Chapter Text
He didn’t have the exact words for it. Not yet. But Sanji knew that things had been different since Sabaody, the second time around.
There was one less eye in the mix, for starters. When he’d first seen the scar bisecting the swordsman’s brow, the world had swayed for a moment before Sanji could remember to take his next breath. It wasn’t that the swordsman’s face was ruined, not at all. It was the fact that the scar was already healed over, silvered-pink. There was no blood—no angry, leaking wound. The thought of something like this—this loss, the subsequent brutal recovery, the aftermath—occurring in Zoro’s life without Sanji having known…it felt, well, wrong.
The feeling tasted like curdled milk pooled at the base of Sanji’s throat. It distracted him for a beat before he remembered to re-don his comfortable role of crewmate, rival, antagonist, and drag a befuddled Zoro back to the Sunny.
It was comfortable like it always was, of course. There was relief in slipping back into their dynamic. Comfort in the way the sole of his shoe rang against the flat of a blade, in the way the next retort was always primed and ready to fly off his tongue.
But something was off. Something was decidedly, conspicuously off. He found himself faltering in their bickering, avoiding eye contact where before he would have stood his ground. And the swordsman was looking at him in this weird way. Sanji knew he hadn’t grown a second head in Momoiro (though he had learned some…interesting and colorful things about himself). But there was this feeling now, this prick at the nape of his neck, and he’d whip around and find Zoro there, lifting weights or pretending to sleep or otherwise wasting oxygen, and know that he’d been staring. The few times Sanji caught him in the act he hadn’t been able to parse the look—the swordsman’s eyes were wide and almost alarmed, mouth slightly open like he had something to say but had forgotten how to construct a sentence in the common tongue—not that Sanji would put it past the mosshead.
It wasn’t something Sanji was going to bring up. The two of them didn’t exactly talk. Midway through Fishman Island he decided to chalk it up to a Mihawk-induced loss of brain cells already in short supply. If Sanji found himself swinging his leg harder or yelling more or just avoiding the swordsman altogether in favor of trying to simmer down by himself in the pantry and figure out where the fuck this new itch under his skin had come from…
That was an unrelated problem.
…
Zoro, for his part, had known that it wasn’t going to be easy, seeing Sanji again.
For the first year and some change on Kuraigana (after the initial shock, and anger, and mourning for Ace and Luffy and the crew and the time they could have had together and the ways he knew he’d let them down) he’d been able to push the cook far from his thoughts. He’d always been practically minded, and there was no use thinking about the idiot when he knew he wouldn’t be seeing him for two whole years.
This worked, and worked well, for a while.
Then, one evening over dinner, Perona asked him, “Well Zoro, I suppose it’s only a few more months—are you still determined to reunite with your gangly little crew?”
Until she asked, Zoro had been content with digging into his dinner and turning over strategies in his head for besting the Humandrill, who’d recently developed an armed cavalry. But then the image came to him, unbidden:
The cook at the stove, glancing over his shoulder as a lit cigarette dangled in his free hand.
Well Mosshead, did you miss me?
He could practically feel the blood freeze in his veins. The cook—Sanji—in front of him again. The long lines of him. The smell of tobacco and linen as he breezed past. He’d almost forgotten the constant itching in his fingers from wanting to touch.
Zoro, despite all appearances and a severe directional disability, was far from an idiot. He knew exactly what it meant that he thought about his crewmate this way. What is meant when his eyes couldn’t help but follow the cook’s long fingers as they danced across a cutting board. When he had to wipe a dumb grin off his face at the end of every sparring session. Zoro was a man of few words, yes, but he wasn’t stupid. He’d known that first minute after their lanky waiter at the Baratie asked for the crew’s order exactly what the spike in his pulse meant.
When getting to know the cook meant getting to know his kindness, his grace, the way he was always so ready to see the best in everyone and disregard himself, the way he was quick to love and quicker to defend the people he held dear…well, Zoro wasn’t in the practice of lying to himself either.
Didn’t mean he had to agonize over it, or think about it too much in general. It was never going to happen. Sanji was straight, and painfully oblivious, and determined to get on Zoro’s nerves in every possible way.
Zoro was content having him as a nakama. It was beyond good enough—it was great. What they had going with Luffy and the crew was nothing short of a delightful, chaotic miracle, and he wasn’t going to mess that up over a pretty face and a misplaced crush.
He spent months on Kuraigana battling back nerves. What would Zoro say to the cook, after all this time? After Ace’s death and the crew’s separation? With what happened on Thriller Bark still fresh in the recent history of their knowing each other?
He worried Sanji had changed. He worried they’d lose the easy fallback of their rivalry. After he lost the eye, he worried Sanji would find him ugly. He got angry at himself for worrying what Sanji thought of his appearance. He got angry at himself for thinking so much.
In the end, two months before his return to Sabaody, Zoro found peace in a single resolution: he was over it.
There was no use in being anything but over it. Sanji was unavailable and uninterested, and Zoro had bigger things to worry about than a stupid twinge in his stupid heart.
He would greet the blonde in Sabaody as a friend, and nothing more. They would continue on as they always had, and he would be the world’s greatest swordsman, and Luffy would be king of the Pirates. He would gaze upon the cook and see the tears in his eyes when he finally found the all blue, found his ocean, and he would feel nothing other than brotherly warmth and satisfaction.
Zoro had trained himself against cold, against hunger, against the harrowing shriek of Mihawk’s blade. Quashing any rebellion put up by his irreverent heart would be child’s play.
He held firm in this belief for months, and it comforted him through the voyage back to Sabaody; through lonely, antsy nights spent above Shakky’s bar before the rest of the crew arrived.
He held firm as he wandered the island’s bubbly groves, as he made his way onto the deck of the wrong ship, and as he emerged from the sea, groggy and disgruntled.
When he saw the man waiting for him—exasperated, smoking, gorgeous as ever and sporting–was that a goatee? Jesus—his resolve wavered, just a little.
As they made their way back to the ship and Zoro got a chance to realize all the new ways the cook filled out his suit, he felt a definite wobble.
And when Sanji threw a kick at him during their descent to Fishman Island and his eyes flashed with something new and white-hot and absolutely furious, all Zoro could think was
Aw, fuck.
…
So they continued on as they always had, more or less. Zoro counted his inability to tame his desires as another hurdle to master in training. Sanji seemed…fine. The same, if a little twitchy.
Fishman Island was a mess, and between battling drunken octopi and saving a country from undersea demolition, Zoro didn’t have much time to think about it.
The feast was a riot—seaweed wrapped everything and booze with a salty tang that zipped down the back of his throat like the first days of summer. Zoro enjoyed himself, watching happy and silent as Luffy stuffed his face and Usopp explained topside pyrotechnics to a confused Fukaboshi. Even the cook fawning over the giant mermaid felt right, if not mildly annoying. Like everything was the way it was meant to be.
It was after that, after breaching the surface of the New World and fleeing from assembled marines and finally, finally making it back to open ocean and the promise of a few uneventful hours, that it happened.
Sanji was in the kitchen preparing a welcome home dinner for the crew. As Brook regaled them with a song and Luffy bounced around enthusiastically fueled by the promise of meat, Zoro slipped into the kitchen quietly, hoping to snag a bottle of sake before his pre-dinner nap.
The cook glanced up, cigarette smoking between his lips. He looked at the swordsman for a moment, then back down at the pan he had on the stove. Zoro was instantly reminded of his imagined vision of the cook, a year ago on Kuraigana.
Well Mosshead, did you miss me?
He felt his face flush and his hackles rise. He shouldered his way towards the pantry, perhaps checking the cook a little too roughly as he passed by.
“Jesus Mosshead, just because you’re a little bigger now doesn’t mean you’ve got free reign to run people over.” The cook brushed at his slacks like they’d been dirtied. “Big brute.”
Zoro didn’t realize he was grinding his teeth until he’d whipped back around to face him.
“Prissy much?”
“Some of us put in the effort to maintain basic standards of hygiene.” Sanji’s eyes slid past him. “Where are you going?”
“Booze.”
“Fat chance.” Sanji replied. “I barely got the chance to restock on Sabaody, and I’m not wasting Neptune’s good stuff on you.”
Zoro’s hand found Wado’s hilt. “Try me, Curly.”
Sanji’s eyes flashed.
“With pleasure.”
His leg shot out towards Zoro’s head, and like that, they fell into the fight like the steps of a well–rehearsed dance. Zoro parried, Sanji flipped his sword up in the air with a pivot and a spin, bringing his heel down towards the swordsman’s collarbone. Zoro stepped back and slashed with the back of his blade, Sanji caught it on his shin and dropped to swipe his feet out from under him.
They went back and forth for a few minutes until they were both tired, breathing heavily. None of the surfaces or appliances in the kitchen had been so much as scratched—Zoro knew the rules. He resheathed Wado, already tired after the past few days’ mayhem and ready to call it a draw.
Sanji swung out one last halfhearted kick towards his head. Zoro caught it easily with his hand at the cook’s ankle.
The blond’s eyes met his, and for a moment, everything paused.
Zoro forgot his heaving breath, forgot the rest of the crew outside. Something in the cook’s expression was different. His eyes were wide, lips set in a tight line. He looked…fragile, almost. Strangely vulnerable. And angry. Very, very angry.
Still, he didn’t move, balanced on one leg with his ankle in Zoro’s grip. Zoro felt his thumb move slowly along the other man’s ankle, through the hair that grew there. Soft, he thought absently. In a daze, his thumb found the knobby bone of the cook’s ankle and circled it once. Twice. Almost a caress.
The cook’s expression slammed shut and he tore his leg out of Zoro’s grasp, turning and stalking out of the kitchen without a backwards glance.
Zoro was left staring at the palm of his hand.
What the fuck had just happened?