#4-5k

Sanji rolls his eyes. “You’re going to try on three shirts and get tired.”

Usopp’s already darting toward a rack of jackets. “Wrong. I’m going to try on everything.”

Sanji learns, ten minutes later, that shopping with Usopp is… a lot. There’s no pace to it, no dignified progression from rack to rack, no thoughtful consideration of cut or fabric or occasion. Usopp moves through the boutique like a brightly coloured cyclone with a budget he does not personally intend to pay, snatching up shirts on impulse and holding jackets against himself at odd angles, disappearing into the fitting room only to burst back out again before Sanji has even finished critiquing the previous disaster.

The first shirt is catastrophic. It’s patterned and loud and aggressively tropical, all leaves and impossible little flowers in shades no sober person should ever wear above the age of twelve. Usopp steps out in it with the hopeful swagger of someone fully convinced he’s unearthed a hidden masterpiece.

“Absolutely not.”

Usopp looks wounded. “What? It’s bold.”

“It’s a tablecloth.”

“It’s not a tablecloth!”

“It’s exactly a tablecloth,” Sanji counters, getting to his feet and circling him with the grave attention of a tailor assessing structural collapse. “A loud one. The kind of tablecloth a mediocre resort puts on its worst terrace tables to distract from bad seafood.”

Usopp looks down at himself and then back up, stubborn. “It says I’m adventurous.”

“It says you lost a fight with a fruit stand.”

Usopp scoffs and tugs at the hem. “You have no vision.”

“I have vision enough for both of us, clearly.”

They bicker over that shirt for a full three minutes before landing, by some miracle, on a compromise: a darker pattern, still lively enough to satisfy Usopp’s instinct for flair but grounded in richer tones, all burnt rust, deep brown, the sort of palette that makes his skin look warmer instead of swallowed. The minute he changes into it, the whole effect sharpens and Sanji notices at once.

This is the problem with having eyes and taste and a brain built to arrange beauty where he finds it: once he starts looking properly, he sees everything. And what he sees in Usopp now is… different.

It’s not only the shirt, is the thing. It’s also Usopp himself. It catches Sanji with strange force, because yeah, obviously everyone changed during the time apart. You don’t get scattered across hellish little fragments of the world and come back the same shape - Sanji knows this. He’s seen it in all of them: Luffy with more gravity, Nami harder at the edges in useful ways, Robin somehow quieter and more dangerous all at once. Zoro quieter, sterner.

Usopp’s changed too. He’s not simply taller and not simply less gangly than he used to be. There’s more of him now in ways that have nothing to do with height and everything to do with conviction. The old nervousness hasn’t vanished - it lives on in his gestures, in the expressiveness of his face, in the quicksilver energy of him but the body carrying all that energy has settled. Filled in. There’s breadth now at the shoulders, real shape through the chest and upper arms, lean muscle where once there had mostly been angles and determination. More than that, there’s… ease.

That’s what gets Sanji: Usopp moves like his body believes him now, like somewhere over those two years of fear and invention and impossible survival he made peace with the fact that he’s allowed to take up space. It’s in the way he stands after stepping out of the fitting room, one hand on the curtain and the other pushing back his sleeve. In the way he rolls his shoulders like he’s testing the shirt and doesn’t instinctively hunch smaller while doing it. In the way the clothes stop wearing him and start answering him instead.

Sanji had not, until this exact moment, realised how much he still carried the old shape of Usopp in his mind, the liar with the too-thin wrists and all that fragile East Blue bravado wrapped around a body that hadn’t yet caught up to the scale of his own stories.

That boy’s still in there, sure, but he’s not the whole of him anymore.

Usopp ducks back into the fitting room and emerges a minute later in something much simpler: a soft white linen shirt, open just enough at the throat to suggest confidence rather than carelessness. Nothing flashy or trying too hard but the kind of clothing that only works if the person inside it can hold a line without apology.

Sanji looks up and something in his mind misfires, just enough to make the next breath arrive late because the shirt does exactly what a good shirt should do: it clarifies. It strips noise away and lets the body and posture do the talking. The linen catches the light softly. The white throws warmth into Usopp’s skin. The rolled sleeves make his forearms look longer, stronger. The collar leaves the elegant little v of his throat visible and -

Sanji realises, with immediate internal alarm, that he’s staring at Usopp’s collarbone. He drags his gaze back up by force.

Usopp, bless him, only looks a little self conscious as he rubs the back of his neck and says, “Is it… too boring?”

Sanji’s mouth has gone strangely dry which is an outlandish reaction, entirely bloody disproportionate. He’d like to file a complaint with his own nervous system, actually.

“It’s clean,” he says finally, aiming for some kind of professionalism and hitting something a touch too careful. “Classic. Good fit. You look…” He finds the simplest true word and says it with a little more force than necessary. “Good.”

Usopp’s smile blooms, warm and bright unguarded. “Yeah?”

And there it is again, that small, odd, deeply inconvenient rush in Sanji’s chest, the stupid little satisfaction of having said the right thing and watched it land exactly where intended. Of seeing Usopp’s face light up because of something Sanji noticed and named correctly.

Usopp turns a little, checking himself in the mirror from one angle and then another. “Okay. Okay! Maybe I can be a fashion guy.”

Sanji, grateful for the return of banter because sincerity was beginning to feel a little too prickly, snorts and folds his arms. “Don’t get cocky.”

Usopp’s eyes flick to him in the mirror, sharpening at once with mischief. “Says the man who used to wear a shirt with a live swan on it.”

Sanji freezes and the silence that follows is the silence of a man seeing murder as a clean and practical option. “It wasn’f a swan!”

Usopp turns, delighted already. “It was absolutely a swan.”

“It was a crane,” Sanji retorts, scandalised down to the bones. “And it was a statement.”

Usopp laughs so hard he has to catch the fitting room curtain with one hand to keep from folding in half. The sound of it bounces bright off the cedar walls and polished floorboards, irreverent and impossible not to answer with at least a little warmth. “A statement of what, exactly? That you’ll fight a yonko in a bird-themed blouse?”

Sanji points at him with the full, righteous outrage of an artist whose work has been misunderstood by philistines. “You watch your mouth.”

Usopp wipes under one eye, still laughing. “You’ve made some real interesting choices, Sanji.”

Sanji draws himself up. “My choices are impeccable.”

Usopp lets his gaze travel over him with theatrical care, all of Sanji’s lifelong devotion to sharp lines and deliberate elegance made flesh. “Your taste is impeccable! Your execution is sometimes…”

Sanji narrows his eyes. “Finish that sentence and die.”

Usopp grins. “Dramatic.”

Sanji’s mouth twitches despite himself. “I’m a dramatic man.”

“You are,” Usopp agrees and he says it with affection so plain and easy that Sanji feels the word - fond - settle somewhere he does not usually allow things to settle.

He looks away first, pretending interest in a rack of folded pants because his chest has gone way too full in a direction he doesn’t want to look at too closely right now. “Try the blue ones. You’ve got enough earth tones now.”

Usopp beams like he’s been handed a medal. “Oh, we’re building a wardrobe.”

Sanji sighs through his nose, already doomed. “Apparently.”

Usopp complains theatrically at the rest of Sanji’s suggestions, obeys anyway, then reappears grinning like a man playing dress-up with the one audience whose reaction actually matters.

That, Sanji thinks later, may have been where the trouble truly started, in the fact that Usopp cares what he thinks. Which is bizarre, frankly, because plenty of people care what Sanji thinks when he knows what he’s talking about. Food, knives, fabric, weather, women, flowers, wine, presentation… he’s spent his life cultivating taste because taste is one of the few forms of control the world can’t easily beat out of a person once it takes root. It’s not like it’s new to be consulted but what is new is the way Usopp watches him while he speaks, with the easy, unguarded trust of someone willing to put himself in someone else’s hands for an hour and see what shape they make of him.

Sanji hadn’t known that could feel intimate.

Now, standing in this little boutique with folded linen and sunlight striping the polished floorboards, he’s beginning to suspect almost anything can. A fitted vest makes Usopp look like he belongs in a saloon in the middle of some lawless town, cards hidden in one pocket and at least three lies behind his smile. A dark jacket with narrow lapels gives him the improbable air of some action novel hero, sharp and windblown, one good speech away from an explosion. A pair of pants sits lower on his hips than the others and Sanji has to drag his gaze back up so quickly it feels like physically yanking something on a leash.

No. Absolutely not.

He cannot be standing in a boutique at two in the afternoon having thoughts about Usopp’s hips and his mind, traitorous and efficient, tries at once to rationalise the whole thing, tries to remind himself that he’s liking this for mechanical reasons, but it’s not the whole truth. Because yeah, he’s observant and he notices details. He can tell from a distance whether a sleeve’s been cut on the wrong grain or whether a seam will pull badly under real use. That’s real. That’s skill. It’s just… not the reason his chest has gone strangely light every time Usopp steps out in something that fits him well and looks delighted by Sanji’s approval.

The truth is more embarrassing and softer: Usopp keeps looking at him like Sanji can be trusted with this. Like Sanji’s eye’s sharp enough to help and kind enough not to make a joke out of the helping, like he can stand there in half-buttoned shirts and let himself be seen without expecting cruelty for it. That’s the part Sanji didn’t expect to move him; not the clothes or even the beauty of seeing someone sharpen into their own lines but the trust. The lack of armour.

The realisation that he’s genuinely enjoying himself lands so suddenly it almost startles him. Not only because he’s right, though he generally is, and not only because Usopp’s taste, while chaotic, is redeemable with supervision. Not even because the boutique itself is pleasant in that expensive, carefully curated way that offends Sanji morally but satisfies him aesthetically. More than that, he’s enjoying being with Usopp like this, enjoying the back-and-forth, enjoying being useful in a way that has nothing to do with cooking or feeding people until they soften around the edges enough to call it love. It catches him so off guard he has to turn away under pretence of checking a rack of shirts just to regroup and Usopp steps out in a moss green shirt and Sanji’s regrouping is rendered immediately useless.

The colour’s rich without being loud, deep enough to throw heat into Usopp’s skin and make the gold-brown undercurrent in it come alive. The cut is good, all clean through the body and broad enough at the shoulders but neat at the waist. The fabric sits lightly over muscle that didn’t used to be there in this way, or at least not with this quiet certainty. The collar sits a touch uneven against the line of his neck, one side folded in just enough to ruin the whole effect.

Sanji frowns before he can stop himself. “Hold still.”

Usopp blinks. “What?”

But Sanji’s already moving. There’s no thought in it, only instinct, one step, then another and he’s in Usopp’s space with both hands lifting to the open throat of the shirt. He pinches the fabric lightly between finger and thumb, drawing one side straight to smooth the seam down flat. The shirt’s cool from the shop air but Usopp’s skin under it is not. That’s the first immediate, useless thing Sanji notices: a simple living warmth at the base of the throat and along the collarbone where the linen falls open.

The second thing is that Usopp goes completely still, the kind of full-bodied stillness that happens when someone has become suddenly and acutely aware of proximity and no longer trusts himself to move inside it without making the moment worse. Sanji feels it in the pause of Usopp’s breathing, in the held line of his shoulders, in the way the easy chatter goes out of the room all at once, leaving only the little sounds that were there before and beneath it: the rustle of fabric under Sanji’s fingers, the faint creak of the floorboards when one of them shifts weight, the murmur of the shop attendant helping someone near the front.

His own awareness sharpens in answer, climbing him slowly, like heat up the spine, like some careful blue flame finding its way through kindling. His fingers linger just a fraction too long at the collar where they should be, smoothing the linen flat, at the edge of Usopp’s collarbone The touch is nothing but the pause afterward isn’t.

Usopp’s eyes drop, not to his hands but to his mouth and the moment that lands, the whole thing changes.

oh, Sanji thinks, not in words exactly but more in the bodily shape of realisation. A shift under the ribs. A sudden dangerous awareness of the line from one thing to another, the way this has become something else. Something thinner in the air, like the room’s been emptied of enough oxygen that both of them are now breathing too carefully.

Sanji’s hand slides down before he can stop it in a smoothing motion, palm flattening over the front of the shirt to settle the fabric where it catches except the shirt doesn’t need smoothing anymore and Usopp’s heart is beating hard enough under Sanji’s hand that the lie collapses on contact. Sanji can feel the fast, live hammer of it through linen and skin and bone and the way his own pulse answers instantly, traitorous and wild and for one suspended beat they just stand there, too close and too quiet.

Sanji can smell cedar from the shelves and the faint clean soap on Usopp’s skin under the long day. He can see, with terrible clarity, the exact shape of Usopp’s mouth when he forgets to smile. The small pulse in his throat. The way his lashes cast a shadow and Sanji understands, with the full certainty of someone looking over the edge just before his footing goes, that if he leaned in now, Usopp wouldn’t stop him. The realisation’s so clear it might as well be physical. He could close the tiny strip of air between them, could feel what that mouth tastes like. Could put one hand behind Usopp’s neck and tilt him just slightly and Usopp, standing there with his breathing gone careful and his gaze fixed on Sanji’s mouth like it’s become the centre of the room, would let him because he wants to.

Sanji sees the kiss before it happens, feels it gathering, the tiny unconscious lean in both their bodies, the way the room seems to contract around the line between their mouths. The way his own hand on Usopp’s chest has stopped pretending to smooth fabric and has simply stayed, open and warm and traitorously pleased by the fast rhythm under his palm. He’s going to do it, that’s the whole terrifying truth. Not maybe and not almost: he’s going to lean in and kiss Usopp in a boutique full of linen and cedar and soft afternoon light and some stunned stupid part of him has already accepted this as not only possible but inevitable.

Then -

“Ahem.”

The sound cracks through the moment like a dropped tray.

The shop attendant has materialised at their side with the uncanny timing of a polite ghost. She smiles brightly, professionally, with absolutely no sign that she has noticed anything and every sign that she has noticed everything. “Excuse me. Would you like me to ring those up or would you like to see our accessory section?”

Usopp jerks back so hard he nearly trips over the hem of a discarded pair of pants and Sanji’s hand snaps to his own side with such speed the skin of his palm feels cold where Usopp’s heartbeat used to be. Heat floods his face, not just a blush but a full-bodied riot, the sort of temperature spike that ought to set off Marine alarms.

“Uh,” Usopp squeaks before he clears his throat and, somehow worse, says: “Accessories! Yeah. Accessories.”

Sanji would like to die.

The attendant, perfectly composed, nods like this is a deeply ordinary request from two men who definitely did not just stand in the middle of her boutique one breath from kissing. “Of course,” she smiles and glides away.

Silence rushes in behind her and Usopp looks up at the ceiling like he might find a god there.

Sanji stares at a rack of belts like it’s personally betrayed him, mind ringing with the sole coherent thought that he was going to kiss Usopp. Worse, Usopp was going to let him and the second thought lands deeper, meaner. Not because it frightens him but because it doesn’t and beneath the shock and mortification and wild internal scrambling there is a bright, shameful thread of something like joy.

Usopp glances sideways at him, cheeks are flushed and mouth softer than it was ten minutes ago. His eyes are bright with the same stunned disbelief Sanji can feel in his own bones but under that disbelief there’s something warmer. “So,” he says, the casualness of it such an obvious lie that Sanji almost loves him for trying. “Uh. Do I… need a belt?”

Sanji’s laugh comes out strangled. “You need to stop talking.”

Usopp’s mouth quirks. “That bad, huh?”

Sanji drags a hand through his hair, the sudden craving for a cigarette arriving so fast it feels like a headache. “I’m gonna throw myself into the sea.”

Usopp laughs quietly, face still flushed. “After we pay.”

Sanji points at him without looking because actual eye contact at this stage may kill him. “Don’t get smug.”

Usopp’s grin goes small and helpless and delighted all at once. “I’m not smug. I’m just…”

Whatever he was about to say is already there in his face: happy and pleased and a little dazed and Sanji, who can handle bravado and banter and dramatics all day long, has no fucking idea what to do with simple gladness. His throat tightens and he looks away because motion’s safer than thought, and thought is infinitely safer than whatever happened in the middle of that green shirt.

“Pick a jacket,” he says, voice a little rougher than he means it to be. “You need one that doesn’t make you look like a circus tent.”

Usopp lights up again instantly, changing with beautiful, reckless speed. “Yes, chef.”

Sanji scowls on reflex. “Don’t call me that.”

Usopp laughs, already halfway to the racks again, and Sanji follows because following’s easier than standing still with the ghost of another man’s heartbeat still alive in his palm.

He tells himself, as they sort through jackets and argue over lapels, that it was nothing. A moment, a misfire, an unfortunate collision of good lighting and nice fabric and and his own overdeveloped sense of aesthetics.

But the warmth in his chest doesn’t go away. It stays there, stubborn and glowing, all through the rest of the fitting and the choosing and the final armful of purchases and when Usopp holds up two jackets and asks: “Which one makes me look cooler?”

Sanji answers too quickly, too honestly: “Both,” and then has to pretend the heat in his face comes from the shop’s lighting, which is absurd because the light in here’s cool and lovely and absolutely not to blame.

The worst part isn’t that he almost kissed Usopp - the worst part is that some treacherous, newly awakened corner of him is already thinking about how easy it would be to fix that collar again.