Archive of Our Own

“Have you ever died before? It’s a serious question. When an illusion of self is shattered, you simply cease to be. Though it may not seem that way to others. You know when it is true. You can feel it. A stranger in your own body. An impostor. And nothing is the same ever again.”

• Hellblade

“Dammit, Cook, can you fucking stop being so goddamn selfless for a fucking goddamn minute!”

The words are thrown at his face like barbed whips, slashing through the stagnant air between them and leaving bloodied lines of rancor on Sanji’s cheeks. There is an actual taste of blood in his mouth, from an actual wound over his left eyebrow dripping steadily down his face, coating his lips red and sticky. It’s tangy and pungent and cloying, in a way that reminds him of cold dungeons, echoing taunts in childish voices and the sound of bugs skittering on cracked stones. He wants to spit the taste out and wash his mouth with soap. But a taste is a taste and he hates wasting it more than he does the onslaught of cruel memories barraging his mind like point-blank shots through the skull. 

(He could have dodged them all; the problem is, he could have dodged them all.)

(But why would he? When the skull doesn’t dent at all?)

He sweeps his tongue over his lips and bears down on the acrid taste, like he does on his precious cigarettes and on his endless suffering and on goddamn everything else. Fuck, he would give anything right now to replace the rusty taste of metal with the decaying tang of ash and smoke (the taste in his mouth reminds him of Zoro somehow, even though they never kissed at all; came close a few times, but the pull between them wasn’t strong enough). Right now, it’s just him and Zoro in this grayed-out moment in time, too far away from home on the Sunny, standing on exhausted legs in the sea of blood and crumpled bodies amid a war zone; craving a cigarette to conceal his rampant emotions among the smoke. 

What else is new?

In an alternate universe, where the two had learned how to communicate with words instead of jibes and carefully-made bentos and spur-of-the-moment death pacts, Sanji would have said, “how can I be anything but selfless when there is no self?” But in this universe, Sanji and Zoro don’t use real words to talk to each other, so Sanji sneers instead, “If you want me to stop saving your sorry ass, then stop being such a damsel in distress all the damn time!”

The indignant fury that flashes hot and smoldering in Zoro’s steely eye and the ensuing words of vitriol and careless swings of swords at his raised legs are as much comfort to Sanji’s frayed nerves as hearing Luffy’s boisterous laugh when Sanji’s a heartbeat away from slipping into self-loathing, or seeing Nami-san’s and Robin-chan’s fond smiles when his hands are full of pretty seashells and exotic flowers, or listening to Usopp’s wild tales amid the gentle sound of Brook’s strumming while he’s busy rinsing out dishes after an impromptu party. 

Sometimes when he’s not careful and his guard is down, he catches himself wondering what it would have been like if Zoro smiled at him fondly like Sanji’s something as precious as his swords and as beloved as the earthy taste of sake on his tongue (but Zoro rarely smiles). Sometimes when he’s fresh out of a nightmare with his heart beating like a drum somewhere in his throat and the ghostlike sensation of bugs crawling over his skin, he imagines strong arms wrapped protectively around his waist and a gruff voice whispering I got you, love into his sweat-soaked hair (but Zoro is not the cuddling type); but mostly, he doesn’t want anything between the two of them to change, not at all. He gets what he deserves, and he cherishes every little thing he is given after all. 

(Even if it’s scraps; even if it’s leftovers from someone else’s discarded affections for someone that wasn’t even him. He’d take it. And he’d be fucking thankful for it, because he knows too well how it feels to starve. To wait and wait and wait for a ship to show up. To finally allow yourself to sacrifice your innocence to survive only to realize someone has already sacrificed themselves for your pitiful life. To be born in darkness and then get a sliver of light through the iron bars only to lose everything at the end of it all.

A greedy, little thing like him, he’d take it all.)

***

Sanji doesn’t exist. 

He doesn’t mean it in a physical sense, or a metaphorical way. He knows there is a human-shaped body with bright golden hair, mismatched eyes and strong legs that go on for miles. He gets to touch this body with flawless, long-fingered hands and he catches the startling ocean-blue of an eye in the mirror and combs through the silky strands of hair to cover a grey eye that he inherited from the most despicable man on the Four Blues and which looks as world-weary and washed-out as his actual state of mind on any given day.

(For a long time, the grey eye was his most favorite reason for self-loathing — it was Judge’s eye, but he wasn’t Judge’s son and he kept punishing himself for it; for owning something that wasn’t his; that belonged to the vilest man he knew and he didn’t want it, but he deserved it because he’d stolen it. But then, the Momoiro Island happened and he came back with his mother’s eye visible to himself and the world.)

He gets to operate this body, in the kitchen and in fights and occasionally in strangers’ beds during desperate times. He knows how to use this body to his advantage; to make the most delicious and nutritious food in the Grand Line to give his crew an edge during fights, to take down enemies ten times his size, to win hearts while breaking his own to make women feel like the beautiful goddesses they all are. 

He has this perfect body at his disposal. But he doesn’t own this body.

He isn’t inside this body, the way everyone else seems to be in theirs. He is a puppeteer, pulling the strings behind the curtain. The mouth opens wide in a joyful grin and the visible eye twinkles like a pulsing star and sweet lies tumble down like perfect lines read aloud from a manuscript, but behind the curtain, he wails like a madman and stutters half-rants, half-pleas through a gaping hole for a mouth.

Behind the silky curtain of his hair that he stole from his mom, his hidden eye always weeps. No one sees the tears or hears the screams. Because what they see and what they hear isn’t Sanji. 

Sanji doesn’t exist. 

***

He used to exist once. 

Or rather, he used to think that he did. In a technical sense, he was robbed of his existence before he even came out of his mother’s womb; first, there was the genetic modifications and then the poison , which was supposed to save him from numbness and subservience, but ended up damning him to years of abuse and a lifetime of deep, psychological scars, where he learned that no matter what he did and what he was, he was just never enough. And every fucking emotion that was supposed to make him a better version of his wretched brothers (pain, loneliness, self-loathing, misery, dispair, hunger ) was torturously intensified.

(He didn’t become a monster then; but he became a plaything to monsters first, only to turn into a monster later.)

Sanji’s illusion of an existence comes in fragments and fleeting bursts of disjointed moments that rattle jarringly inside his brain. He felt alive in his mother’s embrace and upon seeing his wavering reflection in her lovely ocean-blue eye (did she hide her other eye because it was crying, too? Were her smiles and sweet promises just as fake as his when she held Sanji to her chest while slowly fading away because of him?); his heart thrums in synchronization with the pleased hums of everyone who tastes his food; he blossoms beneath Zeff’s hand that ruffles his hair instead of striking him down; in Luffy’s widened, sparkling eyes as Sanji told him about the All Blue for the first time; and his childlike joy and long rubber limbs that he wraps tight around Sanji as he demands food and endless adventure and warmth; Luffy’s unshakable trust in him and Luffy’s immense, unrivaled love for him and Luffy’s well, that’s how you are smile. 

But these days, Sanji mostly comes alive in the clash of his fiery legs with Zoro’s swords; in the quivering hellfire in Zoro’s dark eyes and the sharp edge of his competitive jibes and the cutting curl of his taunting mouth (does it taste like blood and steel, the way Sanji has imagined it would?) Sanji clings to those moments like a lifeline and prostrates himself on an altar before a vengeful, uncaring god, desperately seeking Zoro’s heat to set himself on fire. But then Zoro calls him any name but Sanji and Sanji’s fragile speck of existence sputters out like a flickering candle caught in a storm. 

Sanji doesn’t exist in Zoro’s eyes, then. He is jagged lines and curly brows and nicotine-stained fingers and spicy fragrance stuffed in a stolen body gift-wrapped in stylish suits and perfect lies. 

There is something in his name — in his clinically cold and numerical name — that belongs to him and no other existence. He didn’t steal it and it’s so worthless to anybody else that no one would ever bother to take it away from him or force a meaning upon it. 

Sometimes, Sanji catches himself daydreaming about the moment Zoro would finally call him by his name and he spills over his clenched hand on a deep, shuddering sigh that dangerously sounds like something between a sob and a plea.  

He hasn’t told Zoro anything about his pitiful pining. He doesn’t think he ever will. 

***

“We all have names; given or chosen. We change them, charge them, invest them with meaning. Names torn away leave us raw and bleeding; rootless, selfless.”

• Hellblade II

It’s one of those ensuing peaceful nights in the galley; after the usual chaos of dinner with Luffy trying to steal everyone’s food, his sweet Nami-san berating almost everyone, but especially Zoro and Luffy, for wasting precious resources on stupid things from the new island and Usopp and Franky arguing over the logistics of some invention or another. 

Now it’s just him and Zoro (there’s been a growing number of instances where it’s just him and Zoro after the death pact. Huh .) They’ve long finished with the dishes and Sanji is on his third cigarette after dinner, with Zoro slouched in the chair, absentmindedly cleaning his most beloved sword. Sanji knows from the pace and the repetition of the motions, Zoro’s as lost in his head as he usually is outside of it (or he’s just napping with his eye open; both scenarios so terribly Zoro that Sanji is no longer taken aback at the absurdity of it.) and like the greedy, little thing he is, he tries to pull the mosshead’s attention to himself. 

“Zoro.” It’s been a long time since he last used this name to call the swordsman. He wonders if there’s something special in Zoro’s name, too; the way that Sanji always feels a visceral pull in his guts every time someone calls him by his name; a name that despite everything (the needle punctures in his soft, paperthin skin, the purple bruises and fractured bones and blood-stained teeth; and merciless words and an iron mask cutting off his air every time he dared to breathe and exist) belongs to him. And only him.

“Curlybrow,” Zoro acknowledges without looking up, still not giving him the attention he seeks. Sanji would’ve snapped his own neck turning to face Zoro if the man ever called him Sanji, but it’s not the same for the mosshead, is it? Sanji has come to realize that the way others feel about things is not even a fraction of what he feels about everything ; so what hope does he have for a man who distrusts everyone on principle and promises to kill his friend like he means nothing to him?

(Zoro meant everything to him when Sanji chose him as the one to put an end to his miserable nonexistence.) 

“You’ve never called me by my name.”

This finally grabs Zoro’s attention, as that mossy head of his snaps up, his hand stops dragging the oily rag uselessly on Wado’s already polished blade and his singular dark eye pins Sanji to the wall behind him.  

“Your name? Did you pick that yourself?” Zoro asks almost snidely, a playful smirk tugging on his lips like he thought his joke was funny.

“Did you pick yours?”, Sanji snorts dismissively and blows a puff of smoke in Zoro’s direction for his stupid question. 

“No, but I don't care for it. They can call me whatever they want. Zoro, Demon of East Blue, King of Hell, Marimo…I’m not too hung up on it. Got better things to do than obsess like an idiot over stupid names.”

At any other time, Sanji would’ve snapped at him for the obvious dig and followed his outburst with a snide remark of his own, ‘Your corny ass is the only one who’s ever called you King of Hell and I’m the only one who’s ever called you Marimo’, but right now he isn’t in the mood for that kind of perfunctory act. 

(He’s in the mood for some long overdue self-punishment through naked honesty and genuine vulnerability that he’s absolutely sure Zoro would mistake for teasing and use against him like a hacksaw trying to cut through his metal skin.)

(And it hurts so good when Zoro does it; takes the words like razors out of Sanji’s shredded mouth and stabs them through his heart over and over until he’s sure Sanji’s bled out nice and slow in front of him. The way Zoro makes him lose precious blood is subliminal. A little like how women’s beauty makes him bleed, but so much different too. Zoro does it with killing intent. Women have no say in it.)

“I hate it when you call me anything related to my eyebrows.” 

If Zoro was as perceptive as Robin-chan or Luffy, he’d notice the sea-king-sized change in Sanji’s usual demeanor. He’d realize that there’s something wrong with Sanji; that something tremendous was happening here. Sanji wouldn’t just blurt out his genuine insecurities to anyone, least of all to his rival who’d pounce on any potential weakness to get ahead of him. Years of abuse at the hands of his brothers has made him all too careful about whom to let climb over his walls. 

Sanji is less careful with his genuine emotions around Nami and Robin, the true goddesses that they are; but then again, despite all the love and respect and adoration he holds in his bottomless heart for his angels, he is not in love with any of them. He wouldn’t change Zoro for any of them. 

(He probably would, if he could.)

(He probably could, if he wanted to.) 

“Huh, figured a prissy, pretty boy like you would be self-conscious about his looks.” 

Sanji is about to say it's not about that , but it kind of is, isn’t it? Not in the sense Zoro is implying — Sanji is obsessed with his outward looks insofar as they conceal the ugly mess inside — but he also hates how his pale coloring reminds him of the unforgiving cold of Germa. Of his mother, even, those last days when her brilliant eyes had sunken and her smiles had waned. Of everything he lost and was taken away from him. Of himself mostly. Of a self that has been emptied out of any meaning. The only thing about him that has any significance is his name, and Zoro refuses to use it. 

“The way you don’t care about anything that isn’t Luffy’s or your own dream is what I like and hate the most about you, marimo.”

Another insecurity unveiled. Boy is he on a roll tonight. Maybe the world is indeed coming to an end and he has decided to spend the last few minutes of it having a completely one-sided heart-to-heart with a man whose skull is seemingly filled with overgrown moss instead of brain cells. 

A man who would fight giant birds to protect Sanji’s food, but says he doesn’t care for it. A man who worries about his safety and his happiness and his dream, but says he doesn’t care for him . A man who seethes in jealousy over Sanji’s interactions with women, but thinks no one would ever notice. A man who sacrifices his life and his dream to save his. A man who promises to kill him, not because Sanji doesn’t mean anything to him, but because he is the only one who cares about Sanji for Sanji and not for his own selfish needs. 

A man who loves him. 

Probably. 

(When Zoro looks at him, with that narrowed eye of steel, silent and stoic, assessing and cutting ribbons of longing into Sanji’s skin, does he go through the same thought process as him?)

(Or does he just think, sake, swords, luffy, weights, naps, gotta get stronger on repeat?)

“Well, you can’t have the best of both worlds.”

“I do have both, actually. With Luffy.” 

If there’s anyone on this whole seemingly infinite planet who’s looked deep into Sanji’s fucked-up, shredded inside and held his broken pieces tenderly in his own scarred hands and said with the brightest smile that they love the pitiful mockery of the man he is trying to be, it’s Luffy. And rarely anyone is like Luffy. 

“Rarely anyone is like Luffy,” Zoro says sagely and Sanji finds himself nodding along, less annoyed as he had expected to be for having to agree with the mosshead on a personal insight.

(Sanji loves Luffy in a way that he thinks is far less than what the future King of Pirates needs and Luffy loves him in a way that he thinks is far more than a failed experiment like him deserves.) 

(Which, at the end of it all, leaves him with…Zoro. His rival, the bane of his nonexistence, Marimo. His partner in crime, the solid weight against his back with the two of them against the world, his equal .) 

“You know, my name, Sanji,” he wouldn’t be surprised if Zoro didn’t remember what his actual name is supposed to be. “It’s not just a name.” (It’s barely a name). “It’s a designator. It has as much to do with who I am as my ancestry or my dream or my looks.” He was so perfectly-engineered that everything about him was a designator for something; the shape of his eyebrows, the despicable grey and the wistful blue of his eyes, or the golden hue of his hair (that would’ve been black like his brows and body hair if the mutation had worked when it was supposed to). 

And it wasn’t all Germa either. With Zeff, the softness of his hands and the vulnerability of his heart around women and his strict view against wasting food became a part of his patchwork identity. 

Nothing about him is natural or accidental or human in a way most flawed things are. He’s more artificial than the synthetic parts of Franky. More monstrous than the most monstrous thing about Chopper and more freakish than Brook’s empty sockets that can see and his tongueless mouth that can taste. His name is just an extension of that grand design of perfection that ultimately ended in failure. He’s not like Zoro with a face and a name that don’t signify anything. He’s not free . Sanji’s name and all the heavy, rattling chains attached to it…“I can’t not care about it.”

It takes Zoro an inordinate amount of time after just staring at Sanji with furrowed brows and pursed lips to finally say, 

“Your name means…three.”

It’s not voiced as a question, but Sanji reads the why in his expression anyway. 

“You know what kind of people are named after numbers?” 

Zoro grunts, but says nothing. Sanji answers it for him, “Test subjects.”

There is actual, honest-to-god surprise in Zoro’s good eye, as if he had never thought about the implications of Sanji’s name until this very moment. But the surprise soon gives way to the far more familiar impression of a sneer and Sanji’s heart sinks. 

Not today either, then. Okay. 

“Your name isn’t even a name and you still pester me to call you it. Wouldn’t shitty-love-cook be a better designator for you?”

A normal person would have followed Sanji’s shocking revelation with ‘ what do you mean you were a test subject?’ , but Zoro isn’t normal. He doesn’t pry. He’s either trying to respect Sanji’s boundaries or in typical Zoro fashion, he just doesn’t care enough. 

(Sanji loves the way Zoro’s indifference hurts him, cuts deep into his slowly hardening skin and makes him bleed and feel human again; but he also hates how his masochism always gets in the way of his desire to have Zoro learn all there is to know about him.)

This conversation didn’t go the way he needed it to go; Zoro being Zoro took an unimpressed look at all the bricks Sanji took out of his walls with torn, bloodied hands and decided that he wanted no part of it. Even with his walls down, standing barefoot and shivering and vulnerable in a downpour, Zoro didn’t bother to cross over the line and peek into the messiest part of him. Who would have wanted to anyway? 

(Sanji wouldn’t have wanted to, if their roles had been reversed and he had been given a choice. Sanji would’ve given everything to be able to ignore and forget.)   

Sanji lights up another cigarette and takes a long drag to quiet his thoughts and settle his nerves. Maybe it’s better for them both if Zoro were never to find out about the reason behind the death pact and everything that happened to him on the Whole Cake Island and Sanji’s insomnia and the recurring nightmares that jostle Zoro awake with the sound of his wet gasps and the flick of his lighter in the dark.

“Aww, marimo-kun,” his voice drips in honeyed snark and teasing belligerent, “I didn’t know you loved me so much you actually wanted to give me pet names.”

“Shut up, asshole. They’re not pet names,” he growls in a totally unconvincing voice (it doesn’t escape Sanji that he didn’t protest against the love part; For whatever purpose that would serve) and Sanji can’t stop a burst of laughter that pushes its way past the smoke and the persistent lump in his throat. So what if he can never get together with the King of Obliviousness? Making him flustered and grumbling like a disgruntled cat is surely the second best thing in the world. 

“You know, about my name not actually being a name… you’re not completely wrong, but you’re not completely right, either.”

Sanji should give it up, really. It’s late and they’re leaving the island in the morning and he has to start on breakfast in a few hours. But when the sun comes up, they both will go back to the comfort of treating each other like crewmates-to-rivals-to-begrudging-friends (and maybe a secret fourth thing?) and this whole conversion will be put behind them like all the lovely people they have to leave behind after each adventure.

Sanji expertly turns the next puff of smoke into the shape of the number 3, blows it away in Zoro’s direction and smirks at the mosshead’s eye-twitch in his peripheral vision.

“There’s a lot of baggage attached to my name, most of which, highly unsavory. But…it’s also a name people I care about call me by. My name sounds different when they use it. It makes me feel…alive. Present . Like I exist as me and not someone’s failed scientific experiment. I hate it for what it was, but I love it for what it’s become.”

Zoro clicks his tongue and looks away, apparently finally disturbed by Sanji’s uncharacteristic display of genuine emotion around him. “Don’t think your tragic childhood or whatever is gonna make me pity you or something. I'm still gonna call you ero-cook and curly.” 

Sanji stubs out his last cigarette of the day in the ashtray he carries with himself everywhere while on the Sunny and heaves a deep sigh of resignation. “Just as well. Wasn’t expecting much from a moss-for-brain idiot like you.” 

“Shitty-cook,” Zoro snarls.  

“Third-rate swordsman,” Sanji snarls back. 

“Curlybrow.” 

“Marimo.” 

***

Five whole days after that totally pointless, slightly embarrassing kitchen conversation, Zoro finally corners him right after Sanji’s watch is over with a bottle of (stolen) sake in hand to hopefully ask the important questions. 

“So…your name…the third son. Does that mean there are two others before you?”

Even now, while not using the name to actually address him, Zoro refuses to say Sanji . What is it in Sanji’s name that Zoro is trying so hard to avoid when he has no problem using anyone else’s name? Is it about commitment? A declaration of undying love and devotion? Or is it out of resentment? Maybe it’s just Zoro being an asshole. It’s not like the mosshead gives much thought to most things he does. And when it comes to Sanji, he does most things out of spite. 

(Or maybe he just hates the name, the way Sanji used to hate it sitting on the cold stones in tattered clothes and a heavy, iron helmet that made the simple, sacred act of eating a special kind of torture.)

Sanji sighs and resists the urge to drag a hand through his hair. It would mess up the perfect arrangement of his tresses. He lights up a cigarette instead and smokes it almost to the filter. Better to mess up his lungs, which no one can see, than to mess up his hair. 

(Not that his lungs would ever suffer any damage thanks to his magic genes; but sometimes the delusion that he’s being self-destructive in every puff of smoke that he inhales, quenches a more violent urge to seriously hurt himself.)

“Took you long enough to put two and two together. There really is moss inside your skull instead of brain, isn’t it?”

Sanji makes a motion to tap his finger against Zoro’s temple, but the swordsman swats his hand away. 

“Oh shut it. Just answer the damn question, curly.”

It’s not the right question, but coming from Zoro, it’s still something .

Sanji leans a little more heavily against the railing and looks at the infinite darkness before him, letting himself soak in the gentle, salty sea breeze upon his face for a precious few seconds before answering, “Hmm. Yeah, there are two before me and one after. We're quadruplets. There’s also Reiju, my older sister.”

Sanji remembers a Western Blue customer at the Baratie once saying something about how twins, due to sharing a womb for nine months, also shared a piece of their souls with each other; that they felt each other’s pain and happiness as if those feelings were their own; that if one lost the other, the grief would be unbearable. Like losing that piece of your soul and forever feeling incomplete. If the saying was true, then Sanji would be missing not one but three pieces of his soul. Maybe that’s why he’s always felt so wrong in his body. He’s just an incomplete soul, forever mourning the loss of the brothers who never got a chance to feel anything for him but loathing and contempt. 

“Damn. You have four siblings?” Zoro sounds impressed or maybe even a little envious. Sanji knows Zoro never had any siblings. He has no idea that between the two of them, he’s actually the luckier one. “And you managed to keep all that a secret from the crew ‘til now?”

It’s now or never. “I’m also a prince.” He says flippantly, but still holds his breath, waiting for a world-altering event to occur between this blink and the next. 

“Huh. Mr. Prince. Actually, I can see that. You’ve always been too prissy and proper for a common waiter at the Baratie.”

He shouldn’t have held his breath. 

For once, Sanji decides not to rise to the bait. “There is…a lot you don’t know about me.”

Please ask me to tell you about me. Please. I want you to know everything about me. About the lonely unloved child in an iron helmet behind iron bars with only rats as friends and skittering bugs crawling on damaged skin and emotionless brothers that called him failure as they drove their knees into his ribs and a father that stripped him of his whole existence and punished him daily for being weak…

“I know enough to find you annoying.”

“What if I want you to know more?”

“Why? It won’t change my opinion of you.”

That’s…actually true. It should make Sanji feel better. It would make anyone feel better, knowing their dark, dirty secrets don’t matter to their friends they are secretly in love with. But it just makes Sanji feel terribly disappointed. “Yeah…I suppose it won’t.”

As if catching the disappointment in Sanji’s voice, Zoro rushes to explain himself. “I mean, you just told me you have four other siblings and you were formerly a prince. But you’re still the same annoying ero-cook to me.”

I also told you I was a test subject, and a failed one at that, but apparently that has flown right over your mossy head. 

Maybe Zoro doesn’t really care about any of that and maybe it’s not a bad thing that he doesn’t. Maybe Sanji should stop judging Zoro’s reactions based on his own experiences. Yes, he’d be terribly concerned if Zoro ever told him he was a science experiment and he wouldn’t rest until he got to the bottom of it, but he’s seeing this through the eyes of someone who has first-hand knowledge of what being a failed experiment right from birth actually entails.

Zoro has no idea about the daily injections, the overhead halogen lights that blinded his blurry, overflowing eyes, the leering doctors that talked about him as if he wasn’t there, the constant pain, the punishments and the crushing self-loathing and self-disappointment festering like an untreated wound under his skin. Sanji is just being selfish and expecting too much. Probably.  

“You never asked me about my past,” Zoro’s voice startles Sanji out of his depressive thoughts. He’s been brooding silently for too long and now the mosshead is looking at him with a subtle hint of guilt in his single eye. Did he think he actually hurt Sanji’s feelings with his flippant words? It’s not like Sanji can even afford to be sensitive about his messed-up emotions and it’s not like Zoro to be considerate about anyone’s feelings, least of all Sanji’s. 

“There’s no way your secrets are as shocking as mine.” Sanji knows a few things about Zoro’s past; overhead him once talking to Luffy about the connection of his dream and his beloved sword to a girl that used to be his childhood rival. But Zoro is right. Sanji never really asked him about his past. He doesn’t think bringing up the fact that he just knows would go over well with the taciturn swordsman. 

Zoro’s eye doesn’t look guilt-ridden anymore; instead, there’s something dark and devastating in there; something so painfully familiar and palpable Sanji can taste it like blood and burnt tobacco in his mouth. Like there is a shocking secret right here between them that Zoro both wants and doesn’t want Sanji to find out. 

“You’d be surprised.”

***

“Tell me.” 

“What,” a grunt, barely inquisitive. 

“Your shocking secret. Tell me.”

“No,” conviction as sharp as Wado’s blade, almost makes Sanji’s resolve bleed.

“Why the hell not.”

“Because it wouldn’t be much of a secret if I told you, now would it? Idiot-cook.” The wry amusement in his voice riles Sanji up. 

“Fuck secrets. Secrets won’t do you any good. Trust me on this, mosshead.”

“I do. Trust you on most things,” and in a softer voice that Sanji would’ve missed among the commotion of battle if not for his mosshead-attuned senses, “Everything.”

The admission startles Sanji into kicking his opponent with more force than necessary, hurling him all the way across the battlefield to give himself a chance to turn around and face Zoro. The devastating look in the swordsman’s eye makes Sanji’s breath hitch. “Oh.” But he doesn’t have time for decoding Zoro’s cryptic looks right now. He has to quickly turn back to kick another pesky marine away. “What if I told you my most shocking secret? Will you tell me yours?”

My most shocking secret is that I’m slowly turning into an emotionless killing machine and I think the last thread to my humanity is the love I’m holding onto with clenching teeth and bleeding claws for you; for all of you.  

“If you can just say it, then it’s not your most shocking secret,” Dismissive. Sanji hates that tone. Fire licks at the balls of his feet and the next poor bastard that is greeted with the sole of his dress shoe is accidentally set ablaze. 

“Who the fuck made that rule?” 

“Just drop it, curly. We’re in the middle of a fight and I’m not going to tell you shit.”

“I’ll drop it only if you call me Sanji. Right here, right now.” He spits out the dare with the cigarette butt in his mouth. He feels Zoro’s back briefly touch his under the incessant assault of the marines and the world shifts a little more into focus after that. 

“Your obsession with your stupid name is getting really freaky.”

“It’s not about my name.” It’s about you, dammit.

This time, it’s Zoro who makes a half circle around him to give him an unimpressed expression as he dispatches the next marine without even sparing him a look.

“Ok, it’s not entirely about my name.” He ducks fluidly under the next slashing assault aimed at his chest to let Zoro have at it. 

“You know the more you want something, the less likely you’re gonna get it from me, right?”

Sanji sobers up. He’s right. This is not how he gets Zoro to give in to him. This whatever between them isn’t so easy. 

They stop talking as the fight grows more intense near its end. They dance around each other in a flurry of graceful movements to dispatch the fools who had thought taking on the wings of the future king of pirates was ever a good idea. 

And as they dance and switch sides, their eyes meet for a fraction of a second and suddenly every motion around them screeches into a deafening halt; like a scene from fairy tale; like those royal waltzes his younger self used to watch in awe. It’s ridiculous how much a heated eye contact in the middle of a fight could mean to him. How much Zoro could mean to him.

In a few minutes, all the marines are dealt with and it’s Zoro and Sanji again. 

They stand before each other, sweaty and a little out of breath, taking stock of the other’s injuries. There’s none. None of the blood belongs to them. They smirk in unison like the smug bastards they are and Sanji lights up a cigarette to replace the smell of blood and burnt flesh with the cherry sweetness of his favorite tobacco instead.

“I don’t want you to ever call me Sanji.”

“Huh, nice try, Curly. You can say meaningless words with that smartass mouth of yours, but your stupid visible eye can’t lie to me.”

Sanji has half a mind to snide, obsessed with my mouth and eyes much? But he has more important things to take care of. He squeezes his eyes shut and is about to repeat his previous demand when he feels rather than hears Zoro starting to walk away. 

Don’t leave me behind when I can’t see you walk away. Don’t leave me with this wasting hope that you’re still here. 

“Oi, marimo-bastard, I wasn’t finished talking!” He launches a powerful kick at the back of Zoro’s head, which he gives the retreating swordsman a fraction of a second to dodge. Zoro’s swords clash with his leg and for the next 30 minutes, it’s just sparks and taunts and racing hearts between them. 

It’s familiar and constant and theirs . If this is all the intimacy Zoro’s willing to share, Sanji will take it in his greedy little hands and secure it safely behind his ribcage.

And with every thumping heartbeat, it hurts. 

***

His hands are sacred.

It’s not a fact, but it’s a truth he has chosen to believe in; like the truth about the existence of the All Blue or the realization of Luffy's dream or Nami-san being the most beautiful person in the whole world.   

His hands are a chef’s hands; meant to create beauty and happiness and peace, not to spill blood and inflict pain and suffering on others.

His hands are his mother’s hands; long-fingered, slender and pristine. They are meant to protect loved ones. They are meant to cherish, shelter and love . 

His hands are not his own, like everything else about his perfectly-engineered, failed, stolen body. But the man who sacrificed his own leg to save Sanji and protect his dream took them into his large, calloused ones and called them his most sacred treasure. He told Sanji to never use his hands in a fight and who was Sanji to disagree with anything that man said?

(After his mother, he thought he would never feel love again.) 

He can’t feel his hands. 

It was a spur-of-the-moment decision as most insane decisions in the heat of the battle tend to be. (He doesn’t regret it. He doesn’t regret it. He doesn’t .) 

He felt it like a punch to the gut and he cried out Nami-swan! several seconds before a cry for help was heard in the distance. Zoro turned toward Nami’s direction the moment Sanji shouted her name. In one shuddering inhale, the haki-infused blade of the pirate Zoro had been fighting swayed downward to slash at Zoro’s back and in the next exhale, Sanji had closed the rather long distance between them, putting himself right between the descending blade and Zoro’s unprotected back. 

Zoro’s back is sacred (that was one of the first things he learned about the swordsman); Like how Sanji’s hands are sacred. Sanji’s hands are meant to protect and Zoro’s back is meant to be protected. What happened next seemed obvious, inevitable, preordained.

And Sanji, the poster lovechild of sacrifice, knows better than anyone that sometimes, sacrifices have to be made. Sometimes, promises have to be broken. Sometimes, sacred things have to be defiled.

To cherish, to shelter, to love. 

And Sanji doesn’t regret it at all. 

He grabbed the blade with his hands. In his mind’s eye, he saw that he would be a fraction of a second too late if he went for a kick instead. He didn’t see the aftermath of grabbing the blade beyond the fact that it would protect Zoro’s back with 100% certainty. He didn’t need any fleeting traces of Future Sight or whatever the hell it was to know that in all probability, the blade would cut through the tendons and the bones and sever his hands from the wrist. So he grabbed the blade with his sacred hands but the blade didn’t cut him. It couldn’t . It turned into dust powder and useless dark energy the moment Sanji’s cursed exoskeleton activated on its own and came into contact with it. 

His next move is more under his control as he sends the pirate hurling upward and away in a whirlwind of angry orange flames. His Observation Haki flares and immediately pinpoints Zoro somewhere near Nami-san’s location. Sanji trusts him with keeping Nami safe as Zoro trusted him with keeping his back safe. 

Sanji doesn’t trust himself. 

He looks down at his hands; they are there, looking as pale and pristine and not-his as ever. But he can’t feel them. It’s as if the blade that was supposed to sever his hands from his wrists ended up severing his soul from his body. 

(Not that he believes in souls. But whatever force keeps people like Brook and Franky alive and human despite the odds, he doesn’t have it. He never had it.)

Sanji breathes in vain. He doesn’t need it. He doesn’t exist. 

And he’s scared; like a child is scared of the creeping darkness and numbing loneliness and the skittering sounds of insects. Maybe it would’ve been better if he had lost his hands instead. At least, that would be just the loss of something that never belonged to him in the first place. But this…this is the loss of control, the utter destruction of the self. This is his worst nightmare taking the shape of Judge smirking down triumphantly at his ultimate surrender. 

And his mother died for nothing. And Zeff lost his leg for nothing. And Luffy starved himself for nothing. And Zoro broke his promise for nothing. 

He’s nothing, he’s nothing, he’s nothing— 

Zoro.

Zoro is looking at him. No, grabbing at him. Shaking him. Shouting at him. What is he saying? Sanji can’t hear a damn thing. It’s just white noise in his head, panic rising up his throat like poison, suffocating him. Everything’s so blurry and time moves in circles around him and awareness is slipping through his hands like sand and he can’t breathe and he can’t feel and he’s slipping—

“SANJI.”

It’s like he’s back in Skypiea and Enel’s lightning has struck him, disintegrating him on a molecular level. Something sharp and unforgiving hooks into his tattered, hovering soul and pulls it back inside his body with a bang. It rattles like an anchor hitting the bed of shallow waters and suddenly he can breathe again. 

He can feel his hands. He can feel . He is gripped with a crushing desire to kneel on the blood-soaked ground and break into relieved sobs. Instead, he cradles his hands protectively against his chest and pins wide eyes on Zoro, blinking rapidly in astonishment. 

“You…you said my name.” 

Zoro’s panicked look turns conflicted. His hands slip from Sanji’s shoulders and the warmth he leaves there tingles like remnants of an electric shock. 

“You weren’t responding to anything else, I thought you were…” Zoro stops himself, face contorted in frustration and anguish. He heaves a deep sigh, as if trying to collect his thoughts. “Shit. I'm sorry. I should’ve called you by your name sooner. Always. I didn’t know it was putting you through so much pain.” 

Sanji blinks slowly at the admission, his mind still stuck on the fact that Zoro apologized to him and Zoro called his name. “You don’t care about my pain.” 

The startled look on Zoro’s face looks out of place. 

“You really think that?”

“It’s how it should be.”

“Why?” Anger drips back into Zoro’s shaken voice and Sanji feels slightly more grounded. “Because I’m an asshole who doesn’t give a shit about anything but himself?”

“No. Because I’m an asshole who doesn’t deserve people giving a shit about him.”

“You're not an asshole. You’re just an idiot.” 

“Hey!”

Before Sanji could voice his objection, Zoro steps forward and cradles his face in his large hands. The touch is foreign; he doesn’t get touched like this often or at all. Luffy’s robbery skin feels different; like an inevitability he made peace with a long time ago; Chopper’s touch is clinical, but much safer and warmer than the doctors back in Germa. Nami-san’s and Robin-chan’s touch is divine, he doesn’t let himself truly feel it or his cells would disintegrate into nothing. Anyone else touching him, whether with the intention to hurt, heal or arouse makes him want to crawl out of his own skin. 

Sanji wants to melt into Zoro’s touch and the intensity of the wayward desire startles him. 

“I’m not Judge or your shitty brothers. If anyone doesn’t deserve kindness, it’s them. From what I've gathered, they were the real monsters, hurting you in a way nothing has ever been able to hurt you. Yet you forgave them. You spared them. You fucking saved their fucking worthless lives! Tell me why every fucking shitbag on the whole Four fucking Blues deserves your kindness but you?”

Sanji feels the claws of panic digging into the walls of his throat again. Zoro knows about his past. He knows about the Vinsmokes, the experimentations, the abuse, and what happened on the Whole Cake Island. All this time Sanji was trying to come clean, only to be stopped by Zoro’s disinterest, and now he just knows? How did he know? Did Luffy tell him? Or did he overhear bits and pieces from hushed conversations, just like how Sanji knows about his past? What else does he know about him? What does he think of him? Does he hate him? Is he disappointed in him? Or did none of the revelations mean anything to him?

All these thoughts are hurting his head, and Zoro is still holding onto his face like it’s the One Piece and the wild, worried look in his steel eye cuts into Sanji’s madly beating heart like an unnecessarily sharp blade through a sponge cake. 

“I don’t know…I don’t know how to handle it.” 

“Doesn’t mean you don’t deserve it.” 

“I’m designed to be a monster. My mother died trying to impede the process but I can’t hold it off forever. Someday, even you saying my name won’t bring me back.” 

Someday I will become what I hate. And my name will lose all meaning. And I will lose everything I hold dear. And everything I hold dear will despise me. You will despise me. And I will lose you. I will lose. 

And you are my last line of defense. 

“I’ll find new ways.” 

“No. You have to kill me before I get too strong for anyone to be able to do so. There’s no saving me. Plus, you promised.”

“I didn’t promise shit.”

Sanji feels the force of the words like a haki-coated punch to the gut, staggering him backward and out of Zoro’s painfully tight grasp.   

“No…”, he says weakly, his unlit cigarette falling out of his slack mouth to the ground like his heart dropping into the pit of his stomach. 

Sanji must look like an exorcised demon; Zoro doesn’t look even remotely guilty about it. 

“You called me in the middle of a fight and told me to kill you. I thought you were in one of those self-destructive moods of yours. I thought you were suicidal and I was too far away to stop you from doing anything stupid. I had to make sure you wouldn’t get yourself killed before I saw you again. It was the only thing I could think of to keep you safe.” 

Keep him safe , when all this time…all this time Sanji had thought…no. No no no no no no—

He is spiraling, the tendrils of a panic attack curling seductively around his throat, slowly, almost lovingly strangling him. He can barely register Zoro’s hands back on his shoulders, his hot breaths ghosting over his chilled skin, his steel eye widened in concern. 

“Sanji.” His name. That’s his name. On Zoro’s lips that Sanji imagined to taste like blood and steel. It means something. It used to mean something. Everything. 

“Do you really think me capable of truly hurting you, let alone killing you?”

Sanji is too busy warding off a persistent panic attack to find the suitable words to answer Zoro.

No; you would never hurt me. You would save me. You promised to save me. Save me!  

“When all I ever wanted was a chance…a chance to show you how much you fucking mean to me.”

“I…” Sanji chokes on his overflowing feelings. Zoro…did Zoro just confess? No. 

“You love me?” He asks faintly, stuttering breaths whizzing past his cracked lips. 

“I love you.” So matter of fact, as if it’s as obvious and natural as the sun in the sky, beating down on their sweat-soaked skins with a personal vengeance. 

Why now? Why the fuck now? Why ever at all? This wasn’t supposed to happen at all.

“Fuck. FUCK.” He screams and grabs at his hair, yanking hard enough to wince. “I'm sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.” I thought you didn’t love me for yourself. I thought you were different from Luffy and everyone else. I forced you into a fucking death pact and you loved me. Fuck. 

“You weren’t supposed to know.” And with a smirk dripping in self-deprecating humor, “It was my most shocking secret after all.”

Funny how both of their most shocking secrets were revealed at the same time. Funnier still how Zoro was right. 

The revelation had taken Sanji completely by surprise. 

Sanji drops heavily on the ground, putting his head on his knees, fingers still tangled in the mess of his hair. 

“If you refuse to do this for me, then…I don’t have anyone else.” 

It’s pathetic, the way his voice quivers. It’s harrowing; The realization that he’s on his own now. That when the time comes and there’s nothing left of him to be called his own, when compassion and death will elude him like the plague, there’s no one to plunge a blade into his rotting heart out of mercy. 

Zoro will show him no mercy. Because Zoro fucking loves him. 

“Wrong. You have all of us. We are all here for you the way you’ve been here for all of us. You don’t need to fight your demons on your own.”

Sanji raises his head, considering Zoro with a beseeching, broken look. “If I lose myself…”

“You will never lose us.”

“Anyone who cares about me ends up truly hurt or dead.”

“You’re not the only one with loss.” 

Sanji lets out a wet laugh that sounds awfully like a sob. “You’re one stubborn motherfucker, you know that, right?”

“As if you’d want me any other way.” 

“Who said I want you at all?” 

Zoro takes a few steps toward Sanji’s seated, defeated form and drops down heavily next to him; his broad shoulder touching his, the warmth radiating from his body dream-like and tantalizing. 

Sanji has fantasized about this moment for so long his mind can’t accept it as reality. 

“You trust me. You care about me. You always have my back even when I’m being extremely annoying. You risk your life to save mine over and over again. You make the best onigiri in the whole fucking world for me even though I never show any appreciation for it. You put your fucking life in my hands and asked me to end it. No one who’d ever said they loved me had ever done half of the things you do for me. What other conclusion is there to make other than you love me?” 

In another world and timeline, where Sanji’s brain isn’t trying to leak out of his ears, he would’ve asked, ‘who were the ones that said they loved you and you didn’t believe them?’ but he is too winded and feels a little too fragile to venture down a path that leads to uncomfortable answers; so he asks instead, “And you thought to never mention that you knew, why?”

Zoro looks bashful. “I thought…I thought you were wrong for choosing me. I thought someone else would love you better. For the right reasons. You looked happier with some random woman than you’d ever done with me.”

Sanji snorts, resting his chin on his knees and looking to the side. “Happiness is overrated anyway.” 

“Not for you. Isn’t it your whole thing, trying to make people happy?” 

Sanji turns his head to look at Zoro again. “You make me happy.”

Zoro looks startled. And hopeful. And a little proud of himself.  It’s a good look on him. 

“I do?” 

“It’s true you can’t cook for shit and love being contrary just to annoy the hell outta me, but you make up for it in other ways.” 

“Such as?” 

“Such as promising to kill me because you thought it was the only way to keep me safe.”

“I’m not sorry. You’ll always mean more to me than your stupid brain can ever understand.” 

“Oh, please. I’m definitely smarter than you, mossball.” 

“Then prove it.” 

Sanji could tell him about his most challenging recipes or the hundred ways of espionage and how to win a fight with only a 10 percent chance of success. But that’s not what Zoro is asking him. Sanji is smart enough to know that much. 

“You want me to believe that I should extend my kindness to myself. That if my bastard, apathetic brothers with all their cruelty deserve to live, so do I. Was that smart enough for you?” 

“Will you do it though? Treat yourself with the same kindness?”

And stop talking about monsters and death pacts for fuck’s sake, goes without saying, but Sanji can read it easily in Zoro’s frustrated tone and furrowed brows. 

“The best I can promise you right now is that I’ll accept your help, any help, to get better.” 

Zoro’s sigh of relief makes Sanji feel a little warmer inside. “Well, as long as you’re not being a suicidal asshat, it’s good enough for me.”

Sanji takes offense at that. “I’m not suicidal. I just believe in the liberating power of self-sacrifice.”

“Who taught you that?”

“Taught me what?”

“That self-sacrifice is liberating?”

“It’s…isn’t it how you show your love?”

Sanji thinks about his mother, Zeff, Luffy, hell, even Zoro himself. The greatest act of love has ever only meant sacrifice to him. He used to hate it; to hate himself for what his mother and Zeff did for him without even asking if he was okay with it. But then he learned the only way to repay that kind of love is a sacrifice of the same magnitude. If he couldn’t make up for the sacrifice with one of his own, he couldn’t live with himself. The guilt and self-loathing would tear him apart. Surely, it feels the same for everyone. Sanji isn’t that special.

“There are other ways to show your love, idiot-cook.”

“Don’t talk like you wouldn’t, like you haven’t sacrificed yourself for the people you love.”

For me, whom you love. Fuck. 

“I wouldn’t call it sacrifice, and it’s my last resort, unlike you who’d throw your life away at the drop of a hat like it’s worth nothing.”

(It doesn’t matter what you call it; it is what it is; the decision to forfeit your humanity and your life and your dream for the sake of others. Love, sacrifice, duty, heroism; at the end of the day, when it comes to protecting the ones you love, you’d do anything. In time, they’ll understand. They have to.)

“It’s not worth nothing. It’s worth something. That’s how I can trade it with something else; something as valuable and precious.”

“Your life…it’s invaluable,” to me, Sanji hears it loud and clear in his pained voice and traces the unsaid words on Zoro’s cracked lips. “You can’t trade it with anything else,” not even my life, or anyone else’s, “because nothing is precious enough to be traded with it.” You’re precious to me. “You hear me, idiot-cook?” Sanji?

Sanji’s heart feels close to bursting. 

“I didn’t know you could come up with so many different ways to say you love me.”

Zoro snorts. “One of them has to finally make it click in your stupid head that I do.”

“I…I love you, too.”

He sounds choked-off and his breath stutters through his dry mouth like needles, and suddenly Zoro bursts into laughter; so light and joyful and carefree that something blossoms in Sanji’s heart and makes it bleed. 

He loves Zoro. And Zoro…Zoro called him Sanji. 

“Hey, Sanji,” Zoro drops his hand on his stooping shoulder, giving it a firm squeeze. Sanji wonders if Zoro’s going to keep calling him Sanji and touching him so casually to make up for the lost time, and if Sanji’s ever going to stop him. Probably not. “We’re gonna find the All Blue and you’ll think back at this moment and be so fucking grateful I made you promise to live instead of you making me promise to kill you.”

His mother sacrificed herself so he could feel. Zeff sacrificed his leg so he could find the All Blue. Zoro exchanged Sanji’s sacrifice with his own so he could live. And Luffy starved himself so Sanji could finally accept that he was loved beyond what his trauma had ever allowed him to see. 

In a way, all the people he met were his saviors…and he tried to vanish without hurting any of them. But that’s not an option anymore. That never was an option, despite what he had made himself believe. 

“We?”

“We.”

***

Zoro doesn’t taste like blood and steel, Sanji finds out. He tastes like onigiri and sake, as they kiss for the first time right after their shared dinner in the dimly-lit Aquarium Bar. He tastes like hope, like love and so much like happiness it thrums under Sanji’s skin like molten blood. 

He deserves this, Zoro tells him as his calloused hands drag through his hair and his mouth trails wet and smoldering down his chest. He deserves this, Sanji believes him as his soul, shattered and incomplete, finally settles back into his body and he breathes in. 

Sanji exists. 

“Do not mourn the waves, the leaves and the clouds. Because even in darkness the wonder and beauty of the world never leaves. It's always there, just waiting to be seen again."

• Hellblade