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He is seventeen. The misting sprinkle that warns of Zunesha's eruption rain has already started, and Pedro has nowhere to hide. Thousands of gallons of water are raining down and attempting to wash him away, into the sea, into oblivion. He is sliding along the ground, the torrent dragging him through the forest. His hands grab hold of a narrow trunk, and he holds on for dear life. As the deluge begins to abate, his hands relax their death grip on the wood, deep claw marks torn into the rough bark.
He wipes water out of his eyes and off of the fur on his face. He looks around, disorientated by the cataclysm that had nearly taken his life. At his feet is a shell. Well, half a shell. It stands out against the grey and green of the forest floor, bright yellow with swirls of black. His hand reaches out to grab it, almost without realizing he's doing it. It is warm, and vibrates slightly in his hand. He's heard of these.
He is twelve. The air is filled with the sounds of cooking, popping, sizzling, chopping. Steam from a pot of boiling clam soup fills every nook and cranny of the kitchen, as sous chefs bustle around. Sanji brings a step stool with him and sets it up next to the counter, attempting to taste the soup. He reaches for a vessel of salt and begins to sprinkle more into the soup, hoping to add more flavor.
"STOP THAT," a shout rings out from somewhere on his left, and he turns to look. Boiling stock, clams, potatoes, and carrots, stream out soaking the wooden countertops and draining down through the floorboards. "LOOK WHAT YOU DID! YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO FIX THIS," shouts the angry sous-chef.
He rushes to the back room to fetch more soup supplies, hoping to avoid the ire of Zeff. His hands are laden with the makings of a new soup and he deposits them on the counter. A pot of water is set on the fire to bring it to boil, and he adds various herbs and bullion to begin forming the new stock. He chops the potatoes and carrots and adds them to the soup. He picks up clam after clam, shucking them into a bowl. Near the bottom of the pile, is a half shell unlike the rest of the clams in the batch. It's a strange color, yellow with black spots, and a streak of orange near the seam.
Sanji begins to toss it into the trash before a hand catches his wrist, and his adopted father growls, "you'll want to hang onto that, little eggplant."
He is thirty-two. Pedro gasps for breath, blood pooling from the multiple gashes on his face, arms, and body. The poison that that monster Jack released is filling up his lungs and drawing out whatever remaining strength he has. Everywhere around him is slaughter. His leaders—Inurashi and Nekomamushi—are tied up and crucified, bleeding their last.
His hands grab onto the dirt, attempting to drag himself… somewhere. Away from here. Energy fades from his body as he sees shadowy shapes approaching out of the fog. "Hey! You're not with them-gara are you?"
He is twenty-one. Sanji holds a handkerchief to his face to keep the poison from getting in. The furry man before him glares in his direction, blood streaming down his face, looking mere minutes from death. "My name… is Pedro… Please help me," is all he can get out before fading into unconsciousness.
Sanji and his companions do what they can to help, neutralizing the poison and carrying the injured animal people back to their village. He looks around at many of the injured people, trying to identify who was causing the shell in his pocket to twitch and shake, as it had been since he arrived.
As the days pass, and Chopper's doctoral skills begin to help the village heal, Sanji continues his search. "It's still shaking," he says to himself, looking down at the shell, "so she must be nearby."
The days pass slowly, as they always do when one is healing, but they seemed even longer than normal. Pedro is laying in bed, still too weak to stand, and watches the world go by. Years ago, while traveling with the Nox Expedition, he had fashioned the yellow shell into a pendant of sorts that he could wear around his neck. It never did much of anything, even though it was supposed to point him towards the person he was destined to be with. It just hung there as a gaudy yellow reminder that he was all alone.
But now, it is alive, shaking, shifting. He doesn't remember when it started, but ever since he woke up from the medically induced coma, it was on the move. It only took him a few days to figure out who it was reacting to, it had to be one of the newcomers. It stays steady when the tiny tanuki named "Chopper" is near, tending to his wounds and taking his temperature. It stays steady when the bone man walks past on his way outside. It stays steady when the orange haired "Nami" is at his bedside, refreshing a glass of water.
It only reacts when the cook is nearby. When he brings Pedro food. When he picks up the plate and asks how it was. When he walks up and down the rows of injured minks like he's shopping, staring down at his own shell.
The physical hurt is feeling better, but watching him make leering remarks… Watching him grab and poke at the injured warriors around him. Watching as blood drips from his nose. That hurt worst of all.
It has been weeks, and Sanji still hasn't found his mate. Still hasn't found the lovely lady that would make him an honest man. Maybe this shell thing was broken?
He sits on the edge of the room, staring down at the insolent object, still insisting that the one for him was nearby. She wasn't. He checked. Twice. Every single sexy mink temptress either rejected him outright or did not have a shell matching his.
He looks around the room. Many of the beds are now empty, the mink that had been recuperating there now recovered enough to leave to collect food or repair their damaged village. His eyes scan the room until…
He rests his eyes upon that first mink that had spoken to him. Pedro has not yet fully healed, he took quite a beating when Jack the Drought was here, and is only just now able to sit up and look around. And Pedro is staring directly back at Sanji, eyes filled with rage.
"What's your problem?" Sanji asks casually, hoping to diffuse the situation. He really wasn't interested in fighting right now, but if that's what he has to do.
"What's my-gara problem?" Pedro winces as he lifts himself up from the bed, legs swinging to the side so he can face Sanji directly. "You-gara are my problem!" Sanji's eyes are wide with shock, "I've been waiting for fifteen years to meet the person I'm supposed to spend the rest of my-gara life with. Fifteen years, and now—NOW I meet you-gara and…"
"And what?" The shock in his eyes is tinged with disgust as he realizes the man he's supposed to be with.
"AND you're a philandering, sexist, creep of a man that can't even for a second consider that you might not be meant to be with a woman." Pedro's eyes are shaking, livid and intense.
"Well, I—"
"I don't care! I've watched you-gara these past weeks. I've watched you-gara come on to every female mink in our tribe. I don't want it." He grabs the shell from around his neck, never taking his eyes off of Sanji's, and crushes it into dust. The remaining powder floats down to the floor, and Pedro returns to his bed, pulling his sheet over his head.
Outside is quiet, but the words his apparent soulmate had said to him mere minutes ago are still ringing in his head. "Sexist?" He says to himself with a scoff, before thinking back on his behavior these last few weeks. "Creep?" He wonders, looking back on all the rejected advances, and his refusals to accept them. He sits down on a large rock at the edge of a clearing of trees, and stares up at the sky.
It's blue, as blue as it has ever been. The clouds gently sway back and forth with the steps of the enormous elephant. He pulls out the shell from his pocket, now recognizing the patterning as that of Pedro's. A crack has formed on the edge of the shell, where the clam's muscle would be.
The crack begins to spread, splintering outwards in a million fractal lines, until the entire shell is covered. His hand shifts slightly as he looks closer at the shell, and it crumbles to dust.
It's been a year since that day. Sanji never figured out the words to apologize to his once soulmate. He thought he would have time to figure it out, but soon after the incident, he was called away to Whole Cake Island.
When he was unwillingly promised to the Big Mom princess Pudding, he tried not to fall back on the behaviors that had seen him called a creep. When he was later rescued by his crew, he learned that the mink, the one that should have been his soulmate, had sacrificed himself in the effort.
He stands aboard the Thousand Sunny, looking back at the Totto archipelago as it drifts off into the distance. He swears to himself to do better. For Pedro.