Chapter Text
iv.
Sometime between inking recipes for invisibility onto his palm and trying to breathe life into the sea beasts painted just off the shore above the compass rose, he read about you, and about the innumerable universes living in the spaces just beyond the warmth of your breath, that dreaming alongside you is another you, and another, all the yous that will ever exist existing right now where your existence bends away.
You, he read.
There on his knees between the stacks and with smudges of dark dust on the pads of his fingers that printed his own crest on everything he touched, he decided there could never exist a him who does not dream of a home he can sink into until his bones forget their own weight, nor a him who does not wonder at the lives he would never touch sharing this same air and sky. That in every iteration of his existence, there must be a moment–a book falling open, a conversation drifting through the wall, the sun catching on something broken and spectacular– when he will come to understand possibilities innumerable as universes. In that moment too, All Blue would unfurl itself again, the world would grow until it can hold this new him who believes in anything and for whom anything can exist. In every iteration of his story, he knows there is an All Blue waiting, infinite and patient.
Years later, he has grown tall and lean and dreams of invisibility have been shelved for grander things and the sea beasts just off the shore have risen and fallen at his feet and the world has opened itself up to offer its possibilities without end. Here and now, bounded by blue above and blue below, he decides something else.
You, he read. There is something about him that is infinite, Sanji knows, infinite and on repeat. There is a him in every universe and in each of them there is an All Blue humming, and it may not be an ocean this time, maybe it’s a hidden city, or a single, lung-blackening word, but in every universe he will find it, but only in this universe is he so lucky to have found something greater.
Only in this iteration is there a crown so sunbeaten and worn and loved, a white as sacred as the white of Wadou’s hilt, a map so intricately beautiful it names even the small rivers whose villages have gone. And where else could you find a bravery so honest every lie finds itself spinning into truth, or an elixir brewed so sincere it buries even your cruelest nightmares under cherry blossoms and snow and when you unearth them again in the morning you will find only peace where their bones should be. There is no language like the one chiseled into towering stone found in the cloud-heights and ocean-depths and furthest desert-reaches of this world, and in no other existence is there a ship home to two laughing spirits, their joy entwined the fiercest protection love can offer. And the song that plays for them on dark, sated nights, springing from wood and string, heady and triumphant, finds its inspiration under their stars, in the spaces between their hearts, pulling its notes from the ether of this life and the one just beyond.
He knows all this, without wavering, believes as he does in All Blue, in all things. He tells Zeff but Zeff doesn’t look up from the menu for tomorrow’s dinner service.
“Shitty brat,” Zeff grunts. “This again?”
“What do you mean,” Sanji says. “What do you mean ‘this again’?”
Zeff wets the tip of his pen with his tongue, gives Sanji a look that makes Sanji want to put his cigarette out on the menu, so that Zeff will kick him through a table instead. Sanji stops himself. Carne comes in through the front door with an armload of sun-bleached whites and Gin materializes from the shadowed corner of the dining room to take the laundry basket from him. Sanji can’t see the look Gin gives Carne, but they both move onto the kitchen without another word.
“Stop hovering,” Zeff says, after the kitchen doors have stopped swinging, the rhythmic thudding of knives against wood stuttering into a palpably anxious silence. “No one’s making you stay.”
“I know,” says Sanji. “But don’t you want to at least try?”
vi.
“Do you think he’ll be thinking of me when he kicks it.”
He flicks the lighter open, flicks it shut and pockets it again without lighting up. For the first time since he can remember, he doesn’t want a smoke. He wants room in his lungs to carry as much of these last moments with him as he can. The mild dawn air charged with early light, the wafting smell of fresh bread, his recipe, with fish bones dried and ground down fine, heartiest bread you’ll find in any of the Blues.
“Probably will. Stupid old man.”
An elephant tuna swims by right beneath their feet, followed closely by a school of sparrow fish in reds and yellows and greens. Sanji looks back up the long stretch of pier they had come down, at their little restaurant with the red brick chimney and big windows that Franky had built, a door studded with seashells. Storybook. Turning back to the water, he sees a ship cresting the horizon with the sun. Their first customers of the day.
Sanji shoves his hands into his pockets. “His last words will probably be, ‘tell that shitty eggplant his soup still sucks.’ God.”
Gin slings the last rucksack onto the ship, where it slides across the deck to join the rest of their heaped provisions. Gin shrugs and gives Sanji a look that says if Sanji’s going to cry again, could he please do it where Gin can’t hear him.
“Asshole,” Sanji sighs. “What do you know anyway. My soup’s fantastic.”
“We should go,” Gin says. “While the wind’s good.”
Sanji thinks about Usopp. Thinks about the first step Usopp had to take after Merry bid them farewell. Thinks about that stretching, churning abyss of guilt and loss, and what could possibly get him across safe.
“Shit,” he says. “Yeah, all right.”
“You can write. And he’ll probably live forever,” Gin offers as a condolence, along with his hand, to help Sanji onto the ship. “He just seems the type.”
Unlike you, Sanji thinks, but that goes unsaid.
v.
At the door of the restaurant, Zeff had grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, yanked him close. Kissed his forehead, bristly and rough. Said, “Don’t think so fucking much.” Looked at Sanji like Sanji was something unbelievable.
Before that, at the threshold of Sanji’s room, Zeff had filled up the doorway, immovable, as Sanji coated everything he owned with nicotine and hunted for lost socks. There was a frantic shushing from the hallway and Sanji knew Patty and the others were huddled just out of sight, listening. They all have a stock in him, knew him even before his fingers could properly wrap around a knife, when he still thought the cover of smoke could make his shoulders seem broader.
At the threshold of Sanji’s room, Zeff had said, “Tell me, what kind of fully grown man can’t keep track of his own socks.”
Sanji had nothing to throw back, or nothing that he’d really mean. Standing before Zeff, he didn’t know if there would ever come a time when he’d feel less like a child. Gave the socks up for a lost cause and sat down on the floor to fold his winter clothes first.
Because before this, at the helm of a battered dream–theirs, Zeff’s and Sanji’s, for all Sanji dreamt of leaving–Sanji’s used-to-be home, the everything Sanji had lived to give, with the blood still fresh on the deck and the remains of an armada knocking against their hull, Zeff had looked down at him and Zeff had said, “Dress warm.”
On the eve of that first departure, Sanji had demanded of himself, how could you be so ungrateful. He has given you a bed to sleep in, a home to call your own, food on your plate, the ocean beneath your feet, a life. He has given up everything, and you cannot find it in yourself to stay, to be happy where you are.
Then and now, Sanji had wanted to say, I would live the rest of my life for you. I would count out all my days like coins to place in your palm and still it would not be enough for what I’ve taken from you, for all the possibilities like universes without end that even together amount to less than your singular sacrifice. But if you ask, I would stay, I would stay, I would learn to want to stay.
Zeff wouldn’t ask. Still looks at Sanji now like he is something unbelievable. Like Sanji is something good.
Both times, Sanji had said, with sincerity enough to blister, but still only, “Thank you,” what else did he have to give, for every day since that first day, for letting me grow, for letting me go, for seeing the good in me worth every life-drop of All Blue.
And at the door, with All Blue rising to their feet, Zeff had said, “I know you never asked to be saved.” Had said, “I did not mean to be your burden all these years.”
And he could not look Sanji in the eye and Sanji had nothing else left in him but cries of no, no, you were never, please. But they sunk deep into his chest before he could speak them. His useless tongue, trembling arms, clumsy heart, selfish selfish selfish.
“No,” he tried, had to try, but Zeff grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, yanked him close, kissed his forehead, bristly and rough, and Sanji felt crushed anew beneath his own gratitude, his own love, the disbelief that he could have this much good, the weight of it so immense surely his knees would give out.
Zeff said, “Don’t think so fucking much. All right?”
Meant, you are a dream greater than All Blue, what could I do but follow you?
Sanji on his knees, the back of Zeff’s hand to his lips. Sobbing, how, how, how can I go, and Zeff pulling him up, Zeff putting him in Gin’s waiting hands, Zeff shutting the door softly.
vii.
“In a perfect world,” says Gin, “you would complain a lot less.”
“In a perfect world,” says Sanji, “I’d be sailing with a beautiful lady and not you.”
Gin doesn’t argue. He places the last dish on the drying rack and, after a moment’s hesitation, wipes his hands on a hand towel instead of on his jeans. Satisfied, Sanji puts his head down on the table and closes his eyes.
When he wakes, it’s to Gin shaking his shoulder gently. The first thing Sanji registers is the smell of burning. The second is the sun young in the sky. Both snap his spine straight.
“Did you try to make toast again.“
“Yeah.” Gin sits across from him. The circles under his eyes are somehow even darker, and something in Sanji twists. “You weren’t awake yet,” Gin says. “But now I’m really hungry.”
“Even Luffy could make fucking toast,” Sanji mutters, getting up.
"I’m not Luffy,” says Gin, and rustles open the paper he brought in with him.
Sanji’s long since learned it’s no fun arguing with Gin, because Gin doesn’t seem to have an anger setting when it comes to Sanji, and anyway, if Sanji’s honest, he knows his own anger is misplaced. If he’s honest, he knows that in this instance, his anger is one seeded by fear. That he no longer rises before the sun, that he had slept through the sound of the kitchen door unlatching and even the smell of burning. If this were the Baratie, Zeff would have made him walk the plank for incompetence. If this were the Sunny, Sanji would have walked himself.
“You should have just woken me up,” he says, swirling oil in the pan for omelets. “For watch too.”
“No green peppers. Please.”
“You’ll eat what I give you and you’ll be grateful,” Sanji snaps. But he puts the pepper back.
With the stove fired up, muscle memory takes over. He could still do breakfast in his sleep, at least. He crisps up the bacon in another pan while the omelets are cooking through, juices some oranges and grapefruit, cuts up strawberries and apples for a salad. Makes toast and doesn’t burn it, whips up fresh butter. After breakfast is plated, he will get started on other preparations, he’s thinking hand-pulled noodles in fish broth for lunch, with a side of simmered tofu, and a seaking paella for dinner, dotted liberally with the fresh green peas they bought on the last island. Triple-check that list of perishables they’ll have to use within the week, have Gin help him take inventory before landfall so that Gin can practice his letters too.
In the middle of flipping a pancake, he hears Gin calling him.
"What,” he says.
“I said, you don’t have to make so much.”
Sanji looks at the spread on the table, counts the dishes, shakes his head because there won’t be enough if Luffy wants fourths, and he always does, not to mention snacks between meals, and if Zoro takes a nap afterwards, he’ll wake up hungry again, and he hasn’t even accounted yet for the servings Usopp and Chopper will steal to feed the fish in their aquarium.
He catches himself.
He turns off the burner and says, embarrassed, “There are still cinnamon buns in the oven.”
“For later,” says Gin, even though Sanji knows for a fact Gin can’t eat cinnamon without pulling a face. Sanji had been thinking of Chopper instead.
Sanji stores the rest of the pancake batter in the fridge and takes his seat. “Old habits, I guess,” he says.
“You’re grinning.” Gin hands him the crossword puzzle from the paper. Sanji moves the pitcher of orange juice and smooths the page out on the table.
“Just eat your breakfast, asshole.”
Sanji absently spears an apple slice with his fork and surveys the landscape of plates near overflowing. He’ll save the noodles for lunch another day, since they’ll have enough leftovers; they are only two and not a crew of nine. It seems he is still accustomed to unreasonable, impossible things, like cooking for a bottomless void of a captain. The smell of cinnamon and butter wraps around them.
Gin’s right: he’s grinning.
“What’s this word,” Gin asks around a mouthful of toast.
Sanji glances up from the hint for 2-across (eleven letters, starts with M, “until recently, Mariejois’s M.O.”).
“Interrogation,” he reads from the headline under Gin’s finger.
“Like when you break people’s kneecaps,” Gin ventures, “so they’ll talk.”
“Yeah. Exactly.”
Gin nods, spells the word out to himself under his breath. Sanji goes back to the crossword and skips over 2-across for 15-down, eight letters, “neighbor to Water 7, known for its tree-lined promenades”: St. Poplar.
iii.
Gin had shown up at All Blue not long after Nami’s maps went into circulation. It was much the same as the first time, Gin looking like even hell didn’t want him, running on empty, except there was no armada on this heels this time and he knew to ask for Sanji by name. Sanji is a little taller than him now, though not by much, and only if he doesn’t slouch. Sitting down, there is no difference.
“Where’s Krieg?”
“Last I heard, he was trying to break into the arms trade in the Montrose Archipelago back in East Blue. But that was years ago.”
“You didn’t stay with him?”
“I left as soon as I didn’t owe him anything anymore. It never was that much, once you got down to counting. I owe you more.”
“You don’t,” Sanji had said, because these days Gin’s cough was a wet rattling deep in his chest and sometimes there was blood between his teeth. Sanji remembered the taste of antidote on the back of his tongue, like iodine, and the rubber groove of the gas mask bruising his cheekbones, Gin’s wrist enclosed in his fist, thin and hot.
“You’re not going to start again, are you,” Gin said, leaning his tonfa against the table. He took a seat at the edge of the booth, elbows on his knees, turned towards the square of orange sky out the window, instead of to Sanji across the table. “With the guilt. I don’t have any use for that, and neither do you.”
“Right. You’re going to tell me it was your choice. You’re going to tell me it was the right choice and I should stop agonizing over it so much. Except I always come out of it whole, and it’s everyone else who’s missing a piece of themselves. Then you say it’s nothing and I’m supposed to live with it.”
Gin turned to look at him. “You’re not talking about me.”
“I am,” Sanji spat. “Both of you were the same. I’m not telling you to take it back. I’m telling you to just let me– no, forget it.”
There was a new, retrospective fear growing in Sanji now. There’s only one of you, Sanji wanted to shout, but everywhere else there is a me. What if you were lost? I would not find a you anywhere else.
Sanji’s foot had been tapping out a frustrated rhythm under the table, the cigarette between his fingers quivering above the ashtray. It had been eight months now since Zeff had shown up with the crew of the Baratie, following the map Nami had delivered by carrier gull, to find an empty, gleaming-new restaurant and Sanji waiting on the pier with his feet in the water. Six months since the Sunny had set sail again and a piece of Sanji’s heart had swam out to sea after it.
The only light left on in the dining hall was the one above the next booth, where Zeff usually sat to do the bookkeeping. In the half dark, Gin rubbed at his eyes and sighed. Sanji braced himself for an argument, but Gin only swiveled around to rest his feet under the table next to Sanji’s.
“Everything I eat tastes like copper these days,” Gin said, folding his hands together. His fingers were crooked, broken and healed all haphazard over the years. “Can you make me something that doesn’t?”
“You’ll have to work off your meal this time,” Sanji said, after a pause. “So stay a while.”
ix.
If Zoro is surprised to run into Sanji again in a little town in North Blue nestled at the foot of a dormant volcano, he doesn’t show it. Greets, “You got any cash on you?”
“I don’t make it a habit to encourage people’s drinking problems,” Sanji replies. He shifts the bag of groceries to his other arm. His scarf is damp from his breath.
“It’s not a problem,” says Zoro, “if I can still punch you out afterwards.”
“No. Come have dinner. Knowing you, you’ve been living off roadkill.”
“What’re you making?”
“That goat stew we had last time we were here. Remember? That old lady made it for us, the one who thought Chopper was a goblin. She got up before dawn with her basket so she could have first pick at the market. Did you know, she passed away last year. I just came from visiting her daughter and she told me. She still wears the earrings Robin-chan gave her, said she wanted something to remind her of us. She said her son didn’t make it back for the funeral. He was working a job two islands over to help make ends meet, and there was a storm. I’m going to go visit the grave later.”
“I’ll help you with that,” Zoro says, holding out his hand. “Since you’re feeding me and all.”
Sanji knows that Zoro, with his broad shoulders and reticent tongue, means more than the bag of groceries, which weighs almost nothing at all. Knows that Zoro is thinking ahead to the weight of snow on a headstone, the weight of earth on a body, of the early nights of the far north, and of Sanji never knowing a home and customs so landed, so rooted.
Sanji hands the bag over anyway, because it’s not often Zoro decides not to be useless. He digs in his pockets for the shopping list, though he knows he has everything. “That’s the last of it. Gin should have picked up the rest.”
“Who?”
“Follow closely and don’t wander.”
They arrive back at the ship the same time Gin does, a sack of potatoes over his shoulder. Gin nods to Zoro, who nods back. They follow Sanji up the gangplank.
Sanji settles single-mindedly into dinner prep while Zoro takes a nap by the galley door. Out of the corner of his eye, Sanji sees Gin thumbing through yesterday’s Grand Line Times. After a while, he seems to give up on words like legitimacy and tribunal and practices instead with Sanji’s shopping lists. The sun’s just touched the peak of the volcano on its downward arc when Sanji finishes setting the table and kicks the chair out from under a lightly-snoring Zoro. Gin doesn’t wait for their scuffle to end before serving himself.
“I got in touch with Nami-san through the den den mushi,” Sanji says, once seated. He gingerly tongues at his split lip as he ladles stew into a bowl and slides it across the table to Zoro. “By then you had already been separated from her and Luffy. How the hell did that happen?”
“They got lost,” says Zoro. His cheek is already mottling, the burst capillaries underneath angry and spidering, courtesy of Sanji’s knee. “And I got tired of waiting around for them.”
“You’re still as delusional as you are green.”
“When’re you going to do something about that stupid dartboard on your face.”
“If you two flip the table over,” Gin warns, pulling his bowl closer.
A truce is reached, unspoken and easy as it always has been. The way Zoro eats has not changed either, his movements focused and economical, not bothering to wait between mouthfuls to reach for the rum. It’s a terrifying sign of fondness when that flash of annoyance Sanji feels is overcome almost immediately by a flash of relief. It’s been close to a year and Sanji worries sometimes. His crewmates, each with their own trajectories that Sanji can only wonder at, that easily may not cross Sanji’s again.
“Bring some of this with us later,” Zoro is saying.
Sanji nods.
It takes no time at all for the sun to disappear to the other side of the world and for the constellations to flicker on. With the dishes drying on the rack, Sanji ties a cloth around the small clay pot and shrugs on his coat. Zoro’s waiting for him on shore with the lantern and Gin’s already slipped off into town.
“How was it,” Sanji asks. “Being the original three again.”
Zoro falls into step next to him. “Quiet,” he says.
Sanji lets it be. The lantern in Zoro’s hand casts a impenetrable circle around them, beyond it a formless, moonless blue-black, and Sanji almost feels they are moving on a different plane. The walk is uphill but it’s not a long one, the town still visible as a soft glow on the horizon, but entering the cemetery gates is like stepping over a demarcation line. The air turns oppressive, the cold suddenly blunt and pressing instead of needle sharp. Their circle of light wavers as Zoro switches hands, and Sanji almost kicks him for the scare.
“You still have that thing about cemeteries?”
Sanji rises to it. “Why bury the dead when you can set them free at sea?”
In way of answer, Zoro says, “Let’s find her.”
They follow the narrow path, squinting at the numbers carved into the ground until they come across the right lot, near a cluster of birch trees, their white trunks evocative of bone, bleached and bare. When he can, Sanji reads the names on the stones, the years belonging to the beloveds and the cherisheds, in our hearts, and with us always, and peace.
When they find her headstone, Sanji’s chest fills at the sight of flowers, a day old at most, and of her name swept clean of snow. Death is so small, he thinks, is nothing before the enormity of your memory, the longing.
Under Zoro’s instructions, Sanji unwraps the clay pot and sets it down as an offering. The stew is still hot enough for steam to rise in the night cold. The sight is a comfort for Sanji, whose earliest memory of the proof of his existence is the curling white heat of his own breath against the Northern air, a sign of a fire within that refuses to go out. He remembers that this cold, this relentless dark, at least, are familiar to him in some primordial sense, despite the bone-trees that tower and the stones in the ground he cannot bear to touch. He finds the air easier to swallow.
“Um,” he stalls, shoving his hands into his pockets. “I’m sorry we didn’t come back to see you sooner. I think about this stew you made us whenever it gets cold like this. Our captain demolished half the town square by accident when we were here, so that didn’t leave too good an impression on you, I bet. But you fed us at your table anyway, and we were grateful. Still grateful. Shit, I don’t know, am I doing this right?”
“Yeah,” says Zoro. “Don’t swear.”
“Sorry.”
“Tell her about Robin.”
Sanji hesitates, is awkward. Tries, “That’s right. Robin-chan was your favorite, wasn’t she? She’s fluent now in Old North. Did you know there’s a whole island of speakers hidden away in the Grand Line? Robin-chan learned a lot from them. She got so excited about the grammar. That’s just like Robin-chan, huh? She would have wanted to speak it with you again. She would have wanted you to know you weren’t the last one. She’ll be sad to hear you’ve passed.”
Zoro nods when Sanji looks to him again. Zoro sets the lantern down between them and the encroaching dark shrinks his stature, so that it’s easy for Sanji to imagine Zoro as he might have been before he met Luffy and before the ocean pulled him in. In East Blue, where there is a girl’s name engraved in Eastern characters instead of the letters of the common tongue, and Zoro as still as her stone, his head bowed. Sanji looks up, the sky a thick sheet of stars, refusing to blink until his eyes start to water and he has drop his gaze, his throat tight.
He understands the want for fixity, so that love always knows where to go. He understands the fear of goodbye, the eternity of it like the vastness of the ocean that can turn cruel as dry, barren land. Above all else, he understands the need to be found. Here, she will always be found.
Zoro covers the pot and wraps it back up. Sanji picks up the lantern and they make their way back in silence.
On the ship, Zoro rustles in the drawer for two spoons. They sit across from each other in silence and share the stew, cold now and congealed. Sanji feels it fill his belly, heavy and dense, like dirt, but this is hallowed, is reverential. Nothing like those child-sized fistfuls of desperation, of empty.
viii.
The den den mushi emits a crackling noise in Nami’s octave, its round eyes blinking rapidfire as it tries to stabilize the connection. Sanji waits, holding the mouthpiece against his lips, feeling his heartbeat knock.
“H–
"Sanji-kun, hello? Can you hear me?”
“Nami-swan!” he cries, his chest seizing. “It’s been so long! Are those idiots taking care of you? Are you eating well?”
“They are.” She laughs and Sanji feels like spinning. “And I am. Don’t worry so much, Sanji-kun. How are you?”
“Better than I’ve been in days, now that I have your voice in my ears,” he says, honest.
“That’s nice, San–”
Their connection wavers, fizzles. When the den den mushi’s eyes focus again, its irises are smaller.
“Sanji!” says Luffy’s voice. “We lost Zoro on the last island! Can you find him for us?”
“What the hell, asshole, keep track of your own swordsman! I don’t even know where you guys are.”
After a brief commotion and a distant whine all warped and thinned out, Nami’s voice returns with a crackle. “Sorry, Sanji-kun. You know how Zoro is, he–
"Under freezing waterfalls or something. Anyway, we were in North Blue, on the map it’s the–
"But past the island where Franky lost his nose, remember, and–
"But don’t worry, they say it’s been dormant for a while. Did you get all that?”
Sanji, who had curled closer to the den den mushi in an attempt to salvage Nami’s words from the static and hiss of a bad connection, straightens his spine. “Don’t worry, Nami-swan! I’ll figure it out!”
“I knew I could count on you, Sanji-kun! Call us again when you’re closer. We miss you and we–”
The den den mushi sputters, then closes its eyes.
Sanji holds his breath, but there is nothing else.
Not for the first time, he wonders if their words still tremble somewhere in the telepathic web of the den den mushis, if all their little hellos and how are yous remain suspended above their heads in the atmosphere. If they sometimes get caught in the current of those invisible waves and are channeled again into another place, another time, a stray have you eaten, an untethered stay inside, it’s going to storm soon. If maybe somewhere on a remote island in South Blue, or along the smooth ribbon of the Calm Belt, someone will turn on their den den mushi years later to hear Sanji’s voice saying, hey old man, I’ve found it at last. If all of Sanji’s professions of love still exist somehow in some form unseen, and will continue to exist, humming and warm, until the last of the den den mushis goes offline and the web unravels and all those words, all those I love yous after an eternity of being true, will drop like rain into the ocean, something apocalyptic.
Sanji wonders at Nami’s last words, we miss you and we– dropped into the distance yawning between them, those words rising and floating for now in some liminal space, alongside a ten-year-old we saw the sun today and a don’t forget to work hard from last week, in the murmuring company of goodbyes and good news and come home soons. Not gone yet, only waiting, for another wave, another time, another place.
And Sanji finds it easier to press down on that feeling of wild loss. He lets the breath go.
“Hey,” Gin calls down from the crow’s nest. “I see land ahead.”
“Change of plans,” says Sanji, cradling the sleeping den den mushi in his palms. “We’re going north.”
x.
After the third time Sanji kicks Zoro in the shins for not pulling his weight around the ship, Zoro finally stomps over to the sink and rolls up his sleeves. Sanji snaps at Gin to sit down and drink his tea and eat a fucking cookie. Zoro complains that isn’t fair and Sanji says he’d upend the teapot over Zoro’s head if it weren’t such a waste of good leaves. Gin takes a mild sip under Sanji’s burning glare.
The truth is Sanji and Zoro have never learned how to get along. The other truth is Sanji is grateful to have another body on board so that he doesn’t have to pace the short, narrow length of the deck alone while Gin is sleeping off the night watches. The still other truth, and the most reluctant one, is Sanji is grateful that body is Zoro.
“I’m going to try my hand at fishing,” Gin says, placing his empty mug by Zoro’s elbow. His voice is less raspy now than it had been this morning. “Thanks,” he says on his way out.
The door shuts on Gin’s back and Sanji turns to face Zoro’s.
“Do you remember,” says Sanji, and it seems that’s how all his sentences start these days, “that island where it was night all the time, and instead of electricity or hydropower they had those water lamps with the little things inside them, what are they called–”
“Phytoplankton,” Zoro supplies without having to pause.
“Right,” says Sanji. “Your photosynthesizing brethren.”
“I know where you sleep.”
“Do you remember,” Sanji continues, “the mayor told us, their city kept growing and they had to go further and further out to collect more phytoplankton and release the ones that had gone dark to recharge. And because of demand they had to do this at all times of the day, even when the sun was out in the rest of the world. And how they were reluctant to because they were afraid? Because the sun beyond their shores was strange to them, and they didn’t know how to contend with it?”
“I remember,” says Zoro. He grabs Gin’s mug and starts to scrub.
“But can you imagine? Being afraid of sunlight, when the rest of world lives on it.”
Sanji expects Zoro to say he isn’t afraid of anything, so no. Sanji also expects Zoro to tell Sanji to get to the point already, or does he really have to subject Zoro to this blathering on top of menial labor.
Zoro shrugs. “The world’s a big place.”
Which means, what I can personally know and imagine is not the limit of possibility. Which means, there are millions I will never meet sharing this same air and sky, and the thought of all that existence is more striking than the fear of sunlight. Which means, it’s all right if sometimes you still cannot bring yourself to sleep on land.
Sanji had expected that too. Just like he’s come to expect Zoro to remember the multi-syllabic names of microscopic sea creatures and to know which sponge is for the dishware and which is for the pots and pans, Sanji can trust Zoro to hear the questions they are not brave enough to ask and to answer in a way that accommodates both their cowardice, lock it in the space between them so that the rest of the world may not know.
“It is,” Sanji agrees. “But I’ve been thinking of going back to visit. I want to see how they’re doing.”
“I have nowhere else to be,” says Zoro.
ii.
It was not rare for Robin to rise the same time Sanji did, before the sun, in the hours of still lightening dark. Sometimes she read at the table and other times she joined him in Sunny’s kitchen, a hip against the countertop, a pair of hands warming around her coffee cup, another pair whisking eggs despite Sanji’s goopy, heart-studded protests that a lady should not exert herself so early in the day.
During these times, because she was a woman of the world whom Sanji could only marvel at, Robin would talk about any number of things. Was Sanji aware of that university in North Blue whose folkloric studies department had deconstructed the tale of Norland the Liar in concert with news of the Strawhats’ visit to Upper Yard to lambaste in no uncertain terms the foundation upon which nearly all of modern Northern society rests, that is, the outdated, ineffectual puppet monarchy with its strings pulled taut by the Gorosei?
Had Sanji read that article in the Grand Line Times about the resurgence of man-of-war colonies in the waters all along the Red Line and did he ever think nature would be one so heavy-handed with the symbolism?
Did Sanji know, on that island they last visited, the native inhabitants had become a minority in their own home, outnumbered by the people coming to see their city of eternal dark and by foreign workers hired to harvest light from the ocean, who did not fear the sun, and so to whom did the city really belong now?
What was Sanji’s opinion on the proliferation of trafficking rings since the launch of the Great Age of Pirates, which broke open the sea for dreamers and adventure seekers, yes, but also for those desperate and trammeled on their home islands, and for those looking to exploit that desperation of others, and how do you reconcile the freedom of one with the enslavement of the other?
Sanji did not think she was looking for any form of meaningful insight from him. Surely whatever intelligent thoughts he had on these matters were already circumscribed by her own, which were continually evolving to encompass all that was knowable, deciphered from the Poneglyphs, wrenched from the jaws of the World Government, gleaned from what passed before her innumerable eyes.
Sanji, she said once, will they say it was enough, years from now, what Luffy did, what we did?
I don’t know, he had answered. What does Robin-chan think?
He could already hear the rumbling from the men’s quarters. Dawn had passed so quickly. One of Robin’s hands placed the last butter knife in its place on the dining table, and she gave Sanji a smile, confessed she was still more attuned to dead voices and silent stone than to the stories of the living, still unfolding, their ends uncertain.
i.
Back at the beginning, when they were still five and Merry, a girl with a woolen cap and embroidered coat and burnished beads around her wrists had stood herself before them and said, “You’re not welcome here.”
She looked young and terrified. Her cheeks were red and wind-burnt and she had a rock in her fist. The sleeves of her coat were frayed and too short. By her patched elbow was a dark-eyed boy with a falcon perched on his shoulder.
“We’re not here to cause trouble. We just came through Reverse Mountain and want a place to rest,” Nami had said, sweet and soft. Not two minutes ago she was threatening to keelhaul Zoro for dropping the anchor into a coral reef. Nami possessed the sort of multifacetedness and quick-turn tenacity that Sanji adored.
Nami’s hair, Sanji remembers, was still short then, the cut of it straight and severe. But she had been smiling and when Nami smiled, you couldn’t say no.
“No,” said the girl, impervious. “No pirates.”
Luffy took a step forward, interest already diverted, and the rock flew from the girl’s fist to hit Luffy between the eyes. Luffy stopped and turned to her and the girl looked like her knees would give out.
Sanji knew Luffy was not above hitting children. He understood Luffy did not have a sense of right or wrong, only us or them, and this girl with her single rock and wet eyes was irrefutably them. Sanji did not trust Zoro to stop Luffy. Sanji knew that Usopp would not be able to.
Nami got to Luffy before Sanji could. Multifacted, tenacious, perfect Nami. She pulled Luffy back behind her, her voice calm over the screech of his protests, “We’re sorry. We’ll leave now.”
Luffy had been herded back onto the ship. Before Sanji turned to follow, he saw the boy’s falcon take flight.
Usopp had wondered aloud, “Marine-sympathizers, maybe?”
Sanji shook his head. “No Marine flag.”
The boy’s falcon had followed them as they rounded the island and hovered until they turned back out to sea.
Sanji does not think Luffy is above hitting children, even now. But Luffy had never truly understood. Luffy had never looked back once. And now that he’s crowned, Luffy is even harder to say no to.
xi.
Usopp’s letter says, I wrote to the restaurant but Zeff wrote back to say you had left so I found a den den mushi to call Nami and she said you were on your way to pick up Zoro in North Blue where they had lost him, so after you do that, can you come get Chopper and me, because we’ve been stuck here for weeks and Nami says we’re too out of the way, and we’re so bored, please Sanji-kun, you’re our only hope.
The return address isn’t familiar on paper, but Sanji finds the name of the island on Nami’s map and when they arrive a week later, Sanji recognizes its shores immediately: the towering, yellowed skeleton of an ancient leviathan rising from the black sand beach, stark, dwarfing even the mountains further inland, into which stone cities are carved.
They find Usopp and Chopper languishing in an outdoor cafe across from a stall selling animal teeth strung into amulets and charms. There is a pile of crumpled napkins next to Usopp’s glass. One of them opens up just enough for Sanji to catch a glimpse of an ear, thoughtfully sketched, as if from memory.
Chopper looks up first. He jumps onto the table and knocks over his glass, thankfully empty.
“You came!” he cries.
Usopp’s pen slips, leaving a gaping tear across the hull of the ship he’s drawing. Sanji has only a second to mourn her seaworthiness before Usopp has his arms wrapped around Sanji and Zoro both. Sanji gets a mouthful of hair and next to him, Zoro, his arms pinned, is trying to shake Chopper off his face.
“Sanji-kun,” Usopp wails. “Zoro-chan.”
It’s Zoro’s muffled how dare you that finally dislodges something that’s been stuck in Sanji’s throat since they’ve docked, a clustered, thrumming feeling crowding his chest that’s only grown since spotting Chopper’s antlered head and the black cloud of Usopp’s hair. The laughter that comes startles even Sanji himself, weakens his knees, shakes him, and it’s embarrassing, how Usopp goes from leaning on him to holding him up, how Zoro alone is keeping them all from toppling into the street even as he tries to pry Chopper off. But Sanji cannot stop.
A vulnerable sort of fondness overtakes him when, later, he is counting the crescent moons Usopp’s fingers buried along his wrist, the hoofed-shaped imprints on his pant leg that will need to be ironed out; a cut-open sort of fondness, that need to give and give and give until he gives out.
xii.
“It’s getting crowded on the ship anyway,” says Gin.
Sanji stops to grab a shop flyer from the young boy handing them out in front of the antiques store. Swipes the ballpoint pen Usopp had devised for him and Nami from his breast pocket, and shoves both towards Gin, who has to put down the giant wok Sanji had just haggled from the woman at the market, right in the middle of the street.
“Write my name,” Sanji demands.
Gin looks at him like he’s snapped but Sanji motions him to get on with it. Gin sighs and grudgingly puts pen to paper, angling it so that Sanji can’t see. The self-consciousness is palpable as the afternoon crowd parts around them, and Sanji glares at anyone who stares too long. The parcel of fresh cut meat he’s carrying will keep for a while longer, wrapped in dried kelp.
“Here,” says Gin, a bit aggressively. He flips the flyer around so that Sanji can read his own name in Gin’s elementary script, the S with a tail that’s just a bit too long, like Gin hesitated about whether it was facing the right way, the J that’s really just an impatient hook.
Sanji nods. “You don’t have an excuse now.”
Gin rubs at the back of his neck. He’s embarrassed, Sanji can tell and Sanji is struck by an overwhelming affection.
“No promises,” Gin warns. “That kind of stuff, I’m no good at it.”
Sanji takes up the wok and throws it over his shoulder so he’s armored like a tortoise. They resume the descent from the mountain city down to the shore. The skeleton of the leviathan looks no smaller from this height; they are just level with the crown of the skull. If he squints, he can make out Usopp and Chopper’s silhouettes darting between the ribs. He hears Gin fold up the flyer and follow.
“Make the effort,” says Sanji. “I want to hear from you.”
“Ok,” says Gin. “Thanks, Sanji.”
“What, not gonna call me ‘Sanji-san’ anymore?” he needles.
“I had to reevaluate after I discovered you owned a pink panda apron.”
If Sanji were a person of weaker conviction, he’d have swung the wok right into Gin’s face. As he is an upstanding gentleman, he settles for kicking Gin down the next flight of stone steps, past a man hocking magic carpets and a child drawing fish on the walls in bright red chalk.
“What do you know, asshole,” he hollers after Gin’s flailing form. “Doskoi Panda is brand name!”
xiii.
Usopp will say Sanji is cornering him but really Sanji just wants to have a chat. Sanji doesn’t think his resting face is cause for alarm like Zoro’s is, and he is offended that Usopp seems to think so. Sanji thinks he has a good face. A little narrow, but that’s easy enough to overlook when he smiles, and he likes that his smile is so wide. He likes that his eyes are heavy-lidded, like he’s half-dreaming always. He likes how well glasses sit on the bridge of his nose. He likes the line of his jaw beneath his beard. He likes that his eyebrows tend to draw up instead of down, curiosity before suspicion.
Sanji’s spent a lot of time looking at his face in the mirror, mapping out his features, how they contribute to his projection of self, and he thinks he is allowed that, to make up for ages ten through twelve when he had been too afraid to, in case his reflection showed his cheeks haven’t filled out as much as he thought they must have. Thinks he’s earned the right to be a little vain after years trying to reconcile bird bones with the weight of all he wanted to carry. Thinks he worked hard to finally accept this body he calls his own, the only one he has, and to think it worthy.
He demands, “Why do you always look so terrified to see me, like I want your bones for soup.”
“Well,” says Usopp. “Guilty conscience, probably?”
Sanji bites back a sigh. He must be losing his edge, or maybe Usopp is getting better at sneaking around. “What’d you take?”
“A bag of flour,” Usopp confesses. “I hid it with my bug collection because I knew you wouldn’t look there.”
Sanji’s eye starts to twitch. “I don’t want to know what you needed it for. Next time, you can just ask me.”
“Flour bombs,” Usopp supplies anyway. “And really? You’d let me have it if I ask?”
“No,” says Sanji. “And you should know why by now.”
Usopp’s mouth opens, closes. He looks down. "Yeah, I guess,“ he says.
Guilt is not Sanji’s intention, not when they’ve only just been reunited. He doesn’t want to always play the bad marine. "I don’t do this to be mean, you know,” he says, feeling suddenly weary.
"Oh, I–” Usopp puts his hands up. “I know, Sanji. I didn’t think you were.”
Smoke rises steadily from the cigarette between his fingers, white ivy winding around an invisible column. Zoro’s been asleep in the crow’s nest for the better part of the morning, and Sanji let Chopper have the galley to sort through his herbs. Gin was so quiet when he was with them that it took Sanji brewing one cup of tea too many just an hour ago to remember he wasn’t there anymore.
Sanji takes a seat on the deck across from Usopp’s haphazard pile of pipes, loose gears, sheets of corrugated steel that look like they were stripped from someone’s roof, and safety pins. He knows Usopp sees it differently, but as far as Sanji can tell, it’s all junk. He can’t even begin to imagine where Usopp had salvaged half of it, if explosions were involved, or why it’s worth carting around from island to island.
“I’m making a prototype for the retractable shield I want to attach to Kabuto,” Usopp explains without prompting. “Doesn’t make sense to run for cover in the middle of battle all the time, right?”
“It’s a good idea,” Sanji agrees. “Though I don’t know how you make any sense of all this.”
“You think I understand how you come up with any of the meals you cook for us? Let’s call it even.”
Sanji blows contemplative smoke rings above their heads. They’re harder to see against the still bright sky, but Usopp’s eyes track them all the same. After the last one stretches itself into nothingness, Usopp looks to Sanji again and grins.
“I’ll buy my own flour next time, so it won’t mess up your inventory,” Usopp says, pulling free the largest piece of steel and setting it aside. Sanji’s afraid Usopp will cut his palms open if he’s not careful. “It’s really good to have you around again, Sanji.”
Sanji grunts, almost bites through the filter.
They say you shouldn’t let your own self-worth be so tied up in another person’s appreciation of you. That people can outgrow people and to be careful where you plant your roots. Make sure you can survive distance and silence, long nights and severance. There will be moments when you are necessarily lonely, as you regrow those parts of yourself you had excised to give away and then lost.
You, he had read once, long ago, when he was still young. But for now, they say practice frugality; the you that you are now is still finite. Remember not to give away too much: the red mass of your heart, a hole blown through your palm, your shoulder where a hand had rested, your wide eyes.
It’s likely sound advice, but Sanji has never known how to be sparing with himself. It’s a lesson Zeff never learned and did not know how to teach, and that makes Sanji’s heart hurt. But Sanji finds that, ever since Luffy crashed through their roof and smashed their ship to plywood, there is no need for such caution. They have been so patient with his clumsiness, the girls with his fawning and the boys with his scowling; they continue to harbor all the pieces of him he had carved out to give. They’ve kept him for their own. He has not grown back. He is riddled with triumphant hollows. Look. How else do you count love?
Good to see you haven’t grown fat and slow, Zoro had said. I haven’t been able to give you a check-up for a while, Chopper had noted when he left the galley. And Usopp–
“What are you making us for lunch?”
He cooked and seasoned the rice early this morning and left it out to cool, has slabs of sashimi grade elephant tuna and lion salmon resting in the fridge, the horseradish already grated, the ginger already pickled.
But he shrugs. “What do you want to eat?”