#sanji character study

Rating: M Pairings: Sanji/original characters Summary: At nine years old, Sanji joins Zeff as he decides to open a floating restaurant on the sea. The ten years that follow are long nights and longer days in which Sanji learns what it means to be a good person.

Sanji is ten years old when paperwork is signed, hands are shaken, and he stares up at a large rundown ship while standing next to Zeff. He is eleven years old when he stands in the same spot and watches the construction crew lower a large sign over the skeleton of a restaurant that reads THE BARATIE.

"What do you think?" Zeff asks.

"I think it looks crooked." It earns him a smack to the back of his head, but he barely blinks at it. Zeff hobbles past him to head back inside, calling for him to follow. He spares another glance up at the sign and then takes in the rest of the floating restaurant on the sea. They accomplished a lot in the last year putting this together. Not that Sanji really helped much. He'd given an opinion here and there, but mostly it was Zeff working alongside architects and men in hard hats designing the layout. Still, he walks through the large wooden doors like it's his.

Rating: T Characters: Sanji Summary: Sanji struggles with the difference between admiration and attraction. (Or: the classic queer tale of "do I want to be with her or do I just want to BE her?")

His ears perk with the undercut of voices, louder than they should be in the careful space, delicately designed to carry even the faintest whisper across like a breeze. The new chore boy's voice hits like a clap of thunder and, more than once, Sanji catches scattered patrons casting glances over their shoulders toward him. Sanji doesn't look, doesn't want to bring attention to it. He sets a salad down on one table and then pauses at another, wrist bending backward enough to allow the flow of the shiraz to round the wine glass in a small wave. The woman doesn't notice. Her eyes are narrowed as she looks at the center table by the stairs where a choking cough is blaring out toward the ceiling. The room shudders with the thump of Chore Boy's body on the floor and that's when Sanji knows the pin has been hit.

He looks up as the explosion begins. It's slow to start - every detail ringing out to make itself noticed. If it's putting on a show, it's gonna do it right, and it starts with the growing laughter from the table, a fist banging on white linen-covered mahogany, a chair creaking with the weight of its patron slumping back against it, and there above the reeling, choking chore boy, is the loudest piece of all.

If there's one thing Sanji has learned over the years, it's that movement and volume doesn't always equate weight of influence on a scene. He's seen the way people can bark orders, slam fists hard enough to earn grunts and cries, laugh a cacophony into the air. It's never meant much to him, which is why The Baratie dining room has always felt like comfort to him. It's silent, it's meticulous, and in the best of times, it's a daunting, looming threat that reminds him it can explode at any moment.

There stands, above Chore Boy, another minefield in human form.

For the first time in nearly a decade, Sanji doesn't notice until the pressure plate is already crunched underfoot. But, like most things, Sanji has learned to adapt to threats before they fully form, and he shifts his gaze enough to find something else to blame the sudden internal detonation on.