Archive of Our Own ^beta

Sanji had spent a week in the dungeons before his brothers found him again. 

With just those words the interaction sounds more painful than it was. For the week he had spent there, Sanji had been well taken care of. The cell was alright, being made about as homey as any room down in a dungeon can be. Nice furnishings, a decent bookcase, a… lamp. It didn’t evoke the dingy and terrible atmosphere such a cage would usually have, for all that it was still a cage. 

It was similar with his brothers. Whenever he thought of them, it was usually to expect a beating. As it stood, they were just standing awkwardly outside his cell, looking at him through the bars like he was some sort of bug. A neutral bug. Not like before, where he was the sort of bug that needed to be crushed and twisted up as an inconvenience. No, maybe something closer to a butterfly— the kind whose beauty they weren’t moved by, the kind of creature whose fragility they’d wonder about but have no time to act on. Utterly inconsequential.

“Father says we can’t beat you up anymore,” Yonji’s curt with his explanation. It shoots relief through him, and it must be visible on his face from how his brothers’ expressions shift around to meet it.

“Why?” Sanji asks. 

“‘Cuz you’re useful now, or something,” Niji says.

“We’re not supposed to be here.” Ichiji adds.

“O…h?”

“We just wanted to see your pathetic face one more time.” 

That was about the end of that interaction. They were serious when they said they couldn’t be down there, and they turned tail and ran back out before any of them got in trouble for it. It was the first and only thing Sanji had heard with any certainty as to his situation. He wasn’t being kept for being useless, for being a failure, for being too kind or not enough, but… for being useful . 

Hearing that stirred enough in him to curl up and cry about it for the night. It was too many things to identify, but tears are tears regardless of any of that.

He didn’t hear anything else about his situation, or his apparent necessity, from anybody that could give him a clue in the time it took for one of his siblings to venture down to the dungeons to look for him again. It was Niji, all on his own, and it was too late for him to be down there. 

Sanji stepped up to the bars of the cell with an unusual confidence. It felt strange to stand in front of his brother, close as they were, without his arm being pulled through the bars— bruised, broken, or dislocated as a result, if not all three. The fear of it lingered, but none of those things came to pass as they stood in silence. Niji had come with his sheet pulled over him, hiding from something. 

“Is everything…?” Sanji began asking, but he cut him off. 

“Shut up.” Niji snapped at him. “... No one’s told you anything else, right?”

Sanji shook his head. “D’you know when they’re gonna let me out?”

Niji sneered. “They’re not gonna.” 

“Eh?”

“Are you deaf? They’re not gonna.” Niji said. “Father’s saying you’re really sick, so nobody comes looking for you. Dunno, maybe if we keep you down here long enough, he’ll just say you’re dead. You’re staying, you aren’t allowed to get out.”

Tears sprung in his eyes once again at those words, but he didn’t let them fall. As much as Niji seemingly couldn’t hurt him physically anymore, it didn’t stop him from saying whatever he wanted. Before he could think of anything to reply with, his brother continued.

“That’s what I wanted to bother you about. I don’t think we made it clear last time— you’re still different , and weak . It’s not even you that’s useful, it’s a ghost.”

Sanji sniffed, frowning in indignity. “Why’d you come down here so late just to mess with me? S’not funny.”

Niji made a vaguely disinterested noise. “I’m not messing with you. I mean, if you wanna be a coward, you can just say that. But it is a ghost. Dad doesn’t seem to like it, but he locked you up here anyway to keep it. I think he’s mad he can’t run tests on it.” He shrugged off the sheet from off the top of his head, revealing his face and the lack of goggles on it. “Yonji thinks dad is full of it, and Ichiji does too. He just doesn’t say anything about it.” 

“And you don’t? You always have the same opinions about that sort of stuff.” 

Electricity crackled at Niji’s fingers as he grabbed onto the bars of the cell in front of him, and Sanji startled back at the action. “You’re so bold! I don’t care what dad says about leaving you alone or whatever, maybe I won’t be able to control myself if you talk like that.” 

Though Sanji had startled back, he didn’t apologize. They both stood as the seconds passed, growing almost into one whole minute of silence before Niji growled and stomped on the floor as loudly as he could. Well, as loudly as he could without having it crack under his heel. 

“Stupid Sanji— whatever! I just wanted to come see something. We won’t have to see your ugly face ever again. Good riddance.” Niji spat in his brother’s face.

Sanji blinked at it, bringing a hand up to where it had landed and cringing. “You’re being weird.”

“Save it,” Niji said. He looked out towards the exit, and then back at Sanji. “D’ya know why I know dad’s right?”

“Why?”

“Your eyes are blue.”

Sanji’s other hand came up to his face, framing his eye around the temple. “Huh?”

“Uh-huh. I wanted to make sure my goggles weren’t messing with anything, but your eyes are blue.” 

That wouldn’t make any sense at all. None of the four of them had been born with blue eyes, and never once had they had them. Niji’s voice had that twinge to it that said he was talking about something interesting though, so he didn’t have a reason to doubt him when he spoke about it. Sanji didn’t have a mirror to verify either way, and he probably wouldn’t for the rest of his life, if Niji was right about them not letting him out. 

“How can you tell? It’s so dark..” He opted to ask.

“You know why,” said Niji. “You’re stupid, not braindead. Anyway, that’s how they can tell you’ve got the ghost. I heard some people talking about it.”

“If—” Sanji didn’t get to finish his sentence, being cut off immediately. 

“You can only see it if you’ve had the ghost before, a guard ratted you out,” Niji giggled as he spoke. “You’re not even special . It got to me and a guard before it ever got to you. You were just the easiest to shove down here.” 

Niji laughed at him some more while he stood there trying to sort the information in his brain, before his head snapped in the direction of the exit. He heard something that Sanji didn’t, hiked his sheet back over his head, and ran as fast as he could out of the dungeons. He didn’t once trip over that sheet, not the way Sanji would have.

That small ember of hope he held in his heart at the thought of finally being good enough didn’t dry up as much as he expected it to. For as much as Niji made a big point about getting the ghost first, he sure as hell didn’t keep it. It stayed with him, and it continued to stay with him. 

He didn’t receive visitors for several weeks after that. He did get people that came down into the dungeons and arranged shelves in the cell in front of him, though. Nicely kept, well-secured shelves. They’d bring in bottles, all neatly labeled, but he was never close enough to see what they were, and the people who came down to sort them and put them on those shelves didn’t take the time to converse with him. They were all very purpose-driven and had no time for the boy in the cell across from their destination. 

The most he managed to get was getting the attention of one of them on their way out. He asked: “What’s in all those bottles?” 

“Rainwater,” the guard said. He turned to leave, and Sanji didn’t get to ask any of the more pertinent questions he had to ask after that one, like what that was for and why they were storing it in the same place they were storing him. None of the others humored him at all. 

Reiju visited, and made no mention of anything much about his situation. He didn’t have any bruises on him, and she didn’t have any bandages or admonishments with her. The most interesting thing about her stay was how white her knuckles were where she was gripping the edge of her dress.

She didn’t meet Sanji’s gaze head on. She didn’t tremble either. She stood there, grip tight enough to break a grown man’s wrist. All Sanji could do was smile, try to take one of her hands, and hope she wouldn’t ever visit him again if it made her own palms bleed like this. That was all the conversation needed to be, and she promised by the end of it she’d try to come back down and see him again, if only for twenty minutes. She lamented briefly she couldn’t get him anything to exercise his cooking with, which meant his questions and requests were being catalogued but being ignored outright. 

She left after that, and didn’t come back for a long time. The vague air of busyness never left him even after she did, as if everyone in the world was going back and forth on the floor above and he could hear everything. It gave him the sense that he should’ve been pacing along with all of those other footsteps, like that would tune him to everything and he’d stop being in a cell for a minute. He opted instead for mauling his bookcase for a fourth of what it had in it, mostly because there wasn’t much else to do in his predicament. A scientist came by and stared at him for a while, and all he did was stare back when conversation failed with him as well.

It was another while before anything else happened. The monotony was almost making him vibrate out of his skin, but eventually someone out there smiled down on him enough to have an adult come by that was willing to acknowledge him for more than two seconds. 

It was actually two people that opened the cell and stepped inside, one of them holding one of those mysterious bottles from across the way. The label had a date on it, but he couldn’t get away with staring at it long enough to remember which numbers corresponded to which month and in what order they were before they demanded his attention. 

The one that wasn’t holding the bottle handed him a note, neatly folded and written on thick, important-seeming paper. “Don’t open that,” he said, and waited for Sanji to nod in acknowledgement and to grip it properly in his hands. The other one dumped the contents of the bottle onto the floor in front of him, forming a messy puddle that left a litany of lonely drops around its periphery. 

“Step in it,” was the simple command that followed. It wasn’t said in a demeaning way, just quite plainly, but both of the men had to look down at him to make any form of eye contact, and they didn’t lower themselves even an inch as they shoved things in front of him and made demands. 

“Why?” He tried one last time, and they stared at him the same as everyone else had when he asked for any kind of answer at all. He considered stalling them out briefly— widening his stance, crossing his arms, and playing a fair game of staring contest— but it was clear with the way their eyes slowly began to narrow that they were willing to just shove him into the puddle face-first if he didn’t want to step in it voluntarily.

He had virtually no dignity left, as a little rat failure locked away for no one to see, but he decided whatever was left of that wasn’t worth throwing out over getting shoved into a puddle. It was just water, and rainwater at that, no bite of salt that the ocean had to it. There wasn’t anything it could do to him, unless he’d become aggressively allergic to freshwater in the span of a couple of hours. 

So, with all of that taken into account, he took a step forward.

A certain coldness surrounded him all at once, as if the puddle had grabbed him first by the ankle and wrapped itself around the rest of him with an eagerness that he’d never been received with before. Everything had flashed dark as if he had fallen asleep, but when he opened his eyes, he… wasn’t in the cell anymore.

He was on a boat, a small one in the middle of a sea that had no land in sight. The sky was completely clouded over, but those clouds were all swirls of different blue colors that made it look like midday painted onto a canvas. There were waves that passed his little boat but did not rock it, as though they too were setpieces in a work of art and not anything real. The calmer parts of the ocean rippled around raindrops that didn’t fall, their echoes on the surface of the water leaving any number of different colored rings as they dispersed into the sea. 

It was the most vast thing he’d ever seen, and the most vibrant to boot. He knew they lived on what was essentially a large cluster of ships, but he’d never nakedly seen the expanse of the ocean around them like this, had never felt for himself how the view made a knot in his chest undo itself little by little. When he looked over the edge of his ship, he saw fish just under the surface, all traveling together, all multi-colored the same as the scenery, and he couldn’t help but smile at them.

Eventually, a goldfish jumped out of the water. It was slightly bigger than any goldfish he’d ever thought of, and the water it had splashed up with it hung in the air in small droplets around it. It looked Sanji dead in the eyes, and it asked:

“It’s terrible, isn’t it?” 

Sanji looked at his surroundings again, taking them in, and looked back at the goldfish. “I think this place is really nice,” he mumbled. 

“Not this place,” the goldfish shook its head. “Your situation. The things they’re having you do. The things they don’t allow you to do. The things they don’t let you know.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Sanji nodded.

“It’s frustrating,” the goldfish said.

“It is,” Sanji agreed. 

They paused, briefly.

“Don’t you want to read that?” The goldfish asked after a moment. 

Sanji realized at that moment that he still had the note he had been handed in his hand. It had followed him, neatly folded in his hand. He looked at it.

“They said I shouldn’t.” 

“Since when have you done what you were told?” the goldfish said.

And it was correct. The only thing that had come between him and cooking his entire life once he got his sights set on it, nothing anyone had told him had any weight on that decision. He carefully unfolded the piece of paper, looking over the text on it. It was some careful documentation of the time and date, but the bulk of it was at the center, something about a success should this note end up in someone else’s hands. 

It was documentation for a trial of some sort. Probably for what he was doing right now. He thought about the idea of sitting down in front of one of those staring men and having to tell them about this place, about his boat and the wonderful moving painting that surrounded it, and the revulsion that came through him almost made his arms entirely weak. He folded the note back up carefully, making sure it was as flat as he had left it and nothing was out of place, afraid that if he looked at it any longer he would drop and lose it. 

He looked back up to the goldfish, expecting a question or even some affirmation of some kind, but that coldness that had brought him there retreated with the same speed at which it had engulfed him. The sea had stopped hugging him in its gentle embrace and it left him waking up on his back, looking up at a very familiar ceiling. He was back in the cell, with its bed and its chair and its lamp off in the corner— and, apparently, with himself . 

He startled. The other him did. That version of himself was apparently in the middle of staring down one of the scientists that had come to look at him, the ones that didn’t answer any questions at all, but when he turned around to see what the man in front of him was staring at he almost jumped out of his skin. 

Sanji could see what Niji meant. His eyes really were blue. It was a strange feature to see on his face, one he’d never seen in a mirror but now saw undeniably on his double. He didn’t know if it was worth a midnight trip to the dungeons for verification, though. 

When he began trying to stand up, the other him made his way up next to him, offering him his hand. Even though he’d been clearly startled, he didn’t hesitate a single bit. His face was all scrunched up with effort, probably the effort not to ask a million questions. It would be rude. Sanji knew that he knew that. That was him. It wasn’t getting any less strange, but instead of thinking on that so much he smiled and took the offered hand. 

Water splattered on his front and got in his eyes, enough to where he had to blink it out. He could feel the drops travel down his arm and collect near his elbow. He blinked, again, to make sure he had his composure properly, and he wasn’t seeing things again. The hand was gone and he registered the heavy fall of wet clothing that had just landed on him.

He looked at the scientist on the other side of the bars for some form of acknowledgement— of shock— but he was the sort of adult who worked for his father, so all he had out was a small notebook, and he’d dedicated himself quite faithfully to putting to writing whatever he’d just seen, instead of talking to him in any capacity. 

That other him, the one with blue eyes and polite demeanor, had definitely disappeared on top of him. As soon as their hands touched, he had dissolved quickly into water and soaked his entire front. It sent a chill up Sanji’s spine, entirely unrelated to the wet, cold sensation that covered his entire front and made his shirt cling to him uncomfortably. That scene must have stayed the same for an entire ten minutes before Sanji had the courage to ask anything, time dragging as drops of water slowly descended from his skin onto the floor. 

“Can I have some dry clothes?” He asked.

He, of course, didn’t get an answer. Just like all the other times. He was left on the floor, sitting in a puddle of water that had previously been himself, with two pairs of wet clothes. They took a long time to dry, and by the time they had he was left with a nasty cough and a clogged nose that didn’t leave him for a week. 

After all of that, he was made to do the same routine over again. He had half-convinced himself he had somehow gone insane with how similar both experiences were, the only thing that ended that train of thought was that the dialogue of the goldfish had changed. 

“You see it’s terrible now, right?” it asked.

“I knew before. ” Sanji replied.

“ Knowing and seeing are two very different things sometimes,” the goldfish told him. “I take it you’re going to want to read that note again.” It pointed its fin towards the thin paper he had in hand again. It was almost the same, except it held a detailed account of how he had dealt with his other self. 

The experience had been chopped up into maybe three sentences, stiff ones, that didn’t convey anything of importance about the exchange he had with his doppelganger. All curt, physical actions. Nothing about the deepness of the silence as it occurred or the strange guilt that came about. Sanji knew that even if he had said anything at all about those feelings, the sentences would have come out identical to the ones he had in hand now. 

The note got folded just the same, and when he woke up in the same position and to the same ceiling, he knew to get up on his own before his other self came over and offered his hand. Sanji’s hurry made his counterpart hurry, however, and he ended up with a lapful of water splashed on him all the same when he tripped into him. It got so cold it circled right back to being warm, and it made him scrub all the water off of himself furiously and sleep without his shorts or underwear on. 

Somehow, it felt more naked than if he’d taken everything off, but he needed to get that warm sensation off of himself before it ate through his legs like acid. He tangled himself in the sheets on the meager bed he’d be staying on for the rest of his life, and he felt the worst need to chew through them as tears pricked at his eyes. He thought of his brother from some weeks ago, more weeks for Sanji than it’d been for him, about his sheet and his running away. 

An ugly feeling weighed down his chest. Not just at the idea that Niji would never trip over himself like that— but at the idea that even if he did, he wouldn’t care about that cold-warm feeling, or about how thick the water felt, because he couldn’t tell which part had once been an arm and which one had once been a startling, wide, blue eye. None of that would phase Niji, but it did phase Sanji. It was part of the reason he was not upstairs, and instead kept in the basement. 

The brand of “failure” really did still run across his forehead— it made getting any sleep at all that night incredibly difficult. 

It was almost just as maddening when they left him alone again after that. It was back to no inquiries and zero demands, just sitting in the same room all day with nothing but books for company. He got the urge to look at the notes again, to at least have proof of his experience, but they’d been long taken from him. He asked, of course, but the guard on duty didn’t know anything about any of that business, and said as much. “That’s logistics’ area,” she’d told him, and it was probably more than she should have, judging by how abruptly she stopped talking after giving him that much leeway to begin with. It didn’t give him anything to work with regardless. Apparently, he was a logistics issue, whatever that meant. 

He ate through the rest of his entire bookshelf as time passed. He slowed his pace when he realized that he couldn’t even get a spare pair of clothes, but they needed him so sparsely that it was hard to find anything else to do. He reread one book many times, and then another, and then another, and then another one for good measure. If he wasn’t doing that, he was eating. They brought him bland food— bland, mostly because it was dungeon food, as opposed to it being bland because that was always how his brothers had preferred to eat and he’d always gotten lumped in with them. 

It was enough of a use of his time to think of himself how he could improve the dishes he was given, mulling it in his head before asking if he could have anything to cook with down here. This, too, went ignored, but at least the activity in combination never really became boring. There were enough cookbooks in his head to give him fifteen different ways to tweak any given thing he got to eat. 

He waited, briefly, for his sister to come back again like she promised. She was the only person he had left to miss after their mother passed, but he was stuck in a place where he couldn’t get to her even if he tried. He found himself almost understanding the red crescents she’d dug into her own palms when she had gone to visit him. They were right out of the painting, eight moons in the sky. 

Those hopes ended up dashed very quickly, when they made him go back another two times. Similar tests, both occasions. Something about consistency of results before anything got done. He and the goldfish did not have anything to talk about for those two times in transit, so it just rested on Sanji’s shoulder and slept. If they kept throwing him back over nothing, it wasn’t like he was ever going to see his sister again. At the very least it seemed they only threw him back a week each time, and by the end of it all he had ended up experiencing two new days on top of the repeats from jumping back.

And that was what it was, jumping back in time. The more he saw the dates on the notes, the ones that displayed the actual date and the date they were supposed to be received, he grew more and more convinced of it. It was why they never gave these notes between each other, and always through him and his painting. Figuring these things out, and even the two new days, did not make up for dissolving himself another two times. 

They did not ask him for anything so soon after that. Another gap. A week came and went and nothing came of it. Nobody came into his cell, much less with a note and a bottle. The more time dragged on, the more he almost missed when they did. It was some stupid, twisted sign of productivity, that he was an existence someone thought of at all. Another time spent stagnating and he found himself thinking at least I’m not getting beaten , to drive away the thought that he would definitely take a beating if it meant being able to walk around anywhere larger than the room he was being kept in. He would take a beating if it meant feeling real at all. 

He was in the middle of rereading one of his many books when he tried, again, to ask for something. He looked up at the guard outside of his cell and tried getting her attention. 

“It would be nice to have some new books,” he said. “I’ve finished all of these.” 

She didn’t say anything to him, just stood there. It was the same as always. 

“I want some new books, please.” He added afterward, just to make sure that he was being clear with his words— that it couldn’t be interpreted as a random statement, or a whim. He wanted new books. He was asking for them.

He spent the rest of his evening still rereading that book he had picked up already once or twice, and he went to bed after he neatly tucked it into his bookshelf again after he got told the lights would be coming off soon.

He did not expect to wake up in the middle of the night to a rattling noise. He got up in bed, blinking and squinting at whoever was out there.

“Failure!” his brother called to him.

“Who’s there?” Sanji replied, sleep leaking into every word. He asked since the words had been in his brain earlier, even though he knew the answer rather easily. Nobody else had a voice like that with a shadow that small, even if he couldn’t see his features well with the distance and with the darkness. 

“Were you always this slow, or are they melting your brain down here?” Niji asked. 

“It’s late,” Sanji replied. “Weren’t you not allowed down here?”

“Your guard lady’s gone.” Niji shrugged. 

“Oh,” he said. He got up off his bed, tip-toeing up to the bars so he could have a proper conversation. “Did you just… want to visit me?”

“You still don’t know anything, right?” Niji asked.

“Are you going to ask that every time you come down here?” he replied.

“Just answer,” Niji said.

He debated telling him about going back in time, about his painting and his goldfish, and decided he wanted to save himself getting called crazy on top of already being called stupid for the night. Sanji shrugged at his brother noncommittally. 

“So you don’t,” Niji said. “I know, though. A lot more.”

Sanji blinked at him. “Okay…?”

“More than I knew when I came here last time,” he kept going. 

“And?” Sanji asked him. “Are you gonna tell me, or did you just come here to make fun of me again?”

Niji scoffed. “You keep talking to me like that— I hate it.” 

“This is just what I talk like when you don’t beat me up about it,” Sanji told him. “Did’ja tell Ichiji and Yonji?” 

Niji shook his head. “They still think dad’s full of it. They don’t really care now that you’ve been down here a couple weeks.”

“And you haven’t told father?”

“Dad doesn’t know I know stuff.”

“Ah,” Sanji put the pieces together in his head, and put his hand in the other in realization. “You’re talking to me because you don’t have anyone else to talk to.”

Niji’s fist clenched, sparked, and then relaxed. There might’ve been a growl in there to accompany it, but it was quiet. It was the sort of restraint Sanji didn’t think he’d ever see his brother display in his life. He tried not to think about it. 

“The ghost is called a Hashihime,” Niji said. “It’s good for going back in time. That’s what I read.”

Sanji knew that second bit already. “Ha-shi-hime…” he repeated.

“You could at least say it like it’s one word, not like it’s hard,” Niji said. 

“It’s the first time I hear it,” Sanji justified himself. “... Does it mean anything?” 

Niji shrugged. “I mean, pro’lly. They’re from Wano. One of the words means ‘princess’. S’kinda funny it ended up with the least royal one of us,” he snickered slightly. 

“So, they’re a girl?” Sanji asked. 

“It’s dead,” Niji replied. “Does it matter?”

“It’s nice to know,” Sanji smiled. “They’re with me all the time, right? So knowing more about them is nice.”

“You’re in a cage, Sanji.” Niji deadpanned back.

“It’s not like that’s her fault,” he hummed. “She didn’t put me down here.” 

NIji rolled his eyes. “You’re a freak. You don’t even seem that surprised.”

“‘Cuz I’m not. I’ve gone back four times now.” Sanji fiddled with his hands as he spoke. “Two people will come down here and bring a bottle, and a note. And they’ll give me the note and spill all the water on the floor, and then they make me step in it… And then I wake up a week behind. I don’t like it.” He ate his words in regards to the painting again. Even if the whole going back in time thing hadn’t gotten him called insane, he still didn’t like the idea of Niji knowing, of what he’d say if he did.

Niji groaned at him. “You don’t like anything anyone does to make you useful. You can’t even train right, and now you’re lousy for going back in time? What good things do you even like? ” 

“Cooking.” Sanji replied simply. 

“Cooking’s beneath you . I guess it’s good you can’t do it at all anymore. That’d look bad.” 

“Doesn’t everyone think I’m sick? Who would care if I cooked down here?” 

“Father wants you maintaining some royal dignity down here. He says you’re an asset now, which is important, so you have to act like it.” 

“If I’m so important, why won’t anyone listen to me? Fat load of good it does me…” he scoffed.

“Assets are different than soldiers. Not like you can complain.” Niji dug his finger into his ear and scratched. “So, what, if I bring a bottle of water down here I can just make you go back in time?”

“It’s rainwater,” Sanji said. “They’re in specific bottles, all of them have labels and stuff. Haven’t been able to read any of them.” 

Niji looked behind himself, pointing at the space across from them. “That’s what that is? Huh.”

“What else would it be?”

“I thought it was wine, or something. That stuff’s usually kept in a cellar.”

“Usually it’s not kept next to the kids.” Sanji replied, and his brother laughed at his joke. It was a small, quiet little laugh that might’ve otherwise escaped his notice, but he’d definitely said something right. He didn’t know if he liked that.

Niji tilted his head to the side after a while. “So, rainwater, right? I’ll see if you’re right about that.”

After he said that, he ran back upstairs the way he had done the last time. It was an abrupt departure that only just barely didn’t leave their conversation hanging in the middle. It left Sanji standing there aimlessly for a while before the interaction fully settled into his skin and he was able to lay back down in bed. Being woken up late meant it was difficult to go back to sleep, but he had the solace with him that he no longer had a set schedule, and he didn’t have to wake up early in the morning if he didn’t want to. 

He was slightly scared that Niji would come back downstairs in the coming days with puddle water poorly held in his hands to test him and boss him around in ways he’d already been pushed around. He fell asleep with the thought that he really wouldn’t put it past him, and he woke up feeling too sleepy.

When he got up, vaguely, sometime in the afternoon, he noticed something. When he went to go get a book, the ones in the shelves were new. It wasn’t half the bookshelf, or only a couple, but all of them. None of the old books he’d been rereading were left. 

The first thing he felt was a sort of pang of guilt, the idea he hadn’t gotten to say goodbye to any of those books that had kept him company for the time he had been down here, and wondering for how long he would remember them correctly. The second feeling undercut the first, covering it like a wave swallowing the shore— an excitement and gratitude that bubbled out of him. 

He turned to the guard stationed outside, a grin on his face, and he let out a “thank you!” Her response, in kind, was just her raising her hand slightly, and not a single action more. The lack of verbal exchange didn’t bother him, he let the rest of his worries leave him to instead look at what new books he had to look through. 

His fears went unconfirmed when Niji did not come back, and they outright stagnated in his mind when the days stretched on again. There was a bit of a false alarm two days in where someone came down again, but it wasn’t to visit him— it was to put another bottle in storage, with another label he couldn’t quite catch. It didn’t have anything to do with him, and it certainly wasn’t his brother coming to torment him once again.

If he had thought a week was bad, whatever amount of time they had left him alone now was downright unbearable. He lost track somewhere down the line, and only having lights coming on and off to tell the march of time felt like a thinly-veiled, terrible punishment of some kind or another. It was another way his seeming importance was failing him, probably. 

He was, at least, well taken care of. He kept saying that to himself. 

As much as they hadn’t given him a spare pair of clothes when he had asked for them that first time he had soaked his entire front, now he had a drawer full of clothes. He was able to bathe, though he didn’t think he’d ever get used to all of the staring that that activity involved now, and the food continued to be bland, but at least it also continued to be consistent. He didn’t have to hear anybody berate him anymore, at least not from people who were supposed to be there, and the feeling of bruising and broken bones on his body was beginning to feel like a bad dream instead of a constant. It was fine.

They did not need him for at least two weeks. 

That was a disingenuous figure— two weeks was the two times he was able to count seven days separately before he lost count. The actual amount of days seemed to extend beyond that into some sort of void he couldn’t keep track of. He had to work to separate the days, take the mass that was what he was experiencing every day and cut it up into appropriate bits with his own hands, but his arms were too weak for such a task. He was too weak, as always. 

Even routine didn’t help. Dinner felt like breakfast which felt like the next day’s lunch. The books didn’t do anything else either, serving to make the days meld together when he reread them too many times. He knew he could ask for more, he’d already been given more, but something in the back of his head told him that was a privilege he didn’t have a guarantee of happening again.

It was in this incredibly long stretch of isolation that the goldfish visited him. The one from his painting between time. It flew out from right under his ear until it came to rest in front of him. Those droplets of water that always followed it were trailing behind it the way they always did. 

His first thought was that maybe he’d gotten so bored he began daydreaming, so he tried shaking his head and snapping out of it, but the goldfish remained. It was solid enough that he felt that, if he brought his hands forward, he’d be able to hold it gently between both of them. The water droplets felt like water when he touched them, but they didn’t keep his hands wet for long.

“Am I seeing things?” he asked the goldfish, dumbly. 

“You wanted company, so I came out to give you some,” the goldfish said in return. 

“I am, then,” Sanji said. “What if I look crazy if I talk to you?” 

He thought about the guard and what she might do. If there was someone she reported to who would call him crazy, or something of that sort. If they’d drag him out and do god knows what. Maybe beat it out of him, like they’d tried beating out his weakness. He had half a mind to shut up before the goldfish spoke to him again. 

“Look at the guard. Does it look like she’s noticed you talking to ‘yourself’?” the goldfish asked. 

He did as told. She looked as impartial as always, completely unsurprised by anything, barely looking like she was paying attention to him. The same as she did when he read, or when he took a nap, or when he ate, or when he stared at a wall and didn’t do anything. Not a single indication on her that she was paying attention to him in any meaningful or special way since his interaction with the goldfish began. 

“No,” he said.

“Then, she can’t hear us talk. We’re fine.” The goldfish reassured him.

“I guess so,” Sanji agreed. 

“You don’t really like the inside of this cell, do you?” it asked him.

“Not really,” he said. “It’s cramped, and there’s nothing to do. Half of all of it is grey. It sucks.” 

The goldfish tilted its head towards him. “Do you want to go somewhere else?” 

Sanji’s shoulders slumped. “I can’t, right? I’m locked in here. S’not like I can walk outside.” 

The goldfish didn’t say anything to him, just swam around his head once, twice, thrice, and then backed off to let him see. No longer was he looking at the inside of a cell, but on a beach near sunset. He could feel the sand under his toes and hear the waves as they hit the shore and slowly retreated. There was the fizz of seafoam and the warmth of the air and Sanji rubbed at his eyes just to make sure what he was looking at was there to stay. 

“You can spend time here, if you like,” the goldfish said. 

“Oh.. thank you.” Sanji smiled at it. 

“Thank yourself.” 

He nodded, half-unsure, but walked up to the shore anyway. He let the water wash over his feet—it was the same as the droplets earlier, feeling wet as water should but not leaving a lasting sensation. There was never a moment where he felt any kind of chill from the waves receding back again before they came back. He stayed puzzlingly dry. 

He knew it wasn’t a real place, but it was better than staring at the grey stone walls of his little room, and better than feeling ignored but monitored by the guard right outside. It was calming, and at the very least much more colorful. 

He rotted by the shore for a long stretch of time yet still. He couldn’t really count the days when everything remained the same and he didn’t see the outside world, it was even worse for keeping time than the cell. It must have been, if he was counting really poorly, at least one week. Probably much more. He didn’t dwell on that extra week any more than he dwelled on the other two he managed to count. It was all fragmentary and it all led to the same thing. 

At some point they made him go back, and predictably his past self dissolved into water. This time it wasn’t an accident— the himself from some months ago looked at him up and down and decided to touch him all on his own. There was a small bit of hesitation, but not that much. 

It jarred him only because it was the first time he’d looked at himself in the eyes and not known a single thing going through his own head. In many other ways it felt like a weight lifted off his soul and a warm feeling in his chest now that his encounter didn’t end with him drenched in cold water. He gathered the soaked clothing from the floor, stuck his hands out of the cell with it, and wrung it out there, so he wouldn’t get any more water mingling with the puddle that would live in his cell for the next while.

The note he had been given this time had a bunch of spots on it, all positioned specifically on a backdrop that was probably a map. Some were circled and there were signs here and there indicating movement and precise positioning, but without any substantial notes that he could gleam. It wasn’t anything that he had a frame of reference for, but he was sure it would be useful for the man he had to hand it over to, and that was the extent of all he needed to do. 

He stopped himself from tacking a bitter for the rest of my life to the end of that thought— he felt like something would slide sideways in his head if he did that, and he’d never be able to put it in its right place again. He sat on his bed and stared at the rest of his things, reacquainting himself with them. 

Niji visited him that same night, not caring for decorum or for an excuse to do so, staring the guard in the eye as he walked up and then dismissing her in favor of looking at his brother.

“Why’re you back?” he said.

“Huh?” Sanji asked. “What do you mean ‘why am I back?’”

“It’s only been two days.” Niji frowned. He didn’t elaborate on why that was an issue, it just seemed to bother him. It wasn’t something Sanji was willing to puzzle out, either. He felt like he’d just been on a long journey, and like no amount of rest was ever going to make him ready to argue with his brother on the logistics of time and how it worked much differently for both of them now. 

He shrugged at him. “I’unno, talk to someone in the labs about it.” 

Niji scoffed at him and crossed his arms. His head moved just the slightest bit to the side— it was the only indicator Sanji had that his brother wasn’t meeting his gaze at the moment. When there wasn’t any continuation to the conversation, he got up and walked over to the bars again, standing right in front of Niji. He meant to say something, ask him if there was any reason he had come down to see him when previously he hadn’t deigned to (previously only for him, he thought, this Niji had been perfectly prudent and it wasn’t like he could hold him accountable for something that he had never done now), but he got interrupted before he could. 

Niji pointed at him indignantly, right between the eyes. “You’re taller now. Why are you taller than me?”

“Am I?” Sanji blinked at him. 

“Yeah,” Niji said. He put a hand flat to the top of his head, and did his best to measure it to Sanji’s through the barrier of the bars. Sure enough, he was maybe an inch or two taller, if the sloppy measuring was to be trusted. It was just subtle enough he hadn’t even noticed when he walked up to him. 

“Huh,” Sanji blinked, looking at the hand that was almost pressed against his forehead. “I guess so. That’s weird.”

“It’s really annoying, is what it is.” Niji huffed. “And freaky. We’ve always been the same height.”

“Not really,” Sanji mumbled. “I mean, I’m some months older now. So… I think I just grew in that time. That’s normal.” 

“Months? Weren’t they just sending you back a week?” 

“Not this time.” He could feel himself deflate at the admission. Just the thought of that stretch of time was unpleasant. “I lost track of time a bunch, but it was a long time. Months.” 

“Wait— that still doesn’t make sense. If you’re coming back in time, then you shouldn’t be a few months taller.”

Sanji shrugged. “Whenever I hop back, there’s a past-me there. They usually disappear, but I’m still the older-me. I don’t wake up in past-me’s body, or anything.” 

Niji’s expression scrunched up at that. “That freaks you out when it happens, doesn’t it.”

“Does it matter?”

Niji laughed at him, that mocking laugh he really hadn’t missed for all the time he spent down in the dungeon and for all the times Niji had visited him and managed not to use it. He had half a mind to do something dismissive, like roll his eyes, but it didn’t come to him. He just kept staring at his laughing brother until he stopped, and left them in awkward silence for a moment when he did. 

Sanji broke the silence. “Did you have anything you wanted to actually talk about?”

“Huh? No,” Niji said. “It’s only been two days.”

“Is Reiju alright?” He asked.

“Reiju?” Niji hummed. “Reiju’s Reiju. Same as always. I think she got more boring.”

He didn’t want to inquire as to Niji’s definition of ‘boring’— he hadn’t understood it before, and he felt that whatever definition he gave now that they were talking earnestly would be something so casually nasty in one way or another that he wouldn’t be able to stomach it in the least. “I guess big sisters just get boring sometimes,” he settled on saying. 

“I guess,” Niji shrugged. “Ichiji’s also pretty boring now, but he kinda has to be. Yonji’s just clueless, so he hasn’t changed at all.”

That made enough sense. He didn’t care as much to have an update regarding his brothers. They didn’t want anything to do with him and didn’t inquire after him, and he had absolutely no issues extending that same courtesy for them. Niji updated him on their general state without him needing to say anything, however. It made enough sense, they did absolutely everything together, but somehow it was somewhat annoying.

“And you’re the same as you were two days ago,” Sanji added. 

“Uh-huh.” Niji nodded. 

“Right.” Sanji nodded. It kind of baffled him— that conversation had been long enough ago that he’d forgotten details about it. He knew what they had spoken of, but not the exact verbiage anymore. But here was Niji, who hadn’t experienced more than two days since that. If he asked him to repeat a random sentence from that interaction, he could probably say it down to the tone. “And you don’t have anything else to tell me about the ghost either.” 

“Duh. If I did, I would’ve said that first.”

Sanji nodded in confirmation at that. He looked at the puddle on the floor, and at the poorly folded, still-damp clothing sitting on the little nightstand he had in the cell.

“You know, you don’t have to keep visiting me.” He blurted out. 

Niji picked at his ear as he replied, indignant, “Who said I had to do anything?”

He left not long after that, looking back at the guard in the eyes on his way out. This time Sanji was left worrying about what sort of consequences Niji would face— or, more accurately, if he himself was going to get scolded or physically punished in some way for Niji’s actions. It felt like it would be a cold day in hell before one of his father’s successful children would get punished, but then again none of them had really ever disobeyed him on any front. 

Days passed, however, and much like the imagined Niji with rainwater in his hands, nothing came of his thoughts and nobody visited. When he asked the guard about it, she pressed a finger to her lips and didn’t say a single other thing about it. That was all the reassurance he needed that things were fine.

After that, a routine emerged. 

Sanji’s cycle of being consisted almost entirely of waiting, but the more he sat down with it, the more a pattern became noticeable through all of it. There would be a massive gap of nothing, before going back a large span and then being made to go back smaller periods of time over and over, before there was a time he had to continue waiting a lot. He would continue descending into delusion, spending time with his painting, his beach, and his goldfish while all of that occurred, and he’d continue aging. 

The longer the span of time he jumped back, the more specific the note he was left with. Sometimes it would even be a folder or something of the sort, still heavily encoded in some way or another, and it took him very little to figure out it was all in service to their military operations. Even stuck in the basement with no way out, they didn’t want him knowing anything of it. 

Niji continued to visit him all the while. It wasn’t absolutely every single time he came back from the future, but it seemed to happen whenever it counted. Like clockwork, he would make his way downstairs and pester his younger brother about something or other. What had originally been him coming downstairs to ramble about the Hashihime Sanji was currently possessed by turned into him rambling about whatever he had in mind, his discoveries seemingly not updating by much. 

Sanji didn’t understand it, this insistence on coming back despite having nothing relevant to share, but he wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth when it came to having a conversation partner. Before long, hearing his brother call out “failure!” as a greeting became a casual thing, losing its bite the more it was used divorced from genuine jabs and beatings. He tended to go on about things that happened outside and other such topics Sanji couldn’t really contribute to meaningfully in a conversation, but occasionally Niji would bring up something he read, and he could measure it up to whatever book he was making his way through at the moment. 

Not that Niji particularly cared, he made that much known, but at least it was conversation.

Watching the gap in their age get wider never got any less surreal, but the process was mitigated by being at least somewhat gradual. Getting to puberty sooner and being made fun of for not being able to grow “a proper beard” was made entirely worth it by seeing his brother hit that same milestone later and realize he didn’t have the capacity to grow facial hair at all . Apparently something to do with the exoskeleton and how that interacted with its growth, or something. He explained it as though Sanji had all of the prerequisite understanding, which he didn’t, and when he made that known it didn’t slow his brother down at all either. 

When Niji hit vaguely fifteen years old, he came downstairs wearing his raid suit for the first time. He gushed about it and the utility for a while, detailing the specifics of not just his suit, but the suits of the others as well. He didn’t once express lament at not being able to show Sanji the others, deeming his to be the best looking— obviously, according to him— though Reiju’s was the exception. Something about it being unique, on account of her being a woman, which Sanji half-figured would be the case. Niji’s descriptions of said suit ended up flat and unhelpful, but it wasn’t like he had ever been known for his writing prowess, so it was pointless to really blame him.

Shortly after the advent of the raid suit and the obviousness of him beginning to go out on missions, Sanji stopped being “failure!” and began being “Sanji” whenever Niji came down to the basement to greet him. By that point Sanji was nebulously several years older than his older brother. He told a hesitant joke about it, something along the lines of “if you get any more familiar with me, you’ll have to call me big brother”.

He almost expected a violent reaction from Niji still, something similar to the floor cracking stomps and fists full of lightning he’d seen for minor back-talk when they were both younger, but all he did was half-heartedly kick at the bars of his cell and said “get real”. It was fair enough— it wasn’t like Sanji had told a joke worthy of a giggle even on his part. 

It felt very strange, to be a younger brother like he still was, and yet get physically older than his older brother. He wondered briefly if that hierarchy between quadruplets had persisted into their teenage years. The way Niji spoke about them didn’t really give it away one way or another, his words oddly sparse for how often they all came up. 

Ichiji remained the sibling with most authority it seemed, but as crown prince, it would be stupid to expect otherwise. Yonji in turn remained the idiot, a perpetual fool that Niji could dog on for this moronic thing or the other every single time he visited. According to Niji, he had never grown a brain, and that was all well and good, but Sanji could hear in his brother’s voice when all of that ranting stopped tasting as light as dust and took on a more uncomfortably tangible note to it. 

He had no way of knowing if the way Niji began biting on his own words when he spoke of his younger brother was reciprocated, but it certainly wasn’t the sort of talking he did because of a regular sibling bond. It didn’t tell him anything about their position in regards to each other, it just hinted at the fact that maybe his absence was making the structure of their little gang collapse internally. Perhaps the three of them had been born with some inherent need to have a punching bag to function, and the fact he wasn’t available anymore was making them cannibalize each other because of the lack of a new one. Just the fact Niji was expressing it to him down in the basement told him that Father had likely expressed to his son just how embarrassing and out-of-line he found it. 

He considered asking about it, but decided he would rather die than pry into all of that openly. He didn’t care how many times he went back in time, he knew the knowledge would bother him, and that Niji wouldn’t handle going into specifics well if this was how he was handling going over the bare surface of it. Instead he asked to hear more about his sister, who absolutely never came up for anything over bare generalities. 

“You took longer to ask than I thought you would,” Niji said to him. “Reiju, huh?”

“What is that supposed to mean?” he said.

Niji shrugged— made a bit of a nasty face, though not exactly intentionally. His features just scrunched up in an ugly way when he had to think about things he didn’t really care to think about. “Eh. She told me not to bring her up.”

“She knows you’re coming down here?” Sanji asked.

“Reiju’s Reiju,” he replied, those words seeming to be the way he always discussed her no matter what. “It’s not like she’s ratting me out or anything, so it doesn’t matter. She’s got some freaky sixth sense about you, that’s for sure.” 

Sanji felt some relief from that. He heard every single I don’t want to hear that! and You need to be less troublesome! that his sister had dropped on him as a child, all of them sounding like her warmth and care and concern, all little firelights, and he found that she told me not to bring her up lit his cell the same way. Whatever other questions he had on the topic got consumed by that new little candle, the embers falling into the cracks in the brick surrounding him. He knew he had never listened to her before, but this time the ball was in her court— he didn’t want to deny her such an easy to grant wish. 

He figured by now it was much harder for her than it was for him. It wasn’t like he was being treated poorly, anyway.

In between those visits that accounted for the entirety of his exposure to the outside world, he took mostly to speaking to himself and spiriting himself away, but occasionally he would sit right in front of the bars of his cell and try speaking to the guard out in front. It was something that hadn’t worked in all the years he had been there even when he accounted for the loops, but he kept doing it. He didn’t have anything to lose, and with him ostensibly losing his mind and speaking to figments of his own imagination, he didn’t think he had to pay much attention to that ‘definition of insanity’ stuff. 

By that point she must have had a library’s worth of book summaries in her head as he talked about all of his speculations as he read through books. She was the one who always replaced them, so part of him thought she would care— nevermind the fact he didn’t know if she picked them based on her own interests, what she thought was good, or just dumped whatever she could in his bookcase whenever he asked for different books. 

They were clearly diverse and picked with discretion, so surely she cared. If not about him, then about the books themselves. It would be easy to not do it at all, or to do it sloppily if it was just an order.

So he talked, and talked. He had more to say about nonfiction titles and the fun facts contained within, but occasionally he’d get truly enraptured by one of the fiction volumes and he wouldn’t be able to shut up about it. In the end, he got her with a mystery novel.

“I mean, I don’t really get it. I guess Albert is more likely to do something like that..?” he said.

“If you ask me.. I think Mr. Blake did it,” she replied. Her gaze had since shifted from the stairs where it often sat and landed right onto him.

He jolted at the sound of her voice, but he couldn’t help a smile from splitting his face at the fact she had just spoken to him. “Mr. Blake?” 

“Well, yes,” she said, more of a whisper honestly, “his motive stacks up, doesn’t it?” 

They spent the night talking about it. He vehemently disagreed with her assessment regarding Mr. Blake, citing not a lack of motive but a lack of access to the tools needed to pull off the murder. She disagreed with him thinking it was Albert, saying he was so thoroughly a red herring it hurt her. He was just too obvious, according to her, it would be just bad and predictable writing if he had actually turned out to be the murderer. They agreed something vague was going on between Vincent and Mr. Blake, however. 

That was how he began reading aloud to her, wanting her to be on the same page as him, so he wouldn’t have to worry about leaving details out in his explanations. The further on they went, the clearer it was that both of them had been incorrect in their assessments, and they hemmed and hawed around it until it was entirely undeniable that they had been wrong. It made for, at the very least, a good giggle.

“Why do you avoid talking to me so much?” He ends up asking when they’re done.

She blinks at him, a sour expression blooming on her face. She admitted to him, sullenly, “I… don’t wanna be a crummy guard. I’m already a useless soldier as-is.” 

“And talking to me would make you a crummy guard?” he asked. He couldn’t really puzzle out the logic there. 

“Talking makes me care, and caring would make me a crummy guard for sure.” She nodded.

“ Why? ” 

“I don’t think I’m supposed to. Caring makes you all… soft. I can’t be soft if I’m guarding you, your highness.”

He squinted at her. “I think it’s normal to care. Citizens care for a prince the way the prince is supposed to care for them, no?” 

She huffed. “Nobody cares for your brothers, your highness. We all fear them, and that fear keeps us in check. But that’s how it’s supposed to be.” 

“I don’t like that,” he said. “Can I ask you to talk to me? It’s not like anybody really knows I’m down here, nobody’s gonna notice you caring. Except maybe Niji, I guess. He doesn’t matter though.” 

Her lips thinned. When she opened her mouth to reply, Sanji cut her off with a desperate plea.

“Please? We spend all day together, every day. You don’t talk to anybody either,” he said. 

She tensed up further for a brief moment before thoroughly deflating. Her shoulders dropped, her spine relaxed from its ramrod-straight position, that furrow between her brows smoothed out and her eyes opened just a little bit more. “Okay,” she replied. 

That started up a new balanced routine. He had a friend, day to day, who would ‘book club’ with him. Both of them were similarly limited in the things that happened in their life, the only difference being that she got to go home to sleep sometime late, late into the night and he stayed exactly where he was no matter what, so the topics they spoke of were all the same and at the same level of engagement. If she was freaked out at all by the way their gap in age kept shrinking, she didn’t say anything about it.

She did, however, vehemently shut up any time Niji came to visit. Nothing could get her to speak or even acknowledge Sanji in those moments, and Niji got upset with him whenever he tried to get her to and it halted their conversation. At some point it became a battle Sanji wasn’t going to pick, so he stopped.

They cycled that way. He would speak to her briefly most days, and then Niji would show up at night and they wouldn’t talk then. 

The newfound company didn’t make Niji’s visits any less of a highlight, he found. The times his brother waltzed into his life having some new mundanity to talk about that was completely foreign to him were still exciting. His abrasive attitude remained, but it wasn’t an obstacle or anything. It didn’t make him unpleasant to speak to at the end of the day. Sanji usually looked forward to whatever update he came with, whatever it was. 

It was one of those times in which Niji came downstairs with his feathers thoroughly ruffled, disrupting that cycle. He had just come back from a mission, raid suit still on, and all Sanji could do was be surprised at how tacky the thing looked, not to mention the fact he was looking at it. Their little rendezvous occurred pretty much exclusively after he had returned from the future, and at night when both of them were supposed to be asleep. It always happened under the cover of moonlight that only barely came through the door. 

It occurred to Sanji that he hadn’t seen the actual shade of blue of his brother’s hair in years, and even more apparently than that, he hadn’t even remembered it right in the interim. It matched the suit down to the shade barring the accents and halfway made him look like a big ball of nothing, but he supposed that when things were more than three shades and you were able to exist in more than one space in the outside world that this sort of look was much more dignified. 

Niji didn’t open any conversation in the usual sense, no greeting followed him as he stormed inside. He sat down in front of him with a huff and the way his shoes scraped across the cobblestone floor made them squeak like a cheap children’s toy. Sanji didn’t even get a word in edgewise before Niji began speaking, not bothering to explain himself.

“Hashihime are the spirits of blind women,” he began, “they’re intentional sacrifices by the local community, whenever a bridge is built. They would dupe some poor wretch into marrying a guy and then dupe her later into giving up her own life for him— and then they’d become ghosts that always sought their husbands no matter what.”

Sanji blinked at him. “Well, hello to you too.”

“They’re used for disaster management,” Niji continued. “Always have been. I guess we’re using it the same way. There’s only ever one, even between two versions of the same person. Usually they’d get entrusted to a specific family to deal with, so they’d ‘pass it down’ generationally. Usually sake brewers, because they were the ones that stockpiled water. It’s the burden of the men of the family, because they don’t possess women.”

“Interesting.” Sanji said. He almost hesitated.

“Nothing else to say?” he asked. 

Sanji ran his fingers through his hair— longer, now, only getting some occasional trims over the years so that it didn’t get too unruly. “Um. What was with the rush to come see me?”

Niji bypassed that question as though he hadn’t spurred it on himself, stopping himself up before replying. “You look scruffy.” 

“Scruffy?”

“ Scruffy. ” 

“Well, it makes sense— I’m the neglected kid in the basement,” he said. “Not like I’d know what I look like right now, I don’t have a mirror or anything.” 

“Ask for one, then,” Niji said. 

“I don’t think I need one,” he replied. “What’s with the insistence?” 

Niji clicked his tongue. He stood up and lifted his goggles from his face, resting them on the top of his head. He looked his brother up and down with restless eyes, crackles of lightning lit right behind them, telling of war in an empty, lopsided way that held not enough weight. He had grown into them remarkably well, Sanji thought. Last time he had seen them, they were still a little too big on his face in the way that makes children cute, in whatever sense. 

The fact his grey irises looked more like an unfinished painting, something with no detail or depth constructed onto them, didn’t rob him of that. It just gave it a distinct sense of wrongness that lived parallel to that. It seemed in his teenage years he had gained clouds in there to drift through, a veritable storm to cover up that emptiness long enough to fool somebody into thinking anything worthy of serving lived underneath. Just the amount of normalcy their father would’ve wanted to keep up an image. 

“You should do something with yourself,” Niji said. “You look… pathetic.”

He turned around, forcing his goggles back over his eyes and going back up the stairs as though the stale air of the basement itself were forcing him out and he was more than happy to agree with it.

Sanji wouldn’t have been proud to admit it, but that interaction got him to begin exercising. It felt like admitting Niji’s insult had somehow gotten under his skin, in the traditional sense. 

He was no stranger to being called pathetic by his brother, he spent his entire childhood with that sort of mockery hanging over his head, and effectively that hadn’t been what had gotten to him about the whole ordeal. It was that hesitation at the end. That deflated quality the word suddenly held when it came out of Niji’s mouth. That… botheredness. 

It wasn’t really anger or mockery— he didn’t want to think too much about the implications but he also wanted badly to not be the source of whatever it was, unwilling to even put a name to it. If he was scruffy, fine. He’d take his health a little more seriously down there in the dungeon. Maybe the tiredness limbo he lived in would lift its veil if he gave himself something to be tired about in the physical sense and not just the mental one. 

It gave him at the very least more reason to speak to his guard. He found out, quite late, that her name was Michael.

Michael was apparently very particular about workout form. Sanji didn’t really have any reference books on the topic, and all of his training as a child was befitting of a class of human he very clearly did not inhabit but had spent a long time chasing after. He didn’t know the first thing about proper stretching, and she took offense to that as though he’d personally pissed in her tea. 

“Of course I’m concerned,” she had explained, “if you hurt yourself on this stuff, then it’s going to be on my head! I’d really rather not die.” 

He sincerely doubted she would die if he irreparably busted his shoulder or his knee or something. It was actually the sort of action that would get a thank you out of his father, at least back when he was a child. Now it was the sort of thing that just didn’t matter. As long as he still had a vaguely intact body he thought it wouldn’t matter to anybody whether or not that body was in pain or anything. The man didn’t make a habit of visiting him, he was logistics' issue. 

It mattered to Michael, though. Maybe if only for her own pride.

She talked him through just about any amount of exercise he did, diligently and even persistently whenever he didn’t quite understand the distinction between what she was saying and what he was doing that made it just slightly incorrect. She encouraged him to do more, to push just a little bit more despite the fact his arms and legs would feel like they would fall clean out of his sockets. He would frequently think to himself it would make even more trouble for her, the amount of blood that would come out if that happened, and he must’ve mumbled it out loud because she laughed so hard he felt entirely stupid.

He was only half-correct about the exercise fixing his tiredness. He certainly did feel better physically, but it didn’t do anything for those days where he didn’t rise from his bed at all, and couldn’t fathom anything beyond staring at the inside of his own mind. 

He spoke to his goldfish those days, because if he didn’t then his entire being would start clawing at him, half a yell about his own laziness, half a deep whining regret about getting to know Michael at all. Not for his own sake, but for hers. He could feel her concern on those days, and by then he almost understood what she spoke about when she said talking to him would make her too soft. He did his level best to not let that train of thought reach anything near a station, and then it would wear off. 

Niji’s visits tapered, until there came a point where he lost track of when he had last seen him, the same way he as a child had lost track of the weeks between his jumps back in time. Certainly it was weeks, maybe a month, maybe two, which wasn’t too much— but it was a disorienting loss, something predictable and mostly consistent becoming erratic and slowly lost. 

Whenever he did come by, he didn’t have as much to say, and quickly that became nothing at all. When he said goodbye one of those times, after muttering something about a mission he was to embark on soon, Sanji was struck in his soul by its singular finality. If he didn’t know any better, he might’ve even called the tone mournful . Funerary. Sanji wondered briefly if those clouds in his brother’s eyes had finally gathered enough to rain at all. 

As if honoring that weird, intense little promise Niji had tucked into the word, the next person who visited him from outside was Ichiji. 

He came in the early afternoon one day, dressed entirely in black, and the first thing he did was dismiss Michael. They had both been sat down on the floor parallel to each other, engrossed in some discussion or another, when the interruption came. He only needed her to hesitate for a second before he opened his mouth about her not being needed, about this being a family matter. She scrambled up and left before he had to threaten her, like any crummy soldier would. 

When he turned to look at him, Sanji could see he held a folder in his hand. The same folder that usually a scientist or some soldier gave him, the kind that made him glorified document transport and was his only official duty. Something that was, presumably, grunt work.

Sanji wanted to quip about that, ask something about why on earth they’d have a prince come do that sort of work, but Ichiji beat him to it. “... I suppose he wasn’t wrong about you,” he said.

“Cryptic.” Sanji rolled his eyes. “What, did you come down here to gawk or something? I thought you were skeptical.” 

Ichiji handed him the folder through the bars of his cell and turned to the opposite side of the hallway. He was completing the usual ritual the backwards way, getting the water bottle second. Technically, he did everything the wrong way the second he handed him anything through the bars of his cell instead of walking inside himself. 

“Make sure you get the bottle with the right date,” he said. “I don’t want to end up in the wrong decade just because—”

“Between you and I, who has failed more in their life?” he asked. He waited in silence for Sanji, for him to clench his jaw, for his teeth to grind each other just tight enough to produce the slightest of sounds, for him to grip what was handed him just a little too tightly. He let that silence speak. “I thought so.” 

“It’s like you haven’t aged at all. If you only came here to talk down to me, then you’re wasting your time.” 

“Niji’s dead.” Ichiji turned back to face him. “We’ve yet to get back a precise autopsy report, but his body came off of the battlefield in several bags, so.” He shrugged a little, as though he were describing the weather and not his brother’s corpse. The brother that was alive this morning. That wasn’t any longer. That, apparently, was now little more than a collection of separate limbs, if the description was accurate. 

“Huh,” was all he was able to reply. The only thing that assured him that he was better than his older brother was that nothing else came out because of how his throat constricted around the words and how his eyes stung.

Ichiji opened his cell and stepped inside. He sat down on Sanji’s bed, legs elegantly crossed, and he set the bottle of rainwater on his bedside table but didn’t let go of it. “He was the one who asked me to come down here and tell you. ‘If anything happens to me, go tell Sanji that I died’— a week ago, start of the war. I chalked it up to his strange superstitions, but it’s looking more and more like his intuition was working overtime.” 

Sanji took a deep breath. “Congrats, I guess? What the hell does it matter if I know? Why the hell do you even care?”

“You’ll have to ask him, won’t you?” Ichiji said. “He was very keen that you specifically know he had died, but only that. The rest… Chalk it up to curiosity, if you must.”

“So you really are down here just to gawk.” 

Ichiji smiled. “You know, I’m surprised you’re a legitimate military asset. For a long time I couldn’t help but think that Father just called you one to justify locking you away to his inner circle.” 

“The ghost was too much for you.” Sanji sighed.

“Of course. For a kingdom of science to have to rely on something like a ghost to maintain its supremacy— it’s the sort of irony you find only in scripts. I wasn’t going to spend any time humoring it, let our greatness be so unbelievable there’s talk of ghosts to justify it, but here you are. How many years older are you?”

Sanji shrugged. “I don’t keep a calendar. Not like it matters.” 

“I can’t begrudge that.” Ichiji nodded, swirling the water in the bottle by rocking it back and forth. “It almost frustrates me how much you ruined Niji, I take it you didn’t keep track of that either.” 

“I beg your damn pardon?”

“You changed him. The more he came down here, the more it would separate us. The way he would look at people, after a while… you did that. I’m tempted to say you killed him, too. If he had still been like us, he wouldn’t have died.” Ichiji said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “You ruined my younger brother. As if one wasn’t enough.” 

Sanji waved him off, his exhale hissing between his teeth. “Don’t talk to me like that. You had a pre-ruined younger brother who thought my eyes were blue. As if you fucking care about him anyway, I doubt his death got so much as a flinch out of you.”

“You haven’t reacted either.” Ichiji gestured vaguely at him with his chin. 

“I know you aren’t that stupid,” he snapped. 

“No, I’m not,” Ichiji hummed. He stood up, one hand in his pocket and the other still grasping the bottle by its neck. “I came down here to see what exactly you’d done, but I suppose you’re right. I’ll have to take it up with Niji.” 

“Right. Don’t come bothering me with—” 

Ichiji took the bottle in his hand, raised it over his head, and threw it on the floor before he could finish his words. The bottle shattered immediately, glass scattering everywhere and Sanji having to shield his face to make sure none landed in his eyes. The folder he’d been handed had deflected most of it, but not all. A neat part of the bottom of the bottle embedded itself in the skin of his palm, curving crescent into his flesh, dripping red before long despite the fact the cut wasn’t deep. The floor became a mess of water he wasn’t even sure he could navigate safely all at once. 

“You’ll have to step in that at some point,” Ichiji said. He stepped on some of the shards as well as he left, grinding them into even smaller pieces. 

That bastard were the only two words that circled in his head for what must have been the next half an hour, on a loop, like a conveyor belt. He really hadn’t aged a single day. The adult face did absolutely nothing for that demeanor of his, nor for how he threw it around. Sanji looked at his hand, at the glass still clinging to it and the blood that was pooling under his palm and dripping off of it. 

He took out the shard, a surprisingly thick thing for how little it did. He couldn’t really feel the cut, his hand felt more that sickening kind of cold that came from the rainwater instead, despite the fact it was dry. He stared at it and threw it in the water and watched as it barely even stained the puddle it fell in. He supposed the rest of him would disappear just like that. As much as Ichiji was a bastard, he was also correct. He stepped in that, careful not to hurt his feet on it. 

On the voyage over, he asked his goldfish, “Do I have to think about all of that?”

“It’s gonna happen regardless,” the goldfish answered. 

When he settled back in time he gave the file to Michael and fell into his bed. The cold from his injured hand spread to his other and didn’t leave him. He sobbed into his elbow and immediately felt a sense of pointlessness eclipse it, but nothing slowed down despite that. His elbow, too, was now so damn cold. Niji wasn’t dead and he was freezing and he couldn’t stop crying. He almost didn’t know why. 

Sanji was able to narrowly keep his dignity by virtue of the fact his brother didn’t come back down to visit him like he usually did. He found he didn’t actually want to see him that much. 

He slunk back into not speaking to anyone, spent time with only his books. He traded the beach he would make for himself for a forest instead, dense with low-hanging leaves and with only a little bit of sunlight filtering through to spare it from being dreary. A week passed and nobody came, and he got a pit in his stomach that wouldn’t turn into vomit no matter what, even though it kept wanting to push its way out of him. 

Another three days after, when he felt like he would burst with it, he finally got a visitor, once again in the middle of the day. He stood in front of Sanji, face obscured with leaves, but he knew exactly who it was. 

Relief didn’t course through him as thoroughly as he would’ve liked. It more came like a light wash on top of something already layers deep, making only the slightest dent. Niji had his arm in just about the bulkiest sling he’d ever seen, his entire shoulder disappearing under an undoubtedly heavy pile of bandages and gauze. It looked almost cartoonish, definitely a little funny, knowing it was the first time Niji had to deal with anything of the sort. He was even still wearing the clothes from the medical wing, the same ones they gave Sanji to wear as he grew out of his regular ones.

“I kept you waiting, didn’t I?” he said. Sanji could only just see the movement of his jaw. 

“Yeah, you did,” he replied. “Gnarly arm.” 

“Thanks. It almost got ripped clean off,” Niji laughed. “Mostly a hassle. The med staff all looked like they were gonna have an aneurism anytime I tried doing anything.” 

“Better than being dead though, right?” he said.

“Technically speaking, yeah,” Niji said.  “Say, Sanji. Why do you care about me?” 

Sanji hummed in response. “I don’t think I have a particular reason. Caring about the people around you… I think that’s just something normal people do.” 

“I see.” He nodded. “It just happens and you don’t know why?” 

“I mean, I guess?” Sanji shrugged. “Usually you kinda know why, like that they’re nice to you or something. For you… I just do. Maybe it’s because we’re family. I’m sure some other people would hate you, you did spend a lot of time beating me when we were kids, but…” 

“So, you don’t have to know,” he said. 

“Well, no. It happens regardless. Why do you ask?” 

“Do you remember when I came down here a while back and told you more about the Hashihime out of nowhere?” 

“You’re side-stepping again.”

“It’s relevant. Do you?” 

Sanji huffed. “Yes, I do. Really weird by the way.” 

Niji sighed. “Well, the reason I knew all of that was because someone told me. I managed to find a man with blue eyes and I just knew they weren’t natural. They were just… too bright. He came from one of those families and ran away, and since I could see his blue eyes he told me about it. He was more than happy to, when I told him my brother was just like him.” 

“And?”

“ And I didn’t tell you an aspect of what he told me. Hashihime get jealous. I wanted to test that out a little bit.”

Sanji sat up slightly straighter. “What’s it mean when they get jealous?” 

“Apparently, if you’re favored by one and you do something selfless, they’ll get jealous and completely fuck it up for you. You’re the kind one, so I was honestly surprised nothing had ever happened… but I figured it was because you’d never been given the information for it.” Niji smiled, and brought his good hand up and patted the mound of wound dressing on his shoulder. “Turns out I was correct.” 

“That sounds like you gave me a heart attack for fun,” he said. “Look at yourself, you almost lost an arm for this crap.” 

“Not like it’s a big deal, right? It’s not like I was gonna stay dead.” He waved him off. “And besides, there was always the likelihood you wouldn’t care that much and nothing would happen.” 

Sanji thought again about that cold feeling on his legs back when he was a child. The cold that had stretched over him just recently all the same. He really had been right, way back when, about exactly what his brother would say about the ordeal, how little he would care. As long as it was efficient, it didn’t matter. 

“Look where it got you, moron,” he said. 

“Nowhere too bad. I got confirmation you’re a weird sap and a bunch of days off.” Niji’s voice sounded exactly like one of his smiles. 

“Har-har.” Sanji rolled his eyes. “You took your sweet time to tell me about this yourself.” 

“I meant to, the first time around,” he said.

“And you didn’t.”

Niji shifted his weight from leg to leg, somewhat pensively. He looked like, if he had both of his arms available, he would've stood there twiddling his thumbs as well. He eventually opened his mouth to reply.

He began, “The man I just told you about, the one who volunteered the information— I killed him, right after he did. Entirely standard. He looked so betrayed about it, like I was supposed to return his solidarity or something.” He let out a half-amused sound, and it wilted all the way on its way out. “I didn’t feel anything about it. I still don’t, really. But… I knew that if I told you any more than I already had back then that I would’ve just blurted it out. That I killed a guy and I didn’t care. That I killed a guy that had been kind to me, even though it was necessary. And I knew you wouldn’t react well. 

“I didn’t know if you were gonna cry, or yell at me, or give me the cold shoulder or something. I didn’t wanna find out, either. I didn’t want to see you like that, to know you were upset. I needed to stop talking and get out so bad, it was like all my joints wanted to explode in their sockets and they would if I slipped up and told you. I couldn’t stand the mere idea, and—” 

Niji gasped slightly, cutting off his speech. A startled laugh bubbled out of him all of a sudden. 

Sanji jolted in his own right. “Niji?” 

“Sanji.” If Sanji didn’t know any better, he would’ve said his brother sounded awed, somewhere under that surprise. Niji’s arm reached up and pushed aside the branch that had been obscuring his face. There was something floaty about his expression, only barely there. “I stopped seeing you for a second there.”

“You can see..?”

“Mm,” he hummed. Niji looked around, shifting slightly to see behind himself. “Nice forest. Looks picturesque.”

“I’ve only ever really seen forests in pictures,” he said. The whole place really did look mostly like the idea of a forest rather than being based in anything from reality, cluttered with enough trees that he didn’t have to worry about thinking about any space beyond his immediate area and thus didn’t have to worry about any potential inaccuracies. “Aren’t I hallucinating?” He mumbled to himself.

“This is something else Hashihime do. Illusions.” Niji’s hand traveled up the branch as much as it could without losing stability, and he snapped it right where he held it. The whole thing came down with a thud— a fake thud, apparently, but it sounded crisp and weighty to him, the way a real branch ought to. “Well, it’s more like you use it like a pencil, than anything it does on its own. Only possessed people can see the stuff, or people who have been and no longer are.”

“You haven’t seen any of this stuff until like two seconds ago, though.” 

“Well, no. You have to be ‘on the same page’ as the other person to do that. However you define that— feeling the same things, I think. We’ve always been different, so I didn’t think it would ever happen.” 

It was Sanji’s turn to laugh, but his was more of a bark. Short, sharp, and with a hint of schadenfreude in place of any genuine mirth. “Holy shit, Ichiji was right.” 

“What’s Ichiji gotta do with anything?” 

“Well— he’s the one who told me you died. Came down here all huffy and puffy and then told me I’d ‘ruined you’. He sounded like he’d been thinking that for a while. I didn’t really know what to think about it, but with all of this…” Sanji gestured vaguely. “That’s absolutely hilarious.” 

“Seriously? He came down here and said that to you?” Niji sneered. “That bastard.” 

“Right?” That got another laugh out of him. “Ah, but, don’t confront him or anything. He’s technically never said that.”

Niji looked affronted at that suggestion as well. “That’s not the sort of thing he’d say if he hadn’t been thinking about it a lot beforehand.”  

“Whatever. As long as he doesn’t come down here and bite my head off, handle it however. Not like I know him enough for it to be my mess,” he said. “Say, Niji.”

“Hm?”

“I am. Angry and upset with you, that is. About you killing that man. And about you dropping all of this on me like this. It sucked,” Sanji said. 

“Oh.” Niji shrank into himself a little. His single visible shoulder slumped. “You don’t look upset.” 

“I am. This is what upset looks like, now that I’m an adult.” He was lying, of course. It had very little to do with the fact he was an adult and a lot to do with the fact that he’d still been grappling with the definitely-dead and now not-dead versions of his younger-older brother. That pervasive cold that had made its home on his skin had grappled with whatever heat came from his upset and tempered it all until he was entirely neutral. 

It wasn’t like he could do anything other than admonish him like this. He really didn’t want to get swallowed whole by the outside world when he hadn’t even seen it in so long.

“Ah. Are you just gonna stay like that?” he asked. Sanji almost couldn’t tell if he’d hid the is there anything I can do to make you not upset? behind those words by accident or on purpose. For all he had grown up and all his voice had deepened, he sounded just like a kid.

“Well, yeah.” He shrugged. “You’re just gonna have to live with it. Think about it. Maybe next time you’ll do something less upsetting.” 

“No promises,” Niji said. 

He left, after that. Sanji’s little forest dissolved soon after, and he was struck by the fact that, ostensibly, they’d completely isolated Michael from at least half of the conversation. He wondered how these sorts of things looked to an outsider— he had forgotten to ask Niji if he knew about any of that, if that man had told him anything. He could ask her what she had seen, but he was terribly tired, and at least slightly afraid of whatever worried question might come out of her mouth. 

He ended up going to sleep in the middle of the day. He only spoke come the next day when he realized that he wasn’t going to be made to go back in time to try and avert Niji’s injury, and when he did speak he pretended nothing happened. 

He wondered briefly if Niji and Ichiji were upstairs, yelling at each other over something that Ichiji had never once said in his life but definitely thought and felt. If they were discussing a funeral that never happened, and bitterness that never spawned from it. It was supposed to be a lighthearted thought, but all it did was make him sink further into the crater he felt he was already halfway encased in. 

The administrative ‘error’ happened a while later, some amount of time but not too much, maybe a week and maybe not. He felt like a downright oracle when it did. When he had teased Ichiji about sending him back a decade, he knew he wouldn’t actually make such a dull mistake, but god or someone else must have loved the idea. 

He hadn’t even registered the face of the man who had picked the old bottle, much less have an answer for whether or not he did it on purpose or by accident, or why it happened in either case. The document he’d been given wasn’t thick enough for it to be some sort of massive long-con, he didn’t think— but he didn’t know, he wasn’t a military strategist. Maybe whatever hypothetical fight Niji had picked with Ichiji had gotten too out of hand. Maybe Judge came to the conclusion that Sanji had ruined his brother too much, and he had to go all the way back in time to correct him and keep his perfect soldier. The contents of what he’d been given were completely useless when it came to gauging anything about the situation at all. 

The most shocking part was seeing his younger self, before any of those thoughts had crashed onto him at all. He had gone back so far in time that this little version of him still had his regular pairs of clothes that matched with the rest of his siblings. He didn’t have the ill-fitting hand-me-downs that came from the medical wing yet. 

He couldn’t gauge exactly how far back he was, but the little one extended his hand to him to help him up instead of going straight for it. He was vaguely devoid of horror and mostly seemed amazed at the sudden intrusion, and that at least told Sanji something.

“Please don’t touch me,” was all he managed to say. His past self retracted his hand, slowly but still no less like he had been burned. A rotten feeling came over him, and a lot of other thoughts he knew he didn’t want to feel quite yet but would have all the time in the world to.

The person in front of him was not himself.

The little bugger was a child. His hair wasn’t yet overgrown, he didn’t yet have bags under his eyes, and those eyes were blue. A bright blue, too bright for a person, just as Niji had described them and just as he had taken them for granted for the entire time he had been down there. 

It was the face of a kid that hadn’t yet grappled with the fact he would be down there the rest of his life. A kid that hadn’t spent his whole life sitting in front of dull food and nothing but books and the things inside his own brain, whose legs felt all kinds of aches up and down from disuse because there was never going to be anywhere else to go. A kid that, probably, still had a dream that was not tucked behind a wall of complacency— a dream he could pull out right from his sleeve, just like his heart. 

As little as he’d seen himself in all his time down in his cell, he knew he was not that child anymore, that that child hadn’t grown up in the least. That child had died down there, down here, victim to some strange ship of theseus where everything that had constructed him had been replaced with paper and fatigue and a weakness of the body, if not the soul itself. 

The urge to get him out hit him so hard it almost took the breath right out of him. If one of them was there, then the other surely didn’t need to be.

The kid looked like he was about to burst with questions, but Sanji decided to tuck him away for later, just a little bit. He got up and sat down on the bed, looking out of the cell to see if the person he was hoping for would be there.

She was. Michael was smaller than he remembered, but no less an adult. He realized he had never asked for her age, and that it had never come up, but time had left its mark on her in ways he hadn’t even been keeping track of and now all of those markers were gone. He knew her almost entirely through the avenue of locked-room mystery stories, and had become the sort of hollow person that only had that information to exchange with her and not a single thing above or below that didn’t make him want to rip himself to pieces. 

He supposed he would have to make friends with her all over again, now, if he ever got around to that.

“Michael?” He called to her, and she jolted so hard he may as well have put a spider down her shirt. 

The expression she settled on was different from her initial shock. Just that single word had made her face twist, pained in a very peculiar way, as though he had stolen something precious from her right under her nose. He supposed in a way he had— she had put a lot of effort in over the years to not speak to him, and to paint over that supposed weakness she carried with her. Him knowing her name crumbled the idea that she might have succeeded. 

“You’re…?” She pointed between both of them, relying on that to carry the rest of her question.

He nodded. “Yes, I am. Do you know if we’re near land at all?” 

She nodded back. “We’re in the East Blue.”

Better than he would have hoped for, honestly. “Great. Do you think you could go get Reiju for me?”

It took one more utterance of her name for her to agree, but she did. Suggesting the fact she wouldn’t be implicated in whatever he was thinking about was enough for her. 

Little Sanji looked at him, eyes wide, and asked, “What’re you doing?”

“Hm? Getting you out of here, hopefully.” He smiled. He got looked at up and down for that answer.

“You’re staying behind here,” the kid muttered. 

“I wouldn’t be any good outside, I’ve spent too much time in here already. S’no big deal,” he said.

He didn’t even need to look at little Sanji’s face to know just how much he didn’t like the idea. It made him smile wider, just on the off chance it would placate the kid, and he knew as well that that wasn’t comforting in the least. It probably looked uncanny, and terrible, and spoke loudly about things that hadn’t actually been that bad, but it was all he had to offer in place of just arguing with the kid. 

Reiju walked down the stairs by herself, and she looked at him like she had seen someone die in front of her. It wasn’t a particularly shocked expression, but the wall she kept up around herself all the time wasn’t tall enough to keep some of her horror from spilling up and around it. In practice, she looked stiff as a board, and she distracted herself by looking at her little brother, letting his visage tell her that he had-already but hadn’t-yet grown up into whatever husk Sanji currently was. That husk being there meant that it didn’t have to happen to her little brother at all. 

“Can you get him out of here?” he asked her. 

She held her hands close to her chest, her fingers digging slightly into the fabric. It made the spiral pattern on her shirt warp and resemble more of a ripple than anything. “What makes you think I’d risk myself like that?” she asked, and he really hadn’t expected a grown woman’s tone to come out of her child voice.

“If I’m here, then he,” Sanji gestured towards his younger self, “becomes the failure again. I’m sure nobody would mind if you just snuck him out.” 

She took his justifications the same way a starving man would take food. It almost felt bad, bullshitting her like that. He looked at his hand and the faint crescent scar that adorned it and thought of his Reiju’s hands, wondered if hers were still dotted with them from her single visit for all those years she didn’t. This Reiju wouldn’t ever have those dents in her. As she pried open two of the bars of their cell wide enough to let the kid out he wondered if his own would ever fade. 

His younger self looked back at him briefly, extended his hand out to him again— a begging gesture. Even if the kid wouldn’t become a puddle at his feet, the opening wasn’t big enough for him to crawl through with them. Sanji let his smile falter and shook his head no. He had to be down there for them to be able to do this at all. Before they broke eye contact, however, he left him with something. 

“Sanji,” he called after him, “promise me you’ll never go out in the rain. Okay? Promise. It’s important.” 

The kid nodded before his elder sister tugged them both out of there, running back upstairs and, hopefully, somewhere where he wouldn’t see him again.

Sanji fell back onto his bed. He waited for their footsteps to fade completely out of existence, and sighed. He didn’t think about any of the awful things that might happen in the next week, or maybe even in the next few hours. 

He just dozed— and he felt lighter for it than he ever remembered being.