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(“Did Mama and Father get married because they were in love?”
“No, stupid. They got married because Father wanted someone to carry his children and Mom’s family wanted power. Don’t be such a idiotic, useless romantic.”)
.
Sanji hears the explosion in the early evening. It's not very close — somewhere on the island, for sure, but not close enough to shake the house itself. He tilts his head towards it, pauses for a moment from slicing scallions, but doesn't pay it much more mind than that.
Things explode all the time, around Big Mom and her family. So long as they're nowhere near him or anything important to him, Sanji does his best not to think about it. That's not his place.
It becomes his problem when, five minutes later, Pudding shoulders open the door to his rooms, anger licking off her like flames. Sanji carefully places his knife to the side and turns to face her. She crowds him against the counter, glaring.
"Did you know about this?" she demands in a hiss, leaning forward. “Are you in on whatever hairbrained scheme they're trying to pull off right now? Do you have fucking contact with them?"
Sanji looks down at her, calm as he can. “I don't know what you're talking about," he says, and it's the truth. But he can feel a traitorous, singing hope rising in his chest, because there's only so many things that could be eliciting this reaction from her. Maybe, maybe — “I don't have contact with anyone, and you've made sure of it."
Made sure of it viciously, that first year or so. The amount of trouble he'd earned himself from trying to sneak letters out alone, never mind the few times he's nearly got his hands on a den-den, ensured that he was very well-versed in how the Big Mom Pirates handled discipline. He'd stopped trying, at first, not out of fear, but out of hopelessness. The two reasons tasted very similar.
Pudding stares at him for another long, weighted second, and then huffs out a breath. “Do not try to leave this room," she orders, and Sanji nods, deferential as always, as she confirms his wildest dreams without saying anything. “The doors will be triple locked. No one is getting in here, not when they're up against Mom. Those," she flicks the cuffs ever-present on his wrists, "will go off if you cross that threshold, until we get this nonsense sorted. Behave yourself."
“Of course, my beloved wife," Sanji responds, and he isn't even really lying. Pudding looks at him with that strange half-pain in her eyes that she gets sometimes, which makes it so difficult to truly hate her.
He and Pudding have an understanding — that he can glare and stare all he wants and she'll pretend to not notice, so long as the words he says are the correct ones. He keeps quiet and he ducks his head and he plays the dutiful spouse. He serves, and he does not bring her wrath down on him and his.
The hardest part about navigating Pudding is how hot-and-cold she runs, how terrifyingly unpredictable she can be. What makes her happy one day makes her furious the next. Sanji learned, though. He's now something of an expert.
“Good." She says, and then turns to go, before pausing. Her eyes linger for a long second on one of the doors off the main room. Sanji tracks her thinking, and his heart lurches.
“No," he says, the first protest he's made since this started, the first time he's spoken in anything other than neutral deference. “Don't. You just said it yourself — nobody is getting up here." It's the first time he's said something he doesn't believe this evening. “Leave it. Please."
Shockingly, Pudding does. She stares for another second, and then turns towards the exit.
“I want beef burgundy for dinner tonight," she says, her back to him.
“Of course. I'll prepare it."
And then she leaves without another word, pulling the door firmly shut behind her. Sanji listens to the many locks slide into place.
He waits another moment. Then he crosses back into his kitchen, puts the finishing touches on the meal he'd been making, and then mechanically plates the whole thing into three bento boxes. He sets them out on the counter. He can hear more explosions.
He does not start cooking the beef burgundy
Sanji walks back out to the center of the room. He digs around in his pocket, finds a cigarette, places it between his lips. He lights it and inhales. He goes through basic stretches, feels his legs loosen. He watches the door.
Waiting for four years, Blackleg Sanji waits just a little bit longer.
.
In his heart of hearts, the deepest part of himself, Sanji's never really stopped being a child in a dungeon, feeding rats to keep his heart alive.
Sometimes, he thinks maybe that kid’s replaced by a slightly older one, skeletal and on a rock in the sea, starvation overwriting everything that came before it. But, really, the rock was just the dungeon in a mirror — instead of the child, he'd been the mouse; some small, helpless thing receiving kindness he had no way to fathom, let alone understand.
But the point is that captivity is a part of Sanji's heart, pressed there from a very young age. Carved into the insides of his ribs. Maybe it's even — and he thinks about his mother, chained by sickness in her bed — a part of his bloodline. A birthright.
It isn’t that he doesn’t fight; it’s that they know exactly what to do to get him to stop. And here is Sanji, who learned every lesson his mother taught him, not all of them good. Here is Sanji, who is well-learned in the art of letting himself hurt.
And so he smiles and he bakes for Big Mom, and he cooks for his wife. And he stares out windows often enough that his in-laws mock him for daydreaming, and so he smiles at them, too, every inch his mother's son.
.
The sounds get louder and closer. He can hear the front entrance shatter to nothing, thunderous footsteps on the stairs.
Sanji stares at his door. He hears something collide with it once, twice, and then the muffled, angry order, “Get rid of it, and then the sound of a slash on thick wood.
And then Sanji is looking at Luffy. And Luffy is looking back.
He's taller than he used to be.
Sanji’s eyes burn, flood over, in the long, long second where Luffy stands stock still, staring at him. And then Luffy’s face breaks too, and he’s also crying, and he launches himself into the room.
“Sanji." His voice breaks, and he crashes into Sanji’s arms, and Sanji catches him and they both whirl in a circle and Sanji doesn’t care how it looks, doesn’t care what anyone thinks, Luffy hugs him so tight it would be hard to breathe except this is the first time Sanji’s been able to breathe correctly in four years.
Four fucking years.
He rests his forehead in Luffy’s dark hair. The hat is around Luffy’s neck. “Hi, Captain," Sanji says, and can’t say anything else.
“We haven’t found All Blue yet," says Luffy, quiet and not an apology because Sanji doesn’t want one. Sanji instead holds back a sob, and clutches his captain a little tighter.
He looks up at the door, then, at the rest of the bodies crowded there —
The stupid swordsman, his hand on the hilt of his white sword. Lovely Nami, her hair cut short once again. Robin, her face icy.
Sanji’s spent every who-knows-how many days wishing to see them, and now they’re in front of him and he doesn’t know what to say.
(He wrote them letters, and took so many risks to try to send them. Spends the first months and years he's here getting in increasingly more trouble for all the ways he tries to sneak them out, but then the Thing happens and he couldn’t risk it anymore, he can't risk the consequences, and so he keeps writing them and and hiding them in depths of his bags, hundreds of them, filled with sentimental nonsense he could never let himself say —
Dear Nami, Dear Robin, Dear Luffy, Dear stupid fucking swordsman, Dear Usopp, Dear Chopper, Dear Franky Brook Jinbei and everyone, I have a [REDACTED], I have no one, I miss you. I hope you're all safe and eating well.)
And so, now, he opens his mouth to say — something, he doesn’t know what — when there’s a clatter on the other side of the room, and Zoro spins to it with his hand on his blade, and what actually comes out of his mouth is “No.”
Zoro stops, eyes snapping to his face, and Sanji continues through a thick throat. “It’s okay," he says, “it’s okay." And then he raises his voice. “It’s alright, sweetheart. You can come out. We have guests — come say hello."
And the door on the other side of the room creaks open the rest of the way, and Sanji closes his eyes, imagining what his crew is seeing.
“Papa?"
She’s tall for her age but still so small, and a skinny little twig of a toddler — three years old and built just like her father, all straight lines and limbs. A mop of brown-red hair falls, frizzy and strange, into her eyes. She’s dressed in little blue pajamas printed with hearts.
Sanji can feel the way his crew is staring.
“Oh!" The smile on her face is sudden and genuine. She races over to Luffy, grabs at the bottom of his vest, rocks back and forth on her feet. “It’s Captain! You’re papa’s captain! Hello, hello!"
Luffy looks like someone just hit him with a sea stone bullet. Sanji glances across the room, at how Nami and Robin are staring at him. He knows they feel the implications. He can’t breathe for having to confront them.
“She’s yours?" Robin asks, low and understanding, and Sanji nods as a few more tears slip down his cheeks.
“Yeah," he says hoarsely, “she’s mine.” It burns his chest to say, with pride and with love and with pain, merciful fucking blues, Sanji hurts. “Introduce yourself, sweetheart," he directs to the child, who is still clutching at Luffy’s vest. “And tell them what you’re named for."
Sanji’s daughter blinks up at him. “I thought that was a secret," she says, very seriously, holding a tiny index finger up to her lips. “I can’t tell anyone that."
“I know, sweetheart. But you can tell them."
“Okay!” She turns to his crew, beaming. “Hi, I’m Tangerine!” She thumps her chest proudly, because if Sanji’s taught her anything, it’s to be properly proud of this. “And I’m named after the happiest part of the happiest ship in the world!"
Sanji hears Nami’s breath hitch.
He can’t help it — he buries his face in his hands, because he can feel the way his cheeks and eyes are burning. The cold of his golden cuffs press to his chin, a constant reminder. Sanji doesn't know how to tell them, that this is why he stopped all his tiny rebellions. This is how they made him so weak. And he can't even care, for how much he loves her.
He can feel, rather than see, Luffy slowly turn away from him and crouch down so he’s on the same eye level as Sanji’s daughter.
“Hey, Tangerine,” says Luffy, in that achingly soft voice he only ever uses when one of them is hurting. Even after all this time, it still sounds familiar, and the familiarity feels as if it’s flaying Sanji open. “I’m real excited to meet you. My name is Monkey D. Luffy. You're right, I’m your dad’s captain, and I’m gunna be king of the pirates.”
Sanji pushes his hands down around a ragged sob.
“That’s so cool!” Tangerine beams, and then turns serious again. She glances up at Sanji, and Sanji manages a wavering smile for her. She asks Luffy, “Do captains rescue people?”
“Yeah!” Luffy smiles so big his eyes crease shut. “They do. Do you wanna come home with us, Tangerine? We’ve got a ship that looks like a lion and lots of adventures.”
Tangerine bounces back and forth on her toes a few more times, all childish energy. “I know! Papa told me all about it.” Sanji can feel Zoro, Robin, and Nami nearly vibrating from all the words they're not letting themselves say. “And I want that a lot!” continues his daughter, and she stares Luffy right in the eyes. “Papa wants that more than anything.”
The air around Luffy crackles, all electric ozone, but his face remains soft in the face of the child. He offers his hand to Tangerine, who takes it without hesitation.
“Let’s go home, then,” he says, easy as anything, as if that isn't a miracle, and gets to his feet. He turns back to Sanji, who lets his captain's eyes give him the strength to pull himself together.
“Darling,” Sanji says, tightly controlled, to Tangerine, “could you go with Robin and grab your bag and mine from the back of the closet? The packed ones, you know where they are. If that’s okay with Robin, of course.”
Robin nods, rolling with the situation with an effortlessness that makes Sanji remember why he’s missed her so fucking much. “Of course.” She reaches out to the little girl, her kindest smile on her face. “Will you show me?” she asks and, after glancing up to Sanji and getting an encouraging nod in response, Tangerine grabs her hand eagerly.
“Uh huh,” says Tangerine. She tugs Robin away to the room she just came out of.
With the two of them gone, Sanji finally meets the gazes of his crew head-on, for the first time in four years. They stare back, Nami and Zoro and Luffy, and even though they aren’t moving he can already feel them pulling him closer, away from here, shielding him and ripping the chains that held him to this imaginary sickbed, this legacy of beaten-down submission his mother hadn’t meant to teach him but taught him all the same.
But Sora also taught him his rebellion. She lit his fire, and Zeff had fed it, and he, himself, Black Leg Sanji of the Straw Hat Pirates, had kept it burning.
(Because he's kept his kitchen, the one in his rooms, in the East Blue tradition, unable to deal with how very, very industrialized and un-human most of the others on these islands are. He's hung fishbone charms over the single window, and put his knives in the proper places, and kept a bowl of dried fruit and nuts out for travelers who will never grace his doorstep. He teaches "A kitchen is a heart of a place" to his daughter because if he's following his mother's footsteps, he might not always be here to remind her, and he will give her Zeff's words if he can give her nothing else. But it doesn't matter because here is his crew, here is his crew and Sanji will not die, Sanji will not leave his child.)
So he lifts his wrists, watches the faces of his friends darken as they process the damned things clamped around them, and says, “Get these off me, will you? And get me the fuck out of here.” Despite the cuffs, his face breaks into what feels like his first real smile in years.
The rest of his crew rains chaos down outside, and Luffy grins back at him, and maybe it's not all okay now, but it's a start.