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Sanji wakes with his heart pounding and a scream trapped in his throat, and only years of training himself to stay quiet on a ship full of other people keeps it at bay. Instead he clutches the sheets beneath him and bites down on his tongue until he tastes blood, as though the iron tang of it might ward away the evil spirits that plague him. They are unfortunately all too familiar to him; a towering giant with a lion’s mane and a hole where his heart should be, cackling imps whose cruel words are as sharp as their merciless blows, a fairy princess forced to watch in silence, her pretty pink wings shackled and staked through. And somewhere in the distance, a woman’s sad voice is always calling—
Sanji? I’m so hungry, Sanji. Why don’t you feed me anymore?
And when Sanji tries to answer that you cannot feed the dead—
Maybe that’s why I died. Maybe you didn’t love me enough.
Sanji hunches over, forehead pressed against the bony protrusion of his knees so hard it hurts. He lets go of his tongue to clamp his bottom lip between his teeth instead, gnawing on it until it goes swollen and bruised. He tries to breathe the way Zoro has taught him (in for four, hold for four, out for six) but the air gets caught in his lungs because the dark is suffocating and Sanji doesn’t know how to make the monsters go away or stop the screaming inside his head or—
“Cook?” comes Zoro’s groggy voice from somewhere to his side. “Was goin’on?” Sanji feels the mattress shift as Zoro turns over, and then the warm, solid heat of him against his side as the swordsman bolts up and crowds in close. “Oi!” he barks, the sharp edge of his voice falling against Sanji’s senses like one of his swords. “Curly! What happened?”
Sanji is, as always, tempted to lie. To plaster on a fake smile and insist that no no, everything’s fine mosshead, go back to sleep, nothing to worry about, nothing to see here, but the problem is that Zoro is Zoro and he’s not willing to buy Sanji’s bullshit under the best of circumstances, let alone when he’s very clearly curled in on himself like a terrified child. There is no hiding the truth of things from Roronoa Zoro. Sanji hates him for it; he also maybe loves him for it (a little, a lot), and it’s the latter sentiment that gets him to force out through gritted teeth against all his greater instincts, “Nightmare.”
Zoro exhales sharply, the broad span of his chest pressing firmly against Sanji’s back as Zoro winds his arms around the cook’s torso and pulls him close. He presses his mouth to the juncture of neck and shoulder, soft and sweet but firm in a way that is so distinctly Zoro Sanji can’t help but snort a little, and the fear still pounding through his veins and screaming inside his head ebbs slightly.
Sanji draws in a shaky breath and lets go of his death grip on the sheets so that he can find Zoro’s hands instead, lacing their fingers together and squeezing like he’s trying to wring water from a stone. His observation haki is going wild in an attempt to ground himself, reaching out across the ship to find those familiar anchor points which tell him he is safe onboard the Sunny and not trapped in an iron cage. Luffy sprawled out on the lawn still digesting his sea beast dinner, red like the blood he can still taste in his mouth and bright, bright, bright as sunlight breaking through storm clouds. Nami and Robin in the girls bunk, tangy tangerine sweetness and parchment laced through with petrichor. Franky’s on watch tonight, patrolling the deck in a trail of effervescent engine oil. The rest are below in the bunks, pinpricks of gunpowder and herbs and bones and salt. And then of course there’s Zoro, blanketing his back like a layer of moss on tree bark and coating Sanji’s tongue with the taste of wasabi; less potent than expected, with earth and greenery floating from the back of his throat up into his nostrils, making it just a little easier to breathe.
“You okay?” he hears Zoro murmurs into his skin, the rough pads of his fingers stroking lightly along Sanji’s abdomen wherever they can reach.
Sanji considers. He can breathe again, which isn’t nothing, but the nightmare still lingers like the stretch of rotten eggs, foul and putrid and nigh inescapable. “No,” he answers honestly, voice rasping out of him like a knife against a whetstone, and Zoro’s hold on him tightens nearly to the point of pain.
“What do you need?” the swordsman asks. “Tell me.”
Sanji swallows thickly. He hates needing. He hates having to ask people for things instead of doing everything himself. He hates being the one that requires care instead of being the one to dole that care out. He has so much debt on the ledger of his existence already that to need anything, anything at all, feels like taking out a loan he’ll never be able to pay back.
Zoro must sense the hesitation in his silence, because he sighs and presses another kiss to Sanji’s shoulder. “Sanji,” he says, voice steady and strong as the hands that wield his swords. “What do you want?”
Sanji’s breath catches in his throat.
Want. Want should be even worse than need, because wanting is so very selfish. It is not in Sanji’s nature to want, to desire anything for himself when others could be served instead, and yet somehow, in his very stupid, very profound, very marimo-ish way, Zoro has managed to make Sanji see the reason behind wanting.
Wanting is human. Isn’t your whole thing that you’re scared you’ll wind up inhuman like your brothers?
Well yeah, but—
So then why should you be afraid of wanting? Doesn’t that just mean you’re still human?
If anyone else had tried to use that kind of logic on Sanji, he’d have laughed out a cloud of cigarette smoke into their face. And yet when Zoro uses it the words sound like wisdom, and Sanji hates (loves) him for it.
“Make it… make it go away,” he answers after several moments of weighted silence, prying the confession out of his own mouth like a pearl from an oyster.
Zoro hums in affirmation, and then sinks his teeth into Sanji’s shoulder like it’s a piece of meat.
Sanji gasps as pain blooms from the bite, sharp and raw. Zoro’s hands shake themselves free of Sanji’s hold and then start palming everywhere they can reach—chest, stomach, thighs, groin. He grips Sanji through the thin fabric of his cotton pajama pants, no finesse, just a rough desperation that’s really for Sanji’s sake more than his own. Sanji bucks into the touch on instinct, arousal spiking in his blood like he just downed a line of shots on an empty stomach, fast and hot and burning. His body has always had a hair trigger for this kind of thing, and Zoro uses it to his full advantage, littering Sanji’s shoulders with bite after bite after bite while he strokes him into hardness, gnawing on him like a dog with a bone.
“Fuck,” Sanji gasps as the headiness of pain and desire start to burn away the fear still lingering inside his skull. “Fuck, yes, that’s it moss, c’mon—” Zoro’s teeth find the curve of his deltoid and sink in until Sanji feels the skin break, and then he soothes his tongue over the wound like a goddamn cat. Sanji thinks he should probably be disturbed by how much Zoro gets turned on by making him bleed; instead it catches within his chest like a match to kindling that’s dry as the Alabastian desert, and Sanji lets out the kind of noise he will vehemently deny ever making outside the privacy of their sheets. He whines when Zoro’s hand disappears from his now fully hard dick, hips chasing the contact with an embarrassing desperation, but then those same hands wrap around his waist and suddenly Sanji is being flipped over and shoved face first into the mattress.
He buries his moan into a pillow as Zoro fumbles for lube from the nightstand, rutting against the bed until Zoro grabs his hips and forces them up and away from the contact, shoving his knees between Sanji’s legs so that he can’t move back down. His own dick nudges against Sanji’s backside, still only half hard, but that’s not unusual; it always takes longer for Zoro to get into it than Sanji, particularly when he’s the one in control. He says it’s because he gets nervous, worried that he won’t be able to take care of Sanji the way the cook always takes care of him. Even now Sanji can hear the way his breath stutters in and out of his lungs, the faint tremble in his hands as his slicked up fingers find Sanji’s entrance and circle it teasingly; and when Sanji turns his head to side and looks back, he sees red flooded across Zoro’s face and torso like an upended bottle of wine, tastes the faint edge of his nerves like the bouquet blooming on the back of his tongue.
“Okay?” Zoro asks as he nudges his fingertips against the tight ring of muscle, and Sanji huffs out a little laugh, affection and arousal winding together inside him like dry wood and wildfire, the remaining remnants of nightmare fleeing in their wake.
“Hurry the fuck up,” he says by way of answer, and grins at Zoro’s responding eyeroll.
“Always so bossy,” Zoro chides as he presses in with two fingers. The roughness of it stings and burns, which is exactly what Sanji wants. His cock kicks against his stomach, pain like a knife edge tracing up his spine while pleasure simmers low in his gut like the kind of soup stock that takes hours to make, slowly extracting flavor from the vegetables and collagen from the bones. Zoro pumps in and out of him in a precise, steady rhythm, the same way he swings his swords when practicing katas out on the deck. It makes Sanji feel like one of those same blades in his hands; cherished, respected, known.
“Fuck that’s good,” Sanji groans, eyes slipping closed as he lets the sensations start to overwhelm him. “Yeah, shit, just like that, make me feel it marimo, yes—” His toes curl at the same time as Zoro’s fingers, and he buries his face into the pillow again to muffle his moans. Zoro makes an answering noise that sounds vaguely like a growl and suddenly his free hand is in Sanji’s hair, gripping tightly as he forces his head back.
“What have I told you about hiding?” he demands as he adds a third finger, and Sanji chokes on the whimper that tries to escape him. Observation haki overlaps with the rest of his senses, Zoro’s green looming over him like the sky right before a storm—wild and dangerous, crackling with energy that he can feel along the edges of his teeth. His arousal always tastes a little bit like alcohol on Sanji’s tongue, and tonight it burns its way down his throat like fine whiskey taken neat, the kind you only drink on someone else’s berry because you can’t justify the expense on your own; heady, potent, and too delicious to stop.
Sanji’s vaguely aware that he’s started begging, words tumbling out of his mouth in a nonsensical jumble the way they always do when he’s so turned on he can barely think straight, which is exactly where he wants to be. He pleads and moans and whines until finally Zoro gives him what he wants, propping him up on elbows and knees and then sliding home in one smooth motion. It hurts from the scant amount of prep and yet Sanji very nearly sobs in pleasure because it still feels like Zoro was made for him—the only person he’d ever let have him like this, because he’s the only one Sanji’s ever trusted enough to do it.
And Zoro does it so well too, fucking into him hard and deep, hands bruising imprints onto Sanji’s hips and teeth sinking into whatever flesh they can reach, bite marks and hickeys scattered across his skin like furikake over a bowl of rice. Tomorrow Sanji will press his fingers into them so he can remember how he felt in this moment, fucked raw and ragged under Zoro’s loving care, reminding himself that it isn’t a sin to want. Especially not when Zoro grants so readily.
“Gonna come,” Sanji gasps wetly as Zoro drives relentlessly against his sweet spot, pleasure fueled by pain surging through his stomach like an incoming tidal wave. “Fuck, fuck, gonna come, gonna come, Zoro, Zoro—”
Zoro makes a noise like a wounded animal, releasing his hold on Sanji’s hips so that he can use one hand to shove between his shoulder blades, keeping him pinned down as the other goes to grab his leaking, aching dick. Sanji cries out as he’d jerked off fast and rough, no rhythm to speak of, just Zoro’s calloused hands and his mean mouth and his hard cock and his presence like thunderclouds against the edges of Sanji’s haki, swollen with rain and ready to break open. There’s nothing left of his senses but Zoro Zoro Zoro, and it’s like this that Sanji reaches his peak, green lightning coursing through his veins and hitting his heart the same way Zoro strikes to kill—vicious, violent, and fatal.
It’s exactly what Sanji wanted. Because what chance do nightmares stand against the world’s greatest swordsman?
He goes boneless in the aftermath, content for once to let Zoro take care of him; wiping up the mess on his skin with the damp hand towel they’ve learned needs to be kept in the bedroom at all times, lavishing kisses over all the places that his teeth claimed mere minutes before, whispering praises into his ear that make Sanji’s insides go gooey and sweet like warm caramel. “You were so good,” Zoro tells him as he wraps Sanji up carefully in his embrace, the gentleness such a beautiful contrast to how he was just behind manhandled. “You did such a good job. You took me so well and it felt so good.” There’s a pause, and then Zoro tacks on with a touch of hesitation, “Do you feel good?”
Sanji hums in satisfaction, eyes fluttering open as he gives Zoro what he’s sure is a very dopey smile. “M’good,” he slurs, brain not yet recovered enough for full sentences and bogged down even further by the siren call of sleep. “S’all gone. Good job marimo.”
Zoro’s cheeks go scarlet—Sanji isn’t the only one here affected by praise. The red clashes horribly with his green hair and yet Sanji swears he’s never seen anything cuter in his entire life than Zoro blushing and flustered, the aura of harsh command leaving him for something softer and sweeter and happy to have pleased. “I’m glad,” he murmurs, brushing the hair away from Sanji’s face so can press a kiss to the curl of his left eyebrow, which is his favorite. “Think you can get back to sleep?”
Sanji doesn’t answer. He’s already there.