everyone notices. Instead he freezes for one beat too long and, like the idiot Nami’s been correctly calling him all these years, lets his hand come up to brush away a wet curl stuck to the side of Sanji’s face  — quick, light, catastrophic. It’s such a small thing but it might as well be a scream for how quickly Sanji freezes.

Everything narrows to this single bright, electric point: the pool light shivering across the water’s surface, Sanji’s hand still resting at his side underwater, thumb pressing just slightly into the muscle of Zoro’s waist like he forgot to let go. The damp heat of his cheek under that brief touch and the fact that Zoro has just reached for him in the open, in front of their friends, with no excuse worth a damn. Sanji’s eyes flick down, just for a second, just long enough to find Zoro’s mouth. It happens so fast Zoro almost thinks he imagined it but he didn’t, he knows he didn’t, because he knows what he’s been living inside for way too long to mistake that look now. He knows the shape of attention dragged lower by pure instinct, knows the brief, naked flash of it. The almost. The spark that jumps the gap between them and lands smoking in Zoro’s chest.

oh, he thinks. oh, fuck.

He has a chance. The realiseation hits like a second wave, warmer and more terrifying than the first.

Luffy slams bodily into both of them a second later and the moment shatters like glass: Sanji jerks back at once, turning the movement into renewed combat with impressive speed. He grabs Luffy around the middle and hauls him down into the water with a triumphant shout while Zoro stands there, entire world shifted. “Got you, bastard!”

“There’s no honour in this pool!”

“There’s no honour anywhere!”

The others keep going and Zoro throws himself back into the wrestling because what the hell else can he do at this stage? The whole word’s just unbearable in the best possible way and by the time they finally stagger out of the pool — hair wet, skin chilled and goosebumped, towels raided from the bathroom cupboard, the night fully down around the yard  — Zoro feels flayed open by hope. It is, he realises dimly, far worse than despair. Despair at least had habits he knew how to live with but hope is feral. It gets into the blood, makes everything feel newly charged and newly possible and newly capable of loss.

They drift back onto the verandah in clumps, wrapped in towels and still arguing over who cheated, who splashed the mos and whether Flat Steve needs therapy after witnessing so many war crimes. Luffy wants instant noodles for post-swim strength, which they don’t have, so Usopp resorts to designating himself as official movie chooser. Sanji, toweling his hair rough and careless, glances at Zoro once across the verandah just once, but this time the look lingers  longer than it should. Usopp, Nami and Luffy bundle inside, leaving wet footprints tracking across the verandah like evidence at a crime scene and towels slung over shoulders, hair dripping onto the floor in steady little taps, the air conditioning slamming into damp skin hard enough to raise a chorus of simultaneous complaints.

“It has narrative integrity,” Usopp insists, voice cracking with theatrical conviction.

“It has a frog on a bike,” Nami deadpans but there’s a tired edge to it, like she’s finally found that sweet pocket of respite the trip was planned for.

Luffy grins. “Put the frog on!”

Sanji sighs. “You do Muppets, I’m cleaning the barbecue before the sugar carbonises and takes my soul with it.”

“Leave it,” Nami calls, already sinking into the couch like she owns the entire house.

Sanji gives her a look that suggests he’d rather set himself on fire than wake up to a sticky grill plate and the ghost of burnt peach residue. “And wake up to that abomination? I’d rather die.”

“That can be arranged,” Zoro mutters on pure reflex, the words out before his brain catches up and Sanji snorts, short and familiar and edged with something that might be normal, but doesn’t answer. He just gathers his supplies and heads back out to the verandah like someone marching to a private execution they’ve chosen themselves. Everybody else keeps moving inward, oblivious: Luffy cannonballs into the couch cushions, Usopp already arguing with the remote while Nami vanishes to change, threatening death to anyone who encroaches on her side of the couch.

Zoro follows by reflex, one step and then two, before he stops in a violent halt, body whirling almost before his mind catches up.

He can’t do this. He can’t walk into that living room, drop onto the couch under a shared blanket and pretend to give a single shit about singing puppets while the pool moment keeps slamming into him on repeat: Sanji freezing mid-breath, eyes dropping straight to Zoro’s mouth with that raw, unguarded burst of attention, the second where something electric and impossible had cracked open between them before the world had snapped back to loud and stupid and safe. He’s spent the last hour trying to bury it, trying to convince himself it was nothing but the heat of the water, the sugar rush, the late hour, his own pathetic projection. He’s told himself not to build cathedrals out of one look, not to let hope metastasise into hallucination but.

But what if he hadn’t imagined it? What if Sanji had looked at him — really looked at him — with that sharp, startled hunger and wanted him back for one fractured second?

And what if Zoro does nothing?

What if he lets the night close over it like nothing happened, lets tomorrow roll in with breakfast and road trip banter and their lives slotting back into the same careful orbit around that one livewire they both refuse to touch? He knows himself too well: it’d become another unkillable memory, polished bright by years of repetition, one more thing he carries in silence while the swords at his hip stays sharp and his mouth stays shut. Years of it. Years of watching Sanji flirt with everyone else, cook for everyone else, exist in the same space as him without ever crossing the line again.

Fuck that.

He turns on his heel and heads back out before the panic can talk him down, to where the verandah has gone quiet, the house noise muffled behind glass. The pool lights throw blue ripples up the walls, an artscape for the insects humming in the garden and the low hiss of the pool cleaner.

Sanji’s at the barbecue, hair still damp enough to curl at the nape. He’s scrubbed most of the peach residue away and is attacking the plate with a focus that borders on religious, shoulders tight, jaw set like this small war’s the only thing keeping him from thinking about anything else. Water still beads along the line of his spine, catching the deck light in tiny glints as the muscles in his back shift with every scrub, lean and defined and always, always unfairly distracting. He clearly hears the door, keeping his voice a little too casual. “Forget your dignity in there, Mossy?”

Zoro’s stomach flips hot and then cold, a full bodied lurch because, sure, Sanji sounds norma; enough to the untrained ear, but there’s a thread of something underneath, extra air in the sarcasm, a slight overcare in the drawl, like he’s reading from a script he wrote five minutes ago and is already regretting. His shoulders are too rigid; the scrub brush moves in short, jerky strokes instead of the usual smooth rhythm. Tension, raw and electric, rolls off him in waves because he must know. He fucking knows why Zoro’s back out here and is deflecting so hard it’s almost painful to watch.

“Came to help,” Zoro says and, god, it sounds just as stupid out loud as it did in his head.

Sanji finally glances over, the deck light catching the sharp line of his cheekbone and the wet shine at his temple, the faint flush that might be from the barbecue or might be something else entirely. For one heartbeat his expression is unreadable. “With cleaning.”

“Yeah.”

“You?”

“Yeah.”

Sanji turns back to the barbecue but not before Zoro catches the way his fingers flex white-knuckled around the brush handle. “Truly, nature is healing.”

Each step closer feels like stepping on thin ice over deep water, every instinct shouting that this could end everything or start it, and he has no map either way and that’s the worst part. In the pool he’d had the ghost of one: follow the pull, don’t let it die unspoken. Now it’s just him and Sanji half dressed and damp and close enough that Zoro can smell the chlorine on his skin and the entire thing has become terrifyingly, irrevocably real. He pauses at the table hands so desperate for something to do that he grabs the cork backed tourist coaster like it’s a lifeline. “What’s this one?”

Sanji freezes for a beat before he glances over again. “What?”

Zoro lifts the coaster higher, feeling like the world’s biggest idiot and unable to stop. “The… fish.”

Sanji stares at him, the silence stretching like taffy, until it’s awkward and humming. Then, because Sanji is apparently as helpless against fish facts as Zoro is against him, he sets the brush down with a soft huff and steps half a pace closer. His voice is tight. “Christ. Let me see.” It’s the thinnest excuse anyone’s ever come up with, probably, but he leans in anyway, hair falling forward, shoulder brushing Zoro’s arm for a split second before he pulls back like he’s been burned. “Wrasse.”

“Which one?”

“The big one in the middle, idiot.”

Zoro pretends to study it like his life depends on fin detail. “And that one?”

Sanji leans in further, close enough now that Zoro can feel the heat coming off his skin. “Too small.”

“You can’t tell.”

“I can tell it’s too far away.” Sanji’s voice cracks on the last word, just a fraction, but it’s there. He clears his throat. The words hang there, heavier than they have any right to be. Zoro’s heart is hammering so hard it feels like it might crack ribs and this isn’t the clean pre-fight adrenaline he knows how to ride. This is just straight up anxiety, bright and humiliating, lightning under his skin screaming for him to do something or lose this forever.

Sanji hesitates before, slowly — like every step costs him — moving around the barbecue, coming to stand beside Zoro at the table properly. He takes the coaster and their fingers brush and neither of them acknowledges it, but Sanji’s hand trembles once before he steadies it. “This one might be bream,” he mutters, staring down like the print might bite him. “Or some kind of juvenile snapper? The artist’s got no respect for fin detail.”

Zoro’s barely hearing the words anymore: Sanji’s right there, a single drop of water sliding slow down the side of his neck, the clean scent of him filling Zoro’s lungs until there’s no room left for anything else. “Keep going,” he says and his voice comes rough, barely there.

Sanji looks up. That same small, startled look. “About… fish?”

“Yeah.”

“Right.” Sanji sounds like he’s walking on cracking glass. He looks back down, tries again. “Wrasse are… complicated? A lot of them are sequential hermaphrodites, which means — Christ. I can’t see this damn thing properly.”

Zoro moves closer and Sanji doesn’t pull away and that, right there, is all the permission Zoro needs. He reaches out, slow and deliberate and every nerve screaming, to set one hand flat against Sanji’s stomach, until he can feel the muscle jump under his palm when Sanji inhales sharply. The sound punches straight through Zoro like a blade.

The coaster lowers in his grip, voice thin. “Wrasse? I said wrasse, right?”

Zoro’s mouth is dry. “Keep going.”

Sanji’s eyes flutter shut for one heartbeat and when they open again he’s still staring at the stupid coaster like it’s a shield. “Wrasse are… they change sex, okay? Some of them. It’s —” He breaks off, a ragged little laugh escaping. “Yeah, I can’t do this.”

Zoro leans in, hand spreading wider over Sanji’s abdomen, steadying them both before he takes every ounce of courage he’s ever had and all the panic he can’t hide and he lowers his mouth to the side of Sanji’s neck, barely. Just a brush of lips against warm, pulsing skin but Sanji goes completely still, utterly frozen under Zoro’s hand, every muscle wired tight. He inhales, hard and shaky, and the sound shivers down Zoro’s spine.

“Zoro,” he whispers and it’s not a warning or anger. Just his name, blunt and helpless, like it’s been pried out of him. Zoro lifts his head, ready to stop, ready to die on this verandah if that’s what Sanji needs but Sanji’s already moving; he drags Zoro in with a force that feels like years of restraint finally snapping, kissing him like he’s been starving for it. There’s no hesitation there, all the awkward tension from thirty seconds ago exploding into something fierce and certain. He tastes like chlorine and peaches and smoke and Sanji and Zoro makes a sound he’s never heard himself make, low and broken. Sanji kisses him harder, one hand fisting in Zoro’s hair at the nape and the other sliding down his chest like he can’t decide where to touch first. He shoves Zoro back into the table edge, slotting between his thighs with zero gentleness, edge digging into Zoro’s back as the whole thing rattles. A glass tips and rolls off, shattering somewhere unimportant but Zoro’s busy: his hands are everywhere, waist and ribs and the dip of Sanji’s spine, the curve of his ass, pulling him closer and closer. Sanji bites Zoro’s lower lip in response, hard enough to sting, groaning into his mouth.

“Seriously,” Sanji pants, half a laugh and half accusation, voice shredded. “Fish? That was your big play?”

Zoro, lungs burning, heart trying to punch out of his chest, manages: “Worked, didn’t it?”

Sanji makes a strangled sound and bites Zoro’s jaw in retaliation, then drags him back into another kiss, slower this time but no less desperate, like now that the line is obliterated they’re never going back. Zoro makes a helpless sound and Sanji rewards it by pressing his thigh up harder until Zoro’s head drops forward against Sanji’s shoulder, mouth open against warm, damp skin as he rocks into it. The table rattles again under the force of it, another glass nearly going over the edge and Sanji breaks the kiss just far enough to hiss against Zoro’s mouth, hand still fisted in Zoro’s hair to keep him pinned.

“Room,” he rasps, urgent. “Your room, now. Before I decide I don’t care who hears us out here.”

The words hit Zoro like a spark to petrol; he doesn’t trust himself to speak. He just nods once, sharp and desperate, and lets Sanji grab his hand, dragging him toward the sliding door. Sanji’s other hand stays possessive on Zoro’s hip the whole way down the hallway, fingers slipping just under the waistband, keeping Zoro half-dazed and following every step.

x

He wakes slowly, which is unusual enough on its own to register before anything else does; he’s not a slow-waking person by nature. He surfaces hard and clean from sleep like a diver breaking water, body immediately accounted for, exits mapped, light sources noted, where-am-i answered within a single breath. Years of training and too many mornings in unfamiliar rooms have built the habit into muscle memory but now? Now, consciousness arrives in layers. Warmth first, the kind that has weight and shape and breath to it, and then the bed. The room’s dim around the edges, curtains not quite meeting to stop the morning light from streaming through in pale bands across the far wall. He can hear muffled movement elsewhere in the house and pipes, maybe. Somebody opening and shutting a cupboard. Luffy’s voice somewhere very far away, so not a direct threat just yet.

Then the verandah, the coaster, the fucking fish, his hand on Sanji’s stomach, that first impossible kiss, the frantic stumbling path from outside to here, all of it somehow both desperate and careful, just hands and mouths and the sheer astonishment of being wanted back, with no caution left to hide behind.

Zoro just lies there and stares at Sanji for a minute, half turned toward him under the sheet with one arm crooked loosely over the pillow. Hair a beautiful mess, mouth soft in sleep, bare shoulder and collarbone warm in the pale light and Zoro wants, selfishly and with full awareness of the selfishness, one quiet second of this that belongs only to morning and not to panic or adrenaline or the fear that Sanji might wake up and decide last night was just a heat-of-the-moment thing.

He reaches out and brushes a strand of hair off Sanji’s forehead, freezing when Sanji makes a noise and shifts. He lets his hand settle at the back of Sanji’s neck anyway, tracking Saji’s exhale before, finally, sliding an arm around him. Sanji presses into him with the sleepy, heedless trust of someone not fully awake yet and so not resisting where he lands, legs tangling loosely under the sheets. Sanji waking happens in stages, too — one hand flexes against the sheet between them before his eyes open, slow and heavy, fixing on Zoro’s face from too close, probably. “Hi.”

Zoro’s mouth does something idiotic around the word before he can stop it. “Hey?”

Sanji’s gaze drifts down, not meaningfully at first, just orienting, taking stock of the evidence highlighting exactly how close they are and exactly how little distance remains to be plausibly reclaimed after last night. The corner of his mouth lifts, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Very clingy in the mornings, Mossy.”

Zoro tightens his arm by a fraction on pure instinct. “You hate it?”

“No,” Sanji returns immediately, croaky with sleep but honest enough to knock something loose under Zoro’s ribs. Sanji, however, has never been able to survive too much unguarded truth in a row without skewing the angle.“But I reserve the right to mock you for it.”

“Yeah,” Zoro mutters. “Fair.”

Sanji laughs a little and it’s nice. Zoro strokes his thumb once, absentmindedly, at the side of Sanji’s neck, feeling how still Sanji goes in response. The shift’s small enough that somebody who didn’t know him might miss it but Zoro, who now maybe knows too much about the way Sanji’s body holds things back when he’s nervous, catches it at once and the the whole mood changes. Sanji’s eyes head towards the washed out stripe of light at the curtains and his hand, which had been resting loose against Zoro’s side, curls in a little. “We should probably talk about this.”

Zoro inhales. “Talk about what?”

Sanji snorts once, without humour. “Oh, I dunno. Unless this is a really common Thursday for you.”

Zoro stares at him and, as the silence stretches, he sees it properly: the tension, the overcare, the way Sanji still isn’t looking straight at him like he’s expecting to be written off or something. Not casually, maybe: Sanji’s too smart for that, he knows what last night was. He knows it had too much in it to be shrugged into anonymity cleanly but it’s clear he’s Zoro to say it was, what, heat. A trip thing. A moment. Something intense and real but still somehow temporary.

The idea hits Zoro with enough force to clear the last of sleep out of him entirely. “What?”

Sanji finally looks back and there it is now, impossible to miss, the nerves under the sarcasm. That old polished carelessness hauled on too early in the morning because he doesn’t know whether he’s safe enough to set it down. “What d’you mean what?”

“I mean why are you saying it like that? Like I’m about to say it didn’t mean anything.” The words leave Zoro’s mouth rougher than intended, underpinned by some kind of offense in a deeper place than anger. Startled by the possibility. A little hurt, even, that this is what Sanji had braced himself for waking up beside him.Sanji’s expression falters, just a little. A line of tension loosens around the mouth so Zoro keeps going, quieter now. “I’m not going to say that. You know I don’t — you know this means something.”

The silence that follows feels enormous. Sanji swallows once, the movement visible in the pale morning light. “Yeah. For me, too,” he admits, voice barely above a whisper.

Zoro frowns and commits to it, because Sanji’s in his bed and the room’s soft with morning light and the sheets still smell like both of them and they’ve already crossed too many lines to survive cowardice. More than anything, because the look on Sanji’s face a second ago — that careful uncertainty — landed somewhere in Zoro that immediately wanted to fight it. “This is serious for me.”

Sanji goes even more still in his arms, if possible. He licks his lips and doesn’t look the least bit surprised. “I figured. I mean, I’ve… I know it’s been serious.”

“What?”

Sanji’s expression does something weird and private, some small soft thing. “You’re not exactly subtle, idiot.”

Zoro stares at him as Sanji shifts a little against the pillow, rubbing briefly over his own mouth. “I mean, fuck,” Sanji goes on, voice low. “You look at me like I’ve ruined your life and also like you want to bite me half the time. It’s not like it was difficult to notice.”

Zoro actually feels his face catch fire. “That’s… you reckon that’s not subtle to you.”

“No,” Sanji snorts, dry. “It was not subtle to me. I kept thinking it’d fade or something, or like… I dunno. A phase. Not for you, I guess, but some weird tension thing? Like you were stressed or pissed or maybe I was just imagining it and filling the rest in, because apparently my life’s not complicated enough? But it didn’t go away. You kept looking at me the same way, even though I kept waiting for you to wake up one morning and be normal again.”

Zoro snorts despite himself. “Sure.”

“You know what I mean. I thought maybe if I left it alone, it’d sort itself out. That one day I’d look up and you’d be over it and I wouldn’t have to…” He trails off, searching.

“Wouldn’t have to what?”

Sanji huffs a little at that, but there’s no mockery in it. More like disbelief that Zoro of all people is making him finish emotional sentences before breakfast. “Deal with the fact that I didn’t hate it.”

That one goes through Zoro cleanly and his arm tightens around the other man before he can help it. Sanji’s gaze flick up, a little more colour in his face now, a little more breathlessness, like now that he’s saying it the thing is getting ahead of him and he knows it. “I never used to know what to do with it. I figured I was just reading what I wanted into things or reading what I didn’t want into things. Or confusing this with all the other bullshit we’ve got wrapped around each other.”

Zoro lets out one slow breath. “So what changed?”

Sanji’s gaze drops to his mouth for one dangerous second. “You. I mean, you kept being serious, that’s what changed. Or maybe it didn’t change, maybe I just finally believed it. You never… you never stopped looking at me like that.”

There’s no good answer to that, no clever one; Zoro’s spent years trying and failing to stop doing exactly that and it’s never occurred to him that consistency — the simple stubborn fact of his wanting not fading — might be the thing that made Sanji finally trust it. He says the only true thing he has right now: “Couldn’t.”

Sanji’s grin goes crooked, so bright Zoro wants to kiss him right then and there. “Apparently. Lucky for you, now I know what to do with it.”

Zoro kisses him with one hand sliding to the side of Sanji’s neck, thumb catching briefly under his jaw, and thinks with a kind of stunned and exhausted disbelief that maybe this is what he’s been waiting for all along  — not only the wanting, not only the kiss, but the mutual recognition of how long it takes to trust something this good enough to touch it. Sanji makes a soft sound against his mouth and presses closer, one leg sliding over Zoro’s hip under the sheets, pulling Zoro closer until. Zoro’s so fucking happy it almost hurts. He rolls them so Sanji ends up on top of him, one hand tangled in blonde hair, the other stroking down Sanji’s side, thumb tracing the ladder of his ribs. Sanji shivers and kisses him deeper, tongue sliding against Zoro’s with a lazy hunger that makes Zoro’s head spin and he thinks, dazed and stupidly grateful, that this might be the best morning of his whole damn life.

By the time they make themselves presentable enough to leave the bedroom Law’s already leaning against the kitchen bench with a takeawya coffee in hand, black hoodie on despite the warmth outside, expression set in its usual dry neutral lines despite Luffy attached to his side with the joy of somebody who did not even consider the possibility Law wouldn’t show up. Nami’s at the stove looking disgustingly awake, chatting to Usopp with bed hair in six directions.

The whole room stops for one gloriously awful second when Zoro and Sanji walk in together, Nami’s mouth curving immediately into something knowing and satisfied.

Sanji, apparently, has no interest in ceding the floor before breakfast and scowls. “What?”

Usopp clutches his chest. “Nothing, absolutely nothing. Carry on.”

Nami says: “Good morning,” with entire novels packed into those two words.

Zoro’s already considering homicide as a lifestyle choice when Sanj reaches back and catches his hand, long fingers threading through Zoro’s like it’s the simplest damn thing in the world. Nami turns back to the stove, grin suggesting her investments have finally matured, even as she bumps shoulders with Usopp. For his part, Usopp looks so fucking chuffed about it all that Zoro almost considers releasing Sanji’s hand right then and there.

Almost.

“Congratulations,” Law drawls, “Try not to break the rental furniture celebrating.”

Luffy points at their joined hands with unbridled joy. “Finally!”

Zoro can’t even fault him, really: to everyone else this has probably looked like two idiots taking the scenic route to a cliff they were always going to jump off. Sanji squeezes his hand deliberately, right there in front of all of them, a quiet, steady press of fingers that says that this is real and he’s done pretending otherwise.

Zoro squeezes back, throat tight. He’d been prepared for Sanji to play it cool in front of the crew, throwing up a casual brush off or a joke or something to keep the dynamic from shifting too obviously. Instead, Sanji’s standing here, hand in his, letting their ridiculous little family see exactly what this is. They drift toward the bench as a unit; Sanji doesn’t let go of his hand even while reaching for a mug with the other and Zoro just stands there, slightly dazed, letting himself be pulled into the morning chaos.

Nami slides two plates of eggs and toast across the island. “So,” she says, voice light but eyes sparkling, “Should we pretend we didn’t hear the bed last night or are we doing the polite thing?”

Sanji chokes on his coffee. “We were quiet!”

“You were not,” Usopp says cheerfully, shovelling his eggs down at a frankly alarming speed.

Law takes a slow sip of his coffee. “I’m going to need a stronger drink if this is the tone for the rest of the trip.”

Sanji’s ears are red but he’s smiling, small and private and undeniably happy. He doesn’t drop Zoro’s hand. If anything, his thumb strokes once across Zoro’s knuckles in a tiny, deliberate reassurance. Zoro feels it like sunlight spreading through his chest.

Usopp wipes fake tears. “My little mossball is all grown up and getting railed by the cook. I’m so proud.”

“I will drown you in the pool,” Zoro snaps without heat.

“And it’ll be worth it!”

Nami leans over and flicks Sanji’s forehead lightly. “Took you long enough. I was about to start a betting pool.”

“You did start a betting pool,” Law mutters.

“And I won it,” Nami says smugly as the kitchen fills with overlapping noise again — Luffy demanding more toast, Usopp already planning a celebratory group photo, Nami threatening to make them pay for the broken glass on the deck, Law accepting his fate as some kind of emotional support antagonist. Zoro keeps his hand still linked with Sanji’s and tries very hard not to think about how he could get used to this.

Sanji leans in just enough to murmur against his ear, quiet enough that only Zoro hears it: “Still serious?”

Zoro turns his head, catches Sanji’s eye and answers just as quietly. “Dead serious.”

Sanji’s smile is everything. The morning carries on around them, loud and messy and full of love in all its disguised forms while they stand there in the middle of it, finally exactly where they’re supposed to be.

x

hi i've assigned sharks to the straw hats no i will not be accepting any criticisim

luffy: whale shark

zoro: great white shark

nami: blacktip reef shark

usopp: port jackson shark

sanji: blue shark

chopper: epaulette shark

robin: wobbegong shark

“Yeah, no shit.”

Usopp looks between them, delighted in the way people are when they don’t have to live inside the thing they’re enjoying from outside. Nami claps once. “Wonderful, wonderful. Get the hell in.”

The seating arrangement is a war that briefly threatens to become a constitutional crisis: Luffy wants shotgun but because Nami’s driving she claims executive privilege. Usopp gets carsick if he sits too far back but also insists on controlling the music at least part of the time and Sanji flatout refuses to sit behind Zoro, claiming ‘his whole aura is hostile’. Zoro says he’d rather walk than sit directly next to Sanji for hours, which is a lie so transparent even he can hear how fake it sounds. In the end, Nami imposes order with the same cold decisiveness she probably uses in hostage negotiations: she drives, Luffy gets front passenger for exactly one hour, Usopp and Zoro get lumped in the middle row and Sanji’s left in the back with the snacks. They’ll all share the responsibility of preventing Luffy from distracting the driver into catastrophe.

This would be fine — totally fine! — if Sanji knew how to sit still, but he doesn’t. No-one in the car knows how to sit still except Zoro, who can do it for hours on end if left alone with enough road and minimal conversation, but Sanji in particular seems fucking incapable of it. He leans between their seats and offers opinions on every bakery and servo they pass, he critiques the playlist with withering comments while also singing along to the choruses and, at one point, he kicks the back of Usopp’s seat in retaliation for a snack theft and nearly starts a battlefield over the chips.

The morning broadens around them as they leave the city, giving way in layers: first the traffic, then thinner suburbs, then stretches of road flanked by scrub and gum trees and glimpses of water flashing silver through the green. The sky’s absurdly blue already, one of those spring mornings so sharp and clean looking it’s amost unreal. Usopp falls half asleep against the window half an hour in but Luffy remains offensively awake. Nami hums to herself with one hand on the wheel and Sanji, having exhausted outrage over the playlist, moves on to roasting the idea of road trip snacks in general.

“Trail mix isn’t food,” he announces from the back seat, “It’s just… gravel. With branding.”

“It has nuts,” Luffy points out magnanimously.

“It has disappointment.”

Zoro, who has spent the last forty minutes pretending not to be aware of Sanji’s knee occasionally pressing the back of his seat from where he’s folded in the row behind them, scowls. “You packed three different kinds of chips.”

“Because unlike whoever bought this garbage,” Sanji sneers, rustling a bag with contempt, “I understand texture.”

Usopp wakes just enough to mumble: “I bought that.”

Sanji twists to look at him over the seat. “Then I’m glad you’re conscious for the feedback.”

Family, Zoro thinks dimly, is a suspicious phrase people use to excuse the fact that your friends have become impossible to imagine life without and also can humiliate you on a cellular level without warning. By the time they reach their first destination — a shark and ray reserve — the sun’s fully up and the parking lot smells like sea salt and sunscreen. The building itself’s lower and less impressive than Zoro had expected, attached to a stretch of boardwalk and netted enclosures with a few faded informational signs out front featuring sharks rendered in some kind of friendly educational style.

Luffy is immediately thrilled. “Sharks!”

“Wow,” Usopp says dryly, stepping out of the car and stretching like the long drive hasn’t touched him. “At the shark place? Famous if true.”

Zoro slams his door shut, rolls one shoulder and stops dead because something in Sanji’s expression has shifted, this brightness clicking on behind his eyes like someone’s gone and flipped a hidden switch. It’s not the usual performative charm he deploys like a weapon, all smirks and flourishes and perfectly timed compliments, but something stripped right down, something Zoro rarely sees on him outside of 3am snack runs and those fuzzy moments where they’ve both had too much beer.

Nami shades her eyes, glances at the big entrance sign, then back at Sanji, and grins . “Bit excited there, bud?”

“About sharks?” Sanji blinks, like it hadn’t even occured to him that he looks plainly thrilled. “Obviously. They’re one of the oldest surviving vertebrate lineages on the planet, you know. They were here before half the bones in your body decided to show up.”

Luffy makes a delighted noise that’s half a gasp and half a war cry. “Whoa! That’s really cool!”

Sanji visibly tries to reel it back in but it’s already too late: Zoro suddenly can’t look anywhere else, not because sharks themselves are riveting. They’re what? Teeth, cartilage, ocean? Fine, good for them. It’s Sanji, the way his whole face has opened up, the way he’s gesturing as they walk toward the entrance, hands cutting through the air with quick little movements. His voice has picked up speed, losing that lazy drawl in favour of something sharper and more animated. He’s not really looking at any of them anymore; his gaze keeps drifting towards the signs and towards the chance to talk about something he clearly loves.

Inside, the reflections from the water wrap around them in cool, filtered light and that unmistakable mineral tang of saltwater, mixed with the low constant hum of filtration systems working somewhere behind the walls. The tanks aren’t tanks but ponds, almost, great stretches of water that go to their ankles where stingrays glide with serene indifference.

Luffy immediately bolts ahead and has to be yanked back before he can just. Jump in. He gets directed to where to change his shoes and how to rinse his feet by the very, very patient attendant. Sanji helps him without hesitation, all exasperated big brother energy. “They’re not here for your entertainment, Luffy. They’re living animals.”

“Uh, they’re literally here for our entertainment,” Usopp points out but he follows the attendant’s guidance and pretty soon he’s in the water alongside Nami and Luffy, biting down a shriek whenever a stingray brushes over his feet.

Zoro hangs back on dry land, content to watch Luffy experience about seventeen different emotions and all of them underpinned with sheer, vivid wonder. Sanji stays back as well, oddly, mouth twisting into a little smile at their friends’ antics and, after a while, he just starts… talking. He tells Zoro about the electroreceptors in rays that let them sense the faint electrical fields of hidden prey, about the branding problem with shark tourism, about media fearmongering and humanity’s inability to respect anything ‘that doesn’t flatter our own self-image’. Nami folds her arms, quietly smug, and catches Zoro’s eye over Sanji’s bent head. She mouths oh, he’s gone.

She’s right — Sanji’s more present than Zoro has seen him in weeks, all of him gathered and focused, attention narrowed to a bright, burning point. He talks with his hands, fingers shaping the concepts in the air and eyebrows drawing together. He says pelagic the way other people say home which is to say naturally and comfortably, like the word’s lived in his mouth for years. When he explains countershading to Nami his voice drops into something low and intent, almost intimate. Truthfully, Zoro doesn’t catch half the actual content at first. He catches the cadence instead, the animation, the way Sanji’s shoulders relax, tension bleeding out as he stops performing the version of himself he usually offers the world and simply is. It’s catastrophically attractive and not just because the sunlight catches the gold in his hair and turns it unfair in every possible direction. In the sense that Zoro feels himself being pulled, helplessly, inevitably, toward the light. He starts lingering when the others drift on, staying near whichever creature’s captured Sanji’s attention. At first he asks questions just to keep the flow going. “What’s that one?”

Sanji doesn’t even glance over. “Wobbegong.”

“Fake.”

Sanji turns, looking personally offended. “It’s really not? It’s a carpet shark, seaweed-brain.”

Zoro steps closer to the glass and stares at the mottled, rug-like creature half-buried in the sand. “Looks like a rug.”

“Yes,” Sanji says, real wonder breaking through despite himself. “That’s the entire point.” And then he’s off again, talking faster about ambush predation and the evolutionary brilliance of camouflage, on the heels of the flattened morphology that lets carpet sharks disappear against the seafloor. By the time they’re at the main shark enclosure Zoro’s stopped pretending the questions are random. It’s a massive outdoor tank with signs everywhere pleading with visitors not to scream or run through the water or drop human food. Sunlight filters down through the water in shifting green veils as the sharks glide with that ancient, unhurried grace, bodies moving like they have all the time in the world because they know exactly where they sit on the food chain.

Luffy whispers: “Whoa.”

Zoro looks at Sanji instead of the sharks, staring down through the water with an expression that suggests he’s standing in the presence of something he has loved for a very long time and still finds new ways to be moved by it.

Nami sidles up beside Zoro. “D’you wanna know how obvious you’re being or do you want it to be a surprise?”

“I’m looking at the sharks.”

She hums with blatant disbelief and drifts away before he can threaten to throw her into the ray pool. Sanji, thankfully, misses the entire exchange because he’s deep in the middle of passionately defending sharks to Usopp. “Most bites are exploratory or mistaken identity or the result of idiots getting too close in poor visibility.”

“Exploratory bite’s a fuckin’ horrible phrase,” Usopp mutters. “Sounds like they’re sampling us like wine.”

Sanji shoots him a withering look. “Usopp, if a shark actually meant to eat you, you wouldn’t be standing here complaining about terminology.”

Zoro, still mostly tuned to the way Sanji is speaking rather than the words themselves, rolls his shoulders again. “So what, they just get bad press?”

Sanji turns on him so quickly there’s almost a smile breaking through the indignation. “Exactly! Humans kill tens of millions of sharks a year… more, maybe? You’ve got finning and bycatch and overfishing, not to mention habitat destruction. But one surfer gets nipped in murky water and suddenly the entire ocean’s evil.” He keeps going, about ecosystems and apex predators and trophic cascades, whatever the hell that is, about how fear is often just ignorance with a better publicist and god knows what else as the others eventually peel off, Luffy distracted by feeding the sharks and then by gift shop plushes. Usopp’s lured away by a display involving venomous sea creatures and the opportunity to pretend he’s braver than he is. Nami, after one long look between Sanji and Zoro that makes Zoro want to fake his own death, says she’s going to find her water bottle and vanishes.

Light wavers bluish green across Sanji’s cheekbone when he glances down, the hum of the filtration system filling the pauses between his sentences. Zoro licks his lips. “How d’you know all this?”

Sanji shrugs, but it’s not casual. “I read.”

“No shit.”

Sanji snorts. “And documentaries. And articles. And… ” He breaks off, clearly wrong footed by the need to summarise. “I don’t know. I just always liked the sea.” Liked is such an inadequate word for what Zoro’s looking at that he nearly says so. It’s not like it’s the first time he’s noticed that Sanji tends to love through defence, with food, with people and, apparently, with fish too. He gets protective and exacting and a little angry, like admiration alone isn’t enough; whatever he loves must also be shielded from stupidity, from mistreatment, from easy bad narratives. It always does something weirdly painful to Zoro’s chest.

He sighs. “Tell me the one about how they can smell blood from oceans away.”

Sanji immediately rolls his eyes. “That’s exaggerated.”

“But not fake.”

“God, you’re annoying.” But, because Zoro asked and because this has become the easiest thing in the world all at once, he tells him anyway and by the time they leave the place Zoro knows more than he did about electroreception and shark nurseries and stingray barbs, and why fish is often too broad a category to be useful in casual conversation. More importantly, he knows exactly what face Sanji makes when he is talking about something he loves enough to forget to posture and that, unfortunately, is going to make the rest of the trip much harder to survive.

x

The drive from the shark place to the beach should, by all rights, feel like a cooldown, a nice little breather. Zoro’s already lived through the worst of the morning: the slow, devastating realiseation that Sanji talking about sharks, animated and unguarded, is apparently one of the most attractive things a human being can do in broad daylight without getting arrested. He’s had time to adjust, to shove this new data somewhere safer inside his chest. Time to remind himself that he’s survived years of this exact brand of self-inflicted torture.

The problem, though, is that once Sanji starts talking about the things he loves he stops being careful in all the tiny little ways Zoro has spent years silently begging him to stop being careful. He drops the cool, amused mask he keeps polished for strangers and half their friends and stops wrapping every strong opinion in sarcasm. He just goes thought-to-mouth with almost no filter, voice shifting pitch and speed, like he’s building the entire ocean between them in real time.

Zoro’s… not really built to survive that on repeat in one day. Hell, who could?

They pile back into the car with damp brochures sticking to fingers and gift shop souveniers already shedding glitter on the floor mats, sun angling hotter across the road. Luffy’s acquired a plush stingray and named it Flat Steve before his seatbelt even clicks. Sanji slides in last, carrying the paper bag of fried calamari he’d refused to share at the aquarium exit. He drops into the back seat, knees knocking the back of Zoro’s seat once, casual and thoughtless.

Zoro, who is trying very hard to sit like a normal person and not twist halfway around just to chase the line of Sanji’s throat in his peripheral view, manages: “What’d you get?”

Sanji pauses. “Calamari.”

“From the gift shop?”

Sanji leans forward between the seats, visibly offended. “What, because I care about marine life you think I’ve suddenly gone vegetarian? I’m not a monster.”

Usopp, still faintly pink from laughing himself stupid when Nami stumbled in the water, snorts. “That feels species-selective.”

“It is species-selective. I’m not an idiot.” Then he drops back into his seat, and the car fills with the mingled smells of salt, fried batter, strong coffee and sunscreen warming on skin. Nami pulls out of the lot toward the beach, the road curving along stretches of coastal scrub and low bushland, flashing occasional glimpses of blue ocean through the trees. She drives one handed and utterly relaxed, her window cracked just enough for warm sea air to ribbon in whenever Luffy or Usopp start fighting over the air conditioning. Zoro stares out his window and tries, for a solid ten minutes, to be a normal person.

He answers when spoken to and watches the scrub roll by and doesn’t think too hard about the fact that Sanji’s right behind him in those stupid fucking mirrored sunglasses. The plan collapses the second Sanji starts talking again, answering some question Usopp asked that Zoro didn’t even hear because he was too busy trying to figure out the tune Luffy’s been humming.

“The ocean isn’t one thing,” Sanji sighs, one foot braced against the back of Zoro’s seat as he leans forward. “It changes, right? You’ve got these gradual shifts, temperature gradients, current systems, salinity layers, whole ecosystem structures stacking on top of each other like —”

Usopp, ever the chaos agent, interrupts. “Can an ocean have too much salt?”

Sanji gives a little one shouldered shrug, the kind that says he’s only getting started. “Depends what you’re asking, really. Most marine species are tuned to a pretty narrow range but currents and upwelling do a lot of the heavy lifting. It’s not static.”

Zoro glances back to where Sanji’s pushing his sunglasses up into his hair, sunlight flashing through the window. He’s talking with one hand twisted in his hair, twirling it absently. “It’s not one big identical blue body of water. There’s different species distributions, different temperature bands, different reef systems, different everything depending on latitude, on season, on depth, you know? Push far enough north and everything starts shifting hard. Warmer water, more tropical species, massive reef complexes. That’s why the reef’s such a big deal — it’s this living gradient, this —”

Luffy glances at him in the rearview mirror. “You’re talking about it like it’s your favourite place.”

Sanji scoffs. “I’m talking about it like it’s the single most important ecosystem on the planet and the rest of you should be on your knees thanking me for the free education.”

“You should charge,” Usopp suggests wickedly.

Zoro opens his mouth before his brain can stop him. “So if you went far enough north what changes first?”

Sanji’s gaze snaps to him through the gap between the seats. “Depends where exactly,” he answers immediately, leaning so far forward Zoro can see the flush high on his cheekbones and the way his eyes have gone bright and focused. “Currents, season, exact coastline, whether you’re measuring temperature or species diversity or visibility or nutrient load… everything stacks. You get these transition zones where cold water species drop off and tropical ones take over. The thermocline shifts. Plankton blooms change.”

Zoro listens with a level of concentration he has never once devoted to marine science in his life because the problem with carrying a crush for three straight years is that it teaches you the exact shape of your own stupidity in excruciating detail. Zoro knows, logically, that he’s currently in a car full of his friends on a bright, beautiful day, driving towards a beach where sand and salt water are waiting. All available evidence says he should be enjoying this in a broad, uncomplicated, group hang kind of way but his brain is busy running some kind of private low grade fever.

Actually, no: the problem with carrying with a crush for three years straight is that it stops becoming a simple crush and shifts into something deeper than the casual desire he’s nursed since the first time Sanji called him mosshead and meant it like an insult and a promise at the same time. Deeper than the constant background hum of i want him that’s lived under his ribs for thirty-six fucking months and counting. It’s the ground giving way, it’s the awareness that what he’s been calling a crush has quietly and mercilessly grown roots, wrapping around vital organs while he wasn’t looking. It’s about wanting this — Sanji lit up and talking and trusting them enough to be this openly fierce and soft in the same breath.

It’s about wanting to be the person Sanji turns to when the passion spills over and, worse, it’s about the terrifying possibility that Zoro’s probably been in love with him for longer than he’s willing to admit and this trip is only making that truth more and more impossible to ignore.

The beach, when they finally arrive, is one of those broad bright stretches that look fake in photos, all white sand and low surf, dunes with scrub and tufts of grass and a few families staked under beach tents, along with some teenagers already half-buried in sand and bad, bad decisions. The local shopfronts are visible from the parking lot, painted in shades of blue so faded it circles back into charm. They unload the car in the sort of cheerful logistical disaster that only works because they all know each other too well to mind. Towels come out first, then sunscreen, then the esky, then a bag full of snacks that Luffy immediately tries to claim before Nami stops him with a hand to the forehead and a level of authority that suggests she’s rehearsed for this exact mutiny her whole damn life. Usopp gets stuck carrying the umbrella and chairs and a plastic bag of god knows what because he made the mistake of looking available.

The sun’s climbed into that rich whitish gold afternoon light that makes the whole coast look overdesigned, the sand hot on top and cool underneath where their feet sink in. The surf’s gentle enough for Luffy to declare it swimmable, so Nami lays out towels with the grave, ritual precision of someone establishing territory in hostile lands. “Anyone who gets sand on my towel can rack off.”

“Everything’s sand,” Usopp says.

“Okay? Then be less sandy?”

Luffy’s already in the water before anyone has fully finished setting up, one second kicking off his shoes and the next he’s halfway to New Zealand, probably, arms windmilling. Usopp spends a full five minutes on sunscreen application for himself and Nami, muttering about the UV index. Sanji hauls the esky into place, straightens up and squints toward the shops. “I’ll go get lunch before the line gets stupid.”

Without looking up from arranging her sandals just so, Nami says: “Zoro can go with you.”

Zoro glares at her but she doesn’t look back, the coward. He should be annoyed or object on principle or at least make some token complaint about involuntary labour but he sighs. “Yeah, fine.”

Sanji’s mouth quirks. “Eager.”

“Shut up.”

“Make me.” The line lands like it always does, half a joke and half a challenge and all old electric familiarity. Zoro has to look at the ocean before his face does anything unfortunate. Family, he thinks as he falls into step beside Sanji, is just another word for having people in your life who can weaponise your obviousness with the efficiency of trained snipers.

The path off the beach is warm underfoot, a packed trail through low bushes and trees, the ocean opening up behind them all at once, vast and bright, white rip at the shore and deep cobalt farther out, sunlight shattered across the surface in a thousand hard pieces. The wind’s stronger up here, lifting the loose hem of Sanji’s shirt and Zoro tries very, very hard not to notice. He fails anyway, because his brain’s a fucking traitor that catalogues details whether he consents or not: the easy, balanced way Sanji walks on sand like he was born to it, the clean line of his shoulders under the shirt flapping in the breeze, the tiny crease that appears at the corner of his mouth when he’s thinking hard about food. It’s embarrassing, but Zoro’s long since accepted that his body will keep betraying him around Sanji with the loyalty of a mutinous dog and that his only real defenses are, what? Face management and the occasional silent prayer that today won’t be the day he does something irreversibly stupid.

The fish and chip shop sits at the edge of the beach access road, loaded with umbrellas that have clearly lost multiple fights with the wind. There’s a line, just long enough to justify Sanji’s sudden sense of urgency. They join the queue anyway, and for a minute the mood feels oddly easy which is… something, because even when they’re perfectly calm the tension’s always there between them anyway, humming like live current in a wall. It’s baseline now, mostly survivable and so damn familiar that Zoro sometimes forgets other people don’t carry this much charge through ordinary conversation.

Sanji pushes his sunglasses up into his hair and scans the menu with narrow eyed suspicion, like the board might be lying to him. Without looking away from the menu, he drawls: “If you stare any harder, Moss, I’ll start charging.”

Zoro snorts, aiming for casual and landing somewhere near strangled. “Thought you like attention.”

“Depends how stupid the next sentence out of your mouth is.”

Zoro forces his gaze up to the board, pretending the listed options are suddenly fascinating. “What’s the good thing here?”

Sanji turns to look at him, something immediate and automatic in his expression, some reflexive readiness that does unfairly warm things to Zoro’s stomach. “Depends what you want.”

“Fish?”

“Wow, that narrows it down dramatically.” Sanji snorts and folds his arms, the motion pulling his shirt a little tighter across his chest. “If the fish is actually fresh then grilled snapper. If it’s questionable, hide behind batter and pray. Whiting’s usually reliable, flathead if they’re not overcooking it.”

Zoro nods like this is purely practical information and not, apparently, a form of courtship engineered by some sadistic god who enjoys watching him suffer. They shuffle forward one step, the paper menu stand wobbling in the breeze. Behind them a kid starts wailing because his ice cream’s melted too far down his arm and, also, weren’t his parents listening when he said he needed the toilet five minutes ago?

Sanji glances sideways. “You ready for the tournament next weekend?”

Zoro blinks. “What?”

“Next weekend, right? Or did I mix it up with the one after?”

“Next weekend,” Zoro confirms, voice rougher than he wants it to be.

Sanji nods once, satisfied. “You fix that footwork issue?”

Zoro frowns, casting his mind back to their last spar at the gym, when he’d buckled just a second earlier than he’d planned, giving Sanji the opening to deck him halfway to Sunday. “Working on it.”

Sanji makes a low, noncommittal sound. “Mm. You always say that when you’re pretending something’s fine.”

Zoro stares at him, words scraping out before he has a hope in hell of fixing them into something less startled. “Since when do you pay attemtion to what I say?”

Sanji shrugs one shoulder like it’s nothing, like he isn’t currently prying Zoro’s ribcage open with casual little questions in the middle of a sunny afternoon. “You’re loud about your hobbies.”

“Kendo isn’t a hobby.”

“Sure. Your extremely intense sword club is a sacred calling, my mistake.” When they reach the counter the kid taking orders looks about nineteen and is clearly unprepared for Sanji’s standards, which becomes obvious in under three seconds. Sanji narrows his eyes. “What species is your flake, exactly?”

The kid blinks. “Uh…”

“You don’t know?”

“It’s… shark?”

“Yes, darling, I can read the board.”

Zoro turns away and laughs into his fist while Sanji politely interrogates the poor teenager on species and sourcing and batter consistency and oil quality with cheerful menace. He asks, innocently: “What’s flake again?”

Sanji whips around with immediate outrage. “Don’t start.”

“What?”

“You know exactly what.”

“I’m learning.”

“You’re baiting me.”

The teenager wisely stays silent as Zoro widens his eye. “Can’t a man want to know where his lunch comes from?”

Sanji stares at him before exhaling through his nose, surrendering not because he has to but because he clearly wants the excuse to keep talking. And so, while they wait for the food, Zoro gets another full lecture about fish naming conventions and public ignorance as a market force and why consumers should demand species transparency and how sustainability starts with refusing to treat seafood as anonymous white flesh. He doesn’t care; he’d listen to Sanji explain anything at this point. Fish. Renters’ rights. The proper way to polish cutlery. The blood supply of a spoon, whatever.

By the time they head back down the sandy path with warm paper parcels and cold drinks and enough chips to keep Luffy from turning feral, Sanji’s still talking, loose and comfortable, the way he does when he’s forgotten he’s supposed to ration out the parts of himself that usually stay private. His voice has that easy rhythm now, words tumbling out with the loose continuity of someone’s who has stopped performing caution. “And if you collapse local predator populations,” he explains, stepping neatly around a half-buried pram wheel, “You don’t just lose the predators, you skew the whole damn system. Species distribution shifts, breeding patterns get thrown off, algal growth explodes in some places and dies in others if you’re looking at reef structures —”

Zoro grunts. “What’s algal growth?”

Sanji glances sideways at him again and there’s definitely suspicion there now, sharp, like he’s turning a puzzle piece over in his mind and realising it might fit a picture he wasn’t expecting. “You’ve been unusually interested in fish today.” His tone is light, sure, but there’s weight behind it. Observation. Testing, even.

Zoro’s pulse kicks hard, one ugly lurch against his ribs. He’s been counting on the ocean and the lunch logistics and the noise of their friends to postpone this exact moment of scrutiny until at least later. He inhales, short and harsh. “Maybe I like hearing you talk about them.”

Sanji stops walking so abruptly Zoro only just manages to plant his feet without crashing into him. The beach stretches bright and wide around them, midday sun bouncing off the water in glittering shards. The rest of the group’s further down the sand now, Nami and Usopp already staking out the towels while Sanji looks at him over the tops of his sunnies before he slowly pushes them up onto his head. For one impossible second his expression’s unreadable, blue eyes narrowed against the glare, mouth parted like he’s caught between several possible responses.

This is it. Zoro could say it right now, the words already half-formed behind his teeth: i like hearing you talk because it’s you. because when you light up like that i can’t look away, because i’ve been carrying this for years and it feels too big to keep swallowing down now. because i want you.  He could lean in and close the small distance the path allows, taste the salt on Sanji’s mouth, the faint trace of coffee , and finally do what he’s been fantasising about since Luffy first dragged them into each other’s orbit. Just the two of them, sand under their feet, lunch forgotten between them while he kisses Sanji like he means it, like he’s been meaning it for years.

His gaze drops, unbidden, to Sanji’s mouth and the possibility hangs there, bright and terrifying. Zoro can feel the pull in his chest like gravity shifting, every nerve screaming at him to stop thinking and do something before the moment collapses under its own weight before the old fear crashes in — years of careful distance, of turning every almost into banter, of convincing himself that wanting Sanji this badly was survivable as long as he never said it out loud. What if he’s wrong? What if this brighter, softer Sanji is just the road trip version and next week they go back to circling each other with insults and sideways glances? What if he ruins the fragile thing they already have?

He swallows hard, the words dying in his throat. The kiss stays imaginary. “Wasn’t that weird.”

Sanji’s mouth twitches, like he knows exactly how close they just came to tipping over an edge. “You asked the guy at the shop if squid count as fish.”

“I wanted to know.”

“No, you didn’t.”

Zoro exhales once through his nose, the almost moment filed away for later mortification and jerks his chin toward the others. “C’mon. Before Luffy eats through the bag.”

That gets Sanji moving again, but the look lingers at the edges of his expression, all sharpened attention, a new kind of awareness that makes the hair on the back of Zoro’s neck stand up. Like Sanji is suddenly cataloging every odd question, every lingering glance, every awkward deflection, and starting to add them up into a picture that makes Zoro’s stomach twist with equal parts dread and stupid, desperate hope. When they finally rejoin their friends Nami takes one look at the two of them and raises a single, perfectly arched eyebrow. Usopp sees the same thing and pulls a face like a man who’s just caught the scent of some excellent and possibly explosive gossip.

Zoro refuses to meet either of their eyes, so they spread lunch out over paper and towels and the little striped umbrella shade. Luffy descends on the chips like a seagull while Nami steals the best potato scallop, unrepentent and by the time they get back in the car the whole group has gone softer around the edges the way it happens sometimes after a good stop. Not everytime: plenty of outings with this lot end in sunburn and arguments and somebody spilling something sticky enough to change the resale value of the vehicle, but this one settles into them nicely. Sharks, lunch, saltwater, sun — something about the sequence has taken the louder corners off everybody’s mood.

The beach stays behind them in flashes of white through the trees as Nami pulls back onto the road, Luffy damp and blissful with Flat Steve tucked under one arm. Usopp has gone pleasantly floppy in the way he always does after food and sun, one knee drawn up, mouth still moving now and then whenever he wakes enough to contribute something before losing the thread. The music’s dropped lower, Nami switching to one of her own playlists, full of guitar lines and steady drums and long breathing spaces between lyrics wide enough for road noise, drowsiness and the kind of dangerous, spiraling thoughts that could wreck a man if he let them.

Somewhere after the servo stop just outside town, the seating arrangement shifts without anyone formally planning it. Luffy nicks a lurid blue sports drink while Nami fetches different snacks. Usopp uses the opportunity to reorganise the chaotic scatter of bags and carefully restore order, When they all climb back in, Sanji, armed with a paper bag of something sweet he claims is for later but will absolutely be declared communal property by sunset, drops straight into the seat beside Zoro like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Zoro, who’d been halfway through fastening his seatbelt, nearly fumbles the damn buckle entirely. His heart slams once, hard, against his ribs like it’s trying to punch its way out because he knows Sanji could’ve taken the window seat or could’ve have climbed into the back with Usopp or could’ve done literally anything else except slide in beside him, close enough that Zoro can already feel the faint heat rolling off his arm.

“What’s wrong with you?” Sanji snorts, “You look like I just decked you in the face.”

“You sat down,” Zoro mutters, the words coming out raw and stupid before he can stop it.

Sanji smirks, clearly bemused. “That’s generally how this works, moss-for-brains.”

Zoro turns his glare to the window instead, jaw locked so tight it aches, pretending the passing scrub is suddenly the most fascinating landscape on earth while his pulse thunders in his ears. From the rearview mirror, Nami’s eyes meet his for a split second and there it is, that bright amusement she gets whenever she senses someone else’s private emotional disaster is about to entertain her for the next hundred kilometres.

The road opens wider ahead, long ribbons of coastal highway unspooling in alternating bands of bright sun and dappled shadow. Bushland presses close on one side; occasional glittering glimpses of the ocean appear on the other, silver blue and flattening toward the horizon. The car hums steadily beneath them, air conditioning finally settling from desperate necessity into something kinder and cooler.

Sanji cracks one of the coffees and hands it over without looking, like it’s automatic, and Zoro takes it without thinking, hyper aware of how sitting in the same row collapses the entire world down to the small, electric radius of Sanji’s body beside him. The faint heat radiating from his arm through the thin layers of shirt, the line of his thigh angled just close enough that every subtle sway or turn of the road threatens contact  — and Zoro’s brain is already mapping every possible point of impact like it’s a tactical briefing. The smell of him is sharper here, impossible to ignore, all salt from the beach and sunscreen and the iced coffee he’s drinking. There should be some kind of legal waiver for the way Zoro’s heart’s currently trying to claw its way out of his chest.

“They absolutely do,” Usopp’s insisting from the back. “You saw how they coordinated around those chips like a tactical unit.”

“That’s not organised crime,” Nami snorts, dry and immediate. “That’s basic opportunism with wings.”

“Same thing.”

“No. Different overheads. Different… risk profiles? Sanji, back me up here.”

“Bird mafia,” Luffy declares from the front before punctuating it with enthusiastic machine-gun noises aimed at the window.

Usopp shrieks, scandalised. “Luffy! Don’t shoot the gulls!”

“No, no,” Luffy laughs. “Metaphorically.”

“There is nothing metaphorical about the way you said ‘pew pew pew,’” Nami mutters but her disdain’s interrupted by Luffy’s phone going off and the way Luffy immediately scrabbles for it, nearly dropping poor Flat Steve out the window.

Nami groans. “Put him on speaker so we don’t have to suffer through this twice.”

Law’s voice fills the car instantly, cool and dry and clearly already exhausted by whatever chaos he can hear bleeding through the line. “Why is it always this loud when you answer?”

“We’re on a road trip!” Luffy announces proudly.

There’s a long pause before, with the heavy silence of a man staring up at the sky and seeing only future migraines, Law exhales. “You’re on a what?”

“A road trip,” Nami clarifies. “Down the coast.”

“With all of you?”

“Yes.”

Zoro can practically feel Law mentally reconsidering every life choice he’s made since he met them. “What happened to the group holiday we planned next month?”

Usopp leans forward between the seats. “This is separate! This is a… let’s say a preliminary chaos event.”

“Oh, that’s reassuring.”

Luffy’s grinning at the phone like Law can see the expression. “We’ll be back in a few days. You should come meet us.”

“Absolutely not.” There’s another stilted pause before Law adopts a tone that’d probably sound indifferent to a stranger, but reads as completely horrifyingly transparent to anyone who’s ever watched Law stand within a metre of Luffy. “Where are you right now?”

Nami gives the town name and Law makes a thoughtful noise that is Not interested, obviously. He’s definitely not calculating distances or mentally checking his own schedule. Not a single soul in the car is fooled except maybe Luffy, whose smile is so bright and pleased it feels almost private.

Sanji shifts slightly beside Zoro, close enough that their shoulders brush, grining. “Disgusting.”

“Shut up,” Luffy says on pure instinct, then immediately brightens again. “Traffy says he might come for dinner.”

“He did not say it like that,” Usopp points out warily, “He’s also, like. Still here.”

“He means it like that,” Luffy replies confidently.

Law sighs through the speaker with long suffering resignation. Nami mutes the call just long enough to say, dry as dust: “See? This is what it looks like when people are obvious.” She’s looking at the road when she says it and no-one answers, but Zoro would like to die all the same.

Usopp coughs suspiciously into his fist. Sanji, somehow, remains focused on mocking Law and Luffy instead of noticing the way the entire car’s muttering about layered subtext. After Law ends the call the mood settles again, softer still. The coastal road stretches ahead like it has all the time in the world, the music low and warm, everyone sun tired and salt crusted enough that sharp edges have blurred into something almost fond. Luffy has started nodding off in the front seat with Flat Steve tucked under his chin like a security blanket while Usopp drifts in and out of consciousness, occasionally surfacing long enough to point vaguely out the window and mumble: “That tree looks cool,” before sinking back under. Nami drives with the same steady, unbothered competence, occasionally drumming lightly against her thigh in time with the music. Every so often her eyes flick to the rearview mirror, and when they catch Zoro’s, they linger just a fraction too long.

Zoro looks resolutely out the window, jaw tight, pretending the passing scenery is suddenly riveting. Beside him, Sanji keeps talking for a while longer about drifts through his sun drowsy brain. He rants briefly and with genuine feeling about someone’s mullet and complains about the slow death of proper sandwiches in this country. He asks Nami whether the next stop might actually have decent coffee and pokes Usopp (who may or may not be awake) to confirm if he actually bought that novelty fudge two towns ago or just claimed he did. Then, because the universe has clearly decided Zoro hasn’t suffered enough for one day, Sanji turns toward him and asks, voice lazy and warm: “You competing in white or navy?”

Zoro looks over, confused. “Uh. Either?”

“You’ve got a better cut in navy. Cleaner line across the shoulders.”

The words land low and strange in Zoro’s chest, the idea that Sanji’s noticed the line of his body in different uniforms enough to have formed an opinion about it. He frowns. “You sound invested.”

Sanji shrugs one shoulder, easy. “You’re the one doing all the work. Might as well not look stupid while you’re at it.”

Every casual remark from Sanji today feels like it’s been quietly dismantling the careful compartments Zoro’s kept this thing in. He looks down at his own broad hands, at the empty lemonade bottle in his lap, at the small scratch on one knuckle from helping drive the beach umbrella stake earlier. Anywhere except directly at Sanji, because if he does he might say something stupidly honest. The music shifts to something even softer, the road smooths out and the car fills with that particular communal quiet that only happens among people who know each other so well that silence doesn’t feel like work. Beside him, finally, Sanji winds down, posture loosening by degrees until his head tips back once against the seat, then forward, then sideways as he fights sleep on principle. THe car takes one long, easy bend in the road and Sanji’s shoulder brushes his before settling against him properly, warm and solid and catastrophically light all at once.

Zoro doesn’t move and, before he knows it, ten minutes have passed and Sanji’s body has gone loose in that rare, unconscious way it never does when he’s awake, all the usual sharp edges melted away. Mouth softened and forehead smooth, heavy and warm. Zoro stays there, frozen, with one hand white-knuckling on his own thigh, experiencing the purest, stupidest, most terrifying happiness of his entire adult life while his brain has a nice little spiral.

Nami says, very quietly: “Zoro.”

He nearly jumps out of his skin. “Don’t,” he hisses instantly, the only available response when his entire nervous system’s already on red alert.

“I said your name.” When she speaks this time it is in a furious stage whisper honed by years of yelling at idiots in dangerous situations without technically raising her voice. “You have to tell him.”

For one second he genuinely thinks he might’ve hallucinated the sentence from sheer stress. He whispers back, hoarse with disbelief: “Are you nuts?”

Nami’s shoulders move in the smallest possible shrug. “Look at this.”

Zoro specifically doesn’t look down because if he actually lets himself focus on Sanji’s head resting on his shoulder he’ll have to strangle something, and it’ll probably be Sanji. “Yeah, thanks, I can see.”

Nami snorts, voice clipped with the force of someone trying not to physically shake sense into him. “People don’t just fall asleep on people they hate, Zoro.”

“He doesn’t hate me,” he says blankly because that, at least, he knows to be true. They might bicker and fight and trip each other up and cause mayhem but they’ve been in the same friendship group for years now.

Nami’s expression in the mirror does something deeply offensive, halfway between exasperation and fondness. “Why won’t you tell him?”

“Because —” He glances at Sanji despite himself and drops his voice even lower. “Because I’m not doing that on a fucking road trip.”

Nami makes a tiny sound of pure incredulity. “Why?”

Zoro stares at her, a thousand reasons on his tongue but none of them feel good enough once dragged into the light. He thinks about how if he tells Sanji and it goes badly, they still have days left in this car, booked accommodation and the long road home to survive. Conversely, if it goes well he might actually die on impact and then what? If he says it out loud then the thing leaves the safe, contained space inside his chest and enters the real world. He can’t, not while some part of him’s still convinced that naming it will shatter the exact fragile shape of what they already have.

Nami waits through the silence before she says, softly and with deadly accuracy: “Because you’re chicken.”

Zoro looks away to the window where the coast flashes by in blue strips, gum trees, and white fences. His reflection in the glass looks as miserable and cornered as he feels. “No shit.”

There’s no point lying to Nami when she’s this close to the bone; she’d only get meaner. “He’s literally asleep on you.”

“That doesn’t mean he wants — anything.”

“No,” Nami allows. “But it’s not nothing.”

He exhales through his nose, careful not to disturb the sleeping man against him or the ruckus going on inside his own skull. “He dates women.”

Nami’s eyebrows lift in the mirror with pure, unimpressed patience and the weary acknowledgment that this is the hill Zoro has chosen to die on after everything. She checks the side mirror, smoothly overtakes a slower car, quiet just long enough that Zoro starts to hope she might actually let it drop. “So? You know bisexuality exists, right?”

He can’t respond to that without waking Sanji through sheer force of humiliation. His ears feel hot, chest is too tight. The weird feeling that’s been simmering all day surges higher because Nami’s dragging things into the open that he’s spent years keeping locked down. She keeps going anyway, because there’s blood in the water and she’s never been one to ignore it when a friend is drowning in his own stupidity.

“Seriously, your entire strategy was… what, exactly? Assume he’s straight until proven otherwise and suffer to death? In my car?”

Zoro’s jaw tightens so hard it aches. “When you say it like that —”

“When I say it accurately?” Nami’s voice softens, threading careful reason through the quiet car. “Listen… he’s been different lately, you know he has. I’m not saying he’s definitely into you, but I am saying he might not react as negatively as you’re convinced he will. He might… he might surprise you. He hasn’t dated anyone in months, Zoro. And the way he looks at you when he thinks no-one’s watching? That’s not just being pissed at you anymore. It hasn’t been for a while.”

Zoro stares at the passing coastline, all blue water and white sand while his heart tries to beat its way out of his chest. Sanji’s head is still warm and heavy on his shoulder, breaths slow and even and the panic’s still there, loud and vicious, but Nami’s words have cracked something open. A sliver of terrifying hope slipping through the fear, wider than before. “Yeah? What if you’re wrong?”

Nami’s voice is steady. “And what if I’m right?”

Zoro doesn’t answer, can’t quite find the words, but for the first time all day, the spiral feels a little less like a free fall and a little more like standing on solid ground, terrifying and uncertain, but may not entirely doomed.

x

By the time they reach the Entrance the day’s gone honeyed gold around the edges.

The road drops them into town past water and boats and low strips of shops painted in cheerful weathered colours, the kind of touristy place that looks almost too quaint until you’re actually in it and realise it’s also chaotic as hell.

It is, Zoro thinks as Nami parallel parks with murder in her eyes, much busier than a place this cute has any right to be.

Usopp leans between the seats to peer out at the waterfront. “Ugh. Why are there so many pelicans?”

Down by the water’s edge a small crowd has gathered around several impressively large pelicans and one suspiciously cheerful volunteer in a branded polo shirt holding a bait bucket. Sanji, who has gone quietly intent in exactly the way he does around anything with fins or feathers, is already halfway out of the car by the time Zoro gets his door open.

“C’mon,” he says brightly, “If one of you idiots scares a pelican on purpose I’m pushing you into the water.”

Luffy’s grin broadens dangerously. “What if the pelican scares me first?”

“That’ll be justice.”

The group moves with that loose, unplanned cohesion that only comes after years of ending up in the same places on purpose. Nami falls naturally to the front because she’s the only one who can cut through a crowd without becoming part of the problem, Luffy slightly left while Usopp lingers near Zoro, half from friendship and half because he trusts Zoro to physically intervene if a bird half the size of a person attempts violence. Sanji drifts ahead and then back and then ahead again, always somehow oriented toward the water like a compass needle.

Zoro’s attention keeps snagging on him anyway, Nami’s words flashing through him in fragments, refusing to settle, urging him to tell Sanji. To kiss him. At least do something. Surely three years is enough, for god’s sake.

The pelicans are absurd, big and ancient-looking, with the kind of deliberate patience that suggests they know full well humans will gather, coo, point and eventually hand over fish. Luffy, predictably, loves them. He listens with starry eyes as the volunteer starts talking through facts about pelican throat pouches and cooperative feeding and their protected status.

Zoro, standing close enough to feel the warmth coming off Sanji in the cooling afternoon air, guesses wildly. “You… like birds, too?”

Sanji’s mouth curves into a small, private smile, brief and real enough to catch and hold. “You’re learning, Moss. It’s almost cute.”

The words land like a spark against dry tinder; Zoro’s stomach flips.

The feeding itself is ridiculous and loud and weirdly graceful all at once. Beaks snapping, wings shifting, fish flashing silver in the volunteer’s hands. Luffy laughs like he’s at a fireworks show, absolutely delighted and bamboozled and in awe of all of it. Sanji watches all of it with his arms folded and his whole face open in those tiny involuntary ways. By the time they cross from the waterfront over toward the amusement park, the tension in Zoro has gone from a private ache to an active storm. The park itself is exactly the kind of thing a tourist town would build half out of nostalgia and half out of optimism: bright painted fencing, lights already coming on even though the sun hasn’t fully set, rides for children and rides for teenagers pretending not to be terrified, stalls full of overpriced games and at the centre of it all a ferris wheel turning slow and white against the darkening sky.

Nami, walking just ahead, glances back at him once and then jerks her head at the ferris wheel, her expression sweet whicjh is how he knows she is absolutely engineering something.

The group mills for a while through the smaller stalls. Luffy wins a plush octopus through sheer probability and cheating but Zoro’s present for almost none of it — all he can think about is ferris wheel and how the way the closer the evening gets the more every interaction with Sanji is starting to feel like prelude. At the ferris wheel, he catches one look at Nami’s face and realises he needs to step in, right now, or she’s going to strongarm into something in front of the whole fucking group.

Zoro turns to Sanji, heart kicking up. “Scared, Curls?”

Sanji snorts. “Of a ferris wheel? Are you projecting? Aw, you need someone to hold your hand?” The flirtation is light and teasing, the kind Sanji tosses out without thinking, probably, but it still lands straight in Zoro’s chest and twists. The uncertainty that he’s imagining all of this burns hotter than ever.

He points at the loading gate before he can overthink it. “C’mon, then.”

“This is the worst invite I’ve ever had.” Sanji mutters but there’s no real bite in it. Instead, his gaze lingers a second longer, something unreadable flickering behind the usual sharpness before he shrugs. “Fine. Wouldn’t want the big bad swordsman looking weak in front of the pelicans.”

Zoro’s pulse spikes so hard he feels it in his teeth. Usopp, from behind them, makes a noise so obviously gleeful that Zoro doesn’t have to turn to know exactly what his face looks like. Nami says, with angelic innocence: “How sweet. Have fun!”

Zoro flips her off without looking and then that’s it, they’re in the gondola together, just the two of them, the wheel beginning its slow, inexorable ascent into the twilight as the park drops away slowly beneath them.

For the first few seconds, neither of them says much. The town spreads out in widening perspective, all  strings of lights along the waterfront and the dark ribbon of road they came in on, the park glowing below like somebody spilled a carnival and decided to keep it. Beyond all of that is the water, vast and dim, holding the very last edges of the sky. Sanji sits with one arm slung over the back of the bench and a knee angled toward the middle with the sort of ease Zoro has learned is only partly natural and partly performed out of long habit,  a shield that’s become comfortable enough to wear without thinking.

Zoro should say something, he thinks. A flirt. A test. A line cast out over strange water to see what moves underneath it. He’s going to tell Sanji if it kills him and if Sanji rejects him, well. Zoro will just have to suck it up and deal with it. He’s survived worse, maybe. Surely. He’ll go back to the house he shares with Luffy and Ace and keep training, keep existing in the same space, keep calling him names like nothing ever happened. He’s had three years of practice swallowing this feeling, god knows he can swallow one more permanent version. He tries very hard not to hope, though, because hope is dangerous. Hope makes the fall worse. He claers his throat anyway. “You’ve been talking about stuff all day.”

Sanji laughs once, surprised. “Okay?”

“I… noticed.”

“Is this your attempt at conversation, Moss?”

Zoro glares at the darkening view outside rather than admit he deserves that. Besides the embarrassment, though, there’s something else, something soft, because Sanji’s tone isn’t cutting tonight. Still rude, yes  — he’d probably become physically ill if he let an insult free sentence live too long in mixed company. But there’s a low, unwary warmth to it, this time.

“I like hearing about the sea,” he says quietly. From up here, the town seems less busy, the pier just a dark suggestion by the water now. The ocean beyond is one huge breathing shape under the bruising sky and Sanji stares out at it for a few minutes before finally speaking.

“Zeff thinks I should just stick with cooking.” The sentence lands strangely, not because it’s shocking but because it isn’t. Sanji talks about cooking all the damn time, lives in it. He loves it with the same precision and intensity he applies to any other subject that gets his full attention, but here, right now, his tone’s too stilted for a casual mention. Some instinct in Zoro,  rare and almost always correct, tells him not to rush the silence here. Sure enough, after a few minutes Sanji exhales and continues. “He’s not pushy. Just… he thinks I’d be good enough to really do something with it, you know? Like I could actually make something of myself if I stopped fucking around with side interests.” The self-deprecation is quiet, almost offhand, but it hits Zoro all the same.

“You would,” he says at once, the words out before he can weigh them.

Sanji glances at him, something so unguarded in the look that Zoro has to grip the edge of the seat with one hand just to stay inside his own body. “At cooking? Obviously, idiot. But I keep thinking about switching or adding or… I don’t really know.”

The wheel carries them up farther, then pauses briefly to load passengers below. Their gondola sways once in the wind and settles and Zoro’s confession — his bright, frightened plan to kiss him, to test the waters, do something — slides sideways and then drops clean out of reach.

“I love cooking,” Sanji continues quietly, frustration in it now not with Zoro but with himself and the whole architecture of wanting more than one future. “I love feeding people and I know I’m good at it. I like making something and watching somebody’s face change when they taste it and realise it’s exactly what they wanted. But then I… I think about the ocean and it feels like I’m already halfway somewhere else.” He laughs under his breath, small and rough. “It’s stupid.”

“No,” Zoro says immediately, sharper than he intends, instinctive and automatic, the same way he’s always called Sanji out when he turns that knife on himself. He can’t help it; he never could. “It’s not stupid.”

Sanji doesn’t seem to hear him, or maybe he does and just keeps going because he’s finally in motion and not stopping now. “It’s just… I don’t know. It gets under my skin, always has. Since I was a kid, before the Baratie. Before anything, really.” His hand lifts in a useless little gesture towards the world below, like somewhere out there is the right shape of the feeling.

Zoro keeps absolutely still.

“Then Zeff taught me fish,” Sanji says, mouth curving faintly. “Not like textbooks but real, actual fish. Freshness, species, how to handle them, what people ruin by being stupid. And then I just kept reading. Now I’m twenty-two and trying to decide if I wanna spend the rest of my life in kitchens or in labs or on boats or some combination of all three and every option feels like giving up the others.”

Zoro had been prepared, vaguely, for soft. For a confessional mood, maybe. For some smaller opening he could answer with the thing he’s been building in his chest all day. He wasn’t prepared for this precise kind of intimacy: Sanji placing his future in the space between them and trusting Zoro not to mishandle it. The kiss he had imagined suddenly feels so small, something taken rather than something answered properly. He keeps his voice careful. “You don’t have to give either one up.”

Sanji snorts softly. “That sounds fake.”

“I’m serious.”

“Well, that’s worrying.”

“I mean it.”Sanji goes still in that tiny listening way he has when something matters and he hasn’t yet decided whether to trust it and Zoro hesitates, knowing full well that words are not his best tools. He tries his best, anyway. “You love food, you love the sea. Those aren’t opposite things.”

Sanji glances over at him, impossible to read all at once. Tired and soft, guarded only by habit. Wanting, maybe, though not in the way Zoro had been planning for. Wanting to be seen and understood and taken seriously.

“You don’t talk about cooking like it’s just work. You talk about it like…” He searches for the shape and almost laughs at himself for trying. “Like it matters morally or something. And the fish stuff? That’s the same. Different language, maybe, but same thing. You’d be good at either. Probably both, you’re insane enough to do it properly.”

The last line makes Sanji laugh, for real this time. “Cheers, big ears,” he says dryly, “Very touching.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Unfortunately.” He’s smiling now, though, and not with that knife edged one he uses when he’s deflecting praise because receiving it cleanly would expose too much and Zoro — who had come up here ready to blow his own life up by force if necessary, ready to resign himself to rejection and just deal with it — sits across from him in the swinging dark and tries to figure out where the hell they’re meant to go next. For a minute they just sit there, suspended over lights and water and the whole ridiculous glowing coast until Sanji tips his head back against the window and looks outward. “It’s pretty from up here.”

Zoro looks at him instead of the sea and says the only thing he can say that still feels honest inside all the wanting he’s swallowed for later. “Yeah, it is.”

x

The Airbnb’s luxurious only in the way holiday houses sometimes are by accident: generous rooms, a decent back verandah, mismatched lamps and overwashed towels and, most importantly, a pool.

Usopp, who is carrying in two bags and Flat Steve at the same time, nearly trips over the threshold with glee while Sanji disappears in the kitchen, already identifying its weak points and storage flaws and stove capacity. Zoro follows more slowly, bag over one shoulder and skin still holding the long warm ache of the day.

The place arranges itself around them in minutes, one of the things Zoro likes best about this group and one of the things he’d never say out loud without being physically coerced: they’re extremely good at making temporary places feel inhabited. Bags get dropped in corners, music comes on low from somebody’s phone. Nami claims the best room for her and Usopp and no-one bothers challenging it because life’s short and, truthfully, none of them have a death wish. Luffy runs through the bedrooms while Usopp discovers a stack of old board games in a cupboard and gasps.

Sanji opens the fridge, looks inside and makes a face of such immediate offense that Zoro laughs before he can stop himself. “The hell kind of fruit bowl is this?”

Usopp pokes his head into the kitchen. “Bad fruit bowl?”

“Indefensible fruit bowl. Criminal, even.” Sanji leans one hip against the bench with a bowl full of peaches in his hands and grins. “You lot still got room?”

The response comes in a ragged, overlapping chorus of yes and it becomes, in minutes, a whole production. Sanji slices the peaches into clean, soft halves while Luffy hovers nearby like a starving ghost and gets his hand slapped away twice for trying to steal one raw before they migrate the operation out to the little gas barbecue out the back. The pool’s glowing in a clean rectangle of impossible blue and, beyond the fence, the neighbourhood’s quiet, other houses occupied, other groups drifting through their own versions of the evening, everyone briefly convinced life is simpler near the sea.

Zoro ends up at the barbecue because god knows he always ends up wherever Sanji is if no-one actively prevents it. He grabs the tongs when Sanji needs them, adjusts the flame when it’s asked and tries very hard not to stare at the way Sanji’s shoulders move under his shirt while he brushes the cut peaches with melted butter and sugar and lays them down on the barbeque. The smell of the sugar melting hits almost immediately, so sweet it’s nearly acrid and Luffy makes a noise no human being should make in public. “Whoa.”

“You’ve said that about eight times today,” Nami scoffs, appearing on the verandah with a glass of wine in hand and all the serenity of having finally reached the stage of the trip where the group is fed and housed and thus not in mortal danger. Probably.

“That’s because life is whoa!”

“Life is peaches,” Usopp says dreamily, perched on the railing.

Sanji points at him with the tongs like he’s awarding a medal. “Finally, some intelligence in this house.”

They eat the peaches standing up on the verandah or sitting in the mismatched outdoor chairs around the glass table, chortling over the little cartoon fish on the cork coasters that have clearly been picked up from some bargain tourist bin. There’s nothing to serve them with, because none of them had the foresight to pick up ice cream but the first bite’s so delicious it doesn’t even matter. It’s just warm peach collapsing under teeth, the edges caramelised and sugar gone dark and sticky. Luffy nearly cries about it, until the conversation slides in the aimless, perfect way only tired groups can manage after a full day together. Usopp starts complaining about the poetry slam he signed up for next month and then clearly regrets confessing it because now Luffy wants to know whether poetry slams involve actual hitting.

“Emotionally,” Nami remarks dryly. It’s fair: she’s probably the one that’s had to listen to Usopp practice the most.

“That sounds… worse.”

“It is worse,” Usopp bemoans. “Last time someone read a piece about their ex and the whole room started crying. I’m not prepared for that level of commitment.”

Sanji licks a streak of peach off the back of his thumb. “D’you have a poem ready?”

Usopp groans. “Parts of one? Does that count?”

That kicks off another round of overlapping nonsense and, in the middle of it, Nami’s phone lights up. She glances at the screen and answers on speaker without asking. “You surviving without us?”

Robin’s calm, amused voice fills the night. “The silence is suspicious. How’s the chaos level?”

“Peach-induced delirium,” Sanji calls out.

“I’m jealous,” Robin says, and they can all hear the smile in her voice. “I found the most charming little wine bar.”

Franky’s voice suddenly booms through the speaker in the background. “Yo! We’re going to some karaoke spot down the road later! Tell Sanji I found a place that does grilled octopus. We’re doing this again next month!”

Sanji laughs. “Tell him I’m not cooking for him if he sends karaoke voice notes to chat.”

It’s stupid and easy and full of the low, constant affection. Robin and Franky discuss more of their day until Luffy points at the pool with his spoon and hopeful eyes. Somehow — through momentum, through poor collective judgment, through the simple fact that all of them are a little buzzed and a little softened by the day and also unwilling to be the one boring person in the room — ten minutes later they’re all changing into whatever counts as swimwear and meeting by the pool under the little outdoor lights.

The water’s delicious warm, a nice little slap that steals the breath for half a second and wakes every nerve like a live current running straight through the body. Luffy cannonballs so hard the splash reaches the verandah railing and nearly takes out a potted plant; the wave he creates probably registers on some distant seismic monitor. Zoro dives cleanly from the side, letting the water close over his head in one long, silent rush. For a single perfect second everything goes still beneath the surface, jsut a muffled world and blue light and the pressure of water against skin and muscle. He opens his eye to see the others above him as broken luminous shapes: kicking legs, flailing arms, a hand slicing through the glow like a blade. He surfaces into noise and chlorinated night and the immediate impact of Luffy slamming into his back with all the grace of a dropped fridge. Usopp, once fully dragged in, discovers he can’t resist retaliatory splashing and declares total war, wielding a pool noodle like a bloody lance. And Sanji…

Sanji’s gold where the sun didn’t reach him and dark where it did, leaner than Zoro remembers until the body’s actually in front of him again,  all long clean lines and quiet muscle that only shows when the usual layers of clothing are stripped away. His hair darkens immediately with water, curling at the ends in a way that should be illegal, like something tailored to ruin Zoro’s entire life in one slow motion glance. Thankfully, Zoro’s staring is disrupted by getting absolutely slammed by Luffy, never one to miss an opening. He dunks Luffy back in retaliation, holding him down just long enough for a dramatic bubble scream before he’s shoved by Sanji hard enough to send him backward into the deeper end. He comes up spluttering laughter and chlorine. “Asshole!”

“You started breathing near me!” Sanji fires back, grin sharp and bright, water streaming down his face in rivulets that catch the lights like liquid sunshine.

“That’s not a move!”

“It is if I say it is!”

Luffy crashes into both of them from the side, some type of guided missile, nearly taking all three under and sending water everywhere. Nami yells from the shallows and Usopp, clinging to the edge with one arm while somehow keeping Flat Steve dry under the other, provides commentary like some kind of deranged sports announcer: “And there goes the mossy one, ladies and theybies —  oh no, he’s down! The curly brow has him in a headlock! This is unprecedented! The crowd’s losing their minds!”

Wrestling in water is nothing but contact, forearms sliding against forearms and hands gripping shoulders and a knee knocking against his thigh underwater where no-one can see. Sanji grabs the back of Zoro’s neck to shove him under while laughing low in his throat, letting go before it turns into anything real and each point of contact goes through Zoro like a livewire straight to the spine. At one point Luffy gets both arms wrapped around Sanji’s waist from behind and starts trying to drag him toward the deep end and Sanji tries to jostle him off to no avail. “Let go of me!”

“Join me in the trench!”

“There’s no trench!”

“There can be if we believe hard enough!”

Zoro catches Luffy under one arm and hauls him sideways with enough force to break the hold so that Sanji can twist free, spinning with the momentum and a laugh, before colliding straight into Zoro, an accident, nothing except for how Zoro feels every bit of it. Sanji’s hand lands on his shoulder first to steady himself, fingers splaying warm and firm against wet skin, other hand catching at Zoro’s side under the water and Zoro nearly loses the next five seconds of his life to that alone. The press of Sanji’s chest against his own, the slide of bare skin on bare skin, the way Sanji’s breath catches for half a heartbeat. Sanji’s mouth open on half a breath, half a laugh, his eyes bright from the lights and from the adrenaline, from whatever vicious joy he takes in fighting for fun. This is where Zoro should move, he knows that. He shove the other man away, say something insulting, turn the collision back into stupid horseplay before the air between them changes temperature and everyone notices. Instead he freezes for one beat too long and, like the idiot Nami’s been correctly calling him all these years, lets his hand come up to brush away a wet curl stuck to the side of Sanji’s face  — quick, light, catastrophic. It’s such a small thing but it might as well be a scream for how quickly Sanji freezes.

Everything narrows to this single bright, electric point: the pool light shivering across the water’s surface, Sanji’s hand still resting at his side underwater, thumb pressing just slightly into the muscle of Zoro’s waist like he forgot to let go. The damp heat of his cheek under that brief touch and the fact that Zoro has just reached for him in the open, in front of their friends, with no excuse worth a damn. Sanji’s eyes flick down, just for a second, just long enough to find Zoro’s mouth. It happens so fast Zoro almost thinks he imagined it but he didn’t, he knows he didn’t, because he knows what he’s been living inside for way too long to mistake that look now. He knows the shape of attention dragged lower by pure instinct, knows the brief, naked flash of it. The almost. The spark that jumps the gap between them and lands smoking in Zoro’s chest.

oh, he thinks. oh, fuck.

He has a chance. The realiseation hits like a second wave, warmer and more terrifying than the first.

Luffy slams bodily into both of them a second later and the moment shatters like glass: Sanji jerks back at once, turning the movement into renewed combat with impressive speed. He grabs Luffy around the middle and hauls him down into the water with a triumphant shout while Zoro stands there, entire world shifted. “Got you, bastard!”

“There’s no honour in this pool!”

“There’s no honour anywhere!”

The others keep going and Zoro throws himself back into the wrestling because what the hell else can he do at this stage? The whole word’s just unbearable in the best possible way and by the time they finally stagger out of the pool — hair wet, skin chilled and goosebumped, towels raided from the bathroom cupboard, the night fully down around the yard  — Zoro feels flayed open by hope. It is, he realises dimly, far worse than despair. Despair at least had habits he knew how to live with but hope is feral. It gets into the blood, makes everything feel newly charged and newly possible and newly capable of loss.

They drift back onto the verandah in clumps, wrapped in towels and still arguing over who cheated, who splashed the mos and whether Flat Steve needs therapy after witnessing so many war crimes. Luffy wants instant noodles for post-swim strength, which they don’t have, so Usopp resorts to designating himself as official movie chooser. Sanji, toweling his hair rough and careless, glances at Zoro once across the verandah just once, but this time the look lingers  longer than it should. Usopp, Nami and Luffy bundle inside, leaving wet footprints tracking across the verandah like evidence at a crime scene and towels slung over shoulders, hair dripping onto the floor in steady little taps, the air conditioning slamming into damp skin hard enough to raise a chorus of simultaneous complaints.

“It has narrative integrity,” Usopp insists, voice cracking with theatrical conviction.

“It has a frog on a bike,” Nami deadpans but there’s a tired edge to it, like she’s finally found that sweet pocket of respite the trip was planned for.

Luffy grins. “Put the frog on!”

Sanji sighs. “You do Muppets, I’m cleaning the barbecue before the sugar carbonises and takes my soul with it.”

“Leave it,” Nami calls, already sinking into the couch like she owns the entire house.

Sanji gives her a look that suggests he’d rather set himself on fire than wake up to a sticky grill plate and the ghost of burnt peach residue. “And wake up to that abomination? I’d rather die.”

“That can be arranged,” Zoro mutters on pure reflex, the words out before his brain catches up and Sanji snorts, short and familiar and edged with something that might be normal, but doesn’t answer. He just gathers his supplies and heads back out to the verandah like someone marching to a private execution they’ve chosen themselves. Everybody else keeps moving inward, oblivious: Luffy cannonballs into the couch cushions, Usopp already arguing with the remote while Nami vanishes to change, threatening death to anyone who encroaches on her side of the couch.

Zoro follows by reflex, one step and then two, before he stops in a violent halt, body whirling almost before his mind catches up.

He can’t do this. He can’t walk into that living room, drop onto the couch under a shared blanket and pretend to give a single shit about singing puppets while the pool moment keeps slamming into him on repeat: Sanji freezing mid-breath, eyes dropping straight to Zoro’s mouth with that raw, unguarded burst of attention, the second where something electric and impossible had cracked open between them before the world had snapped back to loud and stupid and safe. He’s spent the last hour trying to bury it, trying to convince himself it was nothing but the heat of the water, the sugar rush, the late hour, his own pathetic projection. He’s told himself not to build cathedrals out of one look, not to let hope metastasise into hallucination but.

But what if he hadn’t imagined it? What if Sanji had looked at him — really looked at him — with that sharp, startled hunger and wanted him back for one fractured second?

And what if Zoro does nothing?

What if he lets the night close over it like nothing happened, lets tomorrow roll in with breakfast and road trip banter and their lives slotting back into the same careful orbit around that one livewire they both refuse to touch? He knows himself too well: it’d become another unkillable memory, polished bright by years of repetition, one more thing he carries in silence while the swords at his hip stays sharp and his mouth stays shut. Years of it. Years of watching Sanji flirt with everyone else, cook for everyone else, exist in the same space as him without ever crossing the line again.

Fuck that.

He turns on his heel and heads back out before the panic can talk him down, to where the verandah has gone quiet, the house noise muffled behind glass. The pool lights throw blue ripples up the walls, an artscape for the insects humming in the garden and the low hiss of the pool cleaner.

Sanji’s at the barbecue, hair still damp enough to curl at the nape. He’s scrubbed most of the peach residue away and is attacking the plate with a focus that borders on religious, shoulders tight, jaw set like this small war’s the only thing keeping him from thinking about anything else. Water still beads along the line of his spine, catching the deck light in tiny glints as the muscles in his back shift with every scrub, lean and defined and always, always unfairly distracting. He clearly hears the door, keeping his voice a little too casual. “Forget your dignity in there, Mossy?”

Zoro’s stomach flips hot and then cold, a full bodied lurch because, sure, Sanji sounds norma; enough to the untrained ear, but there’s a thread of something underneath, extra air in the sarcasm, a slight overcare in the drawl, like he’s reading from a script he wrote five minutes ago and is already regretting. His shoulders are too rigid; the scrub brush moves in short, jerky strokes instead of the usual smooth rhythm. Tension, raw and electric, rolls off him in waves because he must know. He fucking knows why Zoro’s back out here and is deflecting so hard it’s almost painful to watch.

“Came to help,” Zoro says and, god, it sounds just as stupid out loud as it did in his head.

Sanji finally glances over, the deck light catching the sharp line of his cheekbone and the wet shine at his temple, the faint flush that might be from the barbecue or might be something else entirely. For one heartbeat his expression is unreadable. “With cleaning.”

“Yeah.”

“You?”

“Yeah.”

Sanji turns back to the barbecue but not before Zoro catches the way his fingers flex white-knuckled around the brush handle. “Truly, nature is healing.”

Each step closer feels like stepping on thin ice over deep water, every instinct shouting that this could end everything or start it, and he has no map either way and that’s the worst part. In the pool he’d had the ghost of one: follow the pull, don’t let it die unspoken. Now it’s just him and Sanji half dressed and damp and close enough that Zoro can smell the chlorine on his skin and the entire thing has become terrifyingly, irrevocably real. He pauses at the table hands so desperate for something to do that he grabs the cork backed tourist coaster like it’s a lifeline. “What’s this one?”

Sanji freezes for a beat before he glances over again. “What?”

Zoro lifts the coaster higher, feeling like the world’s biggest idiot and unable to stop. “The… fish.”

Sanji stares at him, the silence stretching like taffy, until it’s awkward and humming. Then, because Sanji is apparently as helpless against fish facts as Zoro is against him, he sets the brush down with a soft huff and steps half a pace closer. His voice is tight. “Christ. Let me see.” It’s the thinnest excuse anyone’s ever come up with, probably, but he leans in anyway, hair falling forward, shoulder brushing Zoro’s arm for a split second before he pulls back like he’s been burned. “Wrasse.”

“Which one?”

“The big one in the middle, idiot.”

Zoro pretends to study it like his life depends on fin detail. “And that one?”

Sanji leans in further, close enough now that Zoro can feel the heat coming off his skin. “Too small.”

“You can’t tell.”

“I can tell it’s too far away.” Sanji’s voice cracks on the last word, just a fraction, but it’s there. He clears his throat. The words hang there, heavier than they have any right to be. Zoro’s heart is hammering so hard it feels like it might crack ribs and this isn’t the clean pre-fight adrenaline he knows how to ride. This is just straight up anxiety, bright and humiliating, lightning under his skin screaming for him to do something or lose this forever.

Sanji hesitates before, slowly — like every step costs him — moving around the barbecue, coming to stand beside Zoro at the table properly. He takes the coaster and their fingers brush and neither of them acknowledges it, but Sanji’s hand trembles once before he steadies it. “This one might be bream,” he mutters, staring down like the print might bite him. “Or some kind of juvenile snapper? The artist’s got no respect for fin detail.”

Zoro’s barely hearing the words anymore: Sanji’s right there, a single drop of water sliding slow down the side of his neck, the clean scent of him filling Zoro’s lungs until there’s no room left for anything else. “Keep going,” he says and his voice comes rough, barely there.

Sanji looks up. That same small, startled look. “About… fish?”

“Yeah.”

“Right.” Sanji sounds like he’s walking on cracking glass. He looks back down, tries again. “Wrasse are… complicated? A lot of them are sequential hermaphrodites, which means — Christ. I can’t see this damn thing properly.”

Zoro moves closer and Sanji doesn’t pull away and that, right there, is all the permission Zoro needs. He reaches out, slow and deliberate and every nerve screaming, to set one hand flat against Sanji’s stomach, until he can feel the muscle jump under his palm when Sanji inhales sharply. The sound punches straight through Zoro like a blade.

The coaster lowers in his grip, voice thin. “Wrasse? I said wrasse, right?”

Zoro’s mouth is dry. “Keep going.”

Sanji’s eyes flutter shut for one heartbeat and when they open again he’s still staring at the stupid coaster like it’s a shield. “Wrasse are… they change sex, okay? Some of them. It’s —” He breaks off, a ragged little laugh escaping. “Yeah, I can’t do this.”

Zoro leans in, hand spreading wider over Sanji’s abdomen, steadying them both before he takes every ounce of courage he’s ever had and all the panic he can’t hide and he lowers his mouth to the side of Sanji’s neck, barely. Just a brush of lips against warm, pulsing skin but Sanji goes completely still, utterly frozen under Zoro’s hand, every muscle wired tight. He inhales, hard and shaky, and the sound shivers down Zoro’s spine.

“Zoro,” he whispers and it’s not a warning or anger. Just his name, blunt and helpless, like it’s been pried out of him. Zoro lifts his head, ready to stop, ready to die on this verandah if that’s what Sanji needs but Sanji’s already moving; he drags Zoro in with a force that feels like years of restraint finally snapping, kissing him like he’s been starving for it. There’s no hesitation there, all the awkward tension from thirty seconds ago exploding into something fierce and certain. He tastes like chlorine and peaches and smoke and Sanji and Zoro makes a sound he’s never heard himself make, low and broken. Sanji kisses him harder, one hand fisting in Zoro’s hair at the nape and the other sliding down his chest like he can’t decide where to touch first. He shoves Zoro back into the table edge, slotting between his thighs with zero gentleness, edge digging into Zoro’s back as the whole thing rattles. A glass tips and rolls off, shattering somewhere unimportant but Zoro’s busy: his hands are everywhere, waist and ribs and the dip of Sanji’s spine, the curve of his ass, pulling him closer and closer. Sanji bites Zoro’s lower lip in response, hard enough to sting, groaning into his mouth.

“Seriously,” Sanji pants, half a laugh and half accusation, voice shredded. “Fish? That was your big play?”

Zoro, lungs burning, heart trying to punch out of his chest, manages: “Worked, didn’t it?”

Sanji makes a strangled sound and bites Zoro’s jaw in retaliation, then drags him back into another kiss, slower this time but no less desperate, like now that the line is obliterated they’re never going back. Zoro makes a helpless sound and Sanji rewards it by pressing his thigh up harder until Zoro’s head drops forward against Sanji’s shoulder, mouth open against warm, damp skin as he rocks into it. The table rattles again under the force of it, another glass nearly going over the edge and Sanji breaks the kiss just far enough to hiss against Zoro’s mouth, hand still fisted in Zoro’s hair to keep him pinned.

“Room,” he rasps, urgent. “Your room, now. Before I decide I don’t care who hears us out here.”

The words hit Zoro like a spark to petrol; he doesn’t trust himself to speak. He just nods once, sharp and desperate, and lets Sanji grab his hand, dragging him toward the sliding door. Sanji’s other hand stays possessive on Zoro’s hip the whole way down the hallway, fingers slipping just under the waistband, keeping Zoro half-dazed and following every step.

x

He wakes slowly, which is unusual enough on its own to register before anything else does; he’s not a slow-waking person by nature. He surfaces hard and clean from sleep like a diver breaking water, body immediately accounted for, exits mapped, light sources noted, where-am-i answered within a single breath. Years of training and too many mornings in unfamiliar rooms have built the habit into muscle memory but now? Now, consciousness arrives in layers. Warmth first, the kind that has weight and shape and breath to it, and then the bed. The room’s dim around the edges, curtains not quite meeting to stop the morning light from streaming through in pale bands across the far wall. He can hear muffled movement elsewhere in the house and pipes, maybe. Somebody opening and shutting a cupboard. Luffy’s voice somewhere very far away, so not a direct threat just yet.

Then the verandah, the coaster, the fucking fish, his hand on Sanji’s stomach, that first impossible kiss, the frantic stumbling path from outside to here, all of it somehow both desperate and careful, just hands and mouths and the sheer astonishment of being wanted back, with no caution left to hide behind.

Zoro just lies there and stares at Sanji for a minute, half turned toward him under the sheet with one arm crooked loosely over the pillow. Hair a beautiful mess, mouth soft in sleep, bare shoulder and collarbone warm in the pale light and Zoro wants, selfishly and with full awareness of the selfishness, one quiet second of this that belongs only to morning and not to panic or adrenaline or the fear that Sanji might wake up and decide last night was just a heat-of-the-moment thing.

He reaches out and brushes a strand of hair off Sanji’s forehead, freezing when Sanji makes a noise and shifts. He lets his hand settle at the back of Sanji’s neck anyway, tracking Saji’s exhale before, finally, sliding an arm around him. Sanji presses into him with the sleepy, heedless trust of someone not fully awake yet and so not resisting where he lands, legs tangling loosely under the sheets. Sanji waking happens in stages, too — one hand flexes against the sheet between them before his eyes open, slow and heavy, fixing on Zoro’s face from too close, probably. “Hi.”

Zoro’s mouth does something idiotic around the word before he can stop it. “Hey?”

Sanji’s gaze drifts down, not meaningfully at first, just orienting, taking stock of the evidence highlighting exactly how close they are and exactly how little distance remains to be plausibly reclaimed after last night. The corner of his mouth lifts, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Very clingy in the mornings, Mossy.”

Zoro tightens his arm by a fraction on pure instinct. “You hate it?”

“No,” Sanji returns immediately, croaky with sleep but honest enough to knock something loose under Zoro’s ribs. Sanji, however, has never been able to survive too much unguarded truth in a row without skewing the angle.“But I reserve the right to mock you for it.”

“Yeah,” Zoro mutters. “Fair.”

Sanji laughs a little and it’s nice. Zoro strokes his thumb once, absentmindedly, at the side of Sanji’s neck, feeling how still Sanji goes in response. The shift’s small enough that somebody who didn’t know him might miss it but Zoro, who now maybe knows too much about the way Sanji’s body holds things back when he’s nervous, catches it at once and the the whole mood changes. Sanji’s eyes head towards the washed out stripe of light at the curtains and his hand, which had been resting loose against Zoro’s side, curls in a little. “We should probably talk about this.”

Zoro inhales. “Talk about what?”

Sanji snorts once, without humour. “Oh, I dunno. Unless this is a really common Thursday for you.”

Zoro stares at him and, as the silence stretches, he sees it properly: the tension, the overcare, the way Sanji still isn’t looking straight at him like he’s expecting to be written off or something. Not casually, maybe: Sanji’s too smart for that, he knows what last night was. He knows it had too much in it to be shrugged into anonymity cleanly but it’s clear he’s Zoro to say it was, what, heat. A trip thing. A moment. Something intense and real but still somehow temporary.

The idea hits Zoro with enough force to clear the last of sleep out of him entirely. “What?”

Sanji finally looks back and there it is now, impossible to miss, the nerves under the sarcasm. That old polished carelessness hauled on too early in the morning because he doesn’t know whether he’s safe enough to set it down. “What d’you mean what?”

“I mean why are you saying it like that? Like I’m about to say it didn’t mean anything.” The words leave Zoro’s mouth rougher than intended, underpinned by some kind of offense in a deeper place than anger. Startled by the possibility. A little hurt, even, that this is what Sanji had braced himself for waking up beside him.Sanji’s expression falters, just a little. A line of tension loosens around the mouth so Zoro keeps going, quieter now. “I’m not going to say that. You know I don’t — you know this means something.”

The silence that follows feels enormous. Sanji swallows once, the movement visible in the pale morning light. “Yeah. For me, too,” he admits, voice barely above a whisper.

Zoro frowns and commits to it, because Sanji’s in his bed and the room’s soft with morning light and the sheets still smell like both of them and they’ve already crossed too many lines to survive cowardice. More than anything, because the look on Sanji’s face a second ago — that careful uncertainty — landed somewhere in Zoro that immediately wanted to fight it. “This is serious for me.”

Sanji goes even more still in his arms, if possible. He licks his lips and doesn’t look the least bit surprised. “I figured. I mean, I’ve… I know it’s been serious.”

“What?”

Sanji’s expression does something weird and private, some small soft thing. “You’re not exactly subtle, idiot.”

Zoro stares at him as Sanji shifts a little against the pillow, rubbing briefly over his own mouth. “I mean, fuck,” Sanji goes on, voice low. “You look at me like I’ve ruined your life and also like you want to bite me half the time. It’s not like it was difficult to notice.”

Zoro actually feels his face catch fire. “That’s… you reckon that’s not subtle to you.”

“No,” Sanji snorts, dry. “It was not subtle to me. I kept thinking it’d fade or something, or like… I dunno. A phase. Not for you, I guess, but some weird tension thing? Like you were stressed or pissed or maybe I was just imagining it and filling the rest in, because apparently my life’s not complicated enough? But it didn’t go away. You kept looking at me the same way, even though I kept waiting for you to wake up one morning and be normal again.”

Zoro snorts despite himself. “Sure.”

“You know what I mean. I thought maybe if I left it alone, it’d sort itself out. That one day I’d look up and you’d be over it and I wouldn’t have to…” He trails off, searching.

“Wouldn’t have to what?”

Sanji huffs a little at that, but there’s no mockery in it. More like disbelief that Zoro of all people is making him finish emotional sentences before breakfast. “Deal with the fact that I didn’t hate it.”

That one goes through Zoro cleanly and his arm tightens around the other man before he can help it. Sanji’s gaze flick up, a little more colour in his face now, a little more breathlessness, like now that he’s saying it the thing is getting ahead of him and he knows it. “I never used to know what to do with it. I figured I was just reading what I wanted into things or reading what I didn’t want into things. Or confusing this with all the other bullshit we’ve got wrapped around each other.”

Zoro lets out one slow breath. “So what changed?”

Sanji’s gaze drops to his mouth for one dangerous second. “You. I mean, you kept being serious, that’s what changed. Or maybe it didn’t change, maybe I just finally believed it. You never… you never stopped looking at me like that.”

There’s no good answer to that, no clever one; Zoro’s spent years trying and failing to stop doing exactly that and it’s never occurred to him that consistency — the simple stubborn fact of his wanting not fading — might be the thing that made Sanji finally trust it. He says the only true thing he has right now: “Couldn’t.”

Sanji’s grin goes crooked, so bright Zoro wants to kiss him right then and there. “Apparently. Lucky for you, now I know what to do with it.”

Zoro kisses him with one hand sliding to the side of Sanji’s neck, thumb catching briefly under his jaw, and thinks with a kind of stunned and exhausted disbelief that maybe this is what he’s been waiting for all along  — not only the wanting, not only the kiss, but the mutual recognition of how long it takes to trust something this good enough to touch it. Sanji makes a soft sound against his mouth and presses closer, one leg sliding over Zoro’s hip under the sheets, pulling Zoro closer until. Zoro’s so fucking happy it almost hurts. He rolls them so Sanji ends up on top of him, one hand tangled in blonde hair, the other stroking down Sanji’s side, thumb tracing the ladder of his ribs. Sanji shivers and kisses him deeper, tongue sliding against Zoro’s with a lazy hunger that makes Zoro’s head spin and he thinks, dazed and stupidly grateful, that this might be the best morning of his whole damn life.

By the time they make themselves presentable enough to leave the bedroom Law’s already leaning against the kitchen bench with a takeawya coffee in hand, black hoodie on despite the warmth outside, expression set in its usual dry neutral lines despite Luffy attached to his side with the joy of somebody who did not even consider the possibility Law wouldn’t show up. Nami’s at the stove looking disgustingly awake, chatting to Usopp with bed hair in six directions.

The whole room stops for one gloriously awful second when Zoro and Sanji walk in together, Nami’s mouth curving immediately into something knowing and satisfied.

Sanji, apparently, has no interest in ceding the floor before breakfast and scowls. “What?”

Usopp clutches his chest. “Nothing, absolutely nothing. Carry on.”

Nami says: “Good morning,” with entire novels packed into those two words.

Zoro’s already considering homicide as a lifestyle choice when Sanj reaches back and catches his hand, long fingers threading through Zoro’s like it’s the simplest damn thing in the world. Nami turns back to the stove, grin suggesting her investments have finally matured, even as she bumps shoulders with Usopp. For his part, Usopp looks so fucking chuffed about it all that Zoro almost considers releasing Sanji’s hand right then and there.

Almost.

“Congratulations,” Law drawls, “Try not to break the rental furniture celebrating.”

Luffy points at their joined hands with unbridled joy. “Finally!”

Zoro can’t even fault him, really: to everyone else this has probably looked like two idiots taking the scenic route to a cliff they were always going to jump off. Sanji squeezes his hand deliberately, right there in front of all of them, a quiet, steady press of fingers that says that this is real and he’s done pretending otherwise.

Zoro squeezes back, throat tight. He’d been prepared for Sanji to play it cool in front of the crew, throwing up a casual brush off or a joke or something to keep the dynamic from shifting too obviously. Instead, Sanji’s standing here, hand in his, letting their ridiculous little family see exactly what this is. They drift toward the bench as a unit; Sanji doesn’t let go of his hand even while reaching for a mug with the other and Zoro just stands there, slightly dazed, letting himself be pulled into the morning chaos.

Nami slides two plates of eggs and toast across the island. “So,” she says, voice light but eyes sparkling, “Should we pretend we didn’t hear the bed last night or are we doing the polite thing?”

Sanji chokes on his coffee. “We were quiet!”

“You were not,” Usopp says cheerfully, shovelling his eggs down at a frankly alarming speed.

Law takes a slow sip of his coffee. “I’m going to need a stronger drink if this is the tone for the rest of the trip.”

Sanji’s ears are red but he’s smiling, small and private and undeniably happy. He doesn’t drop Zoro’s hand. If anything, his thumb strokes once across Zoro’s knuckles in a tiny, deliberate reassurance. Zoro feels it like sunlight spreading through his chest.

Usopp wipes fake tears. “My little mossball is all grown up and getting railed by the cook. I’m so proud.”

“I will drown you in the pool,” Zoro snaps without heat.

“And it’ll be worth it!”

Nami leans over and flicks Sanji’s forehead lightly. “Took you long enough. I was about to start a betting pool.”

“You did start a betting pool,” Law mutters.

“And I won it,” Nami says smugly as the kitchen fills with overlapping noise again — Luffy demanding more toast, Usopp already planning a celebratory group photo, Nami threatening to make them pay for the broken glass on the deck, Law accepting his fate as some kind of emotional support antagonist. Zoro keeps his hand still linked with Sanji’s and tries very hard not to think about how he could get used to this.

Sanji leans in just enough to murmur against his ear, quiet enough that only Zoro hears it: “Still serious?”

Zoro turns his head, catches Sanji’s eye and answers just as quietly. “Dead serious.”

Sanji’s smile is everything. The morning carries on around them, loud and messy and full of love in all its disguised forms while they stand there in the middle of it, finally exactly where they’re supposed to be.

x

hi i've assigned sharks to the straw hats no i will not be accepting any criticisim

luffy: whale shark

zoro: great white shark

nami: blacktip reef shark

usopp: port jackson shark

sanji: blue shark

chopper: epaulette shark

robin: wobbegong shark