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Sanji first learns it from the scar on Zoro’s chest.
He’d seen it firsthand, the birth of that one, the belly of that beast. He’d stood at the helm of Baratie and looked at a man hungry enough to risk death; hungry enough to welcome it with arms open. He’d seen the single-minded ambition, clear as tolling death bells, at the sound of a promise and he’d stood there, uncomprehending.
Sanji had stood there, frozen, mouth open. He’d known the feeling of hunger intimately, and here was someone who’d refused to give it up. He’d starved on an island for weeks and here was someone who’d do it willingly.
Here was someone with his sword to the sky, daring Sanji to reach for it too, that old familiar hunger, that aching he’d stifled. Here was a man with his chest split open, his insides witness to all that could look, daring Sanji to try.
Sanji had only just learned to fill his stomach, to sate that aching, clawing thing in him, and here was someone daring him to let it out, daring him to want.
—
On a nameless island, in a nameless town, they’re hunted. Fledgling pirates and slim pickings for every amateur bounty hunter; or so the hunter would think. When Sanji wakes later, an inexplicable premonition, a change in the wind, he finds Zoro on deck, swords drawn.
“Marimo, what’s going—” Sanji starts before freezing at the sight before him, freezing when Zoro turns and Sanji meets a demon.
Zoro’d been on watch, usually is but this Zoro, the one on the deck with his swords drawn is different to the one Sanji saw last eating dinner in the galley, different to the one who cut his ankles open, will be different to the one Sanji will see tomorrow. Sanji stands at the open mouth of the hallway and watches as the crescent moon shines down on the Merry, down the slope of Zoro’s back—straight and sure, the impossible incline of a mountain—down the muscles in his arms, down where his hands curl around the hilts of his swords, down to the deck with the blood that Zoro flicks off of their edge.
Around Zoro, Sanji can see bodies lying in a circular radius, no uniforms, and not anyone he can identify—bounty hunters, then. He watches silently as Zoro bends to rip the edge off a bounty hunter’s shirt and wipes his swords clean, watches him sheathe all but Wado, in his teeth, red as the moon that he fell to the deck.
Sanji moves, silent, walking up to Zoro in the middle of the deck, and Zoro turns. He has his bandana on but it’s not Zoro that turns to him but his moniker. The Demon of the East Blue the newspapers had called him and Sanji’d never understood, not until that’s who turns to meet him.
Zoro doesn’t say anything as he looks at Sanji. He’s so still, something cut out of the night sky. He’s so still that the wind moves around him, and the waves with him. The bodies spread around him, circular, and he, their reaper, cuts the night for them to take leave. Zoro, the sickle in the sky, the hollow around which the night air rushes, half in shadow and the other half in stark relief.
He turns to Sanji, and Zoro on a fallowed battlefield, is like catching the tail ends of death, Sanji thinks. Still and unmoving, he watches Sanji, the entire line of him silhouetted by the moon, and his eyes—the moon’s lesser sister—Sanji thinks must have been cut from somewhere far away, somewhere deep beneath the earth or high above the sky, to look like that. Zoro, with Wado in his mouth and the moon in his hair, is a primordial thing and Sanji is helpless in the face of him.
Just as the moment had stretched, it breaks just as quickly—Zoro sheathes Wado, takes off his bandana, and then it’s the same old mosshead that Sanji knows.
“Cook, give me a hand with them,” he says, gesturing at the fallen bounty hunters and Sanji doesn’t understand what Zoro means by that, not until he watches Zoro drag one of them by the feet to the edge of the deck and over, to the ocean’s depths.
Sanji gets to work too, and doesn’t think about the practiced way Zoro upends men into the waiting arms of the sea. He doesn’t think of how Zoro, alone in the crow's nest, must have been quiet enough, night after night, to fight off those that dared attack them so none of the others would wake. He doesn’t think of how Zoro will come to breakfast the next day and not say a word, and how none of the crew will ever have to worry about their backs in sleep.
Sanji doesn’t think about any of it, not about how the softest, bloodiest parts of Zoro are the ones they’ll never see. He doesn’t think about it, but he heats the spiced rum he’d hidden in the farthest corner of the kitchen—the one he’s sure Zoro hadn’t found—when Zoro goes to wash up.
They don’t talk about it, and neither of them thanks the other, but Sanji keeps Zoro company for the night, smoking in the kitchen and pretending he didn’t see Zoro’s transparent delight at the sight of the rum while Zoro returns to the crow’s nest. They keep each other company, separated by the width of the ship, separated by the length of their future—intertwined now by Luffy’s gracious hand—despite not knowing each other, not yet at least, they’re not there yet; separated by the body of their trust, that bloody, red thing neither of them will name.
They don’t talk about it and neither of them thanks the other, but on the coldest, harshest nights, if Sanji leaves a bottle of spiced rum out on the kitchen counter, neither of them mention it.
—
In the blue-dawn light of Water 7, Sanji finds him after it all. There’s a flaming hole through the world’s flag, a tree for an archaeologist, and crosshairs waiting for a sniper, but a night of partying is enough to take everyone out but Sanji, with all his dishes, and a swordsman with all his scars.
Sanji finds him on the terrace, leaning on the parapet and looking at a waterlogged town. Aqua Laguna, the debt collector that came knocking by to catch all those that are unaware, and the red of his cherry splits the night air in two — the blue of morning light and the grey colored by his smoke — as he comes to stand beside Zoro.
There’s not a sound from him, barely an acknowledgment, but there’s something here, on this crumbling terrace atop this drowning city, in that fragment of space between blue and grey. The gold of Zoro’s earrings glints even as they lie perfectly still, a cut down the side of his jaw, and Sanji has never known someone so still in the shell of all his violence.
“What are you doing out here, marimo?” Sanji says, and it could’ve been smoke for all that he wants to break this silence, this night sky.
“I could say the same to you, cook,” and it’s just a rumble, the both of them exchanging words like they exchange blows—no real intent.
The wind is blowing south and carries Sanji’s cigarette smoke away from him, winding around the city and its silver-lined houses and their stilt-legged foundations, past the aqueducts and the flickering lanterns, all the crumbling stones and their crumbling legs.
“Did you eat?” Sanji asks, even though he knows he cooked enough for all of Water 7 and double its inhabitants, even though he’d seen Zoro empty the city’s rum. Sanji doesn’t know what he’s asking, but he knows it's not about the food, not about the rum. He’s asking about the white around Zoro’s chest, a constant now, the sight of it. He’s asking about what he’s going to find when he unwraps all that white.
They shot the world in her eye, and Sanji knew they wouldn’t have come out unscathed. He’s asking Zoro if he’s still hungry, even with all his wounds, even with all the scars he’s going to come out with. He’s asking him if he’ll ever be full.
Zoro doesn’t say anything for a while, just looks out at the city like he’s meditating, like he can see something on the far horizon that none of them can see. Sanji wants to shout at him, wants to beg to be taken to wherever Zoro is right now, not to be left behind.
“Don’t worry, cook,” Zoro says instead, finally. He turns to look at Sanji, then, forearms leaned against the railing of the parapet and gold clinking together like the bellow of horns. Sanji doesn’t know what he must look like for Zoro to say that, to say it like that, with not a single edge. Zoro touches the inside of his wrist then, where it lies beside Zoro’s on the railing and Sanji holds his breath. It stretches out between them, the moment thin as smoke and twice as fragile, a receding Laguna in its wake.
Sanji turns his palm up so they’re barely touching, just the tips of Zoro’s fingers on the inside of his wrist, and feels his pulse beating against Zoro’s fingers. Sanji wonders if he’ll ever understand anyone else like this, if anyone will ever understand him like this.
“There’s supposed to be a type of fish in the All Blue. It’s called the eastern demon-spawn,” Sanji starts, and he doesn’t know where he’s going with this, but he can’t stop now, not when Zoro’s looking at him like that, “that would eat anything if it could. It’s not the size of a sea king, not even the size of a shark, but it can eat through anything, metal or stone, entire cities even.”
“Sounds like Luffy,” Zoro snorts from beside him. Sanji smiles at that and doesn’t even bother with hiding it. “So, why doesn’t it? Eat cities and shit?”
“Well, because it doesn’t know how to stop, you see,” Sanji continues, stretching the dew of this night, the silk of this moment as much as he dares. “It eats and eats until it splits from the inside out.”
Zoro doesn’t say anything to that for a moment, to an ending that had always haunted Sanji. Zoro only looks at him, and Sanji knows that there’s a sea inside of him with a boat, a scar down his chest, and a man with a sword.
“You can’t go back, you know,” Zoro says, and his gaze doesn’t waver, his attention doesn’t shift, Sanji might as well be looking in the maw of the All Blue. “Once you take a bite, there’s no going back.”
“Even if it’s going to kill you?” Sanji asks, incredulous.
“Yes, even if it’s going to kill you.” They’re not talking about fish anymore and Sanji will never know a Zoro like this, not again.
Zoro turns back to look at the city, his fingers still on Sanji’s wrist as the sun begins to rise and Sanji understands it a little, that hand on Zoro’s back, pushing him, that sword in front of him, the big why of it all.
There’s no going back, not for any of them. They’re the straw hat crew, all of them, and they’d shot the world through her eye. There’s no going back for Sanji either, never, as he curls his fingers inward so they touch Zoro’s and looks at the rise of the sun before him.
—
Somewhere between drowning Water 7 and the horizon, sometime between when they all fulfill their dreams and the aching space of them trying their very hardest to, Sanji finds Zoro in his kitchen.
It’s not that absurd, all things considered. The mosshead likes to nap in nooks and trip Sanji in inopportune moments, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to see him in the galley, dozing on the Sunny’s kitchen table. It’s only just past sunset, the sky is the bruise of a ripened fruit and the wind is only just the other side of humid. The Sunny is quiet, for once, in a sort of meditative calm and Sanji had wandered into the galley to start dinner prep when he’d found a drooling marimo fast asleep on their dining table.
Zoro has his head pillowed on an arm stretched across the table, and drool down the slope of his chin, and it should be disgusting, but there’s a twisting in Sanji’s chest that makes heat rise to his cheeks, makes him look away, that makes him feel like he’s seeing something he shouldn’t be.
That serves as reason enough for him to get to cooking while the marimo sleeps on, instead of kicking him up and out of the galley like Sanji would’ve done any other day. Outside, he hears distant screeching and the tinkling of Robin’s laugh and wonders what Usopp and Luffy must be up to now.
He’s cooking fried rice, a different kind than the one he usually makes. This time, with scallops, roasted garlic, and miso flavoring. Maybe it’s the smell of the food or the distant screeching growing louder, but Sanji knows Zoro’s awake. He doesn’t look away from the stove, but he can tell, even in the near silence. It’s not a premonition of any sort, more of a habit, of noticing the way someone breathes, the way someone falls asleep when you’ve seen them every day.
“Marimo, you’re on dish duty today in exchange for me letting you sleep here,” Sanji says when he hears Zoro’s back pop with a stretch.
“Fuck you, curly,” Zoro replies with no heat, grumbling around a yawn, his voice a sleep-laden rumble.
Sanji turns around at that—he has to look—and Zoro’s already looking back at him. Head still pillowed on an outstretched arm and eyes half-lidded with sleep, Zoro looks at him and there’s none of the usual annoyance, the hair-trigger irritation they rouse in one another. Zoro only looks sleep-rumpled, a man with a lake inside of him—still and blue and depthless–looking at Sanji like it’s only second nature. As though, to look up and find Sanji is no greater joy or sorrow but a fact of life.
It stretches out between them, that half-awake moment as the wok sizzles behind Sanji and the sun slips ever lower, as Nami yells out a triple-digit fee at whichever poor fool had been unlucky enough to cross her. It stretches out between them, Zoro half awake and in that place between, watching Sanji carefully like a hunter might track a deer through the woods, not to kill but to see how it jumps from grove to underbrush to beyond the thicket. A patience in there that Sanji had never before been graced with, the sort of tenderness that would rip him apart should he look any longer.
He has to turn away at that, something blooming hot and flustered in his chest and spreading up his neck, behind his ears till he can feel himself burning with it. He’s only just seeing a Zoro that isn’t an animal of violence and this is the farthest thing, an animal nonetheless, rendering Sanji one too.
“What’s for dinner?”
“Fried rice,” Sanji answers and startles when he finds Zoro beside him at the counter. The swordsman, big and brutish, and it's still a surprise to Sanji that he moves so quietly. He watches Zoro reach barehanded into the wok on the stove for some rice and only just manages to slap his hand away with the ladle.
“What was that for, curly?” Zoro splutters, clutching his hand dramatically, as though he wasn’t the one committing transgressions in Sanji’s kitchen.
“Try to touch the food one more time before dinner, and you won’t have hands left,” Sanji warns. Even heathens don’t get raw rice.
“Oh, you starting something, cook?” Zoro says, mouth slanting in that feral anticipation, that blood-singing urge that runs through the both of them, either end of an electric wire.
“There’s rum in the far cabinet on the right,” Sanji says instead because he’d drop his ladle right now, he’d forget about the fried rice and the lit stove to fight Zoro if he wished, but that’s more than Sanji can dare admit to. Besides, booze is a failsafe way to get the swordsman to stay put.
Zoro looks surprised for a split-second and then shoots Sanji a grin, boyish and charming, and pleased, and Sanji feels hot all over, turns back to focus on his fried rice. Zoro finds the rum like a dog to a bone and sits back at the table, at the periphery of Sanji’s vision. He sees Zoro twist the cap off with his teeth and refuses to deign that with its appropriately requisite disgust.
The sun sets further, fruit overripe in the sky, the last dying rays slanting through the portholes that line the galley walls and glinting off the kitchen counters, the gold of Zoro’s earrings, the swing of his knife. Sanji swings down on the scallops Usopp and Luffy had fished for him the other day, measured and precise, cleaving them in quarters, and feels Zoro watching him.
Sanji turns sidelong to see what catches Zoro’s unerring vision and is struck dumb. His hands move with muscle memory, unflinching even without Sanji having to look and that’s his only saving grace, for Zoro isn’t watching Sanji, but his hands. Zoro, half-lidded and unblinking, rum forgotten in his hands, as he watches Sanji impeccably slice their scallops for dinner. Sanji doesn’t break it, the silence—the air before a storm, charged—and continues, scallops and then the garlic–finely chopped, the beans and the onions, diced in quick succession. He watches until Zoro’s eyes lose focus and slip upwards to Sanji’s, caught bright, and open, and hungry under the dying sun.
Zoro looks then, shameless where Sanji isn’t, fearless where Sanji isn’t, and looks at him, not with something Sanji has seen from him before, looks at him with appraisal. Sanji gulps, parched, and in answer, Zoro takes a long, dry sip from his decanter. He doesn’t draw his eyes away. This too is a competition that neither of them can lose, and Sanji feels the full force of Zoro’s attention, the sword-edge cut of it, and the weight with which it’s given. He feels the weight of the heat behind it too, that bleeding red thing that neither of them acknowledges—and feels himself losing.
He can’t hold Zoro’s gaze, not with the full flush of his attention flooding Sanji’s face, not with the way it cleaves him—paring knife down his body to the most precious part of him—his hands, not when the secret behind their bared teeth, their tearing hunger, that soft, breakable thing looks him in the face with Zoro’s unwavering gaze. Sanji can do nothing but admit defeat and look away first, turning to the familiar sizzle and heat of the cooking fire.
For a long moment, there’s a silence that stretches through time, heat that weighs on them both. “Make yourself useful and set the table, marimo,” Sanji says, if nothing but to break the silence, heavy and demanding.
“I don’t take orders from you,” Zoro snarks back, but Sanji hears the scrape of his chair against the floor anyway.
When the table is set, and the food is done, “Marimo,” Sanji says, catching Zoro by the arm and offering some of the fried rice for Zoro to taste. It’s not an unprecedented action, although it’s usually Usopp or Chopper he asks, who’s usually around.
Zoro, however, looks surprised and only manages to shrug around the rise of his eyebrow. He turns and bends to take the proffered spoonful in his mouth, foregoing reaching for the spoon himself and Sanji freezes. The last burning embers of the sun slide through the porthole windows of the galley and right into Zoro’s mouth, fried rice and sunbeams stuck in his teeth. Sanji can smell him too, with the proximity, the smell of metal and sweat and it sinks in his mouth like a coin dropped in a lake. He watches, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up, as Zoro chews his mouthful, eyes unreadable.
In this moment, Sanji cannot touch Zoro, as close as he is, as much as they share the same breath, Zoro is far away and unreachable. Sanji watches, bated breath, and it’s not Zoro’s culinary appreciation he’s waiting for—the idiot would shovel dirt in his mouth and call it fine—but for him to come back from that faraway place. When Zoro finally does and catches Sanji’s eyes, the sunbeams—all overripe, all red, all setting bruise—spill down his eyes, run down the curve of his cheekbone, leave his mouth full, and spilling till he says “It’s good, cook,” and Sanji, practiced in the art of denying hunger, feels his mouth fill with blood with all that he wants to taste.
Zoro with the bruise of the setting sun on his face, in Sanji’s kitchen, Sanji’s hands on his arm, with Sanji’s food in his mouth, and Sanji will never admit to it—that unspoken thing, bleeding and red on Sanji’s chopping board between them—the aching hunger Zoro brings out in him.
—
Sanji doesn’t go to see him the first two days after he finds him. He stays away, cooks, and feeds every hungry thing on the island, avoids Brook’s eyes when he can, and very deliberately stays away from Zoro.
On the third day, he can’t help himself. They’d set up tents on Thriller Bark and partied all day and all night, Zoro quietly asleep through it all. With the moon high in the sky, his hands laden with soup, and almost everyone in varying degrees of unconsciousness after two continuous days of revelry, Sanji finally dares sit down beside Zoro.
He didn’t hope, and Zoro doesn’t wake at the sound of him, and Sanji can’t identify his feeling at that, cousin of disappointment, sister of relief. He places the soup beside Zoro, knowing it is most likely going to stay like that till the sun rises and he comes back to collect it. It aches a little; the food left uneaten, Zoro like this.
Sanji had been the first to see Zoro. He’d been the one to carry him back, the one to have felt Zoro’s blood seep into his skin, to have felt the sag of his skin and the break of his bone. Sanji had seen Zoro amidst that circle of blood, amidst his own massacre, and, inexplicably, thought of the eastern demon-spawns illustrated in his book on the All Blue. Full to bursting, hungry enough to meet death with an open mouth.
“You better be hungry, after all this, you shitty swordsman,” Sanji murmurs to Zoro’s comatose figure. His brows are furrowed even in sleep and his forehead is beaded with sweat. It’s a miracle he isn’t simply writhing in pain instead, a miracle with how much he can take.
Sanji isn’t talking about food either, even though he knows he’ll have whatever Zoro needs ready the instant he should open his eyes, knows he’ll gripe and bitch about having to feed another useless mouth, nevertheless. Here and now, though, Sanji’s not talking about food. Here, and now, he can barely hold back his anger, the only thing he can identify in the tight ball of feeling that sits in his throat, that overwhelms him.
“What happened to being the greatest swordsman in the world, huh?” Sanji starts, and the night remains silent. The crickets chirp and distantly, he can hear Luffy’s snores, but it all disappears beneath the blood in his ears. “Did you think you could throw all that away?” he’s barely holding back from shouting now, fuming and forced to hold it within himself.
“Why couldn’t you just let it be me?” Sanji breaks, and it comes out a sob. It’s a wounded sound and none but Zoro is permitted to hear, nothing but this night with its full moon and its chirping crickets. Sanji shakes with it, the ball unraveling in his throat and spooling down his throat, and to his hands till they’re trembling. He lights a cigarette instead, to stop the shake in his hands and watches the cherry reflect against the night, a meteor meeting its end.
Sanji sits beside Zoro, smoke curling between them, and he wants to slap Zoro awake so he lays a shaking hand on Zoro’s forehead instead, wipes the sweat away. “Luffy needs to be the king of the pirates and you, the greatest swordsman in the world so why couldn’t you just let it be me?” his voice breaks, and Zoro still doesn’t reply, the bastard, always having to get the last word.
Sanji wants to claw at Zoro to wake up so trails his fingers down Zoro’s sharp profile, he wants to shout at him, for his idiocy and his recklessness so he traces the cut against his temple, the sharp of his cheekbone, he wants to bite Zoro so every wound will pale in comparison so he rests his fingers against the dip of his throat, the bob of his Adam’s apple. Sanji doesn’t use his hands for things other than cooking and yet, here he is, breaking all his rules. His hands, then, must have been made for two things: to cook, and to know Zoro like this.
“If you die before becoming the greatest swordsman in the world, I’ll kill you,” Sanji breathes out at last, and this too is just for him and Zoro, for the night between them and the distance that stretches wide and painfully intimate between them. This too, is a promise he asks Zoro to keep, asks so Zoro will never know of it, never be beholden, so Sanji can stoke that pit within himself—that hunger Zoro keeps shoving in his hands, clumsy and graceless since he met him—telling Sanji to live with this aching hunger till he could touch that glittering sea where every fish gathered and sink his teeth in the blue of that world.
—
It’s before him when he sees Zoro lifting weights on the Sunny’s deck. Covered in bandages, Sanji can see a stitch tear with a squat, can see the blood leak through like a hand placing a claim. Here’s where you’re cut, and here’s where you bleed, and here’s where you can’t stop, it seems to say. It’s before him again, the face of Zoro’s hunger, its yawning maw, its teeth sunk into Zoro’s skin and cut against his ankles.
Sanji knows Chopper’s going to have an aneurysm at the sight of it and decides to throw the poor marimo a bone when he’s done with his reps.
“You know, Chopper’s going to put you in chains one of these days,” Sanji says, leaning against the railing outside of the galley so his voice carries to Zoro on the deck below.
“Hah?” Zoro says, looking up at him, making that dumb marimo face of his as he makes his way up the staircase to Sanji.
Sanji sighs, making sure to be loud enough for Zoro to hear him, and looking pointedly at where Zoro’s bandages turn red. Zoro looks down at himself and swears out loud. Even Zoro’s not idiot enough to think Chopper won’t tie him to a bed if he sees him tearing his stitches like that.
“Come,” and Zoro doesn’t refuse, just follows Sanji into the galley, cursing under his breath and dripping sweat.
Sanji knows his basic first-aid and Zoro doesn’t argue when Sanji takes to unwrapping his bandages. He’s being absurdly obedient and it would send bells ringing through Sanji’s head, but he can’t hear anything; it's all silent as the gold of the galley lights spills down on them both. Zoro, on the table above Sanji, only frowns down at him, that familiar furrow between his brows that Sanji wants to touch, smooth out, claw right off.
Bare now, and Sanji can see just how much Zoro can take. He’d seen it that first day with a sword slicing through Zoro’s chest, seen it in the stitches around his ankles — uneven and all Zoro’s impatient work — he saw it in the hollow of Thriller Bark; Zoro at the center of a massacre, his blood all around him.
Bare, and Sanji can see it again, all that he can take, lesions through his ribs and contusions on his hips. Sanji can see it all, and this here, these aren’t the marks of hunger, not Zoro’s. It’s something far worse, something to surpass all of Zoro’s ambition. It brings it all back, Zoro comatose beside him and that stretching, pulling distance between them. It brings it all back, that indeterminable tangle in his throat, that rage that’s all too familiar.
He can see where the stitch has split too, right by a rib, how it’s oozing blood, its slow-going descent. Zoro only looks at him curiously, not a word out of him, but Zoro’s never been one to ruin things he doesn’t know. He only watches Sanji forego the antiseptic, forego the gauze to press his fingers to Zoro’s open cut.
“Cook–” Zoro starts, hissing at the contact, the pressure that Sanji’s putting on his open wound.
“Why’d I have to be the one to find you?” Sanji cuts him off. “You shitty bastard,” and he’s furious. Sanji doesn’t know what his face is doing, but standing between Zoro’s open legs in his galley, palm smeared with Zoro’s blood, Sanji’s incandescent. Rage is something he knows well and understands nothing of, especially not this kind, the one that wants to eat him alive from the inside out at the sight of Zoro, his blood.
Zoro must see something on his face then, for his own softens as he reaches down to grab Sanji’s wrist; not to pull it away from his wound but to–press it in further. “It couldn’t be anyone else,” Zoro says, and it's barely audible past his gasp of pain, barely audible to anyone but Sanji, who’s standing mere fingers from Zoro; it’s meant just for him after all.
“You bastard,” he says, furious, voice breaking, pressing pressing pressing into Zoro’s wound till he feels it tear. “You’d do it all again, wouldn’t you?” the blood runs down Sanji’s wrist, a line of stark red. Zoro’s looking at him, and he’s hurt and Sanji’s hurting him more, and that unspoken thing, red and bloody, is breaking open on the floor between them.
Zoro leans down and brings his mouth inches from Sanji’s, his earrings clinking against Sanji’s jaw, his blood dripping the gold of the galley lights down Sanji’s wrist and says, damning, “Yeah I would, every single time,” and Zoro’s furious too, just that little bit like Sanji’s the idiot here for having to ask, like Zoro wouldn’t lay down his life for every single one of them on the crew, like there’s a thing to stop him from laying his life at his captain’s feet.
Sanji pushes his fingers further into the wound on Zoro’s flank, Zoro’s hand a brand against his wrist, and feels Zoro shudder, feels the hot trembling puff of his breath by his neck. “I hate you so much, marimo,” Sanji all but whispers into the side of Zoro’s neck. It comes out almost a sob, Sanji’s head on Zoro’s laden shoulders.
“Hate me till I die then,” Zoro says into Sanji’s temple and Sanji can do nothing but hide in the face of it all, in the face of Zoro’s hunger, of him carving out a space in Sanji’s stomach, another dream to strive for. All that Zoro gives, all that he never asks for in return.
Head down in the crook of Zoro’s neck, Sanji atones by digging his fingers into Zoro’s wound deeper til he feels Zoro tremble around him—here’s where you can’t stop, says the blood dripping down Sanji’s wrist, and here’s where I’ll hold you through it, here’s where you’ll rest says Sanji’s blood red fingers—as Zoro gasps above him.
Sanji looks up and he shouldn’t have, he really shouldn’t have, for he’s ruined for life now with the sight of the flush across Zoro’s cheekbones, with the sweat clinging gold to the curve of his collarbone, witness to the open maw of Zoro, the unrelenting fact of his hunger, his devotion, the both of it coming together.
“Are you hungry?” Sanji says then, bringing bloodied fingers to rest against Zoro’s lips. He can’t tell if it’s him or Zoro that’s trembling. Zoro breathes above him, shallow and panting, and doesn’t say anything.
Zoro, so hungry for it all — the blood and death of battle, the victory that follows — hungry enough for a man to slice open his chest, to kneel for a captain, to make Sanji reach for that feeling he’d left far behind him. Zoro, hungry enough to take it all — all the broken ribs — to tear his stitches, enough for it to show in his eyes when he takes Sanji’s fingers in his mouth, enough to suck them clean.
Zoro, who’s always hungry and Sanji would rather die than let a man starve.
—
It strikes him in the face in a small town in the middle of the New World when he runs into Zoro, lost and slumped in an alleyway, on the way back to the Sunny.
They’d stopped to restock, and Sanji had made his way to the market for food supplies and he curses whoever had been idiot enough to leave Zoro out, unsupervised. It’s only luck and coincidence that he looks out the corner of his eye to see Zoro slumped against the wall of the alley.
He makes his way to the idiot, ready to kick him to kingdom come for all the trouble he causes when he sees it—the blood. Sanji drops his groceries with a thump and kneels in front of the idiot to shake him awake.
“Marimo,” Sanji half-shouts and there’s something seizing in the back of his throat and he distantly wonders if it's panic. “You better fucking wake up right now!”
Zoro lays still and motionless, and Sanji watches the blood color his side. All that red, and Sanji has never seen something so vibrant, never seen something he hates the sight of more. It sticks to his fingers and Sanji aches with the familiarity of it, this blood, Zoro’s–of having it on his hands.
“Stop shouting, cook,” Zoro grumbles awake, yawning and twitching like he’s waking from a long nap and not a stab wound. Considering that it’s Zoro, it might as well be that.
“What happened?” Sanji interrupts, holding Zoro by the shoulders and only just holding himself back from shaking him with that hold. Sanji barely manages to keep the worry out of his voice and hopes Zoro can’t catch it on his face–that damning sign, that last straw.
“What—oh that,” Zoro says, shrugging Sanji’s hands off his shoulders and pressing his own fingers to the wound on his side. They come back red and glinting like coins in the evening light that’s stolen and hidden away in this alleyway. “It’s nothing, just some street-side thug,”
“You let yourself get stabbed by some street-side thug?” Sanji snarks, derision is always a helpful cover. “Getting rusty, marimo?”
“Don’t you worry your head, he got what was coming to him,” Zoro says, smiling up at him. It’s feral in that way Sanji’s seen before, on the battlefield, in bloodlust. Sanji himself has always been all charm, all rage in a fight, never one to lust for battle like Zoro, but it sends a shiver through him nonetheless, the sight of it on Zoro’s face, that surge of competition he can’t resist.
“Not worried,” Sanji lies, rolling his eyes like it's a preposterous thought, and maybe it is with all that Zoro is, all that he’s become.
Zoro only watches him, eyes on his face in unerring concentration, unnerving and animal. He’s been on the receiving end of these looks before, only long enough to run away, only long enough to avoid them, being seen.
“You were worried,” Zoro says then, a sort of incredulity in his voice, a sort of humor to it as well, like he’s laughing at something Sanji doesn’t know, the bastard.
“Absolutely not,” Sanji denies, vehement, and makes as if to stand up, running away.
Zoro catches his wrist before he can stand up though, with the same hand that had touched his wound, so there’s a ring of fingerprints around Sanji’s wrist–red as his butcher’s knife and just as familiar. Zoro just laughs at him instead, in reply. Loud and open-mouthed, the heathen, laughing at Sanji while he lies there bleeding open.
“Let go, we need to go back to the ship so Chopper can look at you,” Sanji snaps, irritated and flushed, still crouched by Zoro and held in place, “Only idiots would think you can sleep off a stab wound,”
Zoro doesn’t let up, doesn’t even attempt to get up. He’s stopped laughing, the bastard, and is only looking up at Sanji with an open, curious sort of look; it only flusters Sanji even more, only leaves him hot and flushing.
“Don’t you want your groceries?” Zoro asks, chin nudging in the direction of the bags Sanji had discarded in his panic, that curious tilt to his brow, that unrelenting pressure around Sanji’s wrist, his racing pulse.
“Huh?” Sanji says, intelligibly, turning to the groceries he’d forgotten.
“Sanji,” Zoro starts, and it shocks Sanji enough to turn right back and look Zoro in the face, that uncompromising will of his, that unending hunger, the barely there desperation, “aren’t you hungry?”
It shocks Sanji silent, cigarette hanging from his mouth as the sun dips beneath the horizon and darkens the alleyway to an island, the last remnants of light sliding like tears down the planes of Zoro’s face. That barely there desperation and Sanji can see it split open on Zoro’s face, in the crease between his brows and the waiting bow of his lips, in the way Zoro’s been telling him all this time—letting Sanji see all the softest, bloodiest parts of him.
The barely there desperation and Sanji realizes why, after all this time, realizes how long Zoro’s been waiting—that he’s been waiting for Sanji this whole time, keeping his hunger at bay. Sanji’s pulse is racing, and he knows Zoro can tell, knows that the both of them realize the exact moment that red, bleeding thing breaks open, killed loud and screaming by Zoro’s fingerprints on Sanji’s wrist.
Sanji leans in so they’re mere breaths away and sets that unspoken, unnamed thing on fire when he finally admits, “I’m starving,” losing to Zoro again, losing with his teeth against Zoro’s lips.
Zoro gasps against his mouth, fingers tightening against his wrist like a man dying. The sun spills through the cracks in the wall and splatters them both—witness to their murder, the only witness Sanji would allow for what Zoro sounds like against him, how the taste of him sinks in Sanji’s mouth like a coin dropped in a lake.
When they break apart, “Sanji,” Zoro says again, broken and Sanji is but helpless to draw closer, to put his hands in Zoro’s hair where he wants to claw him apart, to put his mouth to Zoro’s neck where he wants to bite so every other wound will pale in comparison, to draw back up to Zoro’s mouth, for where else does the body hold its hunger.
Zoro, bleeding open in the amber of the New World’s dying sun, hungry enough to die for it, demon spawn of the east eating and eating till he splits open and Sanji, seeker of lost things, relearns what it means to be hungry.
—