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Sanji, of course, knew what to expect in the event he was ever reunited with his family. It is somehow still surprising just how blatant they are.
They are so similar to how they were in his childhood memories it is as if they were frozen in amber—not just themselves but this entire horrible place—and unthawed solely so they could resume torture that had never stopped but only been paused in the years Sanji had been away.
He expected this, the beatings, the abuse, but he still panics when guards force him to his feet after Reiju slipped the bracelets onto his wrists, and he hears Judge direct them to take Sanji down to one of the labs.
“It’s been prepared for his physical,” Judge says. “Though wasting resources on him is regrettable, we must make sure he is presentable to avoid insulting our new allies.”
Reiju must see the way Sanji’s face goes pale, and she walks with him and his guards a few steps into the hall to whisper, “Don’t try to fight it. It will be over quickly.”
Her words are advice, not comfort, as is her way. But Reiju is cold, not cruel. She wouldn’t try to give him false hope or lull him into letting his guard down before sending him to his torturers. Just a warning.
And with that, she is gone, and Sanji is marched down deeper into the coldest, most sterile parts of Germa as his mind drifts away. His body mechanically takes each step as he recalls the times he had walked this route as a child. He had pushed those memories so far back he nearly forgot they existed.
His biggest concern, then, was if he’d be able to forget whatever was about to happen, too.
There is a chair built to recline—designed for practicality not comfort, as is everything in Germa. There are men with masks and coats and gloves, covered up in uniforms that look as if they were designed to make their occupants as alien as possible. They surround him, they force him into the chair, they place a single finger on the bracelet to let him know he does not have a choice, and they swab a bit of sticky cold liquid over the skin just below the sensitive crook of his elbow and press a needle in.
And Sanji panics.
-
Zeff was not good at dealing with Sanji when he panics. Sanji would start screaming, and then Zeff would start yelling, and then Sanji would kick and scream louder and occasionally even bite until Zeff picked him by the back of his uniform and hauled him away from whoever was unlucky enough to set him off.
That day everything had been going fine in the kitchen. The usual banter, usual insults slung back and forth that Sanji was now more than schooled in. Sanji huffed about being stuck on waiting duty again. “Why can’t Patty do it?” he whined. “It’s not my fault he’s so ugly he scares the customers.”
“Oh yeah, you little brat?” Patty snorted, mussing Sanji’s hair roughly with one of his huge hands. “And customers like looking at your snot-nosed face?”
“Better than your ugly mug,” Sanji shot back as he batted at Patty’s hand.
Patty leaned a bit more of his weight to keep Sanji down, earning a growl that made him laugh. “Maybe we should stick a mask on you,” he said. “Or a muzzle. Keep you from—”
And the chefs who had been standing around, grinning at the display never did find out what the proposed idea would stop Sanji from doing because he bit clean into the meat of Patty’s hand with all his might.
Patty wrenched himself away, stumbling backwards and onto the ground in his hurry. “Oi, Sanji! What the hell was that—”
“If you fucking touch my face, I’ll kill you!” Sanji screamed. His entire body was red and trembling, hands balled at his fists at his side, sweat suddenly appearing at his temples. “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill everyone!” His shaking hands made their way to his hair, and he started pulling, squeezing his eyes shut. “I-I’ll kill you!” he shrieked again, voice coming out more as a wheeze than anything else.
Sanji couldn’t see or feel or hear anything other than how hot his body was, how difficult it was to breathe in this cramped little prison, but he had to keep screaming, he had to tell them that he wouldn’t just lie down and let them take him back to that cell, he wouldn’t do it, he would die first, he would fight, and kill everyone, and they would all he dead, and he would be dead, and he wouldn’t ever go back.
And then hands were on his shoulders, and Sanji immediately tried wrenching out of their grip, twisting away and scratching at them as hard as he could even though his limbs felt so impossibly heavy all of a sudden. The entire time he fought back, a low voice was speaking to him. What it was saying, Sanji had no idea until he had so little energy left, the only thing he could do was paw at the rough hands at his shoulders.
They were scarred with burns and cuts from years of kitchen work and worn even further from time at sea and the usual wear-and-tear of age. Sanji was familiar with these hands—guiding him on the proper way to hold a knife, helping him balance when he did his first handstands, taking his own hands and wrapping them with bandages whenever he got hurt.
Sanji opened his eyes, blinking away tears that he had no idea had formed. Zeff was in front of him, speaking over his shoulder to the other cooks who were taking out the kitchen medkit.
“Eggplant,” he said, when he turned back to him. He waited just a beat for Sanji to show awareness, and Sanji did with a nod. “My office.”
Sanji wiped his face with the back of his hand and ducked his head as he shuffled past the other cooks. He pretended he didn’t see the others helping Patty inspect his new wound, but he still flushed in shame all the way up to his ears.
Zeff didn’t keep Sanji waiting long. Sanji settled into one of the chairs, and Zeff handed him a glance of water he must have retrieved from the kitchen after ordering Sanji away.
With a great huff, Zeff collapsed into his own chair on the other side of his desk. He didn’t say anything immediately, which made Sanji fidget in his own chair. “Um,” Sanji said, throat still dry and raw even after the gulps of water he had just downed. “Is Patty okay?”
“Complaining up a storm, but he’s not gonna need stitches. Insisted we check you for rabies, though.”
Sanji scowled. “Shithead.”
“Eggplant,” Zeff said, his voice stern and Sanji immediately felt cowed. “This cannot keep happening.”
“It… It doesn’t happen that often,” Sanji said. “And he started it…”
“Patty starts shit all the time. You start shit all the time.”
Sanji crossed his arms. “Look, it’s not my fault, okay? If they would just back off—”
“Back off how?”
Sanji stared at the ground. “Just… back off. Not say stupid shit.”
“Last week, this happened when you got shut in the pantry. Before that, you attacked a chef for calling you a son of a bitch.”
Sanji bristled. “My mom is not a bitch.”
“That’s not the point,” Zeff said. “You have two options: start talking about why this happens or find a way to stop it. And quite plainly, even if you did tell us, the rest of the world isn’t going to know, and you can’t just go around having these episodes.”
Sanji knows he’s right. He doesn’t want to be this way, but it wasn’t like he had a say in the way the panic suddenly took control of his limbs, his every thought. “It’s not my fault,” he said again.
“No, probably not,” Zeff said. “But it’s your responsibility now. Find a solution, or you’re out of the kitchens.”
“What!?” Sanji yelled. “You can’t do that!”
“And you can’t randomly melt down in the middle of my kitchen.”
“Then I won’t do it anymore! See? I’m already better right now, and it wasn’t even that big a deal!”
Zeff gave him a remarkably unimpressed look. “Eggplant.”
“You said yourself that Patty was overreacting! I’ll even apologize to the shithead if that makes you feel better!”
Zeff sighed. “This isn’t about me or Patty or anyone else. It’s about you controlling your damn self.”
It was almost amazing how Sanji kept finding new things to hate Judge for even all these years later. It wasn’t enough to hurt and demean him, strip him of his name and even his face. No, he just had to go a step further and slip all of these things beneath his skin that would emerge when even the littlest thing reminded him of Germa and send his mind right back there.
“I don’t know how to do that,” Sanji admitted, and immediately hated himself because his voice came out wobbly. He was crying for the second time in front of Zeff that day and somehow felt even more helpless than when he had relieved those brief moments of his imprisonment. “It just happens when… whenever I think about certain stuff. And then I just don’t know what to do.”
Zeff was a taskmaster and bitter old curmudgeon, but he wasn’t entirely unsympathetic. He never was. “Then let’s think of something.”
The first few solutions Sanji came up with were not ideal (“Well, smoking always make me feel better—” “Do you want to kill your taste buds any faster?”), and he felt terribly awkward practicing breathing exercises under Zeff’s watchful eye. But the next time a new cook called Sanji a worthless little brat and he started to feel his pulse race, he took a deep breath, turned his back, and went to the closest unoccupied workstation to start cooking. He didn’t have anything in particular in mind to make, but he and Zeff did agree that cooking was the thing that made him feel safe, in control.
The Baratie kitchen was flooded with random meals nobody ordered, but they already had strategies in place to make sure no food went to waste. It worked, though, which was the important thing, and Sanji could be subtle about it, come off as mature even for turning the other cheek when something got under his skin.
Existing in an environment like the Baratie that was full of filthy-mouthed cooks and demanding customers started to dull the stings Sanji did feel after a while. Occasionally he still blew up at people, but Zeff seemed to understand the difference between Sanji regularly losing his temper and when something else was happening. As long as it was the former, he didn’t see a need to intervene.
And maybe if Sanji did try his smoking strategy when there wasn’t a kitchen nearby, then Zeff didn’t need to know.
But Sanji had it under control. All the little things that reminded him of the first eight years of his life didn’t set him off anymore—he was in control, finally free from Judge and Germa and everything else that made him panic.
There was no need to panic.
-
The scientists keep touching him, his arms, his legs, his chest, his face, everywhere they can stick their sterile, clumsy gloves. Sanji’s already been reminded not to fight back, but his legs move on instinct and he mule kicks a man trying to strap something to his thigh.
That gets him strapped down, which Sanji expected but still makes his heart race in panic.
They take blood seemingly over and over again, and Sanji can’t tell if he feels lightheaded from that or the general feeling he got as soon as he entered the room that he wasn’t in his own body.
They need to take a skin sample, and Sanji watches them roll up his sleeve and hold his arm steady and bring a knife to it in third-person. It’s surreal that this is happening—that after all that training to become stronger, to protect what is important to him—that he would have to watch someone slice into his most valued limbs without being able to do a thing to stop them.
The scientists speak to each other like Sanji isn’t there, and their words are muffled both because of the mouth and because Sanji’s ears won’t stop ringing. It’s very interesting that he can generate fire, very interesting how it doesn’t seem to harm his own skin. Very interesting.
Sanji’s arm is bleeding, and whatever they rub on it to sterilize the wound stings worse than any of the afterbattle treatments Chopper had ever given him, despite working with far more meager supplies.
The scientist nearest him wraps a puffy, absorbent bandage around his arm and tells him directly that his powers are very interesting.
They will need to run more tests.
-
“Don’t touch me!” Sanji screams, his eyes squeezed closed. Always with the fucking needles, these scientists, and they just keep jabbing his arm over and over again, and he’s going to kill the next one who tries to place their hands on him.
“I’m sorry!” he hears Chopper shout. “I’m almost done with your stitches, but if you need a break—”
That was not the response Sanji had been expecting, and he blinks his eyes open. They’re in the Sunny’s infirmary, and it’s just him, Chopper, and Luffy lazing on a cot after his own check up. Sanji looks down at his shoulder and remembers that he got shot during their escape from Whole Cake Island, and that is something a doctor should handle.
It looks like Chopper’s about half done, and Sanji swallows. “Sorry. I’m fine. You can keep going.”
“Okay,” Chopper says, hesitant. “But if you do need a break, just let me know.”
“It’s fine. I’ve had much worse.” Which is true, but he never did on the tail end of events that sent him right back to the worst moments of his life.
“It’s okay, Sanji,” Luffy says. He’s lying on his stomach, kicking his legs, and he beams up at Sanji with a sleepy smile. It had been a long day with Luffy barely able to move at the end of it, and yet he still insisted on staying with Sanji while Chopper sewed him up. “Chopper had to do a bunch of stuff for me, too, and I was moving around a bunch.”
“Don’t sound happy about that!” Chopper snaps. “You’re a terrible patient!”
“Sorry, sorry,” Luffy laughs, not sounding even slightly apologetic. “But it’s so boring just waiting for you to finish. You should put games in here!”
“Luffy, this is an infirmary,” Chopper says. “Medicine is very serious. You can’t play in here.”
“Boo, Chopper’s boring,” Luffy says. “Hey Sanji, play a game with me.”
“No games!” Chopper insists.
“It’ll just be a word game,” Luffy says. “No moving. Okay, I’ll go first. I spy something with antlers.”
Sanji has always thought highly of Luffy, but the last few days have radically changed his view of him, and it’s difficult to look his captain in the eyes without getting at least slightly emotional. And Sanji has had enough emotional outbursts in those few days to last the rest of his life.
He can’t tell if Luffy is instigating this game out of genuine boredom or that he has somehow seen straight through Sanji and offered up a way to help distract from his discomfort. Either way, he doesn’t feel he’s in any position to refuse Luffy anything.
“Is it Chopper?”
“Yup!” Luffy laughs and Chopper giggles, too, happy to be included despite his earlier protests. “Your turn!”
“I spy,” Sanji says. He trails off looking around the room, and his breath hitches as he feels the needle thread back through his skin. But he can’t close his eyes and drift off back to that place deep under Germa. He has to keep his eyes open, play this game with Luffy. “S-Something red.”
Luffy sticks his bottom lip out in thought. It’s a very stupid face he’s making, but everything Luffy does seems slightly perfect now. Sanji realizes this will likely be a problem the next time Luffy begs for food, but it’s hard to focus on that when he’s trying so hard not to focus on the feeling of cold, surgical metal pressing into his skin.
-
In the midst of the constant poking and prodding, Sanji starts to genuinely wonder if the whole marriage thing was just a needlessly elaborate lie and the real plan is to dissect him.
They apparently need to see how his body, now at maturity, would react to Germa technology that it had previously rejected as a child.
All the tests and the surgeries that had lasted for hours and left him feeling raw and vulnerable as a child came back to him. The constant nausea of new medications and soreness in his arms from being jabbed with new shots or blood extractions. He had gained enough scars from the daily beatings, but Sanji knew that if he looked in the right places and concentrated, he could find the surgical ones for procedures he never knew the purpose of but always left him in some sort of pain when the anesthetics and other painkillers wore off.
But Sanji is an adult now, and they can’t just treat him like they did back then when he was powerless. That part of himself is dead, and exploding bracelets or not, he wasn’t going to let them inject whatever experimental Germa serum they had cooked up to test on him like a guinea pig.
Sanji tells them they would all be fucking dead as soon as they released him if this went on any longer. He would tear out of the straps holding him down and force them to cure their own broken bones.
It isn’t a surprise when the sedatives come out, wrecking some kind of havoc on his body that immediately makes his vision start to blur. But in the few moments left that he does have, he sees them pick up the pace, moving in excitement now that their patient can’t fight back.
When Sanji fulls come to, he’s at dinner with his family, wearing clothes he doesn’t remember changing into, and there’s half a bite of a well prepared steak stuck on his fork. He feels the fog physically lifting as he runs his hands over his arms. The bracelets are still there, of course, and there’s new gauze parading up both forearms.
His fingers dig into the skin, and he wants to tear the bandages clean off, discover what was done to him, but if he does, he knows Judge will send him right back to get them redone.
All of his family are eating and talking like normal, like Sanji hasn’t just emerged from a zombified state, out of his mind with panic. He has to wonder if this is what going crazy feels like, to know something is so horribly wrong while everyone else around you carries on like nothing has happened, laughing and eating fucking steak.
Sanji makes a quick plan in his head. He will somehow get through this dinner, then go to his room and carefully remove the bandages in such a way that he can resecure them while still getting a good look at whatever had been done to him.
It was a good plan. A very good plan—
“Sanji, are you cold?” Reiju asks. “You’re shivering.”
Sanji didn’t realize he had been doing such a thing, and when he turns his head to answer her, he feels a sudden wave of nausea roll over him. He opens his mouth, but forming words is impossible. For a second, his brain short circuits, and he isn’t even sure how he’s supposed to make words—all the muscle memory gone.
“Oi, if you’re going to throw up, do it on Niji,” Yonji says, his chair screeching against the floor as he shuffles away from Sanji.
Sanji hasn’t thrown up in years—barring one very embarrassing incident during his training where he might have had too much to drink and Iva had to hold back his hair—and he is about to tell Yonji that when whatever barrier had been barely holding up falls.
His vomit hits the ground, just a little splashing on Yonji’s shoes, which he can’t even feel good about because the only thing that stops him from face planting right onto the dining table when he faints is Reiju darting over to catch him.
Sanji wakes up in the bed he presumes his family has made up for him during his imprisonment. Reiju is there, giving the impression that she is rather impatient for this whole thing to be over.
“What the hell happened?” Sanji asks, throat feeling like gravel.
“The medication didn’t take, apparently,” Reiju says. “Father is disappointed.” She gets up, taking only a second to smooth out her skirt and deliver a warning that, “He’s scheduled follow up tests for tomorrow morning.”
It’s a small miracle Sanji doesn’t throw up again.
-
Sanji thinks he’s going to be sick.
“Something red… something red…” Luffy says, humming to himself. “Ooh, is it the band on my hat?”
Sanji can’t remember what he had in mind when he gave his hint, so he says, “Yeah, you got it.”
Luffy cheers to himself, which does make Sanji smile. Whether it’s defeating an emperor’s commander or winning a childish game, every victory deserves a full celebration. It’s amazing how Luffy’s enthusiasm for these everyday wonders never fades, and Sanji wishes he could get as excited about anything in his life as Luffy does about his dinner every night.
Sanji’s eyes drift back to the stitches, which makes his stomach turn. Chopper’s almost done, though, so he can get through it. Zeff may have been heavy-handed, but he was right. Sanji would never be able to get through anything if he didn’t find someway to cope with all the little bombs in his head, ready to go off without a moment’s notice.
But god he wishes Chopper allowed cigarettes in the infirmary.
Sanji’s hands are twitching, fumbling through the same movements he would do if he had one. He needs to ask Chopper for a fuller examination—figure out just what Germa’s scientists actually did to him. It was deemed a failure, apparently, but Sanji knows too well that “failure” and “having adverse effects on Sanji’s health” are not mutually exclusive for Judge.
He thinks about whatever was in those syringes worming its way under his skin, warping blood and tissue to turn them into metal. There’s a parasite lurking in his body, ready to devour his being and leave him hollowed out at the slightest provocation. He needs to keep still for Chopper, but Sanji can’t resist wrapping his arms around himself when he remembers what Reiju told him about their brothers.
The entire time, the scientists had been writing things down on clipboards, weighing and measuring each part of his being. Part of Sanji wanted to see just what conclusions they were coming to. As a child, he wanted to know desperately—learn what he could do better, how he could improve. Of course, he knows now that would have done very little, potentially harm his fragile sense of self worth even further by seeing it scientifically documented that he was a failure.
Just the idea that there are charts out there documenting every detail about his body like a science experiment makes the nausea worse, and Sanji tightens his grip on his arms.
“—something made of straw,” Luffy says from underwater. “Are you stumped, Sanji?”
There’s no kitchen in the infirmary, and Sanji really needs a damn cigarette.
“Sanji?”
Sanji opens his mouth to answer, but he just gasps. He recognizes the signs and hates himself. He hasn’t had an episode like this since the Baratie. He had even had the audacity one day to tell Zeff he was cured, which the old man didn’t believe for a second but wasn’t going to fight him on. Sanji was over this. He was supposed to be over this part of his life.
He feels hot breath on his face and the low hum of Luffy’s speech, which means he’s very close and likely saying something important, even if Sanji can’t make out the words. He feels hands, solid and rubbery and familiar in texture on his hands, which at some point stopped grabbing his arms and made his way to his hair.
His vision is blurred, but Sanji blinks his eyes open and tries to focus on what Luffy is telling him. Stop something. Sanji thinks he needs to stop a lot of things, stop freaking out, stop being like this, stop looking so pathetic in front of his captain over and over again.
Sanji shakes his head, and he thinks he tells Luffy he doesn’t understand, but he isn’t sure if he managed words or just garbled noises or just a sob.
Luffy presses his forehead against Sanji’s weaves their fingers together, lifting them away from his head. Sanji feels the pressure he didn’t realize was there immediately lessen. Oh, he had been pulling his hair again.
Luffy is close, way too close, and part of Sanji can’t help but think that this isn’t the right way to help at all. It makes Sanji want to laugh, which comes out choked and causes Luffy’s eyebrows to scrunch together in concern.
There are footsteps and Luffy is talking and someone else is answering—is Chopper there? Did Chopper leave and come back? And then Luffy is taking exaggerated breaths in and out, so over the top they are far more likely to make a normal person dizzy than relaxed.
Sanji has to laugh again, and has to wonder at how even in this state, everything Luffy does is amazing. He clings to that thought, and that somehow brings it all back together. Luffy is babbling, “Name ten things you see, no count backwards from ten! Like a bomb! Wait, uh, count up to ten!”
“Luffy, stop yelling!” Chopper says. “You’re going to make it worse!”
“Sanji, don’t go towards the light!”
“That’s for when people are dying!”
“Sanji’s dying!?”
Sanji did feel a little like he was just a few seconds ago, and he pities anyone stuck alone with Luffy in an even slightly less controlled situation like this. “I’m okay,” Sanji says, voice shaky. “Don’t know what came over me.”
“You started breathing funny,” Luffy says. He doesn’t move back an inch, forehead still pressed to Sanji’s fingers still intertwined. “I thought you didn’t want to play I Spy anymore.”
“Glad that’s what got your attention,” Sanji says with a snort. “I just do this sometimes. It’s not a big deal.”
“You’ve never mentioned this happening to me before,” Chopper says. “I’m your doctor, Sanji. You have to tell me these things, so I can help you.”
“Sorry,” Sanji says. “I’ll tell you later. I’m just really tired right now.”
“Your heart’s beating really fast,” Luffy says. “Are you anxious?”
Yes, always, Sanji thinks. “No. Like I said, it just happens.”
Luffy frowns. “I don’t like it.”
Sanji laughs again. “Yeah, I don’t either. Just the way I’m made, I guess.”
“Well, Sanji is right. He should get some rest” Chopper says. “You too, Luffy.”
“Okay, we’ll nap here,” Luffy says. Chopper twitches his nose in mild disapproval, but doesn’t otherwise protest as he leaves the room to let them rest.
Luffy shifts his hold to pull Sanji into a hug. Sanji’s entire body is drenched in sweat from his sudden panic, his clothes sticking to him and feeling coarse and tacky. Luffy, of course, is still a bit of a mess from his own battles, bits of mochi still matted into his hair. Sanji will help with it later—the very least he can do to show his thanks.
All of this makes for an uncomfortable tangle of limbs that normally Sanji would shove his way out of. But the idea of shoving Luffy away makes his stomach turn, and he wonders how much these new horrors embedded in him will show up whenever he’s relieving the greatest hits of the worst moments of his life.
“Sanji, your heart’s still beating like crazy.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Luffy says, smiling up at him. “Heart’s are just funny.”
Sanji swallows. “They are.”
“Let’s make it better.” He places a hand over Sanji’s chest, fingers splayed wide. “Everything is okay. Calm down.”
Sanji can’t remember ever laughing so much in the wake of a panic attack. “Are you talking to my heart?”
“Yeah!” Luffy says, and he pats Sanji’s chest. “Be good to Sanji. He’s been through a lot, so be nice.”
Sanji feels his face flush and his heart start to race for an entirely different reason, which makes Luffy frown when his pulse picks back up again. “It’s okay, Sanji,” Luffy says. “You can relax now. We’re on the Sunny, and I’m right here.”
Those are several of the exact reasons Sanji can’t calm down, and he thinks again that he really is going to need to do something about how every little thing Luffy did left his heart reeling.
“It’s okay,” Luffy says again, hand over Sanji’s heart. “Everything is okay. Everything you want is right here.”