#zosan3k

Zoro’s there, laid out under the shadow of a shattered beam as if the sky’s tried to pin him to the earth and very nearly succeeded. He looks smaller in stillness somehow, like the sheer width of him has just been a neat trick played by breath. His eye’s closed, his mouth parted, dirty everywhere – blood, ash, the fine grit that coats the inside of a throat and makes it hard to sleep for days.

Sanji’s throat makes a noise he doesn’t recognise and goes to his knees, hands doing all things at once: one braces the beam, one drags at Zoro’s shoulder, one – he has too many hands and not enough – and they’re all clumsy, all wrong. He shoves the wood off with a grunt that turns into a curse that turns into a prayer that turns into a sob and then into nothing at all. Mud soaks his pants, climbs his knees, clings to his shins.

“Okay,” he says, the first word finding his mouth by luck alone. “Okay, okay – hey. Hey, Moss.”

Zoro doesn’t refute and, god, Sanji would give anything for a sneer or a snore or a shut up. He tries for a pulse and finds silence, tries for a breath and finds none. He presses the heel of his hand to Zoro’s chest and the give beneath it feels obscene, wrong in a way bodies shouldn’t be. He thinks, absurdly, that he should worry about cracking ribs, then remembers that broken’s better than stopped and pushes harder.

“Don’t,” he says between compressions, arms shaking. “Don’t you dare, don’t you –”

His voice bleeds out, the deck of the world cants left, then right. He leans in and blows into Zoro’s mouth because that’s what you do. His own lungs answer with a burn; he pinches Zoro’s nose shut and tries again, breathes, counts, breathes again, each exhale a shove, a bargain, a bribe, a plea. He presses down again: one-two-three-four-five – thirty. The numbers break apart.

“C’mon,” he whispers, “Come back.”

The silence’s become a thick, ugly, patient thing. Sanji’s hands slip on blood and he thinks of the way Zoro laughs with red in his teeth after a fight, of the way that laugh has always sounded like a dare being offered to him and him alone. He thinks of nothing else after that because the thought’s a cliff and the drop is the rest of his fucking life.

Something moves, everything moves, none of it Zoro. A thread of smoke flickers in wind that isn’t there. A sigh behind his teeth that is in no way breath. A voice that comes like someone’s crept under his tongue to speak from his jaw, not a sound so much as pressure, a weight set gently at the base of his skull.

Breathe him back.

“No,” he says, which is a stupid answer and a true one.

Breathe him back, it repeats, a little warmer. Invitation.

“I am!” He snaps and he’s not sure if he says it aloud or – “I’m doing everything.”

Not like that.

He wants to spit, he wants to laugh, he wants to tell the world to go to hell. He wants to tell it he doesn’t need fucking necromancy coaching. He wants to say he’s Zoro but the rest of the sentence dies because there’s no way for it to continue without killing Sanji too. It’s desperation, maybe. It’s grief, definitely.

He presses his mouth to Zoro’s again anyway, because there isn’t another thing to do, because the world’s cinched to the area of a kiss, because torment’s found a shape and it’s this. It was always going to be this. Zoro’s lips are cold and slick with mud and Sanji pushes air anyway, like he can push time, like he can shove breath down and haul Zoro back with it. He hates the thought even as he does it, hates that his mouth fits even now, hates that the angle’s somehow familiar, the angle he’s imagined in a thousand other scenarios: sober, drunk, joking, fighting. He hates that he’s wanted this for a hundred stupid reasons and now he wants it for the worst one.

“Come back,” He says, begs, commands. “Come back, please.”

Zoro’s body convulses, not a gentle rise, not the tidy cough of the rescued drowning man. It’s a spasm that jerks his shoulders up off the mud and drags Sanji with him by the mouth, leaving Sanji to choke, surprised air stolen back out of him hard enough to fizz the edges of his vision. A sound scrapes out of them both, raw. When Zoro’s eye opens the green looks like it’s still deciding what colour to be and it’s not relief that hits Sanji first: it’s shock and the taste that comes right along with it. It’s not death, not exactly, although there’s old blood and mud. It’s more the familiar, faint sweetness of rotting fruit and it runs along Sanji’s tongue like a crawling insect before it’s gone again, a flash.

Sanji wrenches back, coughing bile, spitting mud and blood and the idea of something else. He drags his hand over his mouth, gag reflex punching him square in the diaphragm. Under his other hand, Zoro’s chest kicks into a rhythm, heartbeat finding some kind of stumble, like it’s trying to remember itself.

“Z –” Sanji strangles himself on it then tries again. “Zoro?”

Zoro’s eye finds him and doesn’t focus, not really. It lands where Sanji’s face is and sticks there, uncertain, not a shred of recognition or irritation or, hell, fondness. Sanji presses his hand to Zoro’s forehead, more for himself than anything, needing to brace himself against someone else’s pulse to remember his own. “Holy shit,” He says, hoarse. “You’re… okay? You’re okay? Can you… can you hear me?”

Zoro’s mouth moves with the shape of sound and produces none. He blinks once, twice, the eyelid dragging heavy, like he’s still trying to work out what’s happening. Someone who doesn't know him would say alive. Sanji doesn’t say anything, because what his mouth wants to say is this isn’t you and saying that would make it true.Instead, he gathers Zoro’s shoulders and pulls him up, hissing when he feels where the torn muscles pull, where the wounds sit and drag. Zoro’s head sags against Sanji’s chest and Sanji feels the weight settle somewhere deep. Like it’s going to become a memory he’ll keep even when he manages to forget everything else on the whole fucking planet.

“Can you stand?” He asks. “Can you… hey, look at me.”

Zoro’s head tilts with the slow steadiness of a puppet trained to move, but not to decide how to move itself. His eye slides and catches and slides again and when Sanji touches his cheek, thumb sweeping the grit from the corner of his mouth, Zoro doesn’t lean into it. He also doesn’t lean away, or flinch, or sneer. He doesn’t do anything that implies he can feel the difference between tenderness and pressure.

Sanji’s own mouth aches and he doesn’t – can’t – think about why.

“Right,” He swallows, trying to make his voice brisk. He fishes for a bandage he doesn’t have, for water that isn’t clean, for help that isn’t coming. He tears a strip from his own shirt and presses it to the worst of the bleeding because that’s a tangible thing he can do. He slides an arm under Zoro’s and levers them both up properly, because that’s another tangible thing he can do. Zoro moves with him, obedient, not cooperative. Response, not conversation.

They trace a slow pattern through the wreckage, Sanji keeping a steady mutter going because he doesn't know what he’ll do if the silence continues. “Lean on me – no, more. There, that’s… fuck, you’re heavy. Did anyone ever tell you that? Of course they did, you’ve been a chore since day fuckin’ one. Fuck, don’t laugh – oh, right, not laughing. I’m laughing. That’s worse. That’s worse, right?”

He bumps Zoro’s foot around a broken pike. He shoulders a collapsed railing out of their path. Somewhere under the sound of their breathing he can hear vultures trying to pick the battlefield clean, like a tongue against teeth.

By the time the first shape emerges out of the smoke – Usopp, sprinting – Sanji’s found the rhythm of carrying and being followed. Usopp shouts for Chopper, for Nami, for anyone: Sanji doesn’t hear the words, just the relief in them.

“Oh my god,” Usopp says when he skids to a stop that may or may not be a fall in disguise. “You – he – Sanji!” Words scramble over one another, trying to be the first, the loudest. “He’s alright!”

Sanji wants to say no. He says, “Help me get him down,” and the crew gathers around them, immediate and frantic.

Chopper’s careful hooves, Franky’s too-big hands, Robin’s real-and-not, take Zoro from him, desperate but achingly careful. Chopper presses his ear to Zoro’s chest and looks up, eyes bright and frightened and stubborn. “He’s breathing. It’s irregular, but… but he’s breathing.”

Sanji nods without meaning to. Nami touches his elbow, a brief bracket, like she’s giving him something to stand inside of. “Are you…?”

He shakes his head. He doesn’t know how to fill the rest of that. Can’t.

“Back up,” Chopper says, already in doctor-voice and not crew-voice. “Give him room. Usopp, saline. Robin, I need –”

Sanji doesn’t back up. He kneels at Zoro’s side and watches him, feeling absurdly like he’s studying a stranger wearing a mask. Zoro’s eye stares at the sky, blinking at times that don’t quite sit right. When Chopper presses hooves into specific places Zoro’s muscles answer with the compliance of a body that understands the pressure but not so much the pain. They strap a brace across his chest; he doesn’t flinch. Sanji wants to grab Chopper’s wrist and tell him no anaesthetic, he hates it and then realises that disliking a thing requires being present for it.

When they finally lift him clear Sanji’s hand finds Zoro’s shoulder and stays there because, again, that’s a tangible thing he can do, and because if he doesn’t he’s going to vomit.

Back on the ship Sanji hovers in the doorway while Chopper works. The infirmary smells like disinfectant and dried herbs and cleanliness and rank human fear. Zoro lies there with his eye open to the white ceiling unmoving while Chopper stitches. The light pools on his mouth in a way that should mean something and in fact means nothing at all.

“Talk to him,” Chopper suggests as he threads another suture, the needle flashing. “He might… sometimes familiar voices can help.”

Sanji tries. “Hey,” He says with a smile he builds from nowhere but the anxious, roiling pit in his gut. “You look worse than usual. Which is saying something. If you try to die again I’ll give you porridge for a week straight, got it?”

Zoro’s eye slides sideways until it’s pointed at his face and Sanji sways a little, catching the doorframe with his shoulder. He remembers, sudden and sharp and humiliating, the way Zoro’s mouth had felt under his, the way it’d moved without moving, the way it’d taken and given back something that wasn’t air. He wants to wash his mouth out. He wants to never swallow again.

Chopper doesn’t look up, just finishes what he needs to do and the night happens in pieces. The crew comes and goes and comes again. Luffy stands in the doorway once and says nothing, which is how Sanji knows it’s bad. Robin brings tea he doesn’t drink. Nami asks practical questions that require practical answers and lets the impractical thing in her expression be its own personal storm.

At some point Sanji realises he’s shaking and sits on the floor, bracing his back against the wall so he can watch Zoro breathe badly. The scar at Zoro’s side rises and falls, the line of his mouth softening and sharpening. A moth stutters itself stupid against the glass of the porthole and gives up, and Sanji wishes he could tell it to escape, to get out of here. To get away from whatever this will become.

He stands only when Chopper leaves to fetch something, going to the shape on it like he’s checking the stove twice. He looks down at the face he’s been in love with for years and bends, hating himself while he does it but doing it anyway. He kisses him because he needs to know, needs to test the thing that’s brought him back, needs to see if it was a one-time sacrilege or a door he’s opened without knowing how to close. Zoro’s lips are a little warmer now, but they don’t answer him. They don’t push back. They part obediently when he presses and the wrong taste is fainter, somehow, but still there. Sanji’s stomach folds in half but he makes himself stay anywhere, just long enough for the part of him that still believes in miracles and hope to be sure there aren't any left here.

He puts his palm over Zoro’s closed eye, gentle. “If you’re still in there,” He whispers, “I’ll wait.”

When morning finally peels itself out of the sea and presses itself through the porthole Zoro’s still breathing. Sanji goes to the kitchen out of a reflex that’s never failed him and makes broth he doesn’t expect to be eaten.

Zoro’s mouth opens when the spoon touches it and he swallows, does it again. He doesn’t look at Sanji. The broth goes somewhere but Sanji doesn’t know if it counts as nourishment or just the performance of it.

Later, when the crew gathers quietly in the hallway and asks Sanji what happened, he tells them the truest part of it: he found Zoro, he breathed into him, Zoro breathed back. He doesn’t tell them about the voice that had crept into him and doesn’t tell them about the wrong taste and doesn’t tell them about the second kiss in the infirmary, the way the mouth had moved like an empty hinge. He doesn’t tell them about the gape where a person should be.

He doesn’t have words for it yet. He only has a vague shape for it, and it’s a fatal wound.

The day wears itself out and makes another. Zoro lies where they put him and does everything they ask of him: he drinks, he stands with help, he sits when he’s told. When they place Wado into his hand to see if his body remembers he raises it and cuts the air with perfect form. He doesn't smile, he doesn’t scowl. He doesn’t turn his head when Sanji swears or when Usopp cries.

That night, when Sanji can’t bear to sleep, and definitely can’t bear the alternative, he goes back to the infirmary and sinks into the chair by the bed. He watches the slow work of Zoro’s chest and listens to the ocean kiss the hull outside. He puts his elbows on his knees and presses his fists together until the bones in his hands ache.

“Hey,” He says eventually, voice catching. “Remember when you called my soup water a crime? Congratulations, you were right. Guess I finally made you something worse, though. I made you.”

Zoro’s eye stares without narrowing or mocking or softening. It reflects Sanji as a shape that could be anyone and anything.

Sanji leans forward until the world shrinks to the space between them and, god, he knows he shouldn’t. He does it anyway. He kisses Zoro again, a third blasphemy, because he needs to measure something, anything. He needs the horror to be consistent. He needs to know if the wrong taste is getting stronger, or if he’s learning to ignore it, and which is worse.

It’s still wrong, and it’s getting easier.

He pulls back and sits down hard, scrubbing both hands over his face until he can feel his fingernails bite. His mouth tastes like a memory he wishes he hadn’t fucking kept.

He looks at Zoro and understands, finally, what shape the voice had: pity. Not for Zoro. For him, for the kind of love that’d accept alive as a synonym for here. The kind of love that would try to make a home out of that.

“Okay,” He tells the ceiling, his sea, his own stupid heart. “Okay.”

When dawn at last reaches for the porthole his mouth has stopped tasting wrong. This scares him more than anything else: the way horror becomes a background noise if you just listen long enough, just try hard enough. He stands and brushes a piece of hair away from Zoro’s forehead and the gesture makes no difference; he knows it and he chooses to do it anyway.

Sanji goes to boil water and burn toast and practice, one small act at a time, the art of feeding what can’t feel hunger.