#8.5k

The table goes quiet in that specific Straw Hat way that means everyone just became way too interested in the same thing at once, but at least three of them are trying not to look interested.

Zoro looks down to his plate, piled with eggs and potatoes, grilled tomatoes, a wedge of toast... and the little curl of red capiscum cut into a clean heart shape sitting smack bang on top of the eggs. Sanji doesn’t even turn around from the stove, which is double suspicious because any man not guilty of something would turn around immediately and start insulting people. Instead he only says, too casually: “Maybe I felt artistic.”

Nami makes a tiny sound into her cup while Robin lowers her eyes to hide a smile. Luffy leans halfway over the table. “Can I have a heart?”

“No,” Sanji and Zoro say at exactly the same time, which gets a laugh out of Chopper, the traitor.

Zoro looks back at the plate but the heart doesn't become less heart-shaped under scrutiny. He pokes it with his fork like there might be some kind of practical or magical explanation hidden under the eggs but there isn't. “What.”

Sanji turns then, tea towel over one shoulder, and gives him a look so bland it could start wars. “What what?”

“It's a heart.”

Sanji’s mouth twitches at one corner. “Aw, congrats. You can identify shapes. Maybe colours will come next if you keep at it.”

Usopp chokes on his tea and Zoro thinks about throwing the capsicum at his head but can’t quite bring himself to touch it. He eats the eggs around it first, then the potatoes, then the toast before finally, because the table’s still too aware and because he absolutely refuses to make a spectacle of a fucking vegetable, he eats the heart last.

The second sign comes at lunch and admittedly this one is a little harder to dismiss because flowers are a little less deniable than garnish. Thankfully it’s not a bouquet because Sanji isn’t completely deranged, yet. Just one flower, a little pale blue thing tucked into the bottle of water by Zoro’s plate, small enough to miss if one weren’t already alert to bullshit and living in a state of low level dread around the blonde.

Zoro sees it immediately. “What's that?”

Sanji glances at the bottle like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “A flower?”

Zoro’s jaw tightens. “I know it’s a flower.”

“Ah, good. This meal’s already going so much better than breakfast.”

Franky lets out the kind of barked laugh that means he’s trying to swallow it and failing. Brook, the bastard, actually hums like he’s watching a favourite opera gain momentum. Nami doesn’t even pretend not to be listening this time and Zoro wants to die.

It’s one thing to be annoyed by this because, yeah, Sanji’s being ridiculous and theatrical and suspiciously pleased with himself, which are three categories of bullshit that have always deserved correction. It’s a whole other thing to also feel that strange sharp jolt low in the sternum when he notices the stupid little flower, that hot stupid flash of being singled out. Chosen. Marked. The awful bright awareness of that was put there for me. He hates the way his pulse stumbles and the way his ears are suddenly hot and that he doesn’t even know what expression his face is making but he reckons it’s probably the wrong one.

He reaches for the flower on instinct, maybe to remove it, maybe to crush it, maybe to prove to the room and himself that he hasn’t been moved by a decorative plant but Sanji says, sharply: “Don’t.”

Zoro draws his hand back like he touched the stove.

The damn flower stays.

By dinner the whole crew’s openly unbearable. Luffy keeps asking whether there will be more shapes and Usopp asks if they’re escalating ‘through the full courtship rituals of the East Blue’ which makes zero sense because Sanji’s not even from the East Blue and Franky suggests candles and Brook offers to compose 'a tender romantic nocturne for the swordsman’s awakening heart' and, well. Zoro thinks about stabbing him a little.

Sanji ignores all of them with the kind of icy superiority that usually means he’s privately delighted which Zoro would normally find infuriating but, alas. He finds himself watching Sanji’s hands instead. It’s always a bad start to any situation because Sanji’s hands, once noticed, are difficult to stop noticing. He’s got those long fingers and quick wrists and just. Beautiful control. Even now, serving food and slapping Luffy’s reaching hand away with one motion while fixing the tilt of a bowl with the next, they move like they know exactly how much the world will give them if they ask nicely and exactly how much they’ll have to steal if it refuses.

Those hands cut capsicums into hearts, apparently, and tuck flowers into bottles by his plate. Those hands know the shape of romance so well they can make it look casual.

Zoro spends the entire evening in a state of horrified, electrified suspicion.

By the third day, he's got two simultaneous and deeply conflicting beliefs. The first is how ridiculous this is and how it should be absolutely fucking intolerable. Sanji’s treating him like one of those blushing women he used to trail around restaurants with silver platters and smirking devotion and Zoro wants no part of being turned into somebody’s conquest or whatever. The second belief is that he's going to die if Sanji keeps doing this… and also might die if Sanji stops.

This, unfortunately, is harder to live with than the first. The thing about being seduced, it turns out, is that Zoro doesn't know how to stand in it. When Sanji touches his shoulder in passing the touch always lingers by a fraction of a second too long, warm through fabric but charged enough to leave a ghost of a thrill. When Sanji sets down a cup by his hand, the handle’s always turned the easy way for him to grab. When Sanji passes him food the best piece has somehow become his, to Luffy's chagrin. Twice in one week Zoro finds little strips of fried potato twisted into some decorative nonsense at the side of his plate and can only assume the world’s become a criminal place.

And flowers. There are more flowers. One tucked into the strap of his hammock when he comes back from training and finds Sanji by the door with an innocent face. One pinned, somehow, to the outside of his shirt sleeve at dinner so that he doesn’t notice until Chopper points and then nearly apologises for noticing.

Everytime it happens Zoro’s brain just. Stops. A flower appears naer him and suddenly he can hear blood in his ears and none of the words in the world arrive in any kind of useful way. Sanji will be standing somewhere nearby, totally composed, cigarette in hand, with that slight unbearable curve to his mouth and Zoro will have to stand there inside his own skin while every single survival instinct he has collides at once.

He keeps waiting to hate it but what actually happens is stranger and much more treacherous. He gets… shy. It’s fucking ridiculous: he’s spent twenty-one years on this earth without ever needing to account for shyness as a force in his own body. Embarrassment, yes. Irritation, constantly. Self-consciousness when a feeling gets too close to speech. But shyness? The actual physical disorder of it? The stupid heat in his face, the sudden inability to hold eye contact without feeling like he’s being skinned, the miserable awareness of another person's hands and mouth?

No.

Unacceptable.

And yet. And yet there he is on the Sunny’s deck at sunset with a damn flower tucked into his haramaki after a spar and Sanji leaning at the rail beside him saying: “It suits you,” like he's the villain in some romance novel and Zoro can’t think of a single thing to say that doesn’t make him sound either 12 years old or in love.

(Not that he isn’t the latter, maybe, but that’s a whole other problem he can't look at right now.)

One evening after training he gets an offhand: “Sit still, idiot,” before Sanji’s wiping blood from the split above his eyebrow with a level of attention that feels almost criminal in public. Zoro tears the sleeve of his shirt sparring on deck because Luffy barrels through a training session with all the directional control of a cannonball and catches him on the shoulder hard enough to rip the seam straight down from cuff to elbow. Zoro would, under ordinary circumstances, continue wearing the shirt until the sleeve either falls off entirely or someone burns it for public safety. Sanji, seeing the tear over dinner, sighs. “Take it off.”

Zoro glances up, startled. “What?”

“The shirt, idiot. Unless you’re making a statement.”

Before Zoro fully understands what’s happening the shirt’s gone from the back of his chair and later that night it reappears folded with the sleeve mended so neatly he can’t even find the thread until he holds it up to the light.  Zoro wears that shirt again the next day and spends the entire afternoon feeling like his own skin’s become an accomplice to something.

There’s a hand at the back of his neck while Sanji reaches past him for a jar in the galley, brief and warm and almost survivable only because it happens too fast to properly brace for.  A little twist of lemon peel balanced on the rim of his sake cup one evening, useless and decorative.  An apple cut in half and shoved into his hand on deck with a muttered: “Eat something with vitamins before your body gives up on you entirely.” Sanji brushes dirt off his shoulder with two annoyed fingers and a muttered insult about presentation and Zoro gets to spend the next ten minutes pretending his pulse isn't behaving insanely.

He gets food altered toward his taste before he says a word and flowers chosen for colour rather than smell because Sanji knows he doesn’t give a fuck about scents and little practical touches hidden inside the flourish, like Sanji can't help but romance somebody through care no matter how much decoration he wraps around it.

The flower from the bottle by his lunch plate dries between the pages of some useless old navigation book Usopp left lying around. The tiny ribbon Sanji used to tie a bunch of herbs used to flavour his sake bottle ends up wound around the hilt of Kitetsu for two whole days before Zoro reluctantly removes it.  

He ties it back the next morning, anyway.

x

The next shore leave starts suspiciously, which Zoro notices immediately because it’s been a week of this and god knows by now he’s learned that any interaction with Sanji that begins too smoothly is probably a setup. Usually going ashore shore with the cook means one of three things: Sanji vanishes into the markets like a bloodhound with a credit budget, Sanji gets distracted by women and leaves Zoro swearing in the street or Sanji acquires seventeen bags of ingredients and then, with criminal inevitability, makes them Zoro’s problem. That’s the established pattern, so when Sanji appears beside him on the dock with one hand in his pocket and says, with suspicious casualness: “Come with me,” Zoro assumes he’s about to spend the next hour hauling vegetables.

“I’m not carrying your shopping.”

Sanji lifts one eyebrow. “Bold of you to start this conversation like I asked.”

Zoro, already matching pace because some part of his body has become embarrassingly accustomed to following when Sanji uses that tone, snorts. “Then what?”

“You’ll see.”

That isn't an answer. It is, in fact, a phrase specifically engineered to make Zoro suspicious enough to turn around on principle but he doesn’t, of course, because Sanji looks especially good. The suit’s a little sharper than his usual, the shirt open one button lower at the throat, the cuffs neat, the shoes polished enough to catch light. His hair's curled exactly the way Zoro likes it, the way it gets when he comes out of the shower. Zoro’s already having a hard enough time existing around the man on deck and now, on land with space and light and no crew to dilute the effect, it’s become ridiculous so excuse him for not being able to stare and talk at the same time.

They walk through the town under the late afternoon sun, past market stalls and canvas awnings and the smell of frying fish and citrus peels and the sea pressing itself into every open street. People pass and traders call and somewhere seagulls are screaming over a dropped prawn like the apocalypse itself has arrived but Sanji doesn't go toward the produce market at all. He just keeps walking through the crowd with the easy measured pace of a man who knows exactly where he's headed and has absolutely no intention of letting Zoro discover it before they arrive.

Zoro frowns. “If you’re leading me into some weird trap I’m going back to the ship.”

Sanji looks sideways at him, mouth curling. “If I were trapping you, trust me, you’d know.”

That doesn't help - nothing helps, not until they come to a stop in front of a restaurant, small and yellow, with clean windows and blue windows and actual lanterns hanging under against the decorative glass. The sign above the door is tasteful in a way Zoro instinctively distrusts. Inside, through the open front, he can see linen on the tables with proper wine glasses and a vase of flowers on the front table. Zoro stops dead. Sanji, half a step ahead, turns and looks at him, the evening light catching at the angle of his mouth and the gold in his hair, the little satisfied stillness in him that says yes, i know exactly what this looks like and no, i’m not going to save you from it.

“What.”

Sanji’s face is so composed it should be illegal. “What what?”

“What is this?”

Sanji glances at the restaurant like he’s only just discovered its existence, the asshole. “Looks like dinner.”

Zoro stares because no, actually, this doesn’t look like dinner. This looks like a scene in one of Robin’s romance novels. This looks like a place Sanji’d take a woman to if he wanted candlelight and compliments and all the little performative courtesies he executes with that learned charm of his. It doesn't look like anywhere he should be standing with Zoro.

And yet. And yet.

Zoro’s pulse is suddenly everywhere. “You’re kidding.”

Sanji’s expression softens by less than a degree but enough that the joke beneath the surface shifts into something much more dangerous. “I’m really not.”

Zoro should ask, probably. He should demand what is this and why here and is this what i think it is but he can’t, because the truth is that if Sanji answers directly – if he confirms that, yeah, this is a date – Zoro isn't sure he’ll survive the rest of the evening. “This place looks expensive.”

Sanji rolls his eyes and opens the door. “Come on, Moss.”

Inside, the restaurant is even worse. It’s quiet in the costly way, hushed by the soft clink of cutlery and the low private murmur of other people’s evenings. The lighting’s warm and low enough that everything glows at the edges, the windows open to the sea air. Somewhere in the back a quartet’s playing something instrumental and beautiful, probably, but there’s an awful racketing buzz in Zoro’s ears so it’s lost on him. Their table’s in the corner by the window, where the last of the sunset lays a stripe of gold across the linen and the sea outside’s gone all bruised blue and silver. There’s a candle in the middle.

Zoro sits because his legs are still technically functioning and no-one has yet declared an emergency. Sanji sits opposite him with the relaxed, polished ease of someone who belongs in every room he enters… or maybe only the ease of someone who's decided to belong and then does. He thanks the waitress, orders water, glances once at the wine list and then at Zoro. “Any objections?”

“No,” Zoro croaks. 

Sanji doesn't consult the menu for longer than a heartbeat before selecting half the table himself under the guise of sharing because he knows exactly what Zoro likes well enough to choose dishes that sound expensive and complicated and still somehow undeniably like things Zoro’ll actually eat. It sends one of those awful hot little jolts through Zoro’s chest everytime Sanji says: “He’ll like that,” or “No sugar,” or “Make the fish the second preparation, not the first.”

Zoro spends the first half of the meal in a state of electrified disbelief: the food’s incredible. The fish is perfect and the roasted vegetables are the exact degree of charred at the edges and the sauce with the meat’s sharp enough to cut the richness but soft enough not to overwhelm it. The wine’s better than any wine Zoro would’ve willingly chosen for himself and exactly right with the food, which feels like a private act of manipulation so fucking refined it qualifies as art.

Sanji watches him taste things, looking up at the exact second Zoro takes the first bite or the first sip or discovers some detail in the dish he clearly wasn’t expecting. Watching with that quiet, terrible little focus of his. At one point Zoro realises he’s gone nearly five whole minutes without speaking because he's too busy having his internal organs rearranged by the sheer force of all this.

“Did the food kill you or are you finally learning manners?” The light catches in his hair and in the curve of the wineglass at his fingers and in the soft line of his mouth where it’s gone less sharp with the evening. He looks looser here. Not less controlled because god knows Sanji’s never really uncontrolled unless something has gone very wrong or very right but… less armoured? Like he wanted this enough that some part of him has stopped pretending otherwise and that thought’s so dangerous Zoro almost chokes on his wine.

“You... made a reservation.”

Sanji looks incredulous. “Wow, and he's observant, too.”

“That’s… not normal.”

“Nothing about you is normal and I still manage.”

Zoro narrows his eye but the banter helps give him a road to run on. Everytime the whole affair starts to feel survivable, some new detail lands and knocks him sideways again. The waitress tops up their glasses and Sanji thanks her with effortless charm but doesn't, pointedly, let the charm turn anywhere else. The best bite of one dish gets nudged onto Zoro’s plate without comment. When Zoro reaches for the bill at the end Sanji catches his wrist under the table for half a second and says, without looking up: “Don’t insult me.”

He wants so badly, by then, to just ask the questions that’ve been been pacing in him all evening like a caged thing. is this a date? is this what you do when you mean it? am i reading this right or am i making a idiot of myself in a whole new category? But each time a word gets close to his mouth something in him locks, too aware of how much the answer matters.

They leave the restaurant long after dark, when the town’s gone soft around the edges. Voices drift from bars farther down the street, blurred by distance and sea wind and somewhere further down a wannabe musician’s murdering a violin in the name of love. The tide’s in and the air smells like salt and warm stone and wine still ghosting on the back of Zoro’s tongue. Sanji walks beside him through the narrow street toward the inn where the crew’s shacked up, close enough that their shoulders nearly brush every few steps.

There’s suddenly nowhere left for Zoro’s gaze to go except Sanji’s mouth; it’s not subtle. Worse, he knows it’s not subtle. He can feel his own body leaning toward the moment before he’s even moved, the wine a warm low hum in his blood. The whole evening is still in him – the candlelight, the reservation, the hand on his wrist, the fact that Sanji never once made him carry anything and somehow fed him exactly what he didn’t know he wanted. The thing is, Zoro’s never been kissed by someone he wanted like this and definitely not while standing in a quiet street after a meal that felt so blatantly like Sanji’s version of flirting that he still can’t quite believe it was real. He thinks – he really thinks – this is happening, that they’re going to lean in and it’s going to happen and all this static horrible impossible want is finally going to have somewhere to go besides his own bloodstream.

Then the panic hits, the sudden spike of fear of getting it wrong with a body that suddenly feels too large and clumsy and newly awake in all the worst places, of being seen in the exact instant before contact and having all of his own shyness and wanting fully visible in his face. He mutters something that might be “night” or might be a prayer to whatever god oversees cowards, turns too fast, shoulder checks the door frame, catches himself and goes inside with all the dignified speed of a man escaping a fire he personally started.

He gets three steps into the inn before he realises what he’s done and stops right there in the dim hall with his heart trying to climb out through his throat. Outside, through the open doorway, he can hear the sea and the distant murmur of the street and nothing else. He turns, slowly, expecting maybe no-one, maybe anger, maybe Sanji gone entirely but Sanji’s still in the doorway with one hand in his pocket and the other loose at his side, looking at Zoro with an expression so complicated it nearly kills him on sight.

Fond.

“You’re an idiot,” he says softly and Zoro, standing in the hall like the world’s least accomplished romantic lead, feels his whole face go hot.

“I was –”

Sanji lifts one eyebrow, mouth curving small and wicked and unbearably warm. “Go to bed, Zoro.” And turns away before Zoro can die a second time on the same night.

x

Zoro doesn't really sleep. He lies down on the narrow bed with his arms folded under his head and his jaw set and tells himself, with considerable force, that the evening’s already over. It happened! It’s finished happening. He's horizontal therefore he should sleep but his body, traitor that it is, straight up refuses. He lies there in the dark and replays the evening so many times it should really count as a second happening.

The restaurant, the candlelight, the hand around his wrist under the table, the walk back, the doorway. Sanji standing there with his mouth parted slightly and the whole evening hanging in the air between them like a match waiting to go. And Zoro… Zoro doing what any self respecting man confronted with romance and possibility and his own terrified body would do, which is apparently sprint inside like he’s being hunted for sport.

He turns onto one side and then onto his back and then onto the other side, because maybe shame has different angles? Maybe one of them will be more restful? The first dream takes him just before dawn and is so stupidly transparent that waking from it feels like being mocked by the universe: it's all kissing Sanji in the galley with one hand braced on the bench and Sanji laughing softly against his mouth, kissing him on deck by the rail with the sea black around them and Sanji’s tie blowing sideways in the wind. Kissing him exactly where he nearly did outside the inn, except in the dream he doesn't panic and flee – he leans in and Sanji’s hand catches at the front of his shirt and then everything goes warm and bright and unreal in some deeply embarrassing way. 

He wakes from that one with his face hot and his pulse climbing and reckons he’s slept a total of maybe forty minutes. He drags himself upright and sits on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees and his head in both hands, which really only gives him a more structured position in which to suffer.

The inn’s dining room is only half awake with a few other guests, some fishermen and an elderly couple eating toast in complicit silence. Nami’s already there and, really, Zoro should turn around but he’s tired and Nami has coffee and she spots him before he can run, anyway. 

She takes one look at him and laughs. “Wow. You look terrible.”

He sits with a scowl, because pride’s a luxury but coffee sure as hell isn't. “I slept great.”

Nami snorts into her cup. “You look like you got into a knife fight. Date didn’t go well?”

Zoro stares at her and fights tooth and nail to get past the sheer embarrassment of Nami knowing his love life (or the fact that he apparently has a love life). Out of spite, he steals her coffee and considers how much he’s willing to share. Nami’s useful, sure, but she’s also… well, Nami. Information given to her becomes a blade she might later use for your own good while laughing at you. And yet. And yet. She's also the person Sanji has apparently gone to for advice at some stage in this whole disaster. More importantly, he's knackered and full of candlelight and flowers and the memory of almost leaning in. “He took me to dinner.”

Nami smirks. “Yes, I know what a date means.”

Zoro closes his eye. “It wasn’t…”

“Mm?”

He opens his eye and finds her looking almost unbearably pleased. “He didn’t say it was a date.”

Both of Nami’s eyebrows go up. She looks like she’s struggling not to laugh. “Oh, sweetheart.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Are you thick? Nicest restaurant in town, just the two of you? I assume he paid because he’d rather die than let you do it if he was being serious?” Zoro doesn't react and Nami’s smile widens like a knife being polished. “Oh my god. He paid.”

“This isn't helping.”

“Did he flirt?”

Zoro thinks about the whole evening and realises with a kind of exhausted horror that he no longer has any kind of clear definition for flirting where Sanji’s concerned. The restaurant was flirtation in architectural form. THe garnish campaign has turned his meals into emotional warfare. Sanji breathing too close to his mouth in a doorway is pretty much attempted manslaughter.

“Wow,” she says again, softer this time and much more delighted. “He really is wooing you.”

Zoro wants to throw himself through the window. “I hate that word.”

“Clearly not enough.”

He glares as she steals the coffee back and takes an obnoxious sip. “So what happened after dinner?”

Zoro says nothing because what the heck can he even say?

“Oh no.”

He scrubs a hand over his face. “We were outside.”

“And?”

“And…” He stops and starts again because even the memory’s enough to make his damn ears burn. “It felt like maybe we were gonna…”

Nami slaps one hand over her mouth, her eyes huge over her fingers and delighted in the worst possible way. “You were going to kiss.”

“We weren’t.”

“You absolutely were.”

“We might have.”

“What did you do?”

He doesn’t answer. Turns out he doesn’t have to: Nami makes a small strangled sound into her palm and then actually bends over the table laughing. Zoro stares at her with the dead eyed hatred of a man who knows, in his soul, that he deserves this but resents it anyway. When she finally recovers enough to speak, she wipes under one eye. “You ran. Oh, this is art.”

He steals the coffee back instead of murder, because apparently murder in public’s frowned on or whatever. Her face softens by a fraction then, amusement still all over it but threaded now with something more practical. “Okay, you’ve got two options.”

Zoro narrows his eye immediately. “I didn’t ask.”

“You very much did by sitting down looking like the ghost of yearning.” He doesn't dignify that with response and Nami continues anyway like she was always going to. “Option one: you talk to him. Use your big boy voice and ask him if it was a date. Tell him you liked it. Tell him you panicked because your brain fell out, whatever. Just be honest.”

Zoro looks and feels horrified. “No.”

“Then option two: do something romantic back.”

The sentence is so appalling it actually leaves him briefly blank. “What?”

Nami smiles with all her teeth. “Romance him back.”

Zoro’s soul exits his body. “I’m leaving.”

She laughs again, more softly now, and props her chin on one hand. “It doesn’t have to be huge. Just… something that makes it clear you’re not only standing there dying everytime he’s nice to you.”

“That’s not what I do.”

“Oh buddy, it’s exactly what you do. Bring him something or ask him somewhere or give him your full attention. Say something nice and don’t die afterward. I mean, c’mon, Zozo, you’re into a man who cuts veggies into hearts and takes you to candlelit dinners. You can probably survive one romantic gesture.”

He can’t survive one romantic gesture, is the problem. The thought of attempting one himself makes his skin go hot in a completely new pattern of dread. What does romance even look like from him? A dead fish? A whetstone with meaning? Sitting near Sanji on deck and not pretending it’s tactical? The whole category feels fucking rigged.

Nami watches all of this cross his face and, because she isn't content with simple victory, sighs. “If Usopp can do it you can manage it too, I promise.”

Unfortunately for both of them, again, Zoro’s not actually stupid. He turns painfully slowly. “What? Do you mean… with you?”

Nami’s eyes flick up to his and for one tiny weird second there’s actual awkward silence between them before she says, much too quickly: “I mean, like, in general. Do not make this about me.”

“It kinda... is about you?”

“It absolutely isn’t.”

“It just was.”

She goes pink in the most satisfying way he’s ever seen on her and immediately doubles down into offense. “You know what, forget all my advice.”

He sits back a little, the stolen coffee finally beginning to make him feel vaguely composed and malicious enough to enjoy this. “You brought it up.”

Nami looks like she’d like to throw a spoon at his face. “Fine, yes. I mean me. Kind of. A little. Whatever! The point is if you like someone and they’re very obviously trying it wouldn’t kill you to try back.”

The words settle more deeply than the teasing had and Zoro scowls and slumps down in the chair.  Outside the window the harbour’s waking properly, all sunlight on the water and seagulls fighting over the day’s first scraps. Somewhere upstairs a door slams and somebody – Luffy probably – immediately yells that he’s starving.

try back. It sounds simple when she says it. It sounds, worse, possible. Sanji’s made this whole thing so clear, in retrospect, and maybe Zoro’s the only one still hiding behind static and panic and body failure. 

Nami sees some shift in his face and leans back with the expression of someone who’s successfully kicked a boulder downhill and now intends to watch it gather speed. “Oh, you’re actually considering it.”

“I’m considering murder.”

“Same look, different outcome.”

He drinks the last of her coffee in one swallow and stands up before she can get any more mileage out of his expression. As he turns to go, she suggests, in a tone far too innocent to be trusted: “Maybe start small.”

He pauses. “What’s small?”

Nami’s smile goes sweet as poison. “Tell him he looks good.”

Zoro leaves immediately, not because the advice is bad but because the thought of saying that to Sanji with his actual mouth makes his vision go a little white at the edges. He gets halfway up the inn stairs before he realises Nami’s laughing again behind him but the thing is, though… the thing is he keeps thinking about it.

He thinks about it all the way upstairs and then all the way through washing his face and all the way through getting dressed. All the way through trying and failing not to imagine Sanji’s face if Zoro, by some fucking catastrophic lapse in self preservation, actually tried romance back. By the time he catches sight of Sanji across the harbour later that morning – coming back from the market with a bag over one shoulder, sunlight on his hair, mouth curved in concentration around a cigarette he hasn’t lit yet – Zoro’s heart’s already doing too much again. 

It's a stupid idea.

And yet. And yet.

x

He lasts a grand total of four hours.

It’s not entirely Nami’s fault, to be fair – Sanji has to shoulder some of the blame for making romance look like a thing that can be done rather than just kind of suffered through, and for doing it with such pointed intent that Zoro's spent the week feeling like someone strapped his nervous system directly to a bell and keeps ringing it every damn time the cook enters a room.

So now Zoro’s on shore at eleven in the morning, in a market town he doesn't give a shit about, buying bread with the focused expression of a man selecting explosives. The harbour’s already busy in that bright irritating way coastal towns are once the sun's up properly and Zoro moves through it like a man under duress because if he slows down long enough to think too hard about what he's doing he’ll absolutely abort the mission and spend the afternoon pretending he lost track of time ina bar.

The bakery’s tucked between a fishmonger and a shop selling rope thick enough to halt a battleship, shelves crowded with loaves and rolls and sugared pastries. He stares at the bread and knows he’s fought bounty hunters with more confidence than he currently feels selecting fucking carbohydrates.

A broad old woman behind the counter holds up two loaves for him to inspect. “You want the crustier one or the softer one?”

Zoro stares at them like the answer might be hidden in the scoring. Sanji would know which one to pick immediately, probably while insulting the baker’s rye percentages and also charming her into throwing in rolls he doesn’t even need. He'd have a basket and a plan or a cloth or some impossible arrangement of fruit and cheese and... atmosphere.

Zoro has panic and bread, apparently. “The… better one?”

The old woman snorts. “For what?”

He should lie, he knows he should lie. He should say lunch or the ship or literally anything except the truth. “A… picnic?”

The old woman’s whole face brightens with immediate understanding. “A picnic?”

Zoro feels his ears go hot. “It’s not –”

“Romantic?”

“No.” Zoro pays and escapes before she can elaborate, bread hot and accusing under his arm. The bread under his arm’s warm through the paper and it’s only fifteen minutes before he’s also gotten his hands on a small wedge of decent goat cheese, a few apples and a bottle of something local the shopkeeper swears is light enough for the afternoon but serious enough for love.

Zoro almost walks out at that line, too.

Sanji has flowers and candlelit restaurants and all the polished architecture of romance built into his bones while Zoro has bread and cheese and a growing conviction that he should throw himself into the nearest fucking river so he doesnt have to actually present these items like they mean anything.

And yet. And yet.

The thought of doing nothing feels worse so he keeps going. There’s a little path beyond the edge of the market, leading up past the town into a rise of pale trees and patches of grass where the view opens now and then over the cliffs. Zoro had passed it on the way in and thought, with all the blunt poetry available to him, that it looked less stupid than sitting in the town square with a blanket or something. The plan’s simple enough in theory: get the food, find a decent spot, go back for Sanji, say something minimally humiliating. Eat bread. Don’t die.

By the time he gets the apples his hands have started sweating. He keeps replaying versions of the invitation in his head and rejecting all of them.

come eat this with me sounds like a threat but i got lunch sounds like an accident. He's halfway between the cheese shop and the path into the woods, bag under one arm and dread blooming in his ribcage when he hears a familiar voice behind him drawl: “Well.”

Sanji’s standing a few metres away in the middle of the road with a cigarette tucked behind his ear. The wind’s done that thing it does to his hair where it lifts the fringe off his forehead and makes him look unfairly alive, even with the ridiculous eyebrows. There’s a basket over one arm, covered in some paisley cloth and Zoro stares at it with the growing horror of a man watching his own brilliant plan get outclassed in real time.

Sanji’s mouth curves. “That’s a lot of feelings for bread, Mossy.”

“You followed me.”

Sanji snorts. “Please, you’re not subtle enough to require following.”

That’s… probably true. Zoro grits his teeth anyway, just for kicks. “What’s in it?”

“Well, that’d ruin the surprise, wouldnt it?”

Zoro narrows his eye. “You made a picnic.”

Sanji says nothing. The whole answer’s in the line of his body, in the basket, in the fact that he's standing in the road with that expression and that bloody ten-steps-ahead certainty.

“I was also making a picnic,” he says before he can stop himself, the words coming out so defensive and so deeply embarrassing that he wants to bite them in half.

Sanji blinks before his expression gives way to something much warmer and infinitely more dangerous. “You were?”

Zoro’s ears burn. He considers denial but the evidence, unfortunately, is under his arm and smells like a bakery and also he just said it, so. “Maybe.”

“Wow,” Sanji says softly.

Zoro wants to strangle him. “Shut up.”

“No, I don’t think I will.” The grin that finally breaks over his face is small and brilliant and so clearly not mean spirited that Zoro’s whole body misfires around it. This is the other thing no-one told him about trying romance back: if the other person is Sanji and he (apparently) likes you, your every clumsy attempt becomes, apparently, the cutest thing Sanji’s ever seen in his life.

The market noise goes on around them – vendors calling, gulls screaming over fish guts, footsteps on stone, laughter spilling from somewhere under an awning – but it all begins to blur at the edges. Zoro becomes aware only of the warmth of the bread under his arm and the basket on Sanji’s wrist and the fact that the man in front of him’s looking at him like this.

“So,” Sanji says. “This was… your idea?”

Zoro’s mouth goes dry. “It was a bad one.”

“And here I thought the romance was in the effort.” Zoro just scowls because the alternative’s collapsing and Sanji’s eyes drop to the paper bag again. “What kind of cheese?”

“Goat.”

“At last. You truly know my heart.”

That shakes out – against all will – one rough bark of laughter and Sanji’s whole face softens around the sound. Then he lifts the basket slightly. “C’mon, Mosshead. I found a spot.”

The woods are cooler than the market, all green shade and patches of sunlight broken over the path in gold scraps. The air smells like pine and dirt and sea wind coming through the branches. Sanji walks ahead at first, basket swinging lightly at his side before he slows enough that Zoro falls into step beside him. “So. Just to make this clear: you were going to ask me on a picnic?”

Zoro closes his eye. “Don’t.”

Sanji’s voice warms with laughter. “No, I think I’m gonna enjoy this one.”

“It was… tactical.”

“Of course.”

“You’re impossible.”

“And yet here you are, bread in arms, halfway to seducing me in broad daylight.”

That nearly makes Zoro walk into a tree but Sanji reaches out on reflex and catches the back of his sleeve before he can, sending a sharp bright line straight through Zoro’s spine.

“There you go,” Sanji murmurs. “Head in the game, swordsman.”

“Hard to do that when you won’t stop talking.”

Sanji’s laugh moves through the shaded path like sunlight in water. The spot he picked is, infuriatingly, perfect: it’s a little clearing near the cliff edge where the trees break just enough to give a view over the sea without losing the shelter of shade. Someone – maybe guests, maybe locals – has left a flat stretch of stone there half covered in moss and sun warmed enough to use as a seat. The grass around it’s full of tiny white wildflowers and, below, the water’s a deep impossible blue. The basket goes down on the mossy stone with all the ceremony of a magic trick and the whole thing gets worse. There’s smoked fish wrapped in wax paper and olives in a little jar and roasted tomatoes shining with oil. A small knife, proper plates, glasses wrapped in linen so they don’t clink, fucking strawberries, some absurd little pastries dusted with sugar and a tiny bottle of honey because apparently there’s no limit to Sanji’s need to overachieve.

Zoro sets his own bread and cheese and apples down beside the spread and Sanji grins, genuine and soft and no trace of mockery at all. “Perfect. You got the good bread.”

The praise is so sincere Zoro almost has to sit down before his knees decide for him.

The picnic itself is quiet in the best possible way. There’s still the low electric hum of everything unsaid, still the awareness of what this is and isn’t and how clearly it resembles a date even without either of them using the word. But there’s also food and the sea and shade and the steady calming practicality of sharing things by hand. Sanji breaks the bread and passes half over without comment while Zoro slices the cheese. Sanji pours wine and Zoro hands him one of the apples and watches his fingers brush Sanji’s skin absently as he talks. They eat the strawberries warm from the basket and the fish with too much lemon and the little pastries, which turn out to have some cheese baked into them. At one point Sanji reaches across the cloth to wipe a smear of honey off Zoro’s thumb and Zoro forgets what he was saying mid-sentence.

Later, when the food’s gone from arranged to devoured and the wine’s loosened the edges of the silence, Sanji leans back on one hand in the grass and smirks. “You were really gonna do this yourself.”

Zoro, stretched out beside him with one knee bent and the other leg straight in the sun, grunts. “Maybe.”

Sanji turns his head to look at him, all fondness edged with amusement edged with something much softer than either. “And what were you going to say?”

Zoro stares out at the sea, knowing the answer is absolutely nothing useful. He grimaces. “Didn’t get that far.”

Sanji laughs under his breath. “Tragic.”

“Shut up.”

“It's sweet when you’re trying.”

Zoro turns his head so fast he nearly gives himself a cramp. “What?”

Sanji’s face goes a fraction pink, which saves Zoro’s life because it means the line wasn’t calculated. It means it slipped, honest and unpolished. Sanji recovers by taking another drink but Zoro doesn't recover at all. By the time the sun begins to slant lower through the trees, everything between them has gone quiet and close and impossibly full. Sanji lies back first, one arm crooked under his head, and looks up through the branches like this is the most natural thing in the world.

Zoro watches him and thinks, not for the first time and with more alarm everytime it occurs, that there might be no cure for this after all. After a minute, though, he lies back as well.

Sanji says, very quietly: “I’m glad you tried.” He’s still looking up at the branches.

“You were serious,” Zoro says. He licks his lips. “About the... hearts.”

Sanji’s smirk is absurdly gentle. “I usually am, once I’ve started bringing flowers into it.”

That gets a low startled laugh out of Zoro before he blurts, unplanned: “I thought maybe you’d laugh.”

Sanji goes still for a bit before he eventually turns his head, the look on his face so open Zoro almost regrets giving him the sentence. “Not at that.”

Zoro can feel the awareness of the gap between them like a living thing, the narrow strip of cloth and grass and air between his fingers and Sanji’s, charged beyond reason simply because it’s there and available and neither of them has yet crossed it. Sanji’s gaze drops once, just once, to Zoro’s mouth and Zoro stops breathing. It feels, with terrible clarity, like the inn all over again except this time there are no walls and no door to panic into, no narrow hallway to flee down while his courage bleeds out through his shoes.

Sanji’s thumb brushes once over the back of Zoro’s hand. “You know, for a man with bread and cheese and no plan, this was kind of romantic.”

Zoro inhales and turns his head, ready with some halfhearted insult he’ll never get to use because Sanji leans in and presses one warm, brief kiss to his cheek. It’s tiny and utterly, utterly catastrophic. Zoro can feel the heat all the way down his throat.

“Come on,” Sanji murmurs, rolling away to gather the picnic cloth. “Try not to fall off the cliff, idiot.”

Zoro lays there another full second, staring at the branches overhead and wondering whether a man can actually die from being treated too nicely. Then he gives up on fighting the smile working its way onto his face, gives up on trying to control the heart climbing up his throat, and lets himself grab Sanji’s hand properly this time, for real, for keeps. “Yeah. Okay.”

x

wow nothing in the world compares to good bread hey

also not me throwing usonami everywhere these days <3 it's a disease i simply cannot help it