Work Text:
Olive oil
When Rayleigh first meets him, Roger has an accent.
His ‘r’s’ are always rolled, and whenever he says a word with a ‘k’ in it, he produces the sound way at the back of his throat, so that it kind of sounds like he’s choking. His ‘h’s’ always sound like he’s hissing.
Rayleigh’s never met someone from one of the clans before. He learns pretty quickly that Roger belongs to a clan on one of the arid islands in the westernmost reaches of East Blue, one of the few pockets left in the world which doesn’t speak the common tongue. His people, to this day, are still nomadic herders, living largely in isolation from the rest of East Blue. It’s partly by choice, and also partly because trade ships avoid the clan-ruled islands in the west—they know that their sales pitches will just fall on deaf, unimpressed ears. Ears which wouldn’t understand a single word of what they were saying, anyway. Apparently, Roger only began dreaming of leaving his homeland when a wayward pirate ship crashed on their shores and he caught sight of their fancy gold jewelry.
All that is to say, Rayleigh learns that the reason behind Roger’s thick accent is the fact that he didn’t grow up speaking the common tongue like most kids. He didn’t even grow up knowing how to read or write. When they first meet, he can scrawl his name messily and can read it, but nothing more. There was simply no need to know such things where he came from—what mattered was practical skill, the ability to wrangle horses and camels, the ability to use a sword, the ability to predict sandstorms before they hit. And who needs to know how to write a letter when all of your immediate relatives live together under the same tent? Who cares about reading a newspaper when the rest of the world has no bearing on your life? What Roger can do is recite centuries-old epic poetry for hours on end, exactly as his grandfather recited it. Rayleigh listens to him quietly sing it in the afternoons as they work side-by-side on the deck of his boat, not understanding a word but mesmerized nonetheless. He supposes there’s never been a need to write any of it down, not when there are always children like Roger to hear and remember it.
The only reason Roger knows any common tongue at all when they first meet is because he’s a quick learner. He’d been in Loguetown for a few years by then—he left his home at sixteen and he shouted his way onto Rayleigh’s boat when they were both nineteen. But that means that most of his speech is random slang and idioms he’s picked up from the beggars and other alley-dwelling folk in town. It’s the strangest thing—he knows every cuss word in the book, but doesn’t know the names of the days of the week. Rayleigh has to teach him the word “please.”
In their first few months of sailing together, Roger’s language blunders are some of the best parts of Rayleigh’s day. Perhaps it’s cruel of him to laugh, but sometimes the things Roger says are just so funny. Roger isn’t self-conscious either way—he always laughs right along with Rayleigh, totally unashamed. Rayleigh asks him once, while preparing dinner, what part of the chicken he wants, and, in an attempt to say “the breast,” Roger says, “the titty.” There’s one morning, after a few days of being lazy with personal grooming, in which Roger wants to ask Rayleigh to shave his stubble for him but doesn’t know how, and so he just says, “erase my face, please!” There’s another day when they’re docked in the port of Loguetown and a seagull feather drifts down onto the deck of the ship. Roger picks it up and proclaims excitedly, “Look, Ray—bird leaf!” Rayleigh can’t fucking get enough of it.
A miscommunication is actually what leads to them sleeping together for the first time. The first few months they sail together, they sleep separately. Rayleigh’s (stolen) boat has a hold, plus two tiny closets on deck which he fashions into bedrooms, one for him and one for Roger. Rayleigh hardly knows him at that point, so it seems appropriate. Roger is completely baffled by the concept of having his own room since, of course, he’s spent his whole life sharing a mattress on the floor of a tent with all his older brothers. He doesn’t adjust well—most of the night, he talks to Rayleigh through the wall between their rooms, and so the wall really may as well not be there at all for all the good it does giving Rayleigh peace and privacy. Sometimes, Roger drinks whiskey with Rayleigh in his room until very late in the night, and is always extremely reluctant to return to his own room. Clearly, he’s lonely in there.
So, when he hits Rayleigh with a question one morning, Rayleigh figures it’s just that benign loneliness talking.
“Hey Ray, wanna sleep with me tonight?”
Rayleigh’s heart softens, and he can’t help but imagine a young Roger curled up under a wool blanket with all his brothers, safe and cozy. Of course he would be uncomfortable in a closet all by himself, imprisoned by wood walls. And anyways, by now—half a year in—they’re pretty solid friends. Rayleigh trusts him, enjoys his company. In fact, he’s already beginning to notice intense feelings of loyalty for this kid bubbling up inside himself. He finds himself wanting to please Roger, to make him happy, to do anything he asks. So, Rayleigh sighs and says:
“Yeah, sure.”
Roger seems surprised by his answer, but genuinely delighted. Before sauntering off to work on the rigging, he cups Rayleigh’s cheek and brushes his thumb over his lips, leaving Rayleigh completely stunned and confused, wondering if he’d missed something.
It hits him later that night when they get into Rayleigh’s bed and Roger tackles him down onto his back and kisses him. Wanna sleep with me? Rayleigh grimaces, realizing his own misinterpretation of Roger’s words. Any apology dies on his lips pretty quickly, though, when Roger starts sucking love bites into the skin of his neck. Rayleigh finds himself wrapping Roger up in his arms and making encouraging noises to spur him on. Before he knows it, his pants are on the floor and they’re rubbing off against each other.
He can’t be blamed for getting caught up in the whirlwind of Roger’s passion. Roger is nigh impossible to say ‘no’ to on the best of days, and Rayleigh is no better than anyone else at resisting his magnetic pull. In fact, he might be the worst at it.
But, when Roger shifts and Rayleigh feels blunt, hard pressure nudging between his cheeks, he doesn’t hesitate to kick Roger in the gut and twist away from him.
“Whoa, whoa! Have you lost your damn mind? You can’t just stick it in dry!” he exclaims. Rayleigh’s never fucked a man before, never even thought about it really, but even he knows that. But Roger just blinks at him in confusion, still holding his dick in one hand. Rayleigh huffs.
“I’m not a girl, you knucklehead.”
“Well yeah, duh,” Roger says.
“I don’t make my own slick.”
“Ohhh! I get it! Just wait one second!” Roger scrambles out of bed and runs out of the room. All Rayleigh can do is laugh and shake his head, amused to no end that Roger apparently knew enough about sodomy to know that he could stick it in Rayleigh’s ass, but not enough to know that he’d need to get things wet first.
Roger returns with the bottle of olive oil they keep in the chest of cooking supplies in the hold. He brandishes it for Rayleigh’s approval, and as soon as Rayleigh nods, he’s back on the bed in a flash, eagerly clambering on top of him. Everything suddenly feels very real, and Rayleigh’s heart starts thundering. He reaches for Roger, who meets him halfway, and they tumble into the bedding together.
It’s good. Really good. Roger fucks him slow and deep, and the whole time, Rayleigh thinks about how absurd it is that when they first met, he told this man to fuck off, and now they’re having sex. By the end, the whole room smells like sweat and olive oil, and Rayleigh has never felt such pleasure in all his life.
“They don’t charge enough for this stuff,” Roger muses later, when they’re tangled up together all sated and happy. He’s holding the bottle of olive oil. “For the kind of things I just felt? Only ten berries? That’s a steal.”
Rayleigh laughs. “If they charged more than that, we’d go broke pretty quick.”
“Oh, are we gonna be using a lot of this stuff, then?” Roger drawls, grinning.
Rayleigh hides his face in Roger’s shoulder as he feels himself blushing.
They use a lot. A lot.
Seaweed
They’re in the North Blue the first time they get shipwrecked. It’s totally their own fault, too. They foolishly skirt too close to the North Pole, which might have worked out fine if they had a boat bigger than a junk, but despite amassing quite a lot of treasure over the past few years, they still haven’t upgraded from the boat Rayleigh had when they first met. They just never needed any extra space, and it would have been impossible to man a full-size galleon just the two of them anyways. Plus, Roger is sentimental.
So, when they end up in the churning inky-black water in the remotest part of North Blue, no amount of clever rigging can save their dinky little boat from being swallowed up by the massive waves. Which is exactly what happens. They end up in the frigid water in the middle of the night, choking on salt, unable to see in the darkness but knowing that their beloved boat and all its associated memories are slowly sinking to the bottom of the sea. The only solace Rayleigh gets is knowing that they just stored all their treasure in a secret cave on an island further south and it’s not heading to the sea floor along with the boat.
They’re strong swimmers, even in Arctic water, and they manage to reach a nearby (deserted) island after about an hour, close to dawn. By then, they’re both so exhausted that they drag themselves onto the beach and collapse right there. They sleep side-by-side in the soggy sand for a good long while.
When Rayleigh wakes, the sun is high in the sky, but it’s suffocated by blue-gray clouds. It’s still kind of chilly, even at midday, and he shivers as he clambers to his knees. The right side of his face has a coating of sand, which he wipes at as he assesses the current (absolutely fucked) situation.
The beach they’re sprawled out on is definitely a far cry from the picturesque beaches of East Blue. It’s littered with red and green seaweed and hulking boulders, and there’s a lingering aroma of rot. Up ahead, there’s not much vegetation—just moss-covered stones and dark emerald-green grass, permanently flattened down by the weight of an ever-present cold mist. Everything is silent—there are no animal calls or trills of insects. Just the lapping of the waves.
“Mmph.”
And a low grunt to Rayleigh’s right.
Rayleigh watches as Roger heaves himself upright, absolutely caked in sand. He spits a few times; it must be in his mouth.
“Have a nice nap?” Rayleigh asks, leaning in to help brush off the front of his damp shirt.
“Mm, yeah. I had a dream about an iguana,” Roger answers. “It was eating lettuce.”
“That’s nice.” Rayleigh didn’t realize how despondent he’d been feeling until Roger’s words spark a contrasting burst of amusement. He finishes brushing debris off his partner and leans closer to rest his head on his shoulder. Just for a little comfort. It makes Roger chuckle, and he presses his cheek against the top of Rayleigh’s head. Rayleigh’s stress melts away—at least, enough for him to clap his hands together and say:
“Alright then, let’s get to work.”
They forage for food and firewood. There’s not much of either, but they do find a field of fully-grown six-row barley that’s ready for harvest, as if the powers that be just couldn’t bear to let an already-spoiled Gol. D Roger go hungry. They also find a small stand of evergreen trees, but the wood is so damp that starting a fire with it takes more than an hour and results in a whole lot of rage and cussing on Rayleigh’s part. While he’s verbally abusing the makeshift fire pit, Roger builds a nice little shelter with the rest of the wood. In the evening, Rayleigh hulls the barley and makes some porridge, which Roger whines about like the brat that he is.
“It tastes boring….” He scoops some up with a piece of bark and lets it all plop back down into the bark bowl it came from, pouting.
“You’re spoiled, you know that?” Rayleigh retorts mildly.
“And whose fault is that, hmm?” Roger hits back with a smirk.
Rayleigh just grins because, damn it, he’s totally right.
That night, it rains, and it’s so fucking cold that all they can do is cling to each other in their hut and shiver. Rayleigh can’t help but dread the next three or four weeks it’ll take them to build a seaworthy boat.
Building the boat ends up taking way longer than that. The trees are scattered sparsely across the entire island—one or two on this hill, another couple on that hill—never just one dense grove. Collecting wood takes forever and costs a lot of energy because they have to drag the tree trunks all the way back to their camp from all the far-flung corners of the island. Stripping the trunks takes even longer because all they have is their pocket knives. Rayleigh has no earthly idea how they’re going to cut up the logs into planks. But they’ll have to, because a half-assed raft will never survive these churning Arctic waves. On top of all that, the weather is shit—it rains more often than not, and it’s frigid even at midday. Sure, they don’t need to worry about having fresh drinking water, but Rayleigh is definitely concerned about one or both of them catching pneumonia at night. Of course, all of their extra warm clothing is currently at the bottom of the sea.
In the end, though, none of that stuff is what makes their time on the island truly unbearable—it’s the absence of olive oil. They don’t realize its critical importance in their lives for the first few days when they’re focused wholly on survival, but once they get settled down and establish a solid plan for getting off the island, their minds naturally return to their infatuation with each other. And then the problem begins.
They’re spooning in the hut after a long, dull day of work, about a week into their involuntary stay on the island. Rayleigh’s fingers finally have some feeling back; they’d gone numb within about ten minutes of peeling bark off the soggy logs that morning and never really came back to life. There’s no blanket in the hut, but at least the walls block the wind. Plus, there’s a big, hot-blooded man curled up behind him who’s always warmer than a furnace. It’s almost nice. Rayleigh wiggles backwards, deeper into Roger’s embrace, and there’s an ensuing chuckle near the back of his neck.
“Cold?” Roger asks.
“Mm.”
Roger hugs him tighter and drapes a thigh over him for good measure. Rayleigh grins. Forget almost nice— it genuinely is nice.
They lay like that for a while, until Rayleigh notices something jabbing into the back of his thigh. He shifts to feel it out, realizes what it is, and laughs. Roger giggles and buries his face in Rayleigh’s hair.
“I like holding you!” Roger explains, as if he needs to justify himself.
Rayleigh just smiles bigger, flattered and flustered all at once. He cranes his neck so that they can kiss, and from there on, they slip effortlessly into the familiar mating dance that usually happens in these situations. They roll so that Rayleigh is on his stomach and Roger is laying on top of him, kissing and biting his throat. Rayleigh pants and squirms underneath him, Roger grinds against his ass. Through body language, they telegraph to each other what they both want. It’s all smooth sailing, right up until Roger starts tugging Rayleigh’s pants down. And then he freezes.
“Hm?” Rayleigh hums, curious.
“We don’t have any slick,” Roger groans, disappointment dripping from his words. His forehead thunks against Rayleigh’s shoulder blade.
“Oh. Fuck. ” Rayleigh thinks of the bottle of olive oil in the chest in the boat kitchen, currently at the bottom of the sea. As if things couldn’t possibly get any worse.
They trade blowjobs instead, which is nice enough, but it’s really not what either of them wanted. In many contexts, a blowjob is great; receiving one is Rayleigh’s favorite sexual act, actually. But a guy doesn't want blowjobs all the time. Sometimes, you just want to be held down and plowed by a big, strong man. Specifically, Gold Roger. It’s a primal craving that can’t be satisfied by anything else.
In fact, as the days on the island turn into weeks, Rayleigh starts to discover that doing any other sex act in lieu of the fucking you want just makes the craving worse. It’s the fact that he can’t have it—it makes him want it desperately. It’s even worse for Roger, whose favorite sex act is, without question, fucking Rayleigh in the ass. Now the poor bastard has to grapple with the prospect of never fucking Rayleigh in the ass again for the rest of their lives, if they never manage to get off this damn island. If this were a life-or-death scenario, of course, their minds would be on other more important things, but it’s not. They’re perfectly healthy, perfectly safe, perfectly equipped to live on this island until they’re old and gray if need be. But there’s no. Fucking. Lube.
As time goes on, there are so many thwarted moments.
When Rayleigh is pulling splinters out of Roger’s hands at the end of the day, and Roger, smitten, runs his foot suggestively up Rayleigh’s calf, even though they know it can’t lead to more.
When Rayleigh stops working for a while to admire Roger’s muscles as he saws branches off tree trunks, mouth watering but unable to go over to him and ask for what he wants like he usually would.
When they both wake up in the morning hard and dripping, and Roger pins Rayleigh on his stomach and rubs the head of his cock up and down in the crevice of Rayleigh’s ass, unable to go further.
When they laugh together ‘til their sides hurt as they eat dinner in the evening—when it feels the most like they’re Roger and Rayleigh— and yet they can’t make love about it.
It’s not a problem that can be solved with spit, either. Roger is not small, not by any stretch of the imagination, and Rayleigh is tough, but he has sex for enjoyment, not for masochistic purposes. It wouldn’t feel good for either of them and they both know it. The feeling they want is the way they have sex in their cabin on the boat—obscenely slippery, squelchy, unhinged, gasping against each other’s lips because it feels so good. Wanting and not having is exquisite torture.
Salvation comes by accident. Rayleigh decides one day that they can’t just live off of barley and fish for the rest of their lives, and that they should probably eat some vegetables (no matter how much Roger hates them) if they’re going to keep living on this island. The only candidate he can think of is the seaweed blanketing the shores, so he goes down to the nearest patch of beach and collects some while Roger is busy stripping logs. There’s both green and red seaweed slathered all over the rocks, but the red just calls to him for some reason (probably the association in his mind between Roger and that particular color…). He gathers up an armful of the stuff and hauls it back to their camp.
Because he doesn’t love the thought of eating it raw, he boils it. It smells like the sea alright, like distilled and concentrated fish shit, and Roger comes sniffing after a while.
“What’re ya doing?” he asks, crouching beside Rayleigh near the fire.
“Saving us from scurvy,” Rayleigh answers bleakly as he stirs the mixture.
It takes Roger a minute to compute what he means, but when he gets it, he makes a gagging sound.
“No way! I’m not eating that!”
“I don’t like it either, but we’re getting pretty malnourished here.”
“I’m totally fine!”
“After another week like this, you won’t be.”
“Nooo….” Roger lays down on the ground in the fetal position. Rayleigh pats his head apologetically.
Rayleigh strains the seaweed through a shirt and they eat it, miserably. Roger complains the whole time, and Rayleigh can’t even call him a brat for it. It’s pretty damn gross. Rayleigh thinks that this is what the feeling “life sucks” would taste like if it was edible.
Later, after working some more on the logs, he goes to grab a bowl to fill it with drinking water, only to find that it’s already full of the water he boiled the seaweed in. Ah, that’s right—he saved the strained water. As he tilts the bowl left and right, he’s intrigued to find that the seaweed water has noticeably thickened after sitting out for a few hours. It’s starting to look like a blush-pink gelatin, kind of like when his mom used to make jellies. In fascination, he leaves the bowl alone.
The next morning, following a particularly cold night, Rayleigh happens to glance at the bowl while he’s making breakfast and does a double-take. All of the pink seaweed water has coagulated into a gel. Amazed, he touches it with his index finger, and finds it to be firm but with plenty of give.
“Roger!” he shouts, because he knows his easily-entertained partner will get a kick out of this.
Roger emerges from the hut rubbing his sleep-puffy eyes, but perks up immediately when he sees the strange goo.
“Whoa!” He sticks his whole hand into the bowl and squishes the stuff around. “It’s like jelly! So slippery!”
Rayleigh freezes at Roger’s word choice. Roger stills too. They sit there for a long moment, staring down at the bowl of gel. And then their eyes meet.
Rayleigh barely has time to yank his pants down before Roger is mounting him from behind. He shoves his cock in with an ensuing squelch courtesy of the seaweed goo, grips Rayleigh’s waist with his two massive hands, and starts thrusting hard. Fuck, he thrusts hard. Rayleigh groans and digs his fingers into the dirt.
“ Mmm! ” Roger whines brokenly behind him, sounding absolutely devastated by pleasure.
It’s one seriously hard and deep pounding. Roger doesn’t let up or slow down for even a second. Oh god, the sounds Roger makes—he whimpers and groans and grunts like Rayleigh’s body is the most orgasmic thing he’s ever felt. His thighs tremble in pleasure with each thrust, Rayleigh can feel it against him. He doesn’t even ask if he can cum inside or not, he just does—with a ragged gasp and both hands squeezing the flesh of Rayleigh’s hips, moaning like it snuck up on him before he could even think of pulling out. Rayleigh didn’t want him to anyway; he wanted to feel the liquid warmth flooding inside him. Been too long.
After Roger is done, he curls over Rayleigh chest-to-back and jerks him off apologetically with a gloriously slippery hand. Rayleigh is so wound up by the whole experience that it only takes a minute or two. When he starts spilling in Roger’s fist, Roger groans in his ear and gives a few shallow thrusts like he’s jealous of the pleasure, no matter that he just had his own. After, he licks his hand clean like an animal, like Rayleigh’s cum is fucking ambrosia to him. Rayleigh shivers, and fuck he very badly wants to do it again, right fucking now.
He shoves Roger off and tackles him onto his back, straddles his waist, and grabs the bowl of seaweed gel. They don’t leave that particular patch of dirt for the rest of the day.
Soap
About a year later, they turn up in Sabaody Archipelago with a brand-new boat. They dock at Grove 1 because they’ve never been to Sabaody before and are blissfully ignorant of the plethora of dangers. Like two idiots, they wander right through the core of the archipelago, sticking tight to the Lawless Area out of sheer dumb (literally) luck. If they’d just gone to the amusement park like everybody else who visits Sabaody, all of the ensuing trouble could have been avoided, but frankly, neither of them know that it even exists. And so, the trouble begins.
They find themselves at a bar on Grove 13. They’d passed a lot of other bars already, but decided to stop at this place in particular because as they were passing by, the bar owner literally threw a man clear out the door and then kicked him in the nuts with her high-heeled leather boot. Obviously, they had to talk to her.
Her name is Shakky. She’s dryly humorous and refreshingly blunt, with an understated charm that makes you forget that all the drinks are obscenely overpriced.
“Are you just looking to get buzzed, or do you want to do shameful things that you won’t remember tomorrow morning?” is her way of asking what they want to drink.
“Shameful things!” Roger shouts with glee.
“Maybe just questionable things,” Rayleigh corrects.
Shakky chuckles. “I can already tell who’s the captain and who’s the first mate.”
They haven’t even told her they’re pirates.
She mixes them some unnamed cocktails with plenty of bite, but not so much that Rayleigh feels like he’s drinking rubbing alcohol. A happy medium. For a while, they chat with her about sailing, the places they’ve been so far, Roger’s ambition to see every island in the Grand Line and be the greatest of all pirates. Rayleigh fell under Roger’s spell a long time ago—he’s believed for ages that his partner will someday rule the seas. He knows Roger, has seen firsthand his magnetism and the divine fortune that follows at his heels wherever he goes. To Rayleigh, it’s obvious. To Rayleigh, he’s already the greatest pirate to ever live. But, everyone else usually dismisses Roger as a daydreaming fool, and Rayleigh fully expects Shakky to react with the same attitude. Instead, she surprises him.
“When you find whatever’s at the end of the Grand Line, come back and tell me what it is. I might even give you a drink on the house.” The way she says it isn’t teasing or condescending at all; she says it like she just knows it’s inevitable.
“By the time I get to the end of the Grand Line, I won’t need free drinks!” Roger laughs. “I’ll buy this whole place!”
“Over my dead body, Pirate King.”
Rayleigh likes her.
By the end of the night, thanks to Shakky’s company and the drinks she keeps slinging at them, they’ve crossed over from “questionable” territory into “shameful.” Roger has lost his shirt for some reason and is laying on his back on top of the bar while Shakky pets his hair like he’s a large puppy. Rayleigh is resting his forehead on Roger’s thigh and staring at the wood grain of the bar top. The swirls in it are making his head swim.
“Where’s th’ music comin’ from?” Roger asks out of nowhere.
Shakky holds up a singing den den mushi. Rayleigh almost falls off his stool trying to force his eyes to focus on it.
“There’s a strip club just down the block with a live band. The girls can’t dance to silence, you know. They have a den den mushi that I tune in to so I get the music too,” she explains.
“A what club?” Roger asks with a confused tilt of his head.
Shakky’s eyes pop in delight. “Oh, my sweet innocent boy,” she coos as she pinches his cheek. “Go check it out later, I’m sure you’ll enjoy yourself. If you can still stand up, that is.”
Roger looks to Rayleigh for an explanation. Rayleigh sighs.
“A strip club is a club where girls dance on a stage and… take their clothes off.”
“Oh. I don’t wanna see that.”
Shakky laughs uproariously. “You’re certainly not like any other pirate I’ve ever met!”
“If Ray danced and took his clothes off….” Roger mumbles to himself.
Without another word, Rayleigh climbs onto the bar. Roger starts cackling and clapping and Shakky reaches under the counter for a wad of bills. His eager audience is enough to make him forget about any remaining shreds of dignity he might possess, and he starts slowly undoing the buttons of his shirt while gyrating his hips. There are some whistles and whoops from the other tables around the bar—everyone else in the place must be equally plastered—and Rayleigh almost starts to believe he might be sexy. That is, until Shakky grabs him by the belt and stuffs a couple beris in his waistband, which disrupts his tenuous balance and sends him toppling onto the floor behind the bar. He thinks maybe it might be time to go to bed after that.
Rayleigh knows Shakky recommended a hostel somewhere nearby, but for the life of him, he can’t remember its name or anything about it. He and Roger just stumble endlessly up and down the alleys of Grove 13 under the light of the moon, arms around each other’s shoulders, stopping every couple of minutes to lean against the walls of buildings to laugh hysterically. It’s a lot of fun, right up until they pass by a man in a shadowy side street who gives them a weird look. The next thing Rayleigh knows, there’s a tiny dart in the side of his neck, and everything feels really heavy, and he’s out cold.
Rayleigh wakes up in handcuffs. His head is aching and his vision is blurry, but he immediately tries to summon haki to break them. Nothing happens. Angry and a little frantic, he yanks at them, tries to pull the chain between them apart, but his arms are weak and useless.
“Don’t bother. It’s seastone,” a gruff voice near him says.
Rayleigh blinks a few times to clear the fog and looks down at his wrists. Seastone indeed. No haki for Rayleigh. He accepts defeat for now and finally looks around the room he’s in—it’s a nondescript cell of some kind with bars on the windows and a guard at the door. Roger is laying on the stone floor beside him, unconscious, but his chest is rising and falling with steady breath. There’s a little wound on the side of his neck; he must have also been tranquilized. Rayleigh wants to reach over and stroke the hair out of his face, beg him to wake up, but it would probably be unwise to show any kind of tenderness to Roger in front of the guard, who could easily exploit it. For now, he sits still and waits.
A few minutes go by, and then a man in an auctioneer’s uniform arrives to inspect them both, and suddenly, all the puzzle pieces click into place (which is honestly impressive considering how hungover Rayleigh is). They’re in the Human Auction House on Grove 1. Oh this is so far beyond shameful, this is humiliating . Shakky and her damn drinks! Rayleigh thinks murderous thoughts about the bounty hunter who caught them last night as the auctioneer combs through his hair for lice. Roger wakes up in the middle of having his fingernails examined and kicks the auctioneer hard in the gut on impulse. The strength of the kick just excites the auctioneer, and the guy starts murmuring about selling Roger for higher than starting price. Rayleigh is too relieved about Roger waking up to be disgusted by the guy’s disregard for human dignity. He gives a confused Roger a look that he hopes is placating, even though he has no idea how they’re gonna figure a way out of this one.
Rayleigh is about halfway through the process of accepting that Roger always lucks his way out of every catastrophe, but he’s aware that he’s gonna need a few more catastrophes to get all the way there. At this point, he’s still stressed. Distantly optimistic, but still stressed. And anyways, it’s his self-appointed duty to protect Roger, to keep his wild impulses grounded in reality, and to get him out of all the trouble he gets himself into. It’s Rayleigh’s job to worry. Not to mention, he hates being inconvenienced—this little imprisonment is going to prevent them from meeting the mechanic who agreed to coat their ship, which is going to prevent them from leaving for Fish-Man Island on time according to the schedule Rayleigh drew up. They’ll have to get the hell out of Sabaody as fast as possible if they do manage to escape, because these slavers won’t just let their merchandise run off on them. He and Roger will be hunted. Which means they’ll have to turn back down the Grand Line the way they came and stay out of this area for who knows how long, which was not their plan at all. Rayleigh isn’t pleased.
To top off all the abstract frustrations, being locked up in the Human Auction House comes with plenty of physical frustrations too. They’re moved to a cell with about twenty other prisoners and are kept there day and night, and it’s so packed and tense that even just standing up to stretch your legs will earn you angry glares. Everyone is high-strung, and they’ve got the misfortune of being chained in a corner next to possibly the two pissiest guys in the place. One of them is a gigantic, grouchy bald man and the other is a scrawny little whip of a boy who won’t stop trying to steal Rayleigh’s gold bracelet. Their first night in the cell, Rayleigh has to kick him away no less than seven times.
Because there are always ears listening nearby, he and Roger speak to each other exclusively in Roger’s native tongue. Even after all this time together, Rayleigh doesn’t understand much—he knows about as many words and expressions as a toddler—but they can’t risk exposing all their secrets to these strangers.
“(How we—how we can—how can we —)” Rayleigh’s frustration only mounts as he tries to string a sentence together in the unfamiliar word order.
“(How can we escape?)” Roger supplies helpfully. “(I don’t know. If we could use haki, it would be easy, but now we are….)” He says a word Rayleigh doesn’t recognize.
“(Yeah. We’re fat. No, wait—!)”
Roger howls with laughter. Rayleigh hides his face in his hands. ‘Fat’ sounds almost exactly like ‘weak’ and he always mixes them up. His divine retribution for always laughing at Roger’s mistakes when they first met, he supposes.
“(We definitely won’t be fat. I’m so hungry,)” Roger whines, rubbing his tummy.
And for once, it’s not Roger being gluttonous—they haven’t been feeding the prisoners enough even for Rayleigh’s taste.
At night, they spoon in their corner, Roger against the wall and Rayleigh between him and everyone else. Of the two of them, Roger is actually able to sleep, and so it only makes sense for Rayleigh to guard him, since he’ll be awake regardless. He keeps the little bitch boy thief next to them at bay, and stares threateningly at anyone else whenever they open their eyes and happen to glance in his direction. Nobody steals from them, but Rayleigh is also becoming more and more sleep-deprived as the days progress, which means he’s also getting exponentially grumpier.
One morning, five days into their imprisonment, a guard approaches the cell and singles them out.
“Oi! Straw-hat and glasses!”
“(What do you want, small penis boy?)” Roger shouts back. Rayleigh snorts.
The guard, of course, doesn’t understand him, and barrels right on. “Both of you are going on the auction block tomorrow, so you’ll get a bath tonight! Kiss each other goodbye, cuz you’ll never see each other again after tomorrow!” He makes a kissy face and a crude gesture with his hands.
Rayleigh supposes it’s justified—Roger is currently sitting behind him with both arms wrapped affectionately around Rayleigh’s waist.
“(I’ll give your mother a kiss!)” is Roger’s reply.
The guard leaves, blissfully unaware of the disrespect. Roger harrumphs and goes back to resting his forehead on Rayleigh’s shoulder. Rayleigh frowns at the floor and picks at his nails; he really, really doesn’t like that threat of separation. They need to find a way out of this, now.
Sure enough, that evening, they’re escorted to the bath house.
“Make it snappy, I’m not gonna stand here all night,” their designated guard bitches, the same one who harassed them earlier.
Rayleigh, tired of everything, spits in his face. He gets a mean punch to the gut for it, but not hard enough to crack any ribs, probably because the guard has orders not to damage the merchandise. Regardless, a protective Roger is at his side in a blink, muscling in to stand between him and the guard. There’s a silent and tense face-off for a lengthy moment in which Roger manages to look surprisingly intimidating despite the fact that he’s totally naked—something about the look in his eye. But, as much as Rayleigh would love to watch him beat the guard into the consistency of oatmeal, the bastard’s got a sword, and the two of them are incapacitated by seastone. Unfortunately, staying in one piece is critical if they ever want to regain their freedom.
“(Ah, just let it go. Come on, let’s get this over with,)” Rayleigh grumbles to Roger’s back as he slinks away into the bath house proper. After a beat of silence, Roger huffs and follows after him.
They wash up quietly, as best as they can with their wrists cuffed in front of them. The guard watches them over his shoulder the whole time, and it grates on Rayleigh’s already-high-strung nerves. A little fucking privacy is all he wants, just for ten minutes, he’s naked for fuck’s sake, but this dickhead won’t stop staring. Rayleigh wants to carve his eyeballs out of his skull and throw them down the drain at his feet. His, and the eyeballs of everyone else in this hellhole.
In his angry musings, he accidentally drops the soap on the tiled floor, and it’s the final fucking straw.
“God fucking damn it! ” he cusses, rearing back and kicking the soap hard into the wall. It ricochets around the room like a ping-pong ball.
“Whoa!” Roger exclaims. “(What’s wrong? Why are you so mad?)”
“What do you mean ‘why am I mad’?” Rayleigh hisses, leaning in close in hopes that the nosy guard won’t hear. “We’re locked up in a human auction house, about to be sold as slaves, our new boat has probably been stolen from the docks by now, and now this asshole is watching me take a bath! I’m not exactly jumping for joy, here!”
“(Hey, it’s gonna be okay.)” Roger’s voice goes all soft and gentle. “(We’ll figure a way outta this.)”
“(How?)”
“(We just will, I know it!)” Roger gives him a cheerful smile, and then he lifts his arms and loops them over Rayleigh’s head to hug him. Even though the guard is still fucking watching, Rayleigh lets himself be embraced with a sigh. He tucks his face into the juncture of Roger’s neck and shoulder, and a little bit of the tension melts away. Just a little. A little bit more when Roger starts rubbing soothing circles into his skin with his thumb. And a little bit more when Roger starts gently swaying them back and forth where they stand. Rayleigh closes his eyes and sinks a little further into his partner’s arms.
They stay like that for a while. Rayleigh almost falls asleep, actually, and only re-opens his eyes when he feels Roger press a kiss to his throat. It’s intimate, and he instinctively looks to see if the guard is still watching. But, to his pleasant surprise, the guard has turned away. Rayleigh can see the slightest fraction of his profile from this angle—his eyebrows are turned sharply down and the tips of his ears are red. Ah, Rayleigh thinks with some amusement. He’s not a fan of public displays of affection, it seems.
Rayleigh is amused enough that when Roger continues to kiss his neck, he doesn’t stop him. In fact, he delights in watching the tension build in the guard’s shoulders with every audible smooch that echoes in the acoustic bath chamber. That bastard was the one who told them to kiss each other goodbye. The best is when Roger surprises him with a bite under his ear—Rayleigh gasps, and the guard jolts where he stands. After that, Rayleigh can’t watch anymore, because Roger pulls back and presses their foreheads together.
“(Hey,)” Roger whispers with a grin. “(I bet I can take your mind off the situation.)”
“Oh yeah?” Rayleigh murmurs. To hell with it. “Distract me, then.”
If Rayleigh thought the gentle kisses were loud in the cavernous space, the sound of Roger furiously jerking them off together in his soapy fist is deafening. The shick-shick-shick as he cranks his wrist, their heavy breathing, the occasional moan; it all makes the place sound more like a whore house than a bath house. Roger is a genius. It feels so good to stop thinking about all the things that have gone wrong over the past few days, to stop worrying about what will happen tomorrow morning, to stop dreaming up absurd escape plans. Rayleigh just turns his brain off, closes his eyes, and feels. Leaves it all in Roger’s hands. Literally.
“(Gonna cum soon,)” Roger pants.
“(Me too,)” Rayleigh gasps.
Roger crushes their lips together, and oddly enough, it’s the taste of his mouth that sends Rayleigh over the edge. They haven’t kissed since getting captured, he realizes. He explodes with a ragged, drawn-out moan that feels like it emanates from the depths of his fucking soul, cum pouring over the side of Roger’s fist and down his wrist. Roger garbles something along the lines of yeah, baby and follows right after.
They kiss lazily as Roger slows his hand. He doesn’t stop completely, though; he slathers the combined jizz and soap along the both of them, indulging in the slippery nastiness of it all. The oversensitivity is making Rayleigh’s thighs twitch with every stroke, but it’s kind of nice in a disgustingly intimate sort of way. He mouths contentedly at Roger’s shoulder, clings to him, and lets him do as he pleases. That is, until they hear an outraged huff from the bath house entrance.
“For fuck’s sake! I don’t get paid enough for this! Fucking sodomite pirates….”
Rayleigh had completely forgotten about the guard. He watches apathetically as the guy, red as a tomato and visibly hard, paces back and forth for a moment like he’s debating with himself over something. And then he turns heel and storms off down the hall, shaking his head and muttering. Eventually, the sound of his voice fades away and they’re left completely alone in the middle of the bath house, just like that.
“Don’t know why he couldn’t have fucked off a bit earlier,” Rayleigh muses, but without the vitriol of earlier in the evening. “Bit weird to wait until after the public sex is over, if he’s so offended by it.”
He’s expecting Roger to laugh, but he doesn’t. Rayleigh turns to look at him, and finds Roger staring at the barred window on the far wall. After a beat of silence, he lets go of Rayleigh completely and goes over to it. He inspects—the width of the window, the bolts attaching the bars to the wall, whether the bars are hollow or solid. And then he grabs a bar in both cuffed hands, braces a foot on the one next to it, and strains. There’s a piercing screech and both bars snap off. He looks up at Rayleigh with wide, delighted eyes.
A minute or two later, they’re running through the grassy hills totally naked under the light of the moon, laughing hysterically. It’s awkward as hell because their hands are still bound in front of them, but they’re free .
They can’t go anywhere with the seastone cuffs still on, but the only person they know in Sabaody is the bartender from earlier in the week. With no other options, they sneak back to Shakky’s Rip-Off Bar on Grove 13 and bang on the door until she finally opens it with a sour look on her half-asleep face. Her demeanor changes pretty quickly, though, when she sees the two nude pirates on her doorstep. Rayleigh gives her an apologetic look. He seems to be developing a habit of embarrassing himself in front of this woman. She just muffles a giggle with her hand and ushers them in. About ten minutes after she makes a few calls on the den den mushi, a grizzled old blacksmith arrives, and he cleanly splits the cuffs off their wrists without any questions asked. Shakky gives them both some clothes and ogles them as they get changed.
They get the hell out of Sabaody before the sun is up on their new boat, which was miraculously not stolen after all, and Rayleigh resolves to never doubt Roger’s luck again.