Chapter Text
The shit cook is weird about food sometimes. You don’t mind, or rather don't bother trying to get to the bottom of it because when push comes to shove you find you do not have it in you to care. He eats the scraps and screw-ups when he’s cooking and doesn’t think anyone is watching. Now, to any more adjusted person this would seem like a nice thing. You have it in your best interest to assume the guy is trying to kill you.
The thing is, you haven't had any particularly distressing meals in at least a month. And that’s a bad thing. Because when you’re going to enter the grand line you need to be ready for anything, and anything includes situations where you need to eat dirt and weeds in order to survive, and you were never one to be pampered. Your stomach’s going to shrink and you’re going to die because the cook can’t, or perhaps just won't feed you anything below the everyday standard of his ridiculously defined palette.
It’s insane. You know. If Luffy trusts this guy then you suppose you’re just going to have to suck it up and eat seared scallops, lobster risotto and duck breast for the rest of your life. How unfortunate. You know.
You’ve learned to live with the incessant peeving. All of the ‘finish what’s on your damn plate before you drink your gut dry, marimo!’s and whatnots, annoying as they may be.
You just suppose that growing up in a restaurant would do that to a guy. You’ve seen how wasteful rich people can be. Though, sometimes when you would venture to the next town over to Shimotsuki, where some of the more wealthy people resided they would throw food at you out the window like a stray cat, and you would eat it more like a stray dog. All teeth and claws, wrangling and ripping at it like it was still alive.
Ah, the good old days, you still sometimes find yourself thinking.
You’ve never asked the cook about any of it. You don’t see the need to. Don’t even see how it’s strange at all. That is, until what you’ve been calling the incident.
You see, it was a hot day outside, too hot, much too hot, sweltering even, burning you to a crisp kind of hot, so Nami had advised everyone to spend their free time inside. See, you usually rely on others for the time, having no watch or temporal awareness, but in times of great need you would usually look up at the sun. Not a viable option considering you very well might have gone blind. You, having slept through breakfast, decide it would do you good to linger in the dining room while waiting for lunch.
When you walk through the door to the galley Sanji stares at you, blinking once or twice with a sandwich in his mouth. You ignore him the best you can and go to lie down on the bench against the far wall.
Sandwiches. You can do with sandwiches.
Sanji doesn’t normally eat with them, insisting that he eats as he goes, but you know that he never touches the finished products. Talk about a martyr. Once, when they were having soup for dinner you asked if that means some of Sanji’s spit ends up in their food due to the fancy sipping small portions from the serving spoon thing that chefs do. Nami snickered at you and teased you about something of an “indirect kiss” and you didn’t really understand what that whole thing was about anyway. Sanji didn’t answer you, perhaps because Nami had interrupted, perhaps because it was a no and he expected you to magically know that, perhaps he hadn’t even heard and was too busy doing something super-duper important as he always seems to be doing. Maybe he just didn’t do the spoon thing. Maybe he hadn’t even eaten any of the soup.
But when you stop to think about it the sandwich thing confuses you. Sanji doesn’t eat the actual food before food time. So you stare.
They may forgive you for doing so or maybe even won’t but it’s your damn ship and you can do what you want. You spot the problem immediately.
“Cook,” you grunt. “Does that sandwich have anything in it?”
Sanji stares at the two pieces of bread he is holding together and hums. “Nope.” he says and turns back to his cutting board.
You sit up to get a better look. “Why?”
Sanji turns briefly before once more focusing on slicing what seems to be vegetables. “Don’t want anyone else to have ‘em, do I?”
It takes your sleep-addled brain a moment to figure out he means the bread. “Why?” You ask again.
Sanji turns around fully this time and you sigh in relief. Watching him flip back and forth was exhausting and vaguely irritating. “Oh,” he mutters to himself and takes one slice of bread in each hand, flipping them inside out for you to see. “They’re moldy.”
On each slice of bread is the most rancid looking green-ish blue fuzz you’ve ever seen. One piece looks completely black in the middle, like death itself had had enough and decided to lay siege on the affront to nature. The other had more spots of lighter blue around the edges, fuzz, like hair so fine it looked like a nest of dust bunnies, or a burrow or whatever. Whitish spore-looking amoeba – you don't actually know what an amoeba is but that, you are sure, could be considered one – growing out of the crusts.
Sanji, still holding the two slices, puts them back together. “Put them in the cellar and forgot about them. Forgive me but there are a lot of things to keep track of and I’m in a relatively new environment so you’ll have to excuse my oversight,” Sanji says conversationally and slaps the two slices together with all the fineness of a basketball player making a full court shot to take another bite.
Now, you have eaten a lot of rough food over the years when in between jobs, but this is something that is at actual risk of becoming sentient and consuming all of you on the ship. You can’t help it. You gag, convulse and slap your hand over your mouth to prevent yourself from throwing up. You fail anyway, though, and you can feel it burning in the back of your throat.
You stand abruptly and speed-walks to the bathroom, only catching a glimpse of the confused scowl on Sanji’s face as he passes him.
You puke your guts out in the toilet and stay in there for fear of the heat, but probably more so something else.
The next day Sanji didn’t look so good. He was swaying on his feet and looked paler than usual, but straightened up with concerning ease once you stopped staring menacingly at him through the window, unnoticed, and entered the kitchen for breakfast. And you would be, concerned that is, if it were literally anybody else.
It would be the same, you reason with yourself, if it were the other way around.
-x-
I’ve never wondered about birds before. They flew, just as I couldn’t, yet they travelled with me south, just as I was.
There was a pattern to them, someone told me one day, though who or when I’ve since given up trying to remember. That, for all of their incessant futile flapping and seemingly mindless yelling it had long been discovered by scientists that in the deepest crevices of their tiny brains – deep is to them something of a fishman island as is a particularly cavernous pothole is to humans – that they had evolved in such a way that, as if almost hardwired to, they would fly south in the winter looking for food, for they must survive somehow, and only return in the spring, like most natural things do. In this, I decide I am more like them than not.
Only, my food is sustenance, and my sustenance is my goal.
Only my south is southwest, and then who knows where.
Only my winter is unpredictable, and the only thing I must do before my inevitable return home, for my inevitable return home, because of my inevitable return home, is thaw.
They fly back to Shimotsuki, which is, in a way, another goal of mine.
Oh, implications, implications, implications.
In this, I am less like them than not.
I was never one for such a childish ambition as to wish I was able to fly, no, even since then my mind was that of a hardened warrior. Or, a childish ambition of one anyhow.
I’m a terrible poet, really. Never been good with this kind of stuff.
“Their bones are hollow, too,” you said from where you were washing dishes.
Usopp had been explaining to me something about how they fly. How their digestive tracks are so strange they shit and pee at the same time. I don’t know if I believe him, even now.
“They aren't as dense, and because of that they can house a more complex respiratory system which helps them fly.” You had a wistful expression on your face, something that, at that very moment I couldn’t place. I had never seen it before, and I’m not ashamed to admit I rather never wanted to see it again. I could lie and say you looked so pathetic like that, that if you were to ever adopt such an expression anywhere else I would be appalled to call you my rival.
I understand it now as something closer to melancholy.
But melancholy breeds miserere, otherwise known as a danger to the mind.
If I were any stronger of a man I would ask you. If you were any weaker, you would tell me how they clipped its wings and tore out its feet. How they served it to you on a tray, still screaming and thrashing. How you refused to take it, because how could you, how would you, and why was it even expected of you in the first place, but they never brought you anything else. How you waited until the screaming got too quiet to hear, and the thrashing too inconsistent to depend upon, and the blood, oh the blood, became simply too much – painting everything around it with a horrid stench, too liquid for an even coat, too thick to reach you, poor eight-year-old you, huddled in the far corner of the cell. How after all was said and done you were left with the bones. How hollow were they? I would wonder. How did you find out? Would you hit them against the bars and were they so brittle they would crumble in your hands? Would you break them in half to suck out the marrow? And alas, after, when you would cry quietly with the guilt of not taking a life, but the guilt of being an object of torture so profound you killed one anyways, would you shake with hunger and thirst nonetheless?
That look on your face, kuebiko: a state of exhaustion borne from endless, senseless tragedies.
-x-
You heard him talking to Nami one morning, or was it an afternoon?
“It started when I was mad at him for some reason or another – you know how it is dear, I’m always mad at him for something – and I just to happened to be making tea at the time because we had a bunch of it on board and I thought why not, so I gave him a cup of near boiling water and-” It is here that Nami chokes a little, almost too quietly to hear, but you just so happen to hear it anyway. “Do you know what the bastard does? He has the gall – the absolute gall – to not even notice! So then it sort of spiraled from there and since then I’ve been giving him increasingly disturbing drinks and yet he still – still! – hasn’t noticed a thing. And you know, it’s gotten to the point where I’m worried I might have to stop, see, yesterday I gave him a pint of tabasco sauce – yes, what’s with that look? I swear I did! A whole pint! – and he didn’t even blink. This morning I considered a shot of hand sanitizer but decided against it for fear of being accused of attempted murder. Which got me thinking because he drinks things that taste and smell like hand sanitizer already so would he even notice? And Zeff always used to say that if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a motherfucking duck you idiot boy and I would never admit it to his face but I think he was on to something.”
Truth is you haven’t actually noticed anything with the drinks, but not because of your ‘caveman palette’ or whatever Sanji likes to say. No, you haven’t ever noticed anything off about the drinks because Sanji is the one who makes them, and Sanji is the one who hands it to you, and Sanji is the one who will get upset if you don’t finish it, and really, what is a man to do?
“Sounds to me like another one of your obsessions.”
You do not stick around for that conversation, knowing it was not meant for you. Especially a you who would be stuck to the side of a doorframe, unable to assist in unnecessary commentary.
One of Sanji’s obsessions. You wonder what she means by that.
More so than anything you wonder if you already are one, though you know the answer to that, don’t you?
-x-
Sanji swears he isn’t afraid of needles, and so far you trust him on that.
But, you do have to admit that when the kid came outside after he dried off all his tears, asked how recently you all had had blood work done, and after about five seconds of completely crushing silence Usopp asked “what does that mean?” Sanji did look a little wary to put it lightly.
He is not scared of needles, you piece together in the back of your mind, he is scared of what is inside them. Whether that be what is going in, or being taken out.
-x-
You don’t really know whose hand is sliding up your chest, feeling around your muscles, but you gain a smug sense of accomplishment from it. That there is something to feel, even when his mouth is so occupied because, if there is anything you swear by other than the sword – and booze, but you’ve long since ticked that one off for tonight – it is your ability to woo random men at random bars with your tongue. Which isn’t like a particularly good thing, nor is it even particularly useful, but the guy in front of you, pressed up against the wall doesn’t seem to think it’s that bad. He doesn’t seem to be thinking at all, really.
You found him in a bar, as you usually do when docking for an unspecified amount of time and he dragged you over to a secluded back alley. Though, this time it’s strange – you have an eternal log to Alabasta and a civil war to stop or something but hey, if the crew isn’t moving you aren't either.
Figuratively speaking. Your hand is in this guy’s hair and your lips are travelling down to his neck, and he smiles into your temple, fingers lazily tracing their way up your abs, and around each of your ribs.
And it’s terrible, really, because you don’t even like him that much, but what you lack in camaraderie you make up for in lust – but that’s terrible too, because you were never one to give in to lust.
Something of a shout erupts from the end of the alley and there you find Sanji, beet red and staring, though only for a moment as he shields his face with his grocery list and scurries on by.
You don’t remember what happens with that guy, though you know you don’t get very far. It’s late at night when Sanji comes and finds you under a tree, about to fall asleep. The sun had set long ago, but your eyes still follow its path through the earth, and maybe that’s all there is to it.
“So,” Sanji says, looking away from you, cigarette smoldering in his mouth. “Blond twinks, huh?”
You squawk out something unintelligible, but it doesn’t make it very far. Sanji decides the aborted noise is more telling than anything else and snickers. The bastard.
Though, you hadn’t even noticed he was blond, really.
-x-
Sometimes you mistake me for someone else.
Sometimes in only the quickest of moments – moments of anger, of battle, of surprise or of shock – you turn to face me, and yet you do not find me. I struggle to say you are looking past me, though, as you see my body, standing, or walking, or leaning against something inconsequential, or simply existing as I am, but you do not see my soul. I wonder now if you were to ever see someone else’s, or if the person you see ever even had one.
One day you will tell me of something greater. You will speak of all the questions your young mind was brimming with – silly, trivial things that won't help you in whatever ‘the real world’ may be.
Mama, do snakes lick their eyes too, or is that just lizards? Because god knows their tongues are long enough.
I don’t know, she told you, we’ll see if we can find anything on it and report back to each other, okay?
And okay you would say, a smile three-quarters on your face.
And another day you would tell me, for it is a different conversation for a different time, of all of the questions that, thinking back, were really the ones you should have asked.
Mama, what’s your favourite colour?
Blue, like your eyes, she’d say, like she wasn’t the one you got them from.
Mama, what’s your favourite food?
Spicy seafood pasta, she’d say, remembering that you'd told her it was yours last week, but not remembering that she doesn’t like spicy food.
Mama, what do you smell like?
Like your cooking, she’d say, because you bring it to her every day, and she knew somehow that you’d grow up, up and away, but if your food would stay with you, which she knew it would, then so would she.
Mama, what do you love like?
A raging tempest, she would think, but she would not say, too surprised by your simple question. A raging tempest and a torrential downpour and a starving parasite and all of the natural things a mother should feel for her child, for only the naturally violent things she knew you should have had to endure.
And you would smile, to me, now, the tears only three-quarters in your eyes.
And yet that smile, that same one, ever so persistent.
-x-
It is dinner time, and Brook is waxing poetic about a girl from long ago. He speaks of her not only through his lips – though he bears none – but through song, wistful and bright and all contradictory emotions.
You hum at the wrong time, an indication you are listening, but he turns to you with no more to say.
“Have you ever had the privilege to fall in love with a girl?” He asks, and you go to object, but. But.
Not romantically, no, you could say. But platonically, perhaps. Where she was your whole world, sun, and solar system. Where she existed in all parts of you at all times, but to exist in your mouth would be nothing more than a sin. You had been in love, yes, with everything related to her. The sword equal to the scabbard she kept it in, waiting until you would ask her to show you just what it meant to truly be devoted to her craft.
Because back then it was. Her craft, and only hers.
“No, Zoro likes twinks,” Sanji says from where he is washing dishes. You don’t quite realize how strange it is that he isn't participating in a conversation such as this, prioritizing jumping up from your seat and flushing a deep red colour.
You stutter once, twice, thrice, and he simply laughs. “That wasn’t-! You can’t! That’s not!”
And he smiles, and you know that, even though he hasn’t turned around.
People laugh, some giggle, some do a third thing that fits them best, and you know that now it’s out they won’t tease you about it again. You’ve saved yourself another day of pining with the absence of the word blonde.
-x-
You find him holding his mouth shut over the toilet. His legs are sprawled out at unfortunate angles, like he opened the door to the bathroom and embraced total collapse. His shoulders heave with such force you wonder if his lungs are even still functioning. And you watch, as he shudders in anticipation, convulses, and swallows his puke, some of it escaping in the cracks of his fingers. And he wails, cries, whimpers.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, throw-up covered hand still pressed tightly to his mouth, though you don’t quite know who it is he’s talking to.
When he convulses again you pry his hand away from his face and he startles, looking up at you with shock and what might even be betrayal, but not for long because vomit pries its way out of his mouth and into the toilet.
“I’m sorry, okay?” His voice breaks somewhere in the middle and for once he sounds and looks his age. It looks like he’s talking to you now, but you still don’t even know what he could be sorry for. “I just- she said it was so easy. Why was it easy? Why didn’t I get to have it easy?” he continues.
Not knowing what to say, you make small circling motions with your thumb on his wrist. He doesn’t seem to notice.
“And she swore she saw me before,” his voice, still almost too quiet to hear, but only now do you realize it. “But I wasn’t even there, and do I really look that much like him?”
He looks up at you now, eyes brimmed with tears, cheeks covered in their tracks. There is a moment of silence, and a moment of weakness, where you allow him to forget you, and let his eyes travel up and down your body, like he’s searching for something that isn’t there, or something that should be.
Suddenly he’s back over the toilet, insides all come out.
And he cries. Louder this time. From his very soul, by his very soul, because his very soul is breaking, and really why should you be the one to watch.
After his breathing is as even as it’s going to get, you help him up and stick his hand under the sink. It’s burning when you first turn it on, but Sanji doesn’t seem to notice. You wipe his face with some toilet paper and only then does he look you in the eye.
It doesn’t last long.
“Undigested carbohydrates,” he mumbles. “N’ proteins, and vitamins, and minerals.” He fiddles with the hem of his shirt with his good hand, the one that's – not still under the sink. You shut it off. “I was told never to waste.”
“It’s also got stomach acids and bacteria,” you point out. “That’s why it’s being expelled, curly.”
“It’s being expelled because I’m a fucking coward.” And he doesn’t say anything more after that.
You piggyback him to the galley, because it is the only kindness you know of, and give him a drink of water. You can’t tell if he realizes any of this is happening, eyes blocked behind that wall of fringe, but for his sake you hope he doesn’t.
You go to put the glass back in the sink, because washing it is something you can do in the morning – and you will. Do it in the morning. When you turn around Sanji is staring at you, and as you lock eyes there is an indiscernible expression on his face.
“The first knife I ever owned,” he breathes slowly, letting fury and struggle overcome him. “Was the one you forgot in my flesh.”
And like that, you are leading him out the door by his wrist.