Chapter Text
“Sanji!” Luffy tells him, sometime after learning to listen to the Voice of All Things, “Make me meat that doesn’t have any meat in it.”
For a moment, Sanji is overwhelmingly baffled. Luffy’s late-night excursions into the kitchen while Sanji stays up working his hands in the quiet like he is still a child are rarely worth more than a glace and an appeasement, but usually, Luffy does not open like that. This time, Sanji turns on his heel to look at him fully, standing there half-gold in the entryway.
“You mean flesh?” Sanji clarifies, and then, when Luffy nods, “All meat has flesh, Captain.”
Luffy looks at him like it’s obvious. “Sanji will figure out how to do it,” he declares simply. And that’s that. “You’re my cook.”
He says it like something he gets to decide, because it is; Sanji would not have it any other way.
“Oh,” Sanji says. And then, when the sentences settle tangibly enough for their meaning to set in, something jolts up his spine. His instincts as a chef kick in, “Is this a one off thing?”
“It’s a forever thing,” Luffy says happily, and easily.
Just like that.
Sanji is a cook. He knows how to cater to what people do and don’t eat. He knows how to ask what someone wants to eat and then make it for them. Sanji lets those instincts fill him, because he doesn’t know what to do, and he doesn’t want to flounder.
“You’re vegetarian now?” But he lets himself raise a brow and crook a smile. Then, when Luffy just blinks, Sanji searches his mind for what else is could possibly be. Thinks, thinks—tries, “Vegan?”
It’s not that big of a difference, to imagine Luffy vegan or imagine him vegetarian. Both still exclude meat, which is still the most—absurd—well—
Luffy blinks again.
Sanji stares.
“I wanna eat food,” Luffy provides, unhelpfully.
“Vegetarian means no meat,” Sanji says. “Vegan means no meat or dairy or eggs or honey or other animal products. People also call it plant-based. Is it one of those?”
“Ohhhh,” says Luffy. Then, “You know so much about eating stuff, Sanji. It’s the second one!”
“Thanks,” Sanji says, you know so much curling warmly in his chest, where it still feels like he’s had the breath knocked out and replaced with something fizzy and gone. Even though people compliment him all the time, and much more eloquently. “Alright, then. Okay.”
“Mmmm.” Luffy’s eyes look dark, dark, dark in the night, and golden with the stove-light. They sweep the kitchen, then return to the sky. He’s come down through the ladder-hatch from the deck, and one hand is still on the Adam-wood. He tacks on, almost like an afterthought “It’s not just food, though.”
Sanji is taken aback for what feels like the dozenth time in less than two minutes. “It isn’t?”
“It’s just what it is!” Luffy rocks on his feet. “But I don’t know what it is. You could ask Robin!”
Well.
“What do you mean you don’t know what it is,” Sanji says, which is a stupid thing to ask, because Luffy’s answers can be cryptic on a good day, even when the question is simple, and he hasn’t outright admitted to not knowing the answer. And Sanji barely knows what they’re talking about. His clothes feel tight, fabric bunched at the elbows. And—“Why would Robin know if you don’t know?” A horrible though occurs, and he wants to not say it, because it’s stupid, but just does anyway—Luffy has that kind of effect; “...Did you tell her about this first?”
Whatever this is.
Luffy blinks again. His eyes are wide and open like a sea-king.
“Of course not, silly,” Luffy says. “I told you first. Sanji’s my cook!”
Something that impacts what Luffy does or doesn’t eat. And Luffy eats not only two, nor three, nor even four meals a day—it’s like he eats all day, until it’s hard to distinguish a snack from a meal and a meal from a feast. Sanji is always making his captain something, and he doesn’t mind, because Sanji is always making something.
Relief sinks heavy and loose down Sanji’s stomach. Luffy told him first.
Still, that leaves the question—“Then...”
“Robin just knows everything,” Luffy answers. “She’s an archaeologist!”
“Right,” Sanji says.
That’s not really what being an archaeologist is, he thinks distractedly, but Luffy knows that and it doesn’t matter. Sanji is thinking everything distractedly. He’s still going half by reflex as a chef, and half by reflex as a crew-mate.
What the fuck, some part of him is saying, but the rest is thinking: meat without meat, meat without meat.. soy? Wheat protein? Seitan. Others? Mushrooms are mentioned as an alternative… would they need to be marinated? Marinated with what?
There’s so much he needs to do. His mind cards through half a dozen potential alternatives. Brings up half a dozen half-forgotten memories of plant based cooking that he’d made note of, because he’s a chef, and that’s what he does when he sees something interesting in his field. And he needs to coordinate with Chopper about Luffy’s health, because as a cook Sanji is a decent nutritionist, but Chopper is the doctor. And he needs to coordinate with Nami, because this is going to effect their budget, because it is going to effect their food supplies. They’re a pirate crew. At sea. In the middle of the New World. Where islands are unpredictable, commerce is disturbed, and the sea is a bounty that always gives; they eat a lot of fish because fish are easy to acquire. It offsets the need for a huge storage of food, especially with Luffy’s absurdly high calorie needs, because fish can be brought in mere hours or minutes before a meal. But if Luffy…
“—Why?” Sanji finds himself saying. It’s a completely unprofessional question, but he isn’t serving at a restaurant, he’s looking at his friend, savior, captain—Luffy. “I mean—” he clears his throat, “why the change?”
Because Luffy doesn’t reprimand questions, and always gives an answer.
He always answers straightforwardly, straight to-it. Despite this, or maybe because of it, somehow whatever he says is still so often so hard to understand.
This time is no exception:
“Because I can hear everyone now,” Luffy answers simply.
Sanji tries to make sense of that. He cards through his memory. He thinks: what did I miss. He remembers—Voice of All Things, Robin filled him in on, later, after everything, in the dredges of Wano. Sanji asks, “Because of the Voice of All Things?”
“I could always hear something,” Luffy says.
“Okay,” Sanji says. “Then why—...” he doesn’t know how to complete the question.
“Because I can hear what they’re all saying!” Luffy laughs, for the first time tonight. The ladder-hatch is still open. There’s starlight on his straw hat. “I know how to listen now!”
“Okay,” Sanji says, again. Thinks, again, about everything he needs to do, because it’s the simplest thing to think about. “What should I do with the meat? Most of what we have stored is for you, Captain.”
Inexplicably, it just makes Luffy laugh again.
“Don’t worry,” he says with his voice like a sea-breeze, “someone will eat it!”
By the time Sanji realizes what Luffy means, Luffy is already gone.
He’s abandoned the kitchen for the deck, and left the hatch open behind him. He left like the sun. He stole dried fruit on his way out. Sanji doesn’t try to follow Luffy out to the deck because there’s no point. He isn’t even sure the question he wants to ask, if he wants to ask one at all. Sanji just stands at the counter, at the cutting board. There’s a low bubbling boil filling the air, from the small pot on the stove. Like a ringing in his ears but more pleasant if just as familiar. Don’t worry, someone will eat it; I can hear everyone now. What Luffy meant—
Luffy meant ‘someone’ in the same way that Luffy meant ‘everyone.’
Abruptly, Sanji notices the knife in his hand and the scent of blood. He places the knife down smoothly, and slowly, and carefully. He wants to startle, but it’s his kitchen, and he will not startle at the sight of a knife with blood on it. His motion is practiced.
Sanji has not cut himself, because of course he hasn’t cut himself. The blood is from the fish on the cutting board that he no longer knows what to do with.
...That isn’t quite true, though.
‘Someone will eat it,’ huh?
Sanji gathers all meat from the kitchen—the fridge, the pantry, the counters. He wipes down the cutting board. He thinks about what he needs to do. He needs to coordinate with Chopper, Nami—Robin. He’ll figure out what to do with the rest of everything later, but tonight he can deal with the meat, at least. When everything is gathered into a large bucket, he brings it out of the kitchen, easily, up onto the empty deck. Everyone else on the ship is asleep, or unseen, but the waters are alive because the ocean doesn’t sleep. ‘Someone’—someone is always awake.
He knows what to do with it, because Luffy told him what to do with it.
The New World waters smell like salt and ozone and the bucket smells like blood. Sanji drops each dead fish into the moonlit ocean, and watches eyes peek up and out at him, and teeth snap around his bounty.
Sanji watches each and every piece go, because he does not like food wasted.
They probably need it more, he reasons; the sea creatures lurking around the Sunny are more than likely carnivores, after all, while humans like him are not, and can mostly eat whatever they really want.
Back at the Baratie, there was a certain customer.
The restaurant had vegan and vegetarian options—any good chef would know at least a little about plant based cooking, it’s in the job—but there was this certain customer who only ever got the vegan ones. She came in every other week. Sanji thought she was beautiful, and remembered all her orders. When he offered to make some of the meat-heavy ones plant based for her, she had been happy, and so Sanji was happy. He wished every woman he ever fed would be happy with it, and mostly they were, but there was this one week where she just looked so sad. She came in, and she ordered, and when she was waiting on the order, the menu was still in her hands, and she looked out the window by her table to the bright world outside where a school of fish was dancing, and just looked so sad.
It was unprofessional, maybe, but Sanji couldn’t help himself. “Miss,” he said. “Are you alright?”
“Oh,” she said, “I’m alright.”
“We have a discount for beautiful women,” Sanji said, “special discount, just for today. Half off, for people like you. The cook will even listen to your troubles!”
It almost made her smile, but only almost. “You’re very sweet,” she said, which made him preen, and one of the kitchen chefs peer out to give him a suspicious look. “But you’ll think it’s stupid.”
Sanji denied this immediately, and felt himself become nearly upset that she would think that. “Never.”
“Well it’s just—” she sighed, and her gaze slid down to the menu in her loose fingers. “I—it’s because the whole menu isn’t vegan.”
Sanji was happy to hear this complaint, because he felt it was something he could fix. “Don’t worry,” he said proudly, “any dish can be made vegan on request. You can pick anything.”
“No, it’s not that,” she said, and to Sanji’s sinking feeling, looked even more upset than before. “It’s because it isn’t vegan in the first place.”
Sanji didn’t understand. It must have been obvious.
“Oh you’ll think I’m stupid,” she repeated. “But it’s just—” she gestured to the fish on the menu, and the glittering ocean outside the window, and the fish jumping in and out with splashes, “it’s not like they’re just floating vegetables, you know?”
Sanji had bristled at the time, because it felt like an insult to Zeff, who made the menus, and made the restaurant, and made Sanji into the person he was. Half a globe away and looking at the New World ocean with his legs over the guard-rail and the smokey warmth of a cigarette in his lungs, Sanji still bristles now.
It’s a stupid thing to bristle about. A jaw snaps in the water below; of course a fish is not a vegetable. Luffy said ‘someone’ and ‘everyone.’
...When did Luffy decide that?
No, really, when did Luffy decide that? Robin said that Nami said that Luffy heard the Voice of All Things on Zou, while Sanji was—and if Luffy made this change on Zou, then how long has Sanji not been feeding him right? Has he not been feeding him? Has Luffy been eating right? Has he not been eating what Sanji has made him? He ate like normal in Totto Land, and on the way to Wano. Sanji is sure of it. And on Wano Luffy ate rice, and apples, and sweet red bean paste, and dumplings, and…
did he eat meat? Or eggs? Honey?
Sanji can’t remember. Sanji can’t remember.
Sanji can’t remember a single instance when he did. He tries to remember if Luffy’s eaten any since they left Wano, too, but he can’t find any example of that, either.
In his chest, Sanji’s bruised heart jolts against his ribs and into his throat. It is Sanji’s job to feed Luffy, because Sanji is his cook; Luffy made that very clear.
But he already asked if Luffy told anyone else first. And Luffy said: Of course not.
That’s something.
That’s a lot, actually, so much he barely has space to think about it. He should think about what he needs to do, instead, so he does. Sanji! Make me meat that doesn’t have any meat in it. That’s what his Captain said. It’ll be a challenge—the shift, but it’s a whole field of culinary to explore, too.
There’s a kind of excitement to that, too.