Archive of Our Own

They’re at the kind of island that looks like a postcard someone’s spilled sugar all over, just a crescent of white sand, houses painted the colours of sherbet, a market strung with paper fish and lanterns like something out of a fucking fantasy. It’s a perfectly nothing island, a perfectly ordinary island, with air that already tastes like salt and fried dough. Somewhere, someone has a drum. Somewhere else, three townspeople are loudly losing a drinking contest to Franky.

Zoro lets himself lean on the Sunny’s rail and watches his crew spill out over the island like marbles from a jar. Luffy hits the dock at a run, feet itchy from being cooped up for the past week on the sea, already hollering about god knows what and god knows who. Chopper’s on a mission to find candied fruit and Brook’s already asking a pair of aunties if he can see their – well, the joke lands somehow, the aunties cackle instead of throttling him and Robin smiles into her book like the sun’s gone and moved a little closer to their ship.

From the corner of his eye, Sanji crushes his cigarette under the heel of his boot, looking horrifically happy. Not the slick, intentional flirt-happy he uses like a weapon, but loose in the shoulders, face open, hair tossed by the wind. 

“Gonna restock the galley,” he says to Nami, but there’s a pitch in his tone like he knows Zoro’s listening.  “Fresh greens, decent eggs, spices… if the gods are kind, some bloody citrus.”

“Budget,” Nami sighs, already unfurling a ledger at him like a threat. “Hard cap, Sanji.”

Sanji clasps his hands together, pure theatre for absolutely nobody’s benefit. “Nami, darling, my heart –”

“Hard. Cap.”

He salutes with two fingers and, because he’s Sanji, nicks the pen out of her hand to write the number on his own wrist. “Fine. I’ll charm them into giving me half their market for a smile.”

“Don’t get stabbed by jealous husbands,” she warns without looking up. It’s pretty valid, considering the last island they hit. “Zoro, you go with him.”

“Why me?” Zoro asks because it feels traditional at this point and, besides, he’s got some pep in his step today. He can afford a little resistance, just for kicks. 

“Because if he faints from excitement I’d like someone there who can carry him and not haggle for twenty minutes first.” 

Sanji tosses him a smirk and starts down the gangplank, like this has been an expected outcome. Zoro follows, because it has. The dock bucks underfoot like it’s laughing while kids run between barrels. A woman with arms built like fucking tree roots cleans fish with a knife that’s seen more life than most people while a cat purrs in a coil of rope. A windbell chimes. Somewhere, Franky shouts, “SUPER!” and, by the sounds of it, has managed to acquire a cape.

Sanji moves like he’s born to navigate through crowds: light, angled, precise. When Zoro drifts off the line, Sanji hooks two fingers in his clothes without looking and tugs him back into orbit. The touch is technical and nothing and it still manages to feel like everything.

They hit the market proper and the smell hits right smack bang back with oil and garlic, vinegar, mint, citrus stacked like treasures, a hint of smoke, the unmistakable tang of fish. The stalls are a goddamn maze, the biggest market they’ve found in a stretch of dismal stops. Zoro’s traitorous brain already starts mapping escape routes.

“Don’t,” Sanji warns, catching his eye. “Just follow.”

Zoro would argue if the stall at his elbow wasn’t selling skewers of something blistered and beautiful, glistening in the afternoon sun enough to snare Luffy’s attention. He snatches a few and ghosts into the crowd again, leaving the vendor to wave him away, starstruck or resigned or a little mix of both, probably. 

Sanji veers towards a spice tent, stacked with gold powders and ground brick-reds piled in bowls like low little mountains. The seller, an old woman with a voice like pebbles and a tattoo of a fishhook on her neck, gauges Sanji’s interest straight off the bat and leans in to talk salt, peppercorn heat versus floral heat, the difference between a good cinnamon and a stick that tastes like bark and regret. Sanji handles samples with long fingers, tapping a pinch to his tongue, making a thoughtful noise that tugs at Zoro’s spine like a fucking hook.

“Good?” Zoro manages, because it’s either speak or stare like an idiot, so. 

“Dangerously.” Sanji scribbles an actual list on his wrist under Nami’s number, as if he trusts his own skin more than paper. “Taste?”

He holds his other wrist out, like this is something they do all the time and it adamantly isn’t, but it feels like the easiest thing in the world to lean in and find a grain of powder with his tongue. Warmth blooms at the back of his mouth, bright and smoky and Zoro tracks a freckle he’s never seen, because he’s never been this fucking close in daylight without an excuse.

“Mm,” Zoro grunts, which in his language is supposed to mean I’d let you feed me cement and call it a tasting menu if you look at me like that again but god, he hopes Sanji sucks at translating.

They buy the spices under budget because Sanji weaponises a smile and the woman, traitor to her own profit, decides to throw in a twist of dried orange peel for free. “For love,” she smirks, in a voice that invites denial and sends Zoro’s face thatching red. 

“It’s for soup,” Sanji tells her primly. 

They complete the circuit. Sanji holds up eggs to the light like a jeweler, snaps the stems of green vegetables for crispness and breathes in the bite of them, rejecting anything that sulks. The baker gives them the ends of loaves for free because Sanji compliments the crumb, a well-learned trick.

Sanji haggles, Zoro deadlifts sacks just to see the cook roll his eyes in that specific fond way. Usopp stages a duel with a street magician and wins with a handkerchief full of beetles that, by all laws, probably hadn’t been there a second ago. Robin balances a stack of pamphlets advertising local attractions (“A museum,” she mouths across the square and Nami mouths back, “Budget,” tale as old as time).

At a corner, Sanji stops so abruptly Zoro nearly bangs straight into him. Sanji’s hand comes up, palm to Zoro’s chest, automatic and warm and for half a heartbeat they’re aligned like some kind of two-person dance. “See that?”

Across the plaza, a stall’s draped in woven sea-grass and ribbons. The table carries glass jars with something that glows faintly even in the waning daylight, blue-white like a trapped jellyfish. The man behind the table has a faded red scarf tied over his hair and hands that are stained a permanent green. A sign hangs crookedly from the tent frame in a script Zoro doesn’t recognise or know, but Sanji reads everything his own way anyway, hungry in the way chefs get sometimes. 

“Don’t,” a voice rasps from the spice tent, somehow already there, gaze sharp enough to cut rope and talking directly to Sanji, but god knows she may as well have been talking to the sun. “That’s not for flame.”

Sanji’s smile flashes, all charm and no traction, the kind Zoro’s seen employed on poor unsuspecting women hundred times before. “I can handle a kitchen, my dear.”

“It’s not a kitchen I’m worried for.” The woman glances at Zoro, then back to Sanji, her mouth flatlining. “It’s for decoration. Not flame.” She taps the crooked sign with a knuckle. Zoro still can’t read it, but the warning in her voice might as well be painted in neon fucking red.

Sanji’s interest sharpens the way it always does around rules he wants to test. Sometimes it’s related to cooking, sometimes not. “We’ll see,” he says lightly, because today’s beautiful and bright and nothing can go wrong on a day like this.

The vendor huffs at the spice lady, discontented, and starts yabbering to Sanji about the herb in his hands, almost silvery in the glow, something about a rare growing season, while Sanji smoothes the leaves and brings it to his nose. 

Zoro files the warning away in the same place he keeps the memory of Sanji’s hand on his chest and the taste of smoke-sweet spice and shoulders the bags, tuning them out. He doesn’t like the look of the jars but he likes the look on Sanji enough to leave it alone.

Luffy whoops from the top of a fruit cart a few stalls up as Sanji swaps coins for the herb, grinning with that pleased, intent focus that means dinner is going to be off the charts tonight and the galley’s going to really sing. 

They keep moving through the market, getting other bundles of fresh herbs wrapped in twine, little jars of something pickled, a paper cone of almonds roasted with honey. Sanji shoves one into his palm without looking at him. “Eat that before Luffy sees.”

Zoro pops it in his mouth to find it sweet and hot from the pan, sticky enough to glue to his teeth together, probably. “You getting him some too?”

“Fuck no. Kid doesn’t need more sugar. Neither do you, actually, but you’re less annoying about it.”

“That’s your way of saying I’m your favourite.” Zoro smirks just to watch the corner of Sanji’s mouth curl.

They zigzag between stalls. Zoro pauses at the knife cart and the old man running the wheel eyeballs Zoro's swords with a little too much curiosity. Sanji clicks his tongue, “Hands off.” The old man laughs and sharpens one of Sanji’s knives instead, steel singing

By the time they reach the far end of the market the bags are stuffed and Sanji has two cigarettes left in his pack. They pause at a stall selling little clay cups of golden coffee that Sanji orders for both of them without asking.

“This is nice,” Sanji says, like he’s surprised by it, like he somehow hadn’t noticed they’ve spent the whole afternoon in easy orbit.

Zoro grunts into his cup, which Sanji can correctly translate as affirmation because he’s not stupid enough to open his mouth when Sanji looks like this, striped in gold from the sun.

By sunset the kitchen smells dangerous in a good way, garlic hitting oil, something zesty, butter on the very cusp of browning. Sanji moves between the stove and the bench with his sleeves rolled, hair falling into his eyes until he finally ties it back. The silvery herb sits on the board like some kind of fancy seaweed, little violet flowers catching the light.

Zoro knows this because he’s leaning against the bench pretending he doesn’t want to be in the room at all, which is their standard nightly ritual at this point. He watches Sanji shave the herb into thin ribbons for garnish, the smell coming up sharp and fresh and, just for a heartbeat, tangy in a way that makes Zoro think of biting into a coin or something. 

“You’re cooking it?” 

Sanji smirks around his cigarette. “What’d you think I was gonna do, knit with it?”

“Reckon you could try,” Zoro yawns. “You like fiddly work.”

Sanji gives the pan a toss and folds some long greens into a big pot where fish and tomatoes have been lazing all evening. Usopp and Chopper arrive on the smell alone, hovering with empty bowls. Nami drifts in, counting out spoons for exactly as many servings as she’s willing to share and steals a taste off the ladle when Sanji isn’t looking. Luffy barrels through everyone and has to be peeled off the pot by three sets of hands and one glare.

They eat with the windows open to a pink-gold sunset. It’s not like the stew is particularly fancy but every bite lands perfect: the fish is tender, the broth is comforting, the herb doing something clean and cool on the tongue that makes Zoro want the next spoonful before he’s swallowed the first. Conversation bounces around the table in the lazy, easy way it does when everyone’s at peace: dumb jokes, louder laughter, Brook harmonising.

The food sits right and warm in Zoro’s stomach, spreading heat to his fingers as he watches Sanji circle the table, topping bowls, flicking Luffy’s ear when he tries to double-dip. 

“You gonna eat?” Zoro asks because this happens sometimes. Sometimes Sanji’s so fixated on feeding everyone else his own needs get lumped into the bottom of the pile and it’s like he doesn’t even notice.

“I’ve been tasting all day,” Sanji takes a sip of tea instead. His mouth pulls into that easy curve that means he’s lying or flirting. Both, usually. “Save me a bowl for later.”

When the talk finally thins to content humming and the chair legs have scraped back Zoro helps with dishes without being asked. Sanji pretends to be annoyed about it but keeps finding him things to dry anyway, letting their hands bump more than necessary which is how Zoro really knows he’s in a good mood.

They spill back on deck into warm dark and salt air. Luffy’s already a sprawl of limbs on the figurehead, snoring. Nami’s hat is tilted over her face where she’s stretched out with Robin to watch the last streaks of colour burn off into the horizon. Usopp and Chopper argue about constellations and get them all wrong on purpose to wind each other up. The Sunny breathes under Zoro’s feet like a big, satisfied animal.

The first yawn hits him like a soft punch and he peels off toward the hammocks, the warmth of dinner riding his bones. He sinks in, listening to the ship with its night sounds: the gentle swish of ropes, the tap of something loose in a cupboard, the easy shush of water around them. For a moment, he thinks he can hear a wet, patient sound, like someone’s chewing with their mouth closed right into his ear.

He rolls over, away from it, telling himself it’s the sea and letting sleep take him before he can decide otherwise.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 

Morning makes the Sunny smell like eggs and salt and the caramelised edge of something on a frypan.

Zoro surfaces slow, the memory of the night’s chewing filing itself under ship noises the way you tuck a loose thread under a knot. He stretches, scrubs a hand over his face and follows his nose.

The galley’s bright, porthole already flung open to the blue. Sanji has the stove going, one pan tossing diced potatoes and onions with a flick of his wrist, another working eggs into silky folds. A plate of sliced fruit glows. The silvery herb from yesterday sits in a small jar on the sill, a few leaves bruised in oil that Sanji brushes over toast with a little hum in his throat.

“‘Mornin’,” Zoro yawns, still half asleep. 

Sanji doesn’t look up. “Sit. Eat. Try not to breathe on the food.”

Luffy’s hands appear on either side of Zoro’s plate like fucking sea snakes and Sanji’s heel meets air just shy of their captain’s wrist with a warning thunk. Luffy beams, unfazed, and redirects himself to Usopp’s plate instead. 

Zoro forks eggs into his mouth and says, casual as anything: “Might wanna check the pantry for pests.”

Sanji’s spatula pauses mid-scrape, not long but long enough for Zoro to notice. “There aren’t any pests,” Sanji responds, light, then a shade sharper: “On my ship?”

“I heard something,” Zoro shrugs. “Chewing. Probably rats.”

Sanji snorts. He slides another portion of eggs onto Zoro’s plate anyway, as if to underline the point. “If there were rats I’d burn the Sunny to the bones and rebuild her from memory.”

“You’re so dramatic,” Zoro says because Sanji’s always been this way. 

“Protecting the galley isn’t dramatic, it’s civilised,” Sanji shoots back, softening it with a crooked little smile. “You probably heard Usopp snacking in his sleep.”

“I don’t snack in my sleep!” He absolutely does, but that’s neither here nor there. 

Chopper peers over his pamphlet. “Technically, rats are nocturnal –”

“There are no rats,” Sanji repeats, crisp enough to clip the end off the word. He reaches past Zoro for the herb oil, knuckles brushing Zoro’s forearm, and painting a shine across the toast. The smell lifts, bright and fresh with a metallic thread Zoro can’t place. Sanji’s hand trembles once, barely, then steadies 

Zoro takes the toast just to keep him from fussing. “Fine. No rats.”

Sanji crushes his cigarette out with more force than necessary and wipes a nonexistent smear from the counter. “If something was chewing my walls, I’d hear it first.”

Zoro almost counters but Luffy chooses that moment to howl for seconds and Sanji is suddenly everywhere at once, refilling, scolding, smiling over his shoulder at some dumb joke Zoro doesn’t catch. The moment slides past like a fish in a stream, in a rip. 

Breakfast rolls on loud and easy. Usopp wagers Chopper twenty berries he can balance a spoon on his nose for a full minute. Nami wins back her own money from Luffy with a card trick. Zoro eats until his plate was clean, watching the way Sanji moves through the room, loose, content, king of his tiny kingdom.

Afterwards, Zoro washes his face properly, talks himself into finger-combing his hair, which is as good as it gets. Then talks himself into knocking on the kitchen door with his knuckles. “Market? Or museum with Robin. Your pick.”

The door cracks open just enough to show an eye and a slice of cheekbone before Sanji’s voice comes out smooth and swift. “Busy.”

Zoro blinks, admittedly thrown. The cook hadn’t seemed any busier than usual only an hour ago. “Doing what?”

“Inventory.”

“Since when do you say no to a market?” Zoro asks and he’s not disappointed, but it’s something that feels awfully bloody close. 

“Since today. Go get lost. Buy Robin a souvenir.”

“I’m not –”

The door shuts. The lock slides with a faint, decisive sound and Zoro stares at the wood, stare slipping into a glare after a few seconds despite his best efforts to play this cool. 

It’s fine. The cook’s allowed to be in a sulk. Maybe he’s pissed about the rats? By midmorning he’s run out of excuses to loiter by a damn door, so he lets himself get collected by Robin and Nami, who’ve taken pity on him. Jinbe tags along  too, because of course he does: god knows someone has to keep them from getting fleeced by historic entry fees.

The museum sits on a hill above the docks, whitewashed, cool, smelling like dust and dead things, the way most small-time museums do. A bell chimes politely when they step inside and Zoro already regrets this particular choice. He should’ve stayed back and napped.

“Archaeology of the Southern Shoals,” Robin reads off a plaque, clearly pleased as punch about it. “Fossils, trade routes, folklore.”

“Gift shop!” Nami corrects, already staking out the cases. “Then fossils.”

Zoro grunts something noncommittal because his plan for the day had been simple: stick to Sanji like a shadow, annoy him into another buffet of street food. Instead he’s stuck here, following two women who actually like rooms full of quiet and a helmsman who reads exhibit labels aloud.

“Marine Life of the Deep,” Jinbe says, face lighting up. 

They stop in front of a case of calcified rings strung on fishing twine. The tag says SEA LILY COLUMNALS and the diagram shows how they stack to make a spine.

“Pretty,” Nami gasps, leaning in. 

Robin murmurs: “Echinoderms. Their skeletons come apart after death. Mm. The columnals look like coins. Or teeth.”  

Zoro glares. “Boring.”

“You’re extra charming today,” Nami rolls her eyes.

“He thought he had lunch plans but his lunch plans locked a door,” Robin tells Nami as if Zoro isn’t right there. 

“I didn’t –” Zoro tries but breaks off into a scowl because he knows there’s no point with these two. 

Nami flicks him a tiny, tiny pitying look. He’d rather lose another eye than see it again. “You know he holes up sometimes. The kitchen’s like therapy for him.”

“Kitchen isn’t therapy. Kitchen’s just kitchen,” Zoro sulks. 

They pause at a wall of harpoons and carved hooks to read a plaque that describes old fishermen who claimed the reefs sang in fog, in tones that made men walk off ships never to be seen again. Another case holds conch shells with neat holes drilled clean through, ornamental.

“Sound that compels. It’s a common motif, with the sea,” Robin says, giving Zoro a small smile he has no idea how to interpret. 

Jinbe reads from another label, giving Zoro a side-eye. “Traders once believed certain reefs could bite ships. Metaphorically, not literally. Although sometimes we’re bitten by our own superstitions.” 

“It’s not superstition to notice when someone acts different,” Zoro snips, sharper than he means, probably.

“Then notice kindly,” Jinbe responds, not sharply at all.

They slide through galleries of jars of pickled things absolutely nobody should pickle, fading maps traced with old routes and a jawbone hung from the ceiling. They turn into a narrow hall hung with sketches of spiral shells, ringed worms, weird plants, cross-sections of coral. Zoro makes himself look at them because staring off into space is worse, somehow. 

Halfway down, a sketch pins him: it’s a ring of perfect crescents drawn in obsessive detail, labeled ‘Jaw: Parasitoid. Speculative ’. The paper’s brown with age and the teeth are almost unbearably neat.

Nami clocks his shoulder. “Hey. You breathing?”

“Leave me alone, witch,” Zoro scowls and maybe it comes out like ground stone, maybe it doesn’t, but Nami laughs anyway. 

Robin folds her hands behind her back. “There’s a cafe, perhaps our cook would enjoy a pastry? Consider it a cultural study.”

“Cultural study,” Nami echoes, already turning toward the scent of it. “And we’ll make Jinbe pay because he’s responsible!”

“I am honoured,” Jinbe rumbles, completely earnest.

The cafe’s a bright rectangle with a view over the harbour and Zoro sits with his back to the wall like an idiot, glowering into a cup of tea that tastes, frankly, disgusting. The women discuss a vase, then a necklace, then whether the pastry box should be one or two, since someone (Nami points at him) is clearly going to eat half in the hallway.

“You’re quiet,” Robin points out, unnecessary because he’s always quiet. He says as much and Nami scoffs. 

“Nah, you’re noisy when you’re pretending to be quiet. It’s different.”

He thinks about the way Sanji’s voice had sounded through wood, smooth and stretched thin and pushes his chair back. “I’m going back.”

“We’ll join you,” Robin stands without an ounce of hurry. “Jinbe, the box?”

Jinbe holds up a neat white package, ribboned neatly. He looks extremely pleased with himself. “Already acquired.”

“Give him the lemon tart,” Nami tells Zoro as if that’ll fix everything. She grins, shark-like. “And tell him he’s pretty when he smiles.”

“Sounds like a great way to get kicked,” Zoro mutters. 

“He’d feed you,” Nami counters, not looking contrite at all. “Then he’d kick you.”

On the walk back he barely hears Robin narrate an old stone marker at the foot of the hill. He knows it’s stupid and petty and ridiculous but he suddenly hates this island for changing overnight when all that’s actually changed is one person’s attitude.

He breaks off from the others with the box and ends up, predictably, at the kitchen door holding it like he’s about to bribe someone into spending time with him. He feels like a fucking kid again, dumb and nervous for no good reason, but he makes himself stay anyway.  

“Brought you something,” he says finally because he doesn’t know what else to say without saying too much.

“Leave it.” Sanji’s tone is impossible to read.

Zoro sets the box down on the floor and lets his palm settle onto the wooden door. There’s a press that meets him, gentle, deliberate, lining up with the heat in his hand. His pulse trips under it. 

Behind him he can hear Nami chatting to Luffy about the cafe and Robin asking Jinbe whether the reef folk tale started before trade, the polite chitchat of a crew doing normal things. Zoro takes his hand back, frowning at the way the pressure follows for a beat, almost reluctant, then sinks away. “See you at lunch?” 

Sanji makes a sound that isn’t yes.

He scowls. “Are you sick?”

“I’m not sick.”

“You sound –”

“Leave it, Marimo.”

The voice slides under his skin, not weary or stretched, just. Pissed. Cranky. The same voice Sanji’s used on him a hundred times throughout their journeys but not… for a while, at least. 

Zoro lets himself lean closer to the door to try to hear inside, well aware he’s being weird about this. Soft noises barely carry through the wood: the hiss of flame, the ring of a spoon against porcelain, the faintest click. Then a noise he can’t fucking name, wet and gross. 

He knocks his knuckles once more, because he doesn’t know what else to do. “Museum was boring.”

“Should’ve taken a nap then,” Sanji snaps and Zoro gets the message. . 

He does loops of the deck he doesn’t enjoy and ends them in the same place each time, shoulder to the kitchen door like the ship’s a goddamn track and he’s just a dumb animal who only knows one turn.

At some point he hears the stovetop die and the chewing begin again, louder, like someone’s opened a window in his skull to let the sound in. He sets his palm to the wood and the press comes back, a slow push from the other side, precisely where his skin meets the grain.

He takes his hand away and the pressure fades. “Curls.” 

The press flattens. The door doesn’t open.

“Come eat with us,” Zoro tries because yesterday they’d shared bites of food without thinking about it. 

“Tell Luffy I’ll cook dinner.” The words sound like he’s reading them off a card, flat and disinterested. “Later.”

Dinner’s late in a way it usually only is when they’ve had a Marine-heavy day, or Luffy’s kickstarted another war, or they’re recovering from some near apocalypse. When it does happen, it comes in courses they don’t ask for. Luffy calls it fancy. Nami calls it suspicious. Chopper takes one bite and says, “Sanji, your hands are shaking!” 

“I’m fine,” Sanji says and lifts the next plate like his body’s made to lie and Zoro knows, because Zoro knows him. There are woollen gloves on his hands, like it’s fucking winter or something, and Zoro watches them for far too long. 

After, when the others drift off, Zoro goes back to the kitchen door because of course he does. There’s a handwritten sign slung across the door that says CLOSED!!! even though dinner’s over. He tries to push through without knocking but it’s locked again.“Oi. You don’t bolt this door.”

“Tonight I do.”

“You hiding a lover in there or something?" It comes out meaner than he intends, a dumb comment that gets out before he can wrangle his mouth or temper under control. 

Sanji laughs like it’s funny. “Not the kind you’d fight.”

Zoro scowls and sets his palm to the wood again, and because he’s always been a stubborn bastard, he leaves it there. The press meets him like it’s been waiting for the cue, gentle and deliberate, right under his hand, lining up to the beat in his wrist. His pulse stutters. 

“You eaten?” He asks the door, hating the way his voice cracks on it. 

“Plenty.” The word carries like it’s caught on something inside his mouth on the way out. 

Zoro drops his hand back and the pressure follows for a beat, like it’s reluctant to let go, then sinks away anyway.

He could go to Robin for the tidy logic of it. He could go to Chopper for a thermometre and a lecture. He goes to the deck rail instead and watches the harbour lights shiver and tells himself tomorrow he’ll drag the cook into daylight and make him explain the gloves, the attitude, this reclusive shit that he hasn’t pulled in months, not since well before they all found each other again.

Zoro closes his eye and counts to ten like it’s a prayer or a threat. On nine he gives up and glares at the water instead, because he’s not sure which it is yet.

Sanji never comes to the hammocks. 

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 

The galley smells like coffee and citrus peel and morning light cuts rectangles across the counter where Sanji works one-handed, the other tucked in a fresh white bandage and a glove still pulled over it. 

Zoro plants himself by the door as soon as he can, as soon as he’s upright and vertical, morning breath be damned. “What happened to your fingers?”

Sanji doesn’t look up from what he’s doing. “Mandoline.”

“We don’t own a mandoline.” Admittedly, he’s not entirely clear on what a mandoline is, but he’s never shied away from a bluff.

Sanji slides fish into the pan without missing a beat. “Bought one.”

“When?” 

“Yesterday.”

Zoro wants to cut his fucking head off. “You didn’t leave the – where is it, then?”

“Over there.” He nods at a cupboard Zoro knows damn well only holds rice bowls and plates and cutting boards and nothing with blades. “Want me to draw you a picture?”

Zoro crosses the room before he can think better of it, before he can even articulate what’s wrong. “Show me the hand.”

He reaches, even knowing Sanji’s going to pivot away and sure enough, he moves clear, smooth as a dance step. He flips the eggs, plates, slides breakfast to the table. Luffy whoops, steals a plate, apparently doesn’t notice the way Sanji keeps his bad hand tucked like a bird with a broken wing.

Chopper pads in, blinking sleep and does notice. “Sanji, are you –”

“Fine,” Sanji interrupts, bright enough to sting. “Eat while it’s hot.”

Zoro angles to catch his wrist while the cook’s distracted and grabs it, just for a second, feeling the glove give under his fingers with the tackiness of the fresh gauze underneath. Sanji sucks a breath through his teeth and yanks free, swinging a kick that Zoro dodges with ease. “Drop it, asshole.” 

“What did this?” Zoro demands, voice low, not wanting everyone’s attention just yet. It’d only make Sanji retreat further. 

“Can’t you just…” Sanji’s voice thins before it steadies and he gets back to business, reaching for the pan with his good hand. 

The room’s suddenly full of little sounds: cutlery clinking, pans ticking, Luffy’s happy noises. Chopper’s watching anyway, sitting down with a mountain of toast.  “If you’re hurt, I can –”

“Later,” Sanji smiles.

Nami breezes in with a pile of papers under her arm. “Budget meeting, five minutes.” She barely glances at the gloves and Zoro watches this happen with an uneasy angle in his gut, a sound stuck in his throat. 

He wants to grab Sanji by the shoulders and shake him. Instead, he watches him move through service, with every adjustment to avoid using his damaged hand disguised as some kind of swagger. He waits until the others have left before trying again. “Tell me.”

Sanji’s eyes flick to his, unreadable. “Knife slipped.”

“You’re lying.”

“Then be pissed about that instead and leave me alone.”

He storms out of the kitchen on a thin thread and walks the brief distance to the infirmary, letting his hand catch on the doorknob. The glass vials clink softly inside as the ship rolls and he knows that inside Chopper is probably humming to himself, sorting labels and getting ready for their next leg, where someone will inevitably need first aid because that’s just how their crew rolls. 

Zoro’s fingers tighten around the doorknob. He knows he can open the door. He can order: Look at his hand. He can –

Something about the way Sanji had gone still when he’d grabbed his wrist flickers across his mind: not fear of Zoro, not pain, but the poised-to-break tension of someone bracing for a consequence Zoro can’t see.

He lets the doorknob go and resolves to wait until later.

The wind’s good and the sky’s clear. It’s another nothing day at sea until a boat of power-hungry, bounty-hungry idiots hook the Sunny and try to board with a net and a lot of misplaced optimism.

“Handle it,” Nami sighs without looking up from her chart.

Zoro steps in and lets steel do what steel does best, smooth and precise, almost lazy. A grappling hook clangs as one idiot makes it over, swinging a pike at Zoro’s blind side.

Sanji’s there first, clean kick to the wrist until the bone cracks neat. Another idiot lunges forward and Sanji turns his hip, driving a heel across the cheek. The man’s knees give, his eyes roll; it’s already an easy win but Sanji follows, not to tidy the fall but to add to it. His heel presses down on the mans throat and holds, a heartbeat too long, until the guy’s hands scrabble at nothing.

“Curls,” Zoro snaps. 

Sanji’s gaze flicks up, slow, eyes narrowed but he lifts his shoe off. The remaining crew works the rest of bounty hunters like it’s nothing until they turn tail to Luffy’s cheers. 

Zoro puts Shusui away and turns to Sanji at the rail rinsing his face and gets himself over there before he can second guess it, the adrenaline from the mediocre fight left pacing in his bones with nowhere to go but out, nowhere to go but here. “Spar with me.”

“Busy.”

“With what, glaring at water?” Zoro rolls his eye and steps in as he much as he dares without copping a foot to the jaw. “Five minutes.”

Sanji sighs and looks like he might argue, but for some reason gives in. Zoro knows it’s probably just to get him off his back, to end Zoro’s constant probing, but at this point he’ll take whatever the hell he can get. “Fine.”

They pick the foredeck because it’s got clear planks, enough wind to keep sweat from stinging their eyes and enough space for an audience, who gather as soon as they flag what’s happening. Luffy crows from hanging halfway off the rail. Usopp joins him and claims he’s going to keep score, which isn’t abnormal. Nothing about this is abnormal, except the way Sanji comes in like hell on heels.

Zoro barely meets him, swords sheathed because that’s how they do this when they just want to let off steam. He lets the first exchange be clean, the second exchange be sharp and the third – Sanji goes straight for the wrist and Zoro barely slicks by it, pulse jumping a little despite his best efforts. 

The kick would’ve snapped bone if he’d been a hair slower. 

The follow-up isn’t the usual flashy spin, it’s a knee to the patella that would end a fight that isn’t pretend. Zoro shoves him off with Kitetsu and feels his own temper sharpen. “Thought we were sparring.”

“We are,” Sanji breathes.

Zoro watches his feet as they circle around each other, the set of his hips, the line of his shoulders, the same performance he’s seen a thousand times over and knows the rhythm’s off. Sanji isn’t picking openings, he’s making them. His heel glances off Zoro’s temple, calculated to cut skin and Zoro tastes blood. Sanji’s pupils flare like a match caught.

“Point tooooooo Sanji!” Usopp yells from the sidelines. 

Sanji smiles small and mean and goes again, clearly targeting Zoro’s knee. Wrist. Throat. The notch inside the elbow where Zoro’s nerves scream when the hits land. He lets Kitetsu and Wado take the worst of it, but one kick sneaks through and bites into ribs and another stamps across his forearm with enough heat to make him hiss.

“Pull it, Curls,” Zoro warns.

“Then keep up,” Sanji snaps and goes for his knee again.

Zoro shifts tactics swiftly, leaning on his weight not speed, catching Sanji’s ankle and dragging him a half a step off-balance, shouldering in to break the beat. This close, he catches the sheen at Sanji’s mouth and the way his gaze keeps skimming Zoro’s throat like he’s tracking a target instead of a person. Zoro growls: “You enjoying this?”

“Isn’t that the point, Moss?” His hand flexes in the glove but the fingers don’t close all the way.

Zoro takes another kick on the flat of Wado, heat rolling off it harder than usual. Sanji pivots, body coiling and Zoro, who reads his fights like a playbook, can see the finish: a snapped neck if this weren’t them. He steps right into it, chest to chest, forearm up under Sanji’s collarbones to block the angle. “Calm the hell down.”

Sanji scowls, growls and tries to slip through but Zoro wrenches his grip. Sanji’s always been faster, but Zoro’s never not had a strength advantage and he puts it to use, shoving the other man hard into the planks. Sanji scrabbles for Zoro’s face in a way he doesn’t, not usually, and Zoro uses the opportunity to yank the glove free in a split-second choice that Sanji clearly doesn’t see coming.

The ends of the index and middle finger are gone. Just clean, obscene arcs where flesh ends. Not a slice. Not a crush. For a heartbeat, Zoro can’t feel his own hands. Then the anger hits, ugly and fast. “What the fuck did this?”

“I told you –”

“That,” Zoro snarls, “Is not a knife.”

Sanji jerks his hand free, the sharp cut of his jaw locked tight. “Accidents happen.”

The problem, though, is Zoro’s known those hands for years now: nails neat, knuckles unbruised, burn-scar constellations kept to a minimum like a point of pride. He spent two whole years dreaming about those hands. 

He knows them.  

“Not to you. Not there.” Zoro can barely recognise his own voice, hates the way it’s violent and trembling all in one. Images tumble through, of Sanji lecturing Usopp about knife grips, of swearing off punches in a brawl, of slipping on wet tile once and saving the frypan instead of himself because his fingers are the thing he won’t risk. Zoro stares at the neat crescents, grotesque in their precision, before Sanji’s foot catches him in the thigh.

Zoro jams his elbow across Sanji’s throat, pinning him to the ground again. “Tell me what the hell happened or I’m dragging you to Chopper right now.”

Nami’s whistle cuts across the deck. “Heads up: there’s a Marine patrol in the area. Let’s play it safe and quit fighting, yeah? No fights on deck.”

“Got it, Nami-san!” Sanji sing-songs, teeth flashing before he drives his knee into Zoro’s gut so hard it has the swordsman seeing stars. He staggers back, opening up just enough room for Sanji to sneak out altogether, and sits there a moment longer like he can rewind the past few minutes, make it make sense. 

“Uh, you okay?” Usopp calls across, looking unsure about whatever the hell he’s just seen. Zoro can’t even blame him: he doesn’t know what he saw, either. 

“Peachy,” he mutters and goes off to find Robin, cross-legged under a tree where the light’s good and the air’s sweet, reading a slim book with the museum stamp on the flyleaf. She tips it to shield the page from spray when Zoro stops in her shadow.

“What do you know about this place? The island?” He asks without preface because he’s never been one for small talk and she knows him better by now, anyway.

Her smile’s perfectly mild. “A better question is: what do you want to know?”

“Plants,” Zoro says and god, he can hear how stupid it sounds even as it comes out. “Herbs? Local… remedies.” 

Robin closes the book on one finger, her face thoughtful. “The market was mostly import. What they did grow themselves is relatively common, citrus, sea greens and the like. There was that folk story about a reef that sings sailors into the shoals, but that’s a cautionary tale about sound and fog and hardly unusual, as we discussed. Why do you want to know about plants?”

Zoro shrugs one shoulder and tries very, very hard not to think of the silvery herb in the galley, the only fucking thing he can pinpoint as being new over the past few days. “Cook’s on edge.”

“Is that the name of a plant?”

He doesn’t smile so Robin’s eyes soften the way they do when she’s decided not to press but still wants him to hear the pressing. “You could ask Chopper to check him.”

“He’d hate that.” Zoro looks past her at the harbour, exhaling through his teeth. 

“You dislike when people close doors,” Robin notes, pleasant as an autumn breeze.

“I dislike when they lock them.” He rubs his thumb across the cut at his temple, frowning at the way Sanji had followed the blood. 

“Mm. I don’t have anything helpful for you. But you’re carrying your shoulders like you expect to be struck from behind.”

Zoro tries to angle a shrug again. “It’s a ship. Strikes happen.”

“If something is wrong,” Robin frowns, “It won’t become less wrong because you watch a door.”

“I’m not watching a door.”

“You’re watching a person behind it.” She gives him the kind of smile that always manages to leave a mark. “He’ll open it when he wants to.”

“He used to want to,” Zoro snaps and then wants to kick himself for it. 

Robin hums. “Sometimes when people go quiet it’s because they’re holding onto something fragile, not because they’re throwing something away.” 

And she’s being kind, he knows it, but he still hates the intention underneath the words because it feels thrown. The past few months have felt like a slow, stupid drift towards… something. Late night cigarettes at the rail, Sanji bumping shoulders on purpose and pretending he hadn’t, extra glasses of sake and plates of snacks, fights that’ve ended in knocking elbows instead of bruises, quiet stretches of nothing in the crows’ nest. And Zoro, idiot that he is, had let himself believe in the pace of that, the way you believe a tide’ll keep coming in just because it always has.

Two days and it feels like someone’s gone and emptied the whole ocean. 

The Sunny continues to breathe in the little ways ships do when they’re about to leave: the ropes are busy, the keel whispers, there’s a shiver of anticipation through the mast. Midmorning, the CLOSED!!! sign is parked on the door again and Sanji ghosts through the ship with three domed plates (“Staff meal,” he warns when Luffy blocks him) and disappears back into the kitchen with the domes stacked empty and bone-dry.

He cooks for the crew at noon with the same precision that always makes everyone beam. Chopper squints at the tremor in Sanji’s hands and receives a look that says don’t in any and every language. Robin watches light reflect along the knives the way a cat watches the edge of a glass.

After lunch they cast off and the harbour bells toll thrice to wave them off, uniform as teeth. The Sunny leans into the wind like a creature that wants to run, eager to return to the freedom the ocean provides.

The ship has countless places to bleed energy so Zoro hits them all throughout the afternoon, running the rail until the balls of his feet burn. He does push-ups until his shoulders shake. He goes through forms on the bow of the ship with his swords so sharp they could shave wind and it still doesn't manage to cut the itch under his skin. Every time he resets his stance his head throws him back into the same damn loop: gloves, fingertips, Sanji’s hand curling wrong like something inside hurt.

“Training again?” Usopp calls from behind a coil of rope, clearly trying for some version of polite. “You’ve been at it all afternoon, man.”

“Looks like it,” Zoro says and the edge in his voice makes Usopp find a different errand. 

The deck has a rhythm he can usually ride: Luffy’s orbit, Nami’s barked orders, Franky humming along, Brook’s gentle strumming. He tries to hook himself into any of it but it keeps sliding off, his body angling towards a door he isn’t going to stand in front of like a neglected dog.

He sharpens Wado even though she doesn’t need it. He hits the whetstone too hard and feels the bite skip, cleans sweat off the wraps, rewraps them, undoes them, does them again. None of it helps the picture that keeps slotting over everything, the perfect little crescents pressed into skin that’s never taken a careless knife in his life.

He stalks the length of the ship and back. He gets a look from Jinbe that’s all calm and patience and zero judgment, which is almost worse. “Wind’s fair.”

“Good for wind.” He tries to nap out of sheer spite and lasts the whole of six minutes, scowling at the open sky like it’s somehow responsible for all of this. By the evening he’s talked himself into a plan that’s not a plan: quit being polite. He takes a stool and sets it by the kitchen like he’s oiling a hinge, like this is nothing. He keeps Wado across his knees.

“Having fun?” Nami asks dryly as she passes with the log pose. “You know, if you want him to talk maybe don’t make it a duel.”

“It’s not a duel,” he lies. It is, but in a way that’s stuck under his skin like a splinter he can’t quite find. The way Sanji’s speaking to him now is all vinegar and sour misreadings, the way he used to talk to Zoro when they first set sail years ago and it scrapes raw because it feels like a regression he hasn’t earned. 

The problem is he’s never known how to make it not be a duel. 

If he goes to Chopper or Luffy he’ll be admitting he doesn’t trust Sanji to say help. If he kicks the door in he’ll lose something he doesn’t even have a word for, but has been carrying around in his chest like a blade wrapped in silk. Outside, the harbour shrinks in the distance and he tries, very hard, to remember how to want something without tearing at it. The wanting makes him angry. The anger makes him stupid. The stupid makes him circle back to the kitchen every damn time with the same stubborn orbit he’s always had, because there just isn’t anywhere else to go with it. 

Surprise surprise, Sanji doesn’t remerge until dinner, moving through the kitchen like a blade drawn just short of the cut, precise and fast and definitely not looking at Zoro. The gloves are back on his hands. The smell of meat and garlic should make Zoro’s stomach growl but instead it curdles in his throat.

“You gonna tell them?” He asks finally, quiet enough for just Sanji to hear, waiting until the cook gets close enough.

Sanji doesn’t so much as glance up from tidying as he moves across the table. “Tell them what? That you’ve been stalking me in my own kitchen?”

Zoro’s chair pushes back an inch and he inhales, sticking with his plan. “That something took your fingers.”

The crew’s heads turn at the same time. Nami frowns. “What?”

Sanji stalks to slams a pan onto the stovetop a little harder than necessary. “He’s being dramatic. Nicked myself. Mosshead saw blood and forgot how to use his brain.”

Zoro doesn’t give him an inch. “That’s not a cut, idiot. That’s bite marks.”

Luffy blinks at Sanji’s gloved hand. “Bite marks? Like a sea king?”

Sanji gives him a weary smile. “Sure, Luffy. I fought off a sea king in the kitchen. Want me to make up what it was wearing?”

“Don’t be an asshole,” Zoro growls.

“Stop sniffing around my station like a pest and maybe I’ll think about it,” Sanji shoots back, stepping into his space to drop a plate in front of him with just enough force to count. “Eat. Maybe food’ll keep your mouth busy.”

Nami’s eyes dart between them. “Okay, you guys are… worse than usual.”

“This is not bickering,” Robin agrees mildly, not looking up from her own plate.

“It’s, uh, romantic tension?” Usopp asks timidly and gets a sharp elbow in the ribs from Brook, who for once seems to be able to read the room.

Zoro doesn’t look away from Sanji. “You think you can hide this forever?”

“I think I can hide it long enough for you to get bored, sure.”

Their voices are still low but the weight in them makes the air in the galley feel smaller. Every word feels like a strike and every step feels like a push.

Usopp clears his throat. “So is dinner safe to eat? Or do I need to run an inspection for poison?”

Sanji flicks him a smile without breaking eye contact with Zoro. “Eat or I’ll make you regret wasting my time.”

Zoro doesn’t eat. He tracks Sanji instead, every fucking move the cook makes, watching the dark shadows under his eyes, the sharp brittle-edged movements. Usopp offers to wash dishes, clearly sensing the tension and Sanji shoots him down without pause. The crew linger, exchanging dubious expressions, but clear out of the kitchen at Sanji’s request in staggered pairs: Nami dragging Luffy by the collar, Franky herding Usopp with a ladle like a cattle prod. Brook chattering about a sonata he’s been working on to Jinbe, who listens the same way he always does: with reverence. Robin lingers half a beat, flicking between Zoro and Sanji in a way that says she’s cataloguing before she leaves as well. 

“So you’re gonna keep stalking me?” Sanji drawls, leaning back against the benchtop with eyes half-lidded, cigarette unlit, tucked behind his ear where his hair always curls just slightly.

Zoro lets his fingers brush the tabletop where Sanji’s hands had been a moment earlier gathering plates and for one stupid second he swears he feels the faintest answer from the grain. Zoro wants to put his fist through the table. Wants a lot of things, none of them simple. 

Sanji tries to shoulder past him but Zoro mirrors, hip-to-hip. Sanji’s knee nudges Zoro’s thigh just hard enough to demand retaliation and Zoro’s elbow rides up Sanji’s chest until the breath leaves him.

“Start talking,” Zoro demands.

“Start listening,” Sanji snaps back and drives a knee toward Zoro’s midsection. Zoro catches it in time, twisting to slam the other man into the benchtop. Sanji responds with a blow that cracks Zoro’s brow open.

“Stop holding back,” Sanji snarls, his voice gone rough.

“You want me to cut you?” Zoro spits, blood running warm down from his forehead to his nose. He means to grab at Sanji’s shoulder, shove him back a few paces but his fingers snarl on the collar of the other man’s shirt, just a little, just enough for the fabric to share two mirroring arcs on the juncture of his neck and, below it, a second set, right onto the shoulder.

Zoro’s brain goes cold and hot at once. “Who bit you?”

Sanji kicks him back. “Aw, jealous?”

“Don’t.” Zoro’s voice comes out rough. “Who the fuck’s putting teeth on you?” 

Sanji finally meets his glare and does the worst possible thing: smiles. Not kind. Not even playful. Mean, bright. Utterly wrong. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Zoro moves forward without thinking, crowding him back, one hand hitting the wall behind Sanji’s head and the other catching the collar again, yanking far enough to reveal the bitemarks. “Give me a fucking name.”

Sanji doesn’t so much as flinch. His pupils have blown wide in the fight and the smile cuts deeper. For a breath, his gaze slides, very slowly, down Zoro’s face and stops at his throat like he’s measuring it. “If you wanted to be rough you could’ve just asked.”

Zoro’s hand tightens. “Who. Bit. You.”

Sanji turns his head, teeth snarling down on Zoro’s thumb where it’s hooked into his collar, clean, quick, deep enough to break skin and Zoro hisses. Sanji smirks with his mouth still far too close to Zoro’s pulse.

“That one’s on me. Satisfied?” He murmurs, letting go. 

Zoro could draw a sword, wants to draw a sword but he doesn’t. Instead, he forces himself to breathe and watches the bite on his thumb bead red. The anger doesn’t ebb, it just focuses, tight and hot. “You don’t walk around with marks you won’t explain. You don’t wear gloves in the summer. You don’t skip your own plate. You sure as hell don’t get bitten and tell me it’s none of my business.”

“Then make it your business,” Sanji purrs and the way he says it makes Zoro want to break something because it sounds like an invitation and a threat wrapped up in one. The wrongness in his eyes flickers, there and gone. His weight shifts like he’s listening to something under the floor that Zoro can’t hear. For one heartbeat, his focus knifes back to Zoro’s throat and sticks there, like sun on steel: bare, honest and Zoro feels his stomach bottom out in every fucking way.

“Sanji!” Chopper calls from the door, oblivious. “Nami says Luffy wants dessert!”

Sanji slips out from under Zoro’s arm the way only he can, no shove, no fight, just gone. “On it, doc.”

The fresh bites on his neck catch the light like jewelry. Zoro’s thumb stings where the other man’s teeth had taken him; he moves his hand and watches the blood slick across the web of his skin in a neat shape.

Sanji laughs at something outside the door, with the crew and Zoro adds his bleeding thumb to the bite on the cook’s neck in his mind, filing the match away next to the fingertips and the empty domes of food and the way the kitchen door’d pressed back under his palm yesterday like a hand.

Then he does what he always does when there’s a problem he can’t solve by himself: he goes to his captain. 

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

He finds Luffy on the figurehead, legs swinging and cheeks stuffed with something Sanji hadn’t cooked, which means he’s been getting up to mischief with Usopp again. 

“We need to tear the galley apart,” Zoro says, still lacking any sense of preamble. It’s just not his thing. It’ll never be his thing, apparently.

Luffy blinks at him. Swallows. “Okay.”

To be honest, Zoro’d expected some jokes or a gentle rejection. He blinks back, finding his words. “There’s… I think there’s something in there. Since the market. Sanji’s fingers are fucked up, he’s plating meals for ghosts and –” He cuts himself off before he can mention the bites. “Something’s in there.”

Luffy’s face transitions into the kind of expression he almost never shows anyone: playful gone, captain on. He hops down with meaning. “If something’s hurting Sanji we find it. Let’s go.”

The problem is they need him out of the kitchen without starting a war. They also need Robin’s hands and brain, probably, and thankfully Zoro doesn’t have to say anything beyond Sanji’s name before she’s risen to join them and put Usopp to work, and then to snare her boyfriend and Nami.

“Sanji, dear?” Robin knocks on the kitchen door with three polite taps, the way Sanji’s always answered for her. “Usopp’s resin has bonded to the mast. We need very, very gentle heat to soften it.”

There’s a long pause before the lock clicks and Sanji opens the door in his apron, collar up to his jaw in a way Zoro does not miss. His mouth’s already shaped for a refusal but Robin presses a hand – a real one – to his shoulder. “For me?”

Zoro watches the complicated look flit across the other man’s face before he sighs. “Anything for you, darling.”

Up on the deck, Usopp performs on cue, panicked voice hitting them just so. “Don’t burn the sails!” 

Luffy and Zoro move as soon as Sanji’s gone, Robin in tow to throw up extra hands to pass jars that she sniffs with alarming speed while Franky lifts crates in the pantry like they’re made of paper. Luffy shuts the door behind them with a quiet finality.

Zoro checks the trash (clean), the oven (also clean), under one of the benches (splinters and salt). Nothing.

Franky upends another crate and under the top layer of citrus a folded napkin slips free, alongside more used gauze, dotted with red that Zoro doesn’t miss. There’s nothing left of the silvery herb, not as far as he can see, even though he moves through the pantry like a man on a mission. He opens the spice tin Sanji favours and finds nothing, lifts the cutting board and finds nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. “It’s not here.”

Luffy hums in agreement and they rush to set everything back exactly where they found it, then adjust it a hair more because Sanji’d notice if a ghost breathed. Robin’s hands move ahead of thought, resetting jars to their exact points. Franky tucks the gauze back into place with grim determination.

Nami steps into Sanji’s path the moment he reappears, face ready. “Sanji, a moment? Port authority wants your signature on a food-safety stipend refund and, ugh, you know how it is. Bureaucracy, right?”

“Bureaucracy!” Luffy repeats like that means anything, flashing Sanji a grin that the cook does not return. He eyeballs all of them with an appropriate amount of suspicion before the corner of his mouth tightens. 

“Later.” And he steps back inside the kitchen like a man taking back a throne as they slink out. Luffy stretches again, feather-light, and gives Zoro a plumbing look that Zoro doesn’t know how to interpret, or read, or match. He presses his tongue to his teeth to stop himself from saying something stupid, something he can’t take back, and lets Nami pull him up the hallway and outside.

She doesn’t stop until the chart room doors swing shut behind them, pulling Zoro into a cloud of ink and salt. Papers and maps are pinned under stones and she picks up a pencil, tapping it twice on the margin of a current line. “That was close.”

He stares at her smile, the kind that could probably win a war someday. Or start one, it’s always tricky to know with her. “No shit.”

She taps the pencil again. “He’s pissed. We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t give Luffy a sugar high just to spite us.”

The wind thunks the mast and sends a slow heartbeat sprawling through the ship. Zoro sets his hands on the table and tries not to snap the pencil she’s definitely not offering him. “So you agree. You think there’s something wrong.”

“I think I have eyes.” She draws a tiny notation on a nothing part of the map. “And I think he looks like he does when he’s about to do something dumb.”

Zoro grits his teeth. “He’s been avoiding me.”

“He’s been avoiding all of us.” She sighs. “But yeah, definitely you. Which means you can’t be the person who razes his fucking galley if you want him to talk to you about it. I’ve taught you better than this, you know.”

“So your plan is, what? We wait while he –”

“My plan is we don’t make him choose between the kitchen and us. Because he’ll choose the kitchen and say something stupid and righteous and then you’ll say something you can’t unsay and then we’ll have two idiots to fix instead of just one.”

His pulse feels way too loud in his mouth. Is way too loud, probably. “He’s not like this. He’s been – we were –”

“Closer,” Nami finishes for him, matter-of-fact about it, like she’s talking about the weather and not the world’s longest fucking game of chicken she’s ever had to watch. “Yeah, we know.”

He grinds his thumb into the heart of his palm, where the press had lined up with him. “We didn’t find anything.”

She sets the pencil down and studies him under a fringe of orange. “That’s a good thing. Or maybe bad? Both. We can pick one when we’ve got more intel. Look, if there’s a problem with the kitchen then we’ll find it. If there’s a problem with Sanji… well, he’s not gonna let us find it by destroying his passion to prove we love him or something.”

Zoro glares at the log pose strapped to her wrist. “So you want me to do nothing.”

“You’re supposed to do the thing you’re good at. Stand where he can find you when he’s pushing everyone else away. Keep Luffy calm. Don’t scare Chopper until you have to. And for the love of my ship, don’t start a fight you can’t finish in a room full of his knives. Like, come on. Some basic common sense wouldn’t kill you. Your five minutes are up, by the way.”

He leaves with his jaw clenched tight and his rage shaped into something like a better plan: not kick the door in, but be the wall. It’s not his preferred strategy by any fucking means, but Nami seems sure it’s the one that’ll work and it’s better than the nothing he’s had to work with so far.

Outside the hallway the kitchen door’s locked tight and he doesn’t touch it, steers clear of it completely. He goes onto the deck and starts counting paces along the rails, anything to keep his brain busy enough to forget the wrong pitch of Sanji’s voice. 

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

In the morning, Nami’s on him the moment he wakes up, like she knows the route in his brain already. She dumps a roll of charts into his arm, face split by an easy grin. “Hold these! Don’t crease the corners.”

He could say no but he’s wise enough to bite his tongue and let her park him by the wheel. She unrolls a chart across his forearms and uses his chest as a desk. “Wind shift puts us on this line, current pulls us there, we split the difference here. Thoughts?”

“It’s a line?”

“Brilliant, you’re very helpful.” She flicks a glance at his face, at the cuts healing from yesterday’s brawls. “So helpful that you can also get me the spare wind ribbons.”

He rolls his eye but he fetches them anyway and sighs when she makes him climb to fix two. Then has him coil ropes that absolutely do not need coiling. She points to the horizon and asks him if the clouds are due to weather or his shitty mood and grins when he glares at her. 

When he angles towards the kitchen again she steps into his personal space. “New plan! Stand there and be tall while I count money so Luffy doesn't accidentally spend our savings on a drum again.”

“Nami –”

“Nope.” She grins again, ruthless. “Muscle up, pal.”

He does. Ten whole minutes of coins. Even handles a joke about interest rates (“High, like your blood pressure!” Nami chirps) and a softer one about lunch plans. She keeps him busy the way she’d keep an animal from chewing off its own paw, hands and voice steady and grating until the worst of the itch under his skin knocks itself dull. 

And it probably would continue that way all day, if the Marines don’t catch the fuck up.

They spill down the line like they always do: too many boots, too many orders, not enough braincells. To be frank, Zoro’s almost grateful for the normalcy of it and the distraction doesn’t exactly hurt either. Everyone locks into gear the way they always do, with Luffy immediately slingshotting himself onto their new neighbouring ship with a shriek that’s more delight than battle cry.

Grappling hooks flash in the sun and the Sunny shudders as the grapnels. Nami’s voice is snapping about angles and Franky’s cannon booms across the sky. Somewhere on the Marine’s ship Luffy is laughing like a storm as he jumps between blows. 

Zoro swings Kitetsu and Shusui, keeping Wado locked down because she’s in a foul mood today, cutting a path with ease and flagging Sanji ten paces to his right, stepping in to keep Usopp clean. A boot goes through a man’s chest – through – with wood splintering underneath. A Marine comes low with a baton that Sanji doesn’t jump: he sends a shin across the other man’s wrist until it cracks and follows with a heel to the throat that he keeps there long enough that the kick isn’t a strike, it’s a decision. He drags flames across another face already down, blistering flesh.

Zoro cuts a line and takes it all in, the way the other man moves with no banter, no flourish, just clean and ugly efficiency.  He jumps the gap, blade ringing someone away from Robin’s back and close enough to see the details he’s been choking on for hours, days: the bandaged fingertips, the bites along his neck, the little listening tilt to Sanji’s jaw between kills like he can hear something under the fight telling him again again again.

“Enough!” Zoro snaps because the last kick had caved a chest that didn’t need caving. It’s so far beyond Sanji’s usual moral stance that Zoro doesn’t even know what to do with it. “You trying to wipe out bloodlines or something?”

“Trying to keep the deck clear.”

“This isn’t defense,” Zoro retorts, voice hot with it. 

Sanji bares his teeth, catches another baton on the forearm which isn’t a block, it’s bait because he uses it to tug the Marine closer and scissors his leg around an elbow to snap it clean. There’s a rotation on one foot, a shin across the back of the head and the skull meets plank, smearing red. 

Zoro hits a polearm in half, shouldering a man back into the sea. “Cut it out!”

Sanji doesn’t cut it out. He lights his leg, air sucking towards the flame, colour turned up past safe and so hot Zoro can feel the heat slap his cheekbones. Two Marines rush from the side, like idiots, and Sanji flows between them, cutthroat until they’re falling, and then even still. 

“Since when do you fight like that?!” Usopp yelps from behind a crate.

A lieutenant swings for Zoro who parries without looking so he can keep his eye locked on Sanji, on the way Sanji snaps his boot down on a hand reaching for a pistol and grinds his weight so metacarpals pop in little candy-crack sounds. On the smear of blood along Sanji’s mouth, on the way his tongue flicks, thoughtless, to taste it like he’s cataloguing flavour.

Zoro crosses the gap, catches Sanji’s wrist mid-turn. Hot. Slick with sweat. The tendon jumps under Zoro’s palm like a fish and Zoro’s stomach dips.

“Enough,” he warns.

“Get off.” Sanji doesn’t seem furious with Zoro but is clearly furous at the interruption, which is worse, probably.

The lieutenant, stupid and brave, lunges for Sanji’s back. Sanji wheels for a boot to the face, a clear kill line and Zoro rams Kitetsu’s sheath into the notch of Sanji’s hip to wrench the angle. The kick shears past the man’s jaw and blasts him across three planks instead of through them. Boards smoke. Zoro grabs at his next swing, catching his heel badly and letting the heat bite straight through until his bones sing. 

“Sanji, you’re overheating!” Chopper squeaks from somewhere, panic in the edges.

The last Marines break and run because men who like their bones in one piece can recognise a bad day. Sanji’s fire cuts, smoke rising in its place, ash clinging to the soft wave of his hair. Bit by bit, the world climbs back into his pupils and Zoro just fucking stares at the blood soaked into his trouser legs, smeared by the bottom of his shoes. 

Jinbe’s shadow falls across the deck, across the dead bodies strewn, and Franky hauls any leftover grapple hooks free while cursing about gouges. Robin’s gaze tracks Sanji like she’s reading a dangerous text. 

Nami’s mouth works once before the sound returns. “You…” she trails off, swallowing whatever she’d been about to say and settles for: “Rails are scuffed.”

Usopp’s voice floats out from behind the crate still “Was that… normal? Did it feel normal to, like, anyone here?”

Luffy hops down from the figurehead with his captain-face on, smile absent. “That’s enough.”

Sanji’s mouth twists like he’s just been told dinner’s late. “Deck’s clear.”

“Not what I meant.” Luffy’s voice is steady. Expression stony. 

“Aye, captain.” Sanji salutes him, lazy, and turns for the stairs like the scene doesn’t touch him. 

Zoro cuts across the deck before he can think better of it, all rage and fear and everything he’s been carrying. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

For a breath the deck’s just cooked-wood stink and iron on tongue and the crew trying to regain some sense of balance, Franky grumbling and Nami barking orders and Luffy absolutely silent, and Zoro fists the front of Sanji’s shirt before the other man can slip by. 

Sanji leans in a fraction, the way he leans in when he’s about to start firing. “Get out of my way, Marimo.”

“Not until you answer me.”

“Then we have a problem.”

“We’ve had one for days.” Zoro’s grip tightens and, for the first time, something like anger and panic flashes across the cook’s face, quick as a flash. It’s gone before Zoro can pinpoint it so he makes the choice his body’s wanted to since the first CLOSED!!! sign: he doesn’t let the other man pass. He does what he always does when thinking fails him and moves first, muscling Sanji off the deck, down the hallway, toward the shadowed corner of the galley, ignoring the way the crew’s watching, ignoring the fury building in Sanji’s eyes, and when he shoves Sanji into the kitchen the other man barely stumbles before he hits the pantry door.

“Ask nicely,” Sanji smirks. A drop of blood from the fight zigzags down his cheekbone and he catches it with his thumb, tasting it off his skin: habit of a chef testing a cut. Zoro has seen him do that a thousand times in a kitchen but not like this, not after a fight, not with his pupils a shade too wide for daylight and it’s enough to pull Zoro’s gut tight. Behind his ribs, his heart hammers like a fist on a locked door.

“You’ve flipped your whole damn personality in a couple of days. You’re picking fights to pick fights. You don’t sleep. You don’t eat. And your hands –”

“Still good enough to cook for ingrates,” Sanji cuts in, voice sweet as poison. “You want a refund?”

“I want the truth.”

“That’s rich coming from a man who can’t admit he likes being shoved.” Sanji’s breath skims his mouth and his leg hooks Zoro’s thigh, demanding a block like it’s a spar, like it’s foreplay. 

“This isn’t you.” Zoro’s voice roughens because god, he’d wanted to do this clean. Wanted to be the version of himself that asks twice and listens once but that isn’t happening anymore. “I know you. I know the difference between your bullshit and whatever this is.”

Sanji comes off the pantry door like a spring with a knee for Zoro’s guts. Zoro catches it on his hip before Sanji twists out of range, shoe sweeping up: Zoro blocks it with forearm to shin, the impact buzzing his bones. They crash into the benchtop and send a bowl skidding until it shatters, leftover rice spread across tile like hail.

“Get out of my kitchen,” Sanji snarls.

“Make me.”

They don’t trade blows so much as collide: Zoro crowds him, Sanji angling to spin free, shoulders and hips and breath and heat in a knot too tight to pull apart. Zoro gets a hand on Sanji’s shoulder and shoves him back into the pantry door and he gets the quickest flash of Sanji’s smirk before the cook slams their mouths together. It’s more strike than kiss, but Zoro’s traitorous body stutters all the same, years of want kicking in like a trapped animal – finally – and his hands grab at Sanji’s hips, instinctive, pulling him closer until iron floods his mouth as the bite lands clean on his lower lip. Sanji chases the taste, hot and wrong, hand hooking Zoro’s shirt to trap his arm just enough to make him feel it.

Under Zoro’s hand something moves. Not breath, not muscle: a perfect sharp ring rising under skin to meet Zoro’s arm from the wrong side of skin. Zoro shoves him back into the door. “What the hell –”

“Don’t stop,” Sanji begs, voice wrecked, teeth dragging, knee sliding up Zoro’s thigh like some kind of leverage. A hand at his throat to keep him pinned as he bites the high on the cheekbone, precise and possessive. Zoro feels a hooked point prick his skin from the inside for a blink before it slides away and his vision sparks white. He catches Sanji’s jaw and jams his thumb hard, feeling the bulge slide sideways like peeling a living thing off of bone and Sanji gasps, half-pain, half something else.

“What the fuck is in you?” Zoro snarls, voice raw. 

Sanji’s eyes are blown, off by a hair, listening to something past the both of them, mouth bloodied and god, Zoro can’t tell whose blood it is at this point. “Get closer and find out.”

Zoro headbutts him, skull to brow, and gets a kick to the chest but manages to turn with it, taking it high instead and pinning Sanji, hard, to the door. Enough to get his fingers through the gap of buttons and rip the cook’s shirt clean in two, enough to see the perfect ring of teeth at his collarbone, obscene, before it slides down Sanji’s chest like a drop of oil. Another rises at his side, then another lower, a constellation of teeth shapes mapping a path under his skin.

“Fuck,” Zoro hisses, his hand grabbing Wado without thought. The mouths arc through Sanji’s ribs toward the smear of Zoro’s blood, teeth pressing and releasing like they’re trying to taste through flesh. Sanji’s breath hitches and he goes very, very still, eyes locked on Zoro’s. 

“Happy now?”

“How long?” Zoro demands.

“Long enough you’re not going to like it.”

Zoro shoves him harder. “Wrong answer.”

“Get – off –” Sanji’s elbow cuts for Zoro’s ear and Zoro ducks, slamming his arm across Sanji’s chest. The mouth at Sanji’s throat surges to meet the heat there, rising under skin in a perfect, tooth-ring curve. Sanji makes a sound that isn’t a word, like he’s choking on it and he gives a kick that’d kill a normal man except Zoro swings him sideways and pins Sanji’s shin to the bench with his knee. 

The stovetop hisses as a pot topples. A knife clatters and bites edge-first into the floorboards, quivering.

“Stay down,” Zoro warns.

Sanji snaps at his face and catches Zoro’s split lip again, blood bright. Under Zoro’s hands, three distinct rings surface: sternum, left flank, low belly, all pressing toward Zoro like magnets. He feels each tooth-circle through skin, obscene and curious, testing his pulse.

Zoro slams his palm down on the nearest bulge, a perfect ring, and gets bitten for it, teeth breaking skin to sting into right in the web between thumb and forefinger. Zoro hisses, blood blooming neat crescents but he doesn’t lift his hand. He presses harder instead, until the mouth lets go with a wet, slick shift and slides to the seam of ribs, disappearing.

Sanji’s ankle has caught, smoke rising, but he instead of firing he goes still in that brittle way that means he’s either about to pass out or kill someone.

“Look at me,” Zoro snaps and for a heartbeat, the wrong shine clears and the man he’s known for years looks back, exhausted, livid. Scared. Blood slicks Zoro’s lip; his whole face is throbbing. “Was that you or was I just… bait?”

Sanji smiles with blood on his mouth, in his teeth. “You really want me to answer?”

Zoro shoves him, furious. Hip to hip, forearm to throat, a fight that starts at kissing distance and never gets farther. Zoro takes it on muscle and slams him into the pantry again so hard the door groans.

Under Zoro’s palm, the thing surges, a ring bulging at Sanji’s collarbone like a mouth trying to bite Zoro’s hand. Sanji’s breath breaks on a laugh that doesn’t have a scrap of humour in it. “Enough of me to want it. Not enough to stop it.”

The floor drops out from under him. Years of wanting turns to acid in his throat. “You used it on me.”

Sanji’s face flashes with anger, shame and something uglier. “It used you on me.”

Zoro doesn’t realise he’s snarling until his teeth click together and he presses harder, jamming the heel of his hand down – move – until the teeth writhe beneath his skin and obey. When Sanji lunges for him Zoro swings the flat of Wado up, bracing it across the other man’s collarbones as a barrier.

The teeth go feral at the heat crackling between them, rings popping up in sequence: throat, collarbone, side, each a perfect tooth-circle, surfacing and sliding toward Zoro like drunk moons finding a tide. One rides high at the jawline, pressed outward in a snarl aimed squarely at Zoro’s presence.

Zoro’s horror hardens to something mean and he shoves his thumb there again into the crux of Sanji’s jaw. “Tell me how long, asshole. Tell me when it started.”

Sanji swallows like it hurts to. “Island. I –”

The thing lunges for Zoro’s throat through Sanji’s and Zoro slams his arm down, wrenches the bulge sideways, feeling teeth map his ulna through two bodies. His vision tunnels; bile rises in his throat. Violation beats under his ribs louder than his pulse.

He hooks Sanji’s wrists, pinning them high, and driving him flat to the bench. The impact rattles ladles and a jar of salt. Rings race under Sanji’s skin toward the pressure of Zoro’s body like fish to a hand in a pond and he plants his palm over each as it comes, sternum, ribs, flank, forcing them into the places he chooses. 

Sanji goes very still under him, either letting Zoro do it or too wrung out to stop him. Zoro can’t tell and the uncertainty almost hurts worse than the bites.

“Look at me,” Zoro demands.

Sanji does and the ugly truth swims there, bright and raw: he’d wanted Zoro and the thing had wanted food and those two hungers made a shape that fit too well. The kiss had been both and neither. Zoro tastes blood and says the thing that feels like cutting himself open: “You don’t get to use what’s mine to feed it.”

Sanji’s answering smile is so tired it almost isn’t cruel. “Too late, Marimo.”

A mouth at Sanji’s shoulder taps Zoro’s palm, smug. Zoro presses until it flattens; Sanji hisses. He backs off an inch that isn’t surrender and drags Wado’s sheath across the bulge at Sanji’s ribs, pinning it like a nail. “If it so much as looks at my throat again I’ll break its teeth through you.”

Sanji’s breath comes in ragged, living pulls. The world outside the galley sounds wrong for how normal it is: gulls screeching, water slapping the hull. He spits blood.

Zoro eases the barrier of Wado away from Sanji’s chest but doesn’t lift his palm. The mouths stay where he’s put them. He hates the question and asks it anyway, voice strained: “Did you even want to kiss me?”

Sanji stares up at the ceiling, jaw tight, for one beat too long. “I don’t know.”

Zoro feels something awful in chest give and forces himself to step back, blood drying on his lip, crescents rising in the web of his hand, burn stinging his hip. The kitchen’s wrecked: there are bowls on the floor, steam ghosting the air, the smell of iron and burned citrus hanging heavy. Zoro’s chest heaves and Sanji’s trembles. The mouths lay where he’s put them.

Zoro’s hand locks around Wado’s hilt and stays there, trembling with the want to draw her again and the knowledge that if he does he might do something he can’t take back. The room feels too small for air. 

Sanji’s face does something horrible, pushing into him shoulder-first, deliberately scraping the blood smear against Zoro’s ribs. A mouth presses there, teeth splitting through skin to test the curve of Zoro’s sternum through his shirts and a breath. Zoro doesn’t flinch because he can’t afford to and after a beat Sanji’s body sags back, head lolling. He looks exhausted in a way Zoro doesn’t even have a word for: used up and burning at the edges.

“You need to tell the crew,” Zoro says through his teeth. “Tell Chopper. Right fucking now.”

“He can’t help with this.”

“He’s a doctor.”

“He’s a doctor,” Sanji echoes and then his breath hitches sharp and wrong. It’s small, barely a jolt, but Zoro sees the ripple under his ribs, skin tugging in a tight oval as if something behind it has puckered to listen. “And this is beyond his skillset, Marimo. It knows it.”

“It,” Zoro repeats, strangled. “Say its name.”

“It doesn’t have one. It’s a mouth with a stomach and too much patience.” He tries for a smirk but it doesn’t make it past the corners of his lips. Sweat slicks his temples. The light catches on the hollows under his eyes.

They stand like that for a few heartbeats, the ship creaking around them, a tiny swell rolling under the hull. Zoro can hear the others chatting faintly on the other side of the door, the papery rustle of charts, the glass clink of vials touching in their rack. 

Safety, an arm’s length away.

“Tell him,” Zoro says again, almost an order. “He doesn’t have to touch you. He can look. He’s smart. He’ll –”

Sanji’s fingers claw into his wrist and the movement under his skin sharpens, a slow depression above his heart with a ring pressing out from the inside, teeth-shaped and deliberate.  The depression travels, lazy as a cat kneading, from his ribs down until it disappears back under the surface. “When I thought about telling Robin yesterday it chewed until I couldn’t stand straight. It punishes. And if you bring them into this, it will clamp down and it won’t stop.”

Zoro wants to say he doesn’t scare easy. He wants to say he’ll cut its teeth out one-by-one and make it watch. Instead he swallows – anger, bile, the urge to pound on the infirmary door until Chopper saves him – and says, flat: “And you’re fine with that.” 

“I’m not fine with anything.” Sanji’s mouth makes a tired shape that doesn’t reach the rest of him. “I’m doing the math. If we tell them, we fight. If we fight, I die. If we don’t tell them, I can… manage it. For a while.”

“How long’s a while?”

Sanji’s eyes flicker to the door behind Zoro, the one with the doctor on the other side, and away again. “Long enough for you to think of something that isn’t a sword. Or long enough for me to figure out how to starve it without starving me.”

“Starving you is already happening,” Zoro counters because he’s fucking seen it. Sanji hasn’t eaten since the market.

The thing under his ribs presses again then eases in a possessive rhythm. Zoro feels a stupid, wild urge to punch the other man in the chest just to make it stop moving but he doesn’t, because what good would that do? He leans forward, close enough that if Sanji slides down he won’t hit the floor.

Zoro fists and unfists his hands. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to know. “What is it eating, Sanji.”

“I – me, mostly. Blood. Contact. Fucking loves fire. Anything it can get through skin. Doesn’t matter if it’s from a fight or –” He cuts himself off, jaw locking. 

“Or what.” 

Sanji’s eyes flick up, glass-bright, red-rimmed. Like a punch to the chest. “Or you. Or anyone dumb enough to stand close. It doesn’t care. It just wants.”

Zoro’s stomach runs cold, even though he already knows and still – “Right.” He needs to change the subject or he’s going to do something stupid like cry and then what? Despite his best fucking efforts, the taste of the kiss is still stuck somewhere in his mouth: salt, smoke, blood and the knowledge that it was only a weapon set to maim. “You fed it your own –”

“Hands grow back.” The least funny joke he’s ever told. 

Zoro claws at his own hair, pinches the bridge of his nose. He wants to throw up. “And when your hands run out?”

Sanji’s shrug is half-hearted, broken. Ragged as fuck. He doesn’t look at Zoro. “Then there’s the rest of me. I guess that’s the part you’re not supposed to say out loud.”

Something inside him clicks, teeth kissing teeth and Zoro steps in again, close enough to see the wrong pulse at the other man’s throat. “What else.”

Sanji stares at Zoro’s mouth, then his wrist, where the pulse beats slow and loud from strain. His voice thins, lip curling like the words hurt more than the bites. “It likes you.”

The room changes on the syllable: every ring under his skin turns towards Zoro at once and he feels the alignment hit like a full-body pivot, like a compass finding north. An open mouth rises in a perfect circle through the sternum, another trapping in the collarbone exactly in line with the base of Zoro’s thumb when he grabs it, counting his pulse through the air.

Zoro’s heart kicks and the press matches it, greedy. “Why me?”

Sanji’s tired and mean in the same breath, gaze cutting sideways, away. “It likes fights. Blood. And you’re… convenient.”

“Convenient,” Zoro echoes, flat. “Great.”

A ring of teeth climbs Sanji’s throat – thin skin, easy bite – like it’s testing and Zoro’s hand moves before he can think it through, shoving his palm flat and rolling the rise down, hard and steady, away from the neck. Sanji’s expression flickers between a flinch and relief. “Don’t –”

“Not near your throat,” Zoro says firmly, because he doesn’t know much right now, but he knows this, at least. “How long have you been letting this thing eat you?”

Sanji looks past him again, somewhere a little to the left of mercy. “Market. First night I woke up with it chewing… in case you’re wondering where the thirst’s come from.”

“Really fucking not,” Zoro says darkly, the Marine fight flashing across his skull: stamped throats, broken ribs, burns dragged like brands. It all slots into place too neatly and he meets the next mouth like a brawler, pinning the sternum and shoving it sideways against the lowest rib until Sanji gags. The teeth set against him through skin, polite, patient, pulling, and for a sick second he feels his own blood answer under the skin like gravity.

Sanji’s hands come up on instinct and catch Zoro’s wrist to stay there, knuckles white. He’s shaking, from rage or hunger or being chewed up from the inside or holding a door inside his own body, Zoro can’t say. All of them, probably. For a beat, the tension’s the only thing alive in the room. Then Sanji’s hands empty close in Zoro’s shirt instead and pull him closer in a movement that isn’t an embrace and isn’t a shove. Just contact. Human. Furious. Alive.

Zoro forces his voice steady. “You ever try to feed it with my face again and I’ll end you. And from now on you don’t leave anyone’s sight.”

Sanji’s breath hitches, anger, relief, hunger. “Sounds like a fucking leash, Mosshead.”

“Try choke collar.” He shoulders in closer, daring the thing to press again. The parasite ripples and slides under Sanji’s skin toward the heat between them like a hand seeking a throat. Zoro’s stomach flips, repulsed. 

Knuckles rap the door and Chopper’s voice comes through, bright and worried. “Sanji? Are you okay?”

Zoro doesn’t move and neither does Sanji and the ring under his hand taps, teeth touching teeth, like it’s enjoying the audience.

“Kitchen’s closed,” Zoro says back, edged raw.

“Since when?” Nami sounds like she’s about two inches from kicking the door in. “We need to work out what to do with all the… bodies.”

Robin’s voice comes through mild, careful. “Give them a minute.”

Sanji’s mouth tilts toward a smile. “You gonna let me work, guard dog?”

The mouth tries to rise toward Zoro’s thumb at the throat and he rolls it down without looking, brutal and exact until Sanji gags again. Zoro feels sick with how fast his hands have learned what to do.

The ship creaks. Outside, feet shift: the crew’s patience is measured in inches and gossip. “I’m coming in,” Nami says firmly.

Zoro takes his weight off Sanji by a hair and catches the latch with his heel. “No,” he calls, not taking his eye off Sanji. “Hot oil spill.”

“Smells like blood,” Robin observes, always too thoughtful.

Zoro lets himself breathe once. He eases his arm from Sanji’s collarbones and slides his palm from the ribs to the familiar safer points on the shoulder he’s already mapped by instinct and fury. The ring of teeth follows and stays under his pressure, sullen.

“You good?” Zoro asks, stone-flat. It isn’t kindness: it’s inventory.

Sanji looks at him like a cliff looks at the sea. Disaster, inevitable. “You gonna keep choking me all day, Marimo, or you gonna move so I can cook?”

“I’m gonna stand between you and everyone else while you pretend you’re normal,” Zoro growls. “You slip, I put you through that fucking wall, you understand?”

Something flickers in Sanji’s face, something that looks awfully close to humiliation and consolation. “Leash,” he says again, almost gentle and not gentle at all. He closes his shirt as much as he can, finding any button that’ll stick.

“Yeah.” Zoro steps back an inch that isn’t mercy in any way, shape or form. “Get used to it.”

He flips the lock and the kitchen door opens on five faces pretending not to be pressed to it. Chopper’s gaze goes straight to Zoro’s split lip, his wounded face, then to the crescent dents rising on his cheek and then to Sanji’s sagging scollar where the bite marks are purpled bright. “What happened?”

“Training.”

“With your mouth?” Usopp blurts, horrified, then flinches when Nami elbows him.

Sanji’s smile snaps into place, perfect as porcelain. “Lunch in twenty,” he sings, voice smooth. “Anyone who complains gets a raw onion.”

They peel off, mostly. Robin lingers half a second longer than comfortable, meeting Zoro’s eye over Sanji’s shoulder like she’s counting the quiet things in the room. Then she follows the others.

The door shuts. The galley shrinks again. Zoro wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, hissing at the sting and plants himself at the prep bench where he can touch Sanji in one step.

Sanji rolls his shoulders, every movement a performance of normal. Zoro doesn’t trust it. He doesn’t trust anything.

He lets the thought hit him full: how much of the last few days have been real? How much has been hunger wearing Sanji’s skin? The bile rises in his throat and he swallows it back like bad sake.

It’s not the fucking galley after all. It’s him.

He watches the horizon go nowhere out the porthole, watches Sanji prepare lunch like clockwork, like a robot, and does inventory to keep sane, the same way he does after a fight gone wrong. He can still feel the drag under his thumb when he’d wrenched down Sanji’s throat, how the cheekbone hollowed for a heartbeat until the thing set somewhere deeper. 

A map you make by hurting someone you’re not supposed to hurt.

He presses two fingers to his wrist and counts, steady and loud and tries not to think of the way it’d matched him beat for beat through another man’s body. Scrubs his thumb over the skin where the parasite had tapped through. 

The ghost of the touch lives there like a bruise and he understands something ugly, immediate: it’s not just living in Sanji, it’s chosen a favourite table for itself. Thinks about the first day on the island, the easy way Sanji’d leaned their shoulders together, the dumb jokes, and then the lock on the door, the soft chewing that doesn’t have a mouth you can see. 

He doesn’t know what else to do but stop knocking and kick the fucking door in. Put some rules in Sanji’s mouth until Sanji can put them there himself. He hates how much it really does sound like a leash and, worse, how much he wants the leash on his side of the hand.

The sea hisses and the rails tick and somewhere outside Franky cusses loudly. Somewhere else, Luffy’s laughing. Here, Sanji brings the stovetop to life with practiced ease and doesn’t look at him. Zoro lets the noise fill the space where the fear wants to sit, because what else can he do?

He checks the weight of Wado like the world might decide to attack him after all and when he turns back around he grinds his molars, trying to count to ten, a prayer or a threat. On six he opens his eye, because he finally knows which one it is.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

Lunch comes on like a storm: plates, steam, Luffy’s laugh, the clatter of chopsticks. Sanji moves through the galley like he always does, only sharper. He wears the smile that says he’s fine and anyone who thinks otherwise can choke on it. Zoro sits at the counter, jaw set, tasting copper every time his tongue finds the neat split in his lower lip from the other man’s teeth.

Robin glances up from her book, clocks the bruises and the mood and quietly marks her place.

Sanji slides a plate in front of Zoro. “Eat.”

“I’m not hungry,” Zoro scowls.

“Lie better,” Sanji drawls and leans in, too close, a ghost of their fight skimming the space between them. Zoro doesn’t move because god knows he’s never given ground before. Why would he start now?

“Ohoho?” Brook leers. “I’m sensing some tension in the air. Perhaps you two finally put your differences to bed? I mean that literally, of course.”

Usopp chokes. Nami sets her mug down with surgical care. Chopper peeks over a stack of sandwiches, ears up.

Sanji’s smile doesn’t twitch. “I wouldn’t waste my time with a bunch of moss.”

It’s not their usual banter and it’s clear the whole room feels it by the way the air thins out. Sanji’s eyes catch the light wrong, pupils a shade too wide and when his tongue swipes the corner of his own mouth Zoro feels his stomach drop because his body remembers the pressure there that hadn’t been Sanji.

“Boys,” Nami says carefully, “Whatever this is –”

“It’s nothing,” Sanji tosses back, cheery and poisonous. “He tripped over a threshold and bruised his pride on the bench.”

“That why his mouth’s all cut?” Usopp squeaks, already ducking.

Sanji’s gaze flicks lazily to Zoro’s mouth and the muscle in Zoro’s jaw jumps. He can feel the heat crawl up his spine again, the memory of it, the whiplash of I want this colliding with the horror. He reaches without thinking, catching Sanji by the wrist when he moves to set down another plate.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Zoro says.

Sanji’s brows flick up like make me. He shifts closer, knuckles grazing Zoro’s cheek like a tease. Zoro’s grip tightens and the room tilts around them in a quiet, contained violence.

“Okay,” Chopper says slowly, voice small but brave, “So we’re having a feeling –”

“We’re having lunch,” Sanji cuts in, soft and deadly. “Medical consultations are banned until the second serving.”

“Tell them what happened,” Zoro hisses, just loud enough. 

“Nothing happened,” Sanji sings, still for the room, and then, only for Zoro, “Unless you count you getting exactly what you’ve been salivating over since we met.”

Zoro’s temper flashes white and he shoves off the stool completely, peeling Sanji’s hand away by the fingers: polite but brutal, like he might snap one if he had to.

“Zoro,” Nami warns.

Sanji’s smile sharpens and for a heartbeat the skin just under his cheekbone pushes, a tiny puckering from inside that only Zoro can see. He goes cold again. Sanji’s elbow lifts a fraction, pressing his own cheek like a man smoothing a smile and the mouth subsides like it’s been petted.

Zoro feels the betrayal land again, meaner this time. Not just that it kissed him through Sanji: that Sanji let it. He reaches for the plate. Doesn’t eat. Just plants it down with enough force to make the flatware jump. “New rule,” he states, still not looking away. “You don’t touch me unless it’s you.”

Sanji’s eyes darken, heat and something ugly moving under the surface. “How will you tell?”

“That’s the trick, isn’t it.” Zoro’s mouth curves, no humour in it. “Guess I’ll have to pay very close attention.”

Franky coughs into a fist. Luffy cranes between them like a kid at a window.

“Is lunch cursed?” Usopp whispers.

“Undoubtedly,” Robin returns mildly. “But we can still eat it.”

Sanji leans in one last inch, the smile back on like a mask sewn on. His voice doesn’t rise above the room’s clatter. “If you’re going to flirt at me do it later. You’re blocking service.”

Zoro moves back because if he doesn’t he’s going to pin Sanji to the pantry and rip the truth out of him with his fucking hands.  As he turns  he catches it: the faintest wet click, like teeth touching at the end of a laugh. Nobody else flinches, but he does.

He plants himself at the galley threshold, Shusui across his knees, eye never leaving Sanji. The crew goes back to eating with the brittle cheer of sailors riding out weather they can’t see yet. Sanji plates, serves, brushes past him again and again. Each time, Zoro feels the heat of him and the echo of this morning and the wrongness threaded through both, and he holds the line anyway, seething. 

When lunch is done and they can grab a quiet moment alone he hooks his hand into Sanji’s elbow. “Meet me in the crows’ nest or I tell Luffy.” It’s petty and it’s shitty and it hits exactly the way he wants it to, giving Sanji no option but to bristle angrily and acquiesce. 

He doesn’t have a plan. He doesn’t know what the fuck plan this kind of situation needs but he does know two things as sure as he knows his blades: they need this thing out of Sanji and they need to make sure it’s locked down until they can manage the first bit.

Zoro takes off his bandana and wraps it around his left wrist, not to hide his pulse but to control it. He waits until Sanji comes in, sleeves rolled up enough to see the fresh bite marks littering his forearms, bruised and ugly, perfect indentations. Zoro’s stomach roils. “Rules. It doesn’t go near your throat. If it tries, I knock it out. If you can’t keep it under control you tell me.”

“The fuck’s the point of this?” Sanji doesn’t light a cigarette but his mouth looks like he’s chewed the filter anyway. “You want to, what, teach me tricks?”

“I want,” Zoro breathes out, measured, “To make sure it’s not going to keep snapping at you. Or me. I want it to learn where it’s allowed until we can flush it out. And you need to learn to fight without letting it drive you straight to murder. You ready? Keep your hands up, where I can see them. Shirt off.”

Sanji glares at him but shrugs the shirt off, torso long, ribs breathing in and out in a way that doesn’t look natural, not quite. There’s a bruise under one part of it, a dip that sucks in too deeply before the mouth inside lets go again. 

Sanji comes in cruel and instant, like he’s been dying for this. The first kick punches through Zoro’s guard and right into his thigh, the second clips an eyebrow with the ridge of a shin and opens it again. Zoro closes in anyway, shoulder first and Sanji lets him, before turning the clinch into a twist that smashes Zoro’s mouth against knee, ruining any hope his lip had of healing. The press jumps under Sanji’s skin like a beast smelling meat.

“Off the neck,” Zoro growls, palm rolling a mouth down and away. It fights him, slick, ratcheting, then holds where he puts it.

Sanji’s breath feathers his ear, soft and vicious all the same. “Harder. It likes you when you’re sure.”

Zoro shoves him to the ground and Sanji bounces off it, punishing him for the choice with a heel to calf, headbutt to cheekbone short and dirty, then a palm strike into the split lip that smears the blood across his own throat. The parasite turns toward the smear in a full-body turn Zoro feels: a rim of mouths, snapping at air like a polite request, some breaking through skin and some not. 

“No,” Zoro snaps and presses until the tap stops.

Sanji laughs, a ragged, hungry sound. “Beg.”

“For what?”

“For restraint.” He smirks and drives his knee into the floating ribs hard enough to make Zoro’s breath bark. He follows with a rake of the boot down Zoro’s shin that burns. Zoro takes the pain and uses it, hips in, all contact, giving the parasite nowhere to choose but his palm shoving it back down under skin.

Sanji changes the game: he stops playing distance and starts grappling like he wants marks. He makes space just long enough to spark a flash of heat under skin and palms Zoro’s bare forearm with it. Zoro hisses at the sizzle and almost breaks hold. The parasite’s fucking thrilled about it, teeth rising along the sternum, breaching, hooked crescents pricking through skin until blood beads, bright as a ruby, then slides back under skin. 

“You cheating asshole,” Zoro spits.

“Use your words, Moss,” Sanji pants, bright-eyed and awful. “Tell it no.”

Zoro peels a mouth off the hinge of Sanji’s jaw and shoves it low, then rides the next surge with bone and leverage, one after another as they appear, perfect as coins and then not, hooked teeth, some split into double rows. Blood wells at two old sites where its broken through previously from the inside, neat little half-moons bleeding in real time. The sound up close is a wet, precise gnaw, teeth setting and unsetting to test purchase. 

When Zoro underhooks and dumps him Sanji uses the fall to drag his own teeth along Zoro’s shoulder through his shirt and the parasite teeth erupt under his own skin, breaching in two neat crescents at the collarbone that bleed onto Zoro’s chest.

“Stop it,” Zoro says and he doesn’t know which of them he means. He pins him, the planks thudding underneath them, palm under jaws, hips locking hips. Rings of teeth surge and tap and surge and tap and bite, neat pinprinks through Sanji’s skin and his own if he gets too close.  

Sanji arches against the pressure like a dare. “Yeah? Make me.”

Zoro smashes him back down, grinds mouths off the throat, chases the clicks until they lose rhythm. Sanji’s hand’s a mess, the gauze red through again and when he grabs for Zoro’s shoulder his grip slips on his own blood.

“This fun for you?” Zoro rasps, breath hot over Sanji’s cheek.

“Give me something to chew on so I can get the fuck back to work,” Sanji snaps and Zoro obeys the worst version of the request, letting the fight turn savage. Lets Sanji knee him hard, takes a kick across the meat of his thigh, then gives back with holds that border on cruel. Whenever a mouth tilts towards the throat he hunts it down and moves it where he can reach, keeping it in the shallow water of sternum and ribs where he can see it. 

At the twenty-minute mark, Zoro’s bleeding, his forearm raw from the heat, his ribs buzzing from where Sanji’d found the soft spots and hit them again. Sanji’s shaking, breath stuttering in  short inhales; fresh arcs bloom across his chest where teeth have breached from inside.

He slams Sanji down one more time, pinning everything. The clicks stutter, then line up, then falter again and he still holds, counting heartbeats with the thing like a clock he means to break until it stops. Not gone. Not good. Just… fed. The eager tap at his thumb dwindles to one last annoyed knock. Teeth settle low, flat.

They stay locked there, breathing like animals in a trap until Zoro eases an inch, waiting for the teeth to flare up again, but when they don’t he eases another. Still nothing: just the sulky hum of a predator that’s eaten enough to back off.

He rolls off. Sanji lays sideways, hand over his eyes, laughing once, harsh, because not laughing would be worse, probably. His leg twitches in little nerve misfires where Zoro had forced a mouth off the spine too many times and the warped collar under his skin looks uglier and flatter both. The fresh crescents on his collarbone ooze.

Zoro dabs at his brow with the tail of his haramaki but blood runs warm into his ear anyway. His forearm fucking stings from where the heat’s kissed it and he knows he’ll have a nasty blister.

Sanji sits up on the second try, pushing sweaty hair back with the heel of his hand and leaving a red streak across his temple like war paint. He looks at Zoro’s mouth, at the cut, at the blood on his throat where it’s smeared. The parasite gives one small, sated click under the shoulder, like a contented creature turning three times and lying down.

“It’s quieter,” Zoro mutters, hating how relieved he sounds. 

Sanji spits pink. “Thank fuck.”

“You hit like you’re trying to change my face.”

“Consider it community service.” He stands, wobbling enough for Zoro to reach out but Sanji slaps his hand away, grabbing the wall when his knee fails for a heartbeat. “Blackmail me again and I’ll burn your face off. See if you can leash that.”

They make it back down when dusk’s laid a bruised stripe across the deck. The others are loud midship: Luffy and Usopp arguing over who cheated at cards, Nami threatening to audit both. Zoro takes the far side with Sanji, where the rail cuts through the wind and the planks have enough give to forgive a fall. They probably smell like smoke and blood, the kind of stink that screams fight. They don’t touch but the air between them feels like a tight wire and Zoro’s left hand hovers a breath from Sanji’s shoulder.

The deck goes quiet. Usopp’s cards stall mid-shuffle. Franky freezes with a wrench in the air. Luffy, who’s never learned a lesson twice, binds straight for them. “Sanji! Dinner ti –”

“Sit,” Zoro demands, without looking away from Sanji.

Luffy sits.

Nami snaps her book shut. “What did you two idiots do?”

“Worked out,” Sanji answers, voice sliced thin. He puts a cigarette in his mouth he doesn’t light but the way his jaw works around it promises murder. “Your moss took exception to cardio.”

“You call that cardio again,” Zoro mutters, “And I’ll put you on bedrest.”

Sanji’s head tips at a slow, feral angle. “Aw, you gonna tie me down?”

“Try me.”

Chopper edges forward, timid. “Sanji, if you’re hurt –”

“I’m perfect,” Sanji lies, smile too white. “Sprightly.”

Nami’s eyes narrow. “Okay. Enough. Either you two explain why you’re radiating homicide or I’m fining you both for emotional damages.”

Sanji exhales smoke he hasn't earned. “Ask your guard dog. He seems to think I need handling.”

“You do,” Zoro snaps. They’re close enough that their breaths tangle and Zoro feels the smallest tell: skin tightening under his palm, sharp teeth pressing up as if to test the gap between them. He pushes, just enough to make Sanji swallow and look at him, not the rest of the deck. Sanji’s eyes are a storm he wants to drown in and cut his way out of, like they always fucking have been.

Robin sighs. “You’re scaring the children.”

“I’m an adult,” Luffy counters, sounding unsure about it. “But I am a little scared.”

Usopp whispers, “Is this… more romantic tension?”

Robin hums. “No. This is a territorial dispute.”

“You want to do this in front of an audience?” Sanji’s smile shows too much tooth. “Kinky.”

Zoro’s thumb digs in a hair deeper until Sanji’s breath catches. The crew hears it and goes even stiller. Zoro’s voice drops back to the soft, lethal place he saves for promises. “I’ll say it once. Heel.”

Sanji laughs like a blade. “Couldn’t make me if you tried.”

There’s a heartbeat of silence before Zoro steps through, lining them up chest to chest, the hand at Sanji’s shoulder unrelenting, the other lifting just enough to hook two fingers in Sanji’s belt and shift him half a step left. It looks indecently like a dance move; it’s placement, moving him out of the lantern line, away from heat, away from a temptation only Zoro understands.

Nami blinks. “Did he just… steer you?”

“Enough,” Zoro says, to everyone and no-one. He eases off a fraction and Sanji rolls his jaw, fury bright as a fresh burn. The wire between them thrums.

Chopper tries again, brave and doomed. “Sanji, if you let me just check –”

“No.” Zoro and Sanji snap together. 

Franky clears his throat. “Crew meeting later? Maybe we can all… share our feelings?”

They don’t.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

The galley’s locked again, which means the ship breathes around it, which means he has some time and so Zoro takes the spare den-den to the shadow under the figurehead and works it with blood-stiff fingers. The snail’s slow to wake, like it regrets it. 

“Yo,” Law’s drawl is slow, flat as a blade. “This better not be an emergency.”

“Got a problem,” Zoro keeps his voice low and simple, the only way he knows. “Parasitic, maybe. Internal. Teeth.”

There’s a pause while Law works through it. “Name?”

“No idea. It’s a herb, nobody… they didn’t say what it was. They just sold it.” At least, he’s pretty sure it’s the herb. It’s the only fucking thing he can think of, at this point. “Now there’s… he’s got mouths under his skin. They move, they bite.” He swallows the rest of what he wants to say. 

There’s a rustle on Law’s side. “Fever?”

Zoro hates that he knows the answer and is grateful he does. “Yeah. It spikes. He… gets hot without fire.”

“You said parasitic, so I assume it’s feeding.”

Zoro stares at his knuckles, at the dried blood, his or Sanji’s. Both, probably. “Yeah. It… prefers contact. It comes out if it’s hungry.”

Law doesn’t sigh, not quite, but Zoro hears the hint of one all the same. “You might be describing a colonial organism, myxozoa traits. Possibly annelids. It’s opportunistic symbiosis. It sounds like you were sold a farm and now you’ve brought it home.”

“Will it kill him?” It’s the only question that matters and he has to force it out from behind his teeth, one dragged word at a time.

“Left alone? Probably. It’ll integrate along peripheral nerves, anchor in fascia, chew whatever gives best return: vasculature first, then organ surfaces.”

Zoro flexes his hand and then den-den mirrors the motion with a little grimace. “We’ve been… managing it. Training?” The word tastes stupid. “It listens to pressure.”

“I suppose that makes sense. Colonies follow gradients. You’re giving it friction and heat, thus it’s learning your patterns.”

Zoro shuts his eye. “Options.”

“Be precise,” Law drawls, “Do you want containment or extraction?”

“Both. Extraction.” 

Law snorts. “Not remotely safe. If I had him in front of me I could try to separate the parasitic tissue with Room. But if it’s integrated at the phrenic plexus or carotids you’ll get respiratory failure or stroke the instant you cut its anchors. Probability of total devascularisation is high. Margin for error’s none.”

Zoro clears his throat. “Try anyway?”

Law’s voice doesn’t change, flat and dry, factual. “Not over snail.”

Zoro’s jaw clicks. “Containment then.”

“You need to keep it from hunting. Keep it away from cervical lines and the spine. Cold will likely slow it and brine washes may help. You’re at sea, use it. No stimulants. No alcohol. No burnouts – heat spikes will teach it to rise. Track weight. If he drops fast it’s eating organs, not skin. You’ll see mottling under old bite sites which will signal internal bruising. That’s your stop sign.”

“Seastone?” 

Law hums. “It’ll likely dampen him, not the colony. You’ll just make him weak and teach it he’s prey.”

Zoro paces, feeling the desperate bitterness of this conversation start to wind its way home along his chest. He doesn’t know what he was hoping for, but not – this. “Medicine?”

“You don’t know what you’re dealing with, precisely. Chopper could brew something to make him worse and the parasite better. You want to gamble on that?”

Zoro says nothing. Can’t. The words are stuck somewhere, helpless and pissed and clawing at his throat.

“Tell your captain,” Law adds, like he’s checking a box.

“No.”

“Then tell him I said to,” he says, clearly unimpressed. “Or don’t. You’ll run out of hands to plug holes soon enough.”

Zoro stares at the deck. Stares out at the sea. Feels the bitterness crest and drop. 

“Your best bet is to find the vendor again. Get lineage, a name, the substrate it sat in. Sometimes colonies carry an enzyme we can inhibit. Sometimes. This won’t be cured in a market stall, Roronoa. Your best case is negotiating with it and bringing him here.”

Zoro’s mouth’s dry. “Sounds like you think it’s permanent.”

“I’m saying the longer it lives in him the more he is a we. It sounds like we’re already past easy severance. At this point you’re managing a baseline.”

Zoro tips his head back far enough to see the stars sprawled overhead. “He won’t like that.”

“He doesn’t have to. He just has to breathe.”

There’s silence, nothing but ship sounds and the den-den, the taut pause that Zoro can’t bring himself to end, because ending means the news is final. It means they don’t have a fucking chance in hell. Even if they wanted to, they can’t get to Law in time and Law can’t even guarantee –

“Roronoa,” Law cuts in, voice thinning to something almost human. “Stop letting it learn you. Don’t make yourself the treat.”

“Too late,” Zoro mutters. 

Law doesn’t call him an idiot because he doesn’t have to: they both know. “Call me if you bring him in. Tell Luffy. Understand when I tell you the odds remain dire.”

“Dire we can live with.”

“Only until you don’t,” Law says and cuts the line. 

The snail blinks and goes back to pretending to be a snail. Zoro stands there with the shape of Law’s answer cooling in his hands: no cure, schedule the hunger, ice and salt, rules or die. He wraps his hand and walks back towards voices because the ship doesn’t give a fuck what he just heard.

The main deck’s stupidly calm. Usopp and Nami are playing a game, Nami smiling the way she does when she already knows she’s won. Franky watches Robin reading her book. The sky’s clear and beautiful and the sea air wraps around the rails and none of it makes room for permanent. 

“Zoro!” Luffy lights up like always. “Spar?”

“Later,” Zoro promises. 

Nami flicks a card onto the deck with a lethal little smile, like she knows he needs something to do before he runs himself off the ship. “You owe me three hundred workouts and twenty pushups for ditching us at the museum,” she says, all sing-song “You can start now.”

He drops for the pushups so his arms have a job that isn’t punching a wall. No spine. No throat. He just has to breathe. On the twelfth rep his wounds pull but he doesn’t stop and on the nineteenth Luffy lays across his back to count along, getting the numbers wrong anyway. Zoro starts over so he doesn’t have to hear Law say colonial in his head again. 

“Dinner in twenty!” Jinbe calls from the other side. 

“Think Sanji found eel?” Luffy asks the air.

Zoro grunts. “Probably.” He looks at the horizon and counts knots in the rail until his jaw settles the fuck down. Twenty minutes become thirty and the door doesn’t open. Nami stacks her winnings. Chopper finishes fussing over the cuts on Zoro’s face. The sun pulls itself lower and Zoro stands up because if he sits any longer he’s going to break something that can’t be unbroken. 

“I’ll get him,” he says and nobody hears the way he says him has already started to mean more than one. He crosses to the kitchen like a man approaching a storm, putting his palm to the wood where his hand’s learned a new shape. 

Behind him, Luffy laughs at something stupid. Nami scolds him. The ship continues breathing and Zoro does the dumbest thing he’s going to do a hundred more times: he opens the door and pretends everything is normal. 

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

The dinner table gets loud the way it always does. Bowls clack and Luffy laughs with his mouth full until Nami thwacks him with a spoon. Usopp narrates some epic tale about a fish that allegedly dodges bullets. Chopper tries super hard not to knock over the bottle of vinegar. Franky and Brook share jokes amongst themselves, snorting with laughter and sake.

Zoro sits where he usually does, left end, back to bulkhead, swords in reach. Not because he needs the wall but because he needs the angle on the galley floor.

Sanji balances three plates on one arm, two on the other, a sixth hooked by fingertips. Gloves on, collar high, moving the same way he always does: clean, quick and graceful enough to make you forget he could kill you with a foot. The smell rolls out behind him: citrus, pepper and the faint metallic note Zoro’s learned not to flinch at.

“Eat before Marimo drinks the soy sauce,” Sanji grins, easy as rain. 

“Hey,” Zoro says because his mouth knows its part, if nothing else. “Plate mine raw and save yourself the effort.”

Sanji’s smile cuts sideways and he sets a dish in front of him that’s pinker than anyone else’s by a shade you can’t really call an accident. Zoro doesn’t blink. He lets the crew see their usual flare, their stupid little game, but keeps his face quiet where Sanji can read it.

Bowls make their round and chopsticks click. Robin asks Jinbe about a current and Jinbe answers like a map’s a bedtime story. Luffy inhales a plate and reaches for Zoro’s with a hand that Zoro slaps away without looking.

“Aw,” Luffy pouts, “Hey, we’re sparring after, right?”

“Yeah.” Zoro stabs the piece of meat, thumb aching under the bandage where Law’s don’t be the treat still lives. 

Across the tale, Sanji refills the ladies’ drinks and Jinbe’s tea with steady hands and when he tips the pot Zoro watches the skin there ripple and settle like something under it’s changed its mind. He drifts behind Zoro’s chair after to swap out a sauce bowl, bringing his usual heat with him, not the kind he brings in a battle but the kind that just. Clings to him. Zoro can almost feel the shape of the mouth through the back of his shirt like a memory his hands’ve kept. His pulse ticks once too loud in his own ears and he keeps his chopsticks moving.

“Too much salt?” Sanji asks, too casual.

“Perfect,” Zoro mumbles and swallows the taste of iron his mouth’s invented on some kind of twisted reflex. 

“Aw,” Nami snickers. “Maybe your taste buds finally woke up.”

The table laughs, typical, standard, good. Zoro lets the corner of his mouth turn up for the first time in days. 

Conversation muddles around the tragic weather on the horizon and how they’re going to fix the sailcloth a Marine left a tidy hole in. Luffy builds a meat mountain on his plate and Usopp shows off a handful of screws he insists are precious. Zoro pretends to rest the heel of his hand on the table but what he’s actually doing is not putting it where every part of him wants to: flat on a sternum that isn’t his to touch here.

He skips the sake when Franky offers. “Training later,” he grunts. He doesn’t glance at Sanji when he says it but he can feel the way the room shifts around the rejection with surprise.  

Sanji sets a plate by Usopp’s elbow with a flourish and mild insult about table manners. On the way back he catches Zoro’s eye for the smallest of slices, a look that isn’t mean or soft, just calculating. What did you change? Who did you tell? What am I, today?

Zoro holds the look. Nothing. No-one. You’re alive. He lets himself lean into the rhythm of his crew, the warm clutter of voices, the way the Sunny sings when her people are fed and happy. It almost covers the new sounds he can’t stop hearing now that he knows the name of: a faint patient click from somewhere deep whenever Sanji reaches for a pot or bends to the oven.

Law said baseline and Zoro’d wanted to throw the damn snail into the sea. Instead, he sits here and nods at a story about tangerines and watches the line he’s decided to live hold on another day. He finishes first because he usually does and sets his chopsticks across his plate just so. “Spar in an hour,” he tells Luffy and he tells Sanji nothing at all, but both of them hear the part meant for him anyway.

He doesn’t look back. Takes the deck stairs two at a time, breathing salt and sun like a man who’s learned a new religion overnight and isn’t going to pray where anyone else can see. 

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

The bucket sweats brine in the corner, ice clinking like teeth, ironic and not. Zoro sets the rules the way Law had said, like a checklist they can live through, maybe.

“No throat. No spine. No fire. No cigarettes. No booze. Hands in the bucket between rounds.”

Sanji’s mouth curls but he obeys, up to his elbows before he shakes droplets everywhere. “Since when are you my doctor?”

“Since you started breathing for two,” Zoro snaps. “Hands up.”

They go hard from the first touch because pretending only makes it worse. Sanji snaps a kick, following with a knee to the same rib arch as this morning, opening with spite. The mouths rise under Sanji’s skin the moment they touch, not curious anymore but expectant, like a pet who knows the leash by sound. 

The rhythm of sets fast, too fast: grapple, spike, pin, roll. It should feel like control but it feels like ritual. Every time Zoro pins him the mouths tilt towards the throat or try to move back and every time Zoro shoves them back with one, keeping them on safer ground. They fight him now, wet and deliberate, sharp and jagged, resisting like a muscle that doesn’t belong to any man. Predictably, Sanji weaponises it, making just enough space to flash a ghost of heat under his skin, like an asshole, and the parasite’s just overjoyed about it, breaking skin in greedy waves as Zoro’s pulse kicks high.

“You keep doing that and I’ll throw you overboard,” he grates. 

Sanji grins, feral. “Promises, Marimo.”

The line blurs early: they stop talking. The strikes get precise, cruel, deliberate. Zoro starts holding a beat too long after each pin and Sanji starts angling his body into holds that give the parasite more heat, more pulse, more of the very thing that Zoro said he’s here to ration. He knows it. Sanji knows it. The click -rhythm under skin knows it and sets their pace, the exact angle Sanji leans in, hip locked to hip, mouths rising to meet his hand like they’ve been waiting for his touch and his touch alone.

(The problem is: Zoro’s always liked Sanji best mid-fight, has admitted that to himself for years now. He used to tell himself it was just a swordsman thing, the appreciation of a fellow warrior, but he’s since accepted it’s a Sanji thing. The parasite’s just given it teeth in a way he’s not wholly prepared for.)

“Don’t,” Zoro growls, slamming Sanji hard enough into the rope coil that the deck groans underneath and Sanji makes a decision Zoro feels before he sees: flame flickers to life on his heel, not a show, a warning flare. Heat punches into the space between Zoro’s palm and Sanji’s throat and licks the hand clean, blister-hot. 

“Move it or I burn you,” Sanji says, voice a vow and Zoro can’t – how is he meant to redirect a predator?  

He bites his thumb open before he can think better of it, quick and deep, thoughtless, urgent: hot hits his mouth, the taste snapping something feral and stupid loose in him. He slams the bleeding thumb to Sanji’s sternum, right over the cresting mouth; the reaction’s instant and awful. The ring latches through, snarling points of teeth, jagged and ruthless, pulse to pulse, heat to heat. Zoro’s blood drags through Sanji’s skin in a slick line of pain that isn’t entirely his.

“Zoro,” Sanji rasps, shocked, and he goes very still, the kind of still you get when you’re choosing between murder and mercy. The clicks stutter into pleasure, Zoro pressing harder, guiding the mouth lower, owning its path with his bleeding grip because control’s the only fucking thing he has left here. 

He doesn’t see it coming until it’s already happening, Sanji’s eyes catching his skin. His weight shifts, not to counter, not to break, but to line up and Zoro feels it in the bones: a full-body pivot that isn’t about leverage at all. The mouth under the sternum bites harder, the rings along his ribs crest in a chain, the collarbone arcs lift like something sniffing air and Sanji’s bite lands high on Zoro’s shoulder, human teeth. 

Canines punch into skin, molars drag, taking a scrape of flesh with it, and Zoro’s brain white-out blanks – years of wanting colliding with this use of it – and then slams back in with the sound of his own breath and he lets his thumb drop free.

He goes to shove him off and that’s the second hit: the parasite erupts under Sanji’s skin in perfect sync, mouth breaching beneath the bite to meet it from the inside. Teeth meet teeth with a wet little click that makes Zoro’s stomach drop. Suction. Pull. Heat pouring out of him into someone else’s chest the way a wound pours into seawater.

“Wait,” Zoro gasps, too late. 

Sanji’s hands lock, one in Zoro’s shirt, the other biting down on his hip and for a heartbeat it helps the angle. Zoro feels his own pulse get dragged through that connection, feeling the obscene, right alignment. Horror hits first. Then something else hits behind it, a violent, traitorous spike of pleasure that makes his knees go weak.

He slams his arm across the other man’s chest, pressure on, trying to roll the big mouth down and away. It fights him, ratchet-hard. Human teeth hold fast, tear down, too sharp to be normal. The world tunnels to breath and pain and clicks.

“Sanji,” he tries again, and this time he makes it an order. “Stop.”

For a half-second nothing changes, then there’s a flicker – Sanji’s eyes focus like a man waking up on a ledge. His jaw eases a hair, the human bite loosening last, teeth pulling free with a sting that makes Zoro hiss, with a force that takes a chunk of skin with it. The parasite doesn’t want to let go so Zoro peels it off with his palm, shoving it flat and low, away from throat and heart, until the rings hold where he puts them, sated.

They freeze, locked together, chests heaving. Zoro’s shoulder burns, warmth seeps down his ribs under his shirt where the bite bleeds. Sanji wipes his mouth with the back of a hand, smearing red across his cheek.

“You weren’t –” Sanji cuts himself off. His tongue presses briefly to the sharp canine he’d just used, like he can still taste him. “I didn’t –”

The parasite under his ribs tilts toward Zoro again, slow and interested. Sanji hauls it back with a visible, ugly shudder.

Zoro’s hand shakes on the other man’s sternum even as he tries to force it still. “You ate – you could’ve gone for my throat.”

“I didn’t,” Sanji says and the only fucking part of that sentence that matters is the I. He doesn’t deny the eating. How the fuck could he even hope to deny it?

Zoro grabs at Sanji’s jaw to get his mouth open again, the flat of his thumb finding where each tooth's edge serrates. The way his teeth sit more like points with each passing day, carnassial. “Holy fuck.”

It hits him then, harder than the bite: this isn’t bargaining or ritual or rules. He hadn’t offered. He hadn’t fucking chosen. And it had still taken, both of them had. The parasite because hunger, Sanji because some ruined piece of him now knows the fastest way to quiet a monster is to feed it and because it probably felt good for one empty, stolen second.

The mix in Zoro’s chest of rage, arousal and horror curdles into something he doesn’t even have fucking words for. He breathes through it until his vision stops swimming, until he can see the blue in Sanji’s eye that’s bright and terrified and sorry. He looks one heartbeat from an apology and one heartbeat from a panic attack. 

“You try to eat me again and I break your hands. You bite me without permission again and I –” He stops and finds a truth he can say. “I hand you over.”

Sanji flinches like that cuts deeper than any sword could’ve. “You think I can’t control this.”

“No,” Zoro says and the honesty puts a crack through something in both of them. “I fucking know you can’t. As if that wasn’t proof enough.”

The parasite gives one small, satisfied click deep under the shoulder, like a creature turning three times and lying down. Zoro feels it echo in the bite, a ghost pulse it’s just learned by mouth. He takes his hand off Sanji’s chest by degrees and finds no resistance. Not because it’s obeying him but because it’s not starving anymore.

Sanji looks at the red on his hand. At Zoro’s bloodied shoulder. At the place his teeth had been. “I’m gonna hurt you,” he says and it’s not a threat, not meant as a threat. Just fact. Prophecy. 

“You already do.” He wraps his fingers over the bite and presses hard, until the pain flares clean. 

He can’t stand being here anymore. 

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

He peels his shirt off proper and finds the mess himself, exhaling at the snarl of wound on the shoulder, a smear of subcutaneous tissue peeking through the torn muscle.

He rinses it until the water runs pink and then thin and the bite keeps bleeding anyway, steady as a drumline. He wraps it with pilfered gauze, ignoring the unsteady curl of his fingers. The ship makes the small noises it makes when everyone else is sleeping: hull talking to the dark, the sea licking the plank seams. Zoro creeps into his hammock and lays on his back with his forearm over his eye and counts breaths until counting feels like lying.

If he turns his head the wrong way the human bite sings in a clean arc. If he moves his arm wrong the inside crescents in his bicep answer like a fucking bruise.

How far do you go? 

He’s told himself a dozen pretty answers: as far as necessary, as far as it takes, as far as the crew needs. None of them are the truth in his chest, because the truth’s uglier: he’s already gone further than he swore he would. He’s fed the thing from his own hand. He’s let Sanji bite into him. He’s drawn a line and then moved it because a heartbeat has asked him to.

Above him, there's footstep crosses the deck. Jinbe’s slow weight, probably. Safe. He lets his arm drop and pictures the dock: bounty hunters, the quick wrong movement, the parasite choosing him over the enemy. He pictures the galley: someone’s hand, Sanji leaning in, Zoro tearing him off before the bite can become a meal. He pictures Luffy’s face if it happens in front of everyone, no grin, nothing silly, just that quiet that means you’re one decision away from losing a family member.

They won’t call it a parasite. Not when it’s Sanji’s mouth on his throat. They’d just call it Sanji.

He tastes blood he isn’t bleeding and presses three fingers to the bite through the wrap because pain turns the world into one thing at a time. 

He can go to Luffy. Tell him everything. Ask for a plan that isn’t just let me be the flesh it chews instead of his. Luffy will say, “Okay,” or, “We’ll punch it,” or both. The crew will pull tight around the problem like they always do.

And the minute Sanji puts any teeth on the wrong person they’ll solve it the way pirates solve things you can’t fix.

Zoro rolls to his side and stares at the wall until the grain swims. The ship exhales. He breathes in on four, out on four, lets the helpless part have a minute to talk. You want him. You’ve wanted him for years. You like him best in a fight. You like him awful and close.

He doesn’t try to argue. He’s never been a liar.

He lets the stern part answer next. So what. The stern part counts the crew. Nami’s quick fingers. Usopp’s nervous hands. Chopper’s tiny stubborn jaw. Robin’s steady eyes. Franky’s loud heart. Jinbe’s strength. Luffy, who will forgive anything except a threat to his people.

Zoro sets his jaw and makes a list in the dark because lists feel a little like swords sometimes: No public contact. No fights side-by-side. Keep distance on docks. Make excuses. Take the other flank. Wrap the bite at the neck so tight he forgets the shape for a while. Keep his pulse steady enough the thing doesn’t smell it through a shirt. If Sanji leans in instead of back, he puts him on his ass hard enough to reset the world. If Sanji goes for anyone else…well, there’s nothing after that. There’s only rope and a door and a conversation with their captain.

He doesn’t write the list anywhere, just carves it into the meat behind his ribs where vows live when you don’t want to say them aloud.

He lets the scared part talk last. What if I can’t stop it. What if I freeze. What if I like it again. That one lands in a place he hates. 

He can leave: a thought that walks in on quiet feet and stands at the bunk like a ghost. He could take the rowboat. Take the problem out to sea. Take the teeth and the hunger and the man he loves and drown all three where no-one can follow. Luffy would forgive him. Maybe. Eventually.

He slips his hand under the wrap at his wrist and finds the old cut by feel, the one the big mouth had learned. The scar tugs under his thumb like a memory of teeth and he presses just hard enough to promise. 

Sleep comes late and thin and when it does it brings a dream in which the deck’s a long table, the sea a knife, Sanji’s mouth and not-mouth a single circle of teeth that click in perfect time with the ship. In the dream, Zoro sets his hand over it and it lays down. In the dream, he bleeds deliberately and doesn’t flinch.

He wakes before dawn with the answer he’s already known: he’ll tell Luffy nothing he doesn’t have to, not yet. He’ll keep the leash in his hands until his hands fail or the crew sees what can’t be unseen. While the sky is still greying he slips into the galley, finds Sanji sitting on the floor, face locked in a grimace, those fucking wet chewing sounds that – 

“Quit letting it eat you,” Zoro says before he can stop it, grabbing the other man’s arm to yank him to his feet. Sanji sways just for a second, wincing audibly at whatever’s tugging away at him, before he presses a hand down on his own ribcage, hard. “What about normal meat? Raw? Not…” He can’t quite bring himself to finish. 

Sanji scrubs at his face, at the dark patches, at the way a mouth breaks free over his wrist and tries to grab at air. “Tried that a few times. It doesn’t – doesn’t stick the same.” 

Zoro can’t even look at that concept right now. He sucks in a breath and forces out, quick: “I want to try something.”

“What.” 

He pulls Sanji’s collar down enough to track the dark stippling patched over skin, Law’s warning about internal bruising ringing in his ears. “Here’s what we’re gonna do: I do nothing. Hands off. I want to know how far it goes if I don’t stop it. We need to know how much time we have before it reacts to someone close.”

Sanji’s laugh has fuck all humour in it. “And if ‘how far’ is my teeth in you again?”

“Then we learn that too.” Zoro hooks two fingers in the rope he brought along, looping it around his own wrists behind his back. He doesn’t pull it tight, just enough to make reaching for Sanji a choice. “If I say stop, you stop.”

Sanji looks like he wants to say no but what comes out is worse: “Don’t make me want to find out.”

They face each other in the space and Zoro sets his feet shoulder-width, makes himself still. No baiting. No touch. The press under Sanji’s ribs rises anyway, patient and interested.

“Whenever you’re done pretending,” Sanji says softly, “I start.”

Zoro doesn’t blink. “Go.”

Sanji steps in like water taking a low place and the parasite comes first, rings cresting along the ribs in a clean chain. The big mouth at the sternum yawns, jagged teeth uneven, too many for the space. Zoro feels the heat of it before it touches him, a furnace opening that doesn’t go straight for his chest. It tilts for the neck instead, the strongest pulse in reach, like it’s always wanted to go there and has only been waiting for the chance.

Zoro doesn’t move. He counts: One, two, three – 

Sanji’s mouth beats it there.

Teeth at the angle of Zoro’s other shoulder, not a snap but a sink, clean and human and deliberate. His whole body jerks against the rope; the line bites his wrists as the parasite surges in stereo, smaller mouths breaching under Sanji’s collarbone and along the bicep pinning Zoro’s arm, hunting the collar’s bandage and the crescents in his shoulder like it has a fucking map.

Four, five, six and the big mouth presses through Sanji’s skin to Zoro’s throat without breaking it, testing, teeth grazing. Zoro holds still. Seven, eight, nine and his breath snags, pulse spiking and the parasite likes the spike: he can feel the ring’s delight in the neat, obscene tap lining to his beat. Ten, eleven – 

“Sanji,” he says around a breath that doesn’t feel deep enough. “How far.”

Sanji’s jaw tightens, then eases, not letting go, just adjusting, teeth grinding in a way that makes Zoro see stars, sharper than they have any right to be. “Further than this,” he says against skin, as if any further wouldn’t be to the fucking bone. “If you let it.”

Twelve, thirteen and the big mouth tips for the throat again. The smaller one under the bicep latches to the edge of an old crescent and Zoro’s knees go watery.  

“Keep counting,” Sanji murmurs. “You wanted data.”

“Fourteen,” Zoro chokes. The rush hits then: horror twisted with something he refuses to name right now, months of wanting the shape of Sanji’s mouth on him, ruined and complicated by the reality of why it’s there. It makes everything worse. 

It makes everything honest.

Fifteen, sixteen and the big mouth finally bites through: clean points through skin into the throb beneath. Zoro sees black at the edges. He choses not to move.

Seventeen.

Sanji’s hands land on his hips, his hands, holding him steady like he’s the one about to fall. The parasite clicks in pleasure.

Eighteen. “Done,” Zoro says, tries.. 

Sanji doesn’t obey immediately, jaw holding. The big mouth sucks once, greedy, and the small one under the bicep echoes it. 

Nineteen. 

Zoro’s vision tunnels.

“Sanji,” he tries again, harder.

His jaw unclamps and the human bite stings open air while the parasite’s mouths peel back a heartbeat later, sulky about it. Zoro’s pulse stumbles, then races to catch itself. He staggers forward and Sanji catches him on reflex, forearms under his arms, chest to chest. Without Zoro’s palm, the big ring rises for the throat again like a child going back to a hot stove.

“Don’t,” Sanji snarls under his breath and, god help them,  it listens.

They stay like that, bodies swaying with the ship, Zoro’s wrists still looped behind him, Sanji’s breath hard and measured. Zoro makes himself pull free of the line and presses his hand to the new bleeding groove above his collarbone. “Seventeen. It takes seventeen heartbeats for your little pet to commit if I don’t touch it.”

Sanji’s mouth twitches like he might be sick. “You made it to nineteen.”

“Only because you stopped,” Zoro hisses. “Not because it did.”

Sanji inhales sharply, honest: “I didn’t stop. You made me.”

Zoro looks at him, vision snagging at the eyes blown and glassy, the blood at the corner of his mouth; the warped collar under his skin a little flatter, a little uglier, a little more there. “No,” he says finally and feels the line cross under his feet. “I asked. You chose.”

“So what did we learn?” Sanji asks, brittle.

“That if my hand isn’t on it, I’m dead,” Zoro says darkly. “Or someone else is.”

He wraps the new bite by feel, blood warming the gauze anyway. The parasite gives one last annoyed tap before disappearing under skin. 

Zoro tries to steady his breath into something he can weaponise. “I’m always touching that thing when we’re close. Even if I have to break your jaw to get there.”

Sanji swallows. “You’d break my jaw?”

“If that’s what it takes to keep you from using it,” Zoro says and means it with a tenderness that isn’t kind. “Seventeen beats is too short.”

Sanji’s eyes flick to the mess on Zoro's shoulder, to the bandage on the other, then away. Shame, anger and the ache of both. “This is beyond us.”

“It’s always been beyond us,” Zoro mutters, hoarse. “We’ve just measured the distance.”

Sanji doesn’t get the chance to respond because cannon-smoke wakes the ship like a fucking slap. It’s Marines again, probably chasing up from the other day’s horror, shouting from the port side. Grapnels bite rail already, the Sunny yawing under the sudden weight.

“Don’t you dare move!” Zoro throws over his shoulder, dumping Sanji in the galley to grab his swords and kick his way up to the deck, where Luffy’s already grinning wickedly, hat jammed low, bare hands snapping rifle barrels in half like twigs. Every swing of his arm leaves two Marines flailing over the rail, more tripping over each other to avoid being next.

Nami works the storm in her pocket, staff snapping open, a single flick dropping a curtain of rain so slick half the enemy line loses their footing at once. She smiles without teeth, hooks a man’s belt with her staff and sends him skidding. Usopp, from the rigging, is a one-man artillery, smoke bombs popping in careful patterns to funnel the rest right into Luffy’s fists. “That’s two dozen!” He shouts down gleefully.

Robin’s quieter in her own deadly way, pairs of hands blooming out of the deck planks, tripping and disarming Marines with the calm precision of someone rearranging a bookshelf. A sword clatters across the deck into Franky’s waiting grip and Franky uses it as a lever to flip its owner.

At the wheel, Jinbe stands like a wall, sea-spray clinging to his shoulders. He takes a staff to the ribs without flinching, pries it free, and breaks the shaft over his knee in one clean motion. The ship doesn’t list once under his hand. They’re holding, more than fine and Zoro leaps into it without thinking, Kitetsu and Wado swinging overhead. The fight’s straightforward, despite the bite burning under his collarbone, a hot oval that throbs in time with every shift in movement he makes. 

The fight’s so simple and easy that he doesn’t even notice when Sanji slips through until he feels a blast of heat so strong it nearly knocks him the fuck over. He finds him with blue-white flames licking up calves, up thighs, heat climbing like a bad thought with Marines already down and out around him. Smoke curls off his shirt, his hair. 

“No fire!” Zoro barks, cutting a rifle in half and the man behind it. “Sanji –”

Sanji doesn’t look. He shoves a boot through a shield, pivots and doesn’t follow the break. He just stands there, shoulders squared, eyes flat, like a man counting to a number that means go. Heat climbs higher and mouths rise with it, cresting along his arms, his collarbones.

Zoro shoved through three more Marines, leaving a line of men clutching ruined wrists. “Stop –”

It doesn’t matter: the flame runs up instead of out, climbing his torso, licking his throat, haloing the cut of his jaw. The smell hits first: scorched metal, then hair. The press inside him surges all at once, a chain of mouths racing for the hinge of his jaw, for the soft places under his ears, a neat bead of blood slides from Sanji’s nostril and sizzles off his upper lip. 

He takes a hit on purpose, a baton cracking across his neck, head snapping sideways, flame flaring as if invited. The parasite erupts at the impact, a scream of clicks Zoro feels in his own fucking teeth. Sanji pushes heat higher, towards his head and Zoro’s body chooses before his brain can catch up. 

He cuts a path blind, shouldering a Marine into another, takes a blow across the haramaki and doesn’t slow. He hits Sanji at the waist, driving him down, palm owning the sternum. The heat punches through his hand like a fucking kiln door opening. Sanji’s jaw works, teeth gritted. “I can –” He doesn’t finish end it. Flame crawls up his neck, white at the edges.

Kitetsu slices the side of his Zoro’s wrist open – clean, deep – letting blood hit heat and flash. He slams the bleeding wrist to Sanji’s sternum, lets the parasite tune into it like a compass, lets the mouth latch down with a sick pull that scores his goddamn nerves. The mouths along the ribs pivot back down, away from the neck, greedy for the line he’s drawing with his own blood. The flame shrieks blue-white, collapsing to a mean orange and finally stuttering. Sanji chokes, smoke pouring out of his mouth in a hiss. 

A Marine lunges and Zoro flicks a cut that makes him reconsider having arms and never takes his wrist off Sanji. Sanji drags air. “One –” out on a cough. Blood patterns the deck from his nose, tidy dots. His hair crackles where it’s been singed.

“Eyes on me,” Zoro growls. Around them, Marines made the mistake of thinking he’s busy. He cuts anyone who stepped too close by listening, not looking, blade singing in a tight circle that says try it. Luffy’s laugh breaks sharp somewhere forward and Jinbe roars at the wheel. The world narrows sharply to heat and the clicks losing their rhythm, losing their fight against it.

“Enough,” Sanji gags, voice thin. He grabs Zoro’s forearm with shaking fingers and tries to peel himself off the mouth. Zoro gives him exactly as much fight to keep the mouth down, until the teeth let go with a wet sting. 

Sanji’s eyes are raw and furious. “I almost had it.”

“You almost cooked your fucking brain.” Zoro’s palm stays on his sternum, pressure steady. The mouth holds low, sated enough to listen. “Don’t ever pull that again.”

A Marine captain yelled something about surrender. Zoro looks up, meets his eyes and cuts the air with one clean stroke that makes the man forget the concept. Sanji coughs, awful and wet, then spits pink and laughs once, a horrible, small thing that breaks in the middle. “You’re bleeding.”

“No shit,” Zoro mutters. He presses down again because a mouth breaches the crux of Sanji’s throat the moment he eases off. 

Something ugly moves in Sanji’s face and doesn’t find a home, restless and pacing. “You can’t keep… doing this,” he says and it sounds like I can’t keep failing in front of you.

Zoro sneers. “Watch me.”

The Sunny bucks on a wave and the Marines surrender; the deck stinks of salt, gunpowder and smoke. Under his palm, the monster settles, patient and polite and god, Zoro knows what he’s stopped – this time. He knows what Sanji had tried to do. He also knows the worst part: for three blistering seconds the parasite had listened to Sanji’s suicide mission just as well as it listened to Zoro’s hand.

Zoro cuts the path in front of them clean and ugly until there’s no path left to cut. He doesn’t let Sanji out of his shadow for the rest of the fight, even as the Marines continue their retreat, and he doesn’t stop listening for the first wrong click. He doesn’t think about the smell of hair and the way the flame had climbed. 

He gets him off the main deck before anyone can clock how bad it is, down the ladder, through into the first space he can find. 

Sanji sags against the hallway wall, smoke still coming off him in threads. Up close, it’s worse: heat shimmer in the air, shirt clinging to skin, the mouths under his ribs convulsing like fish trapped in a net. The big mouth at his sternum keeps opening and closing, slow and stupid, like it’s drowning on dry land.

Sanji flinches, teeth bared. “Leave me – ”

Zoro ignores him and strips the ruined shirt open properly, the damage telling on him in ugly colours: blotched purple mottling where the mouths have slammed against tissue, fresh crescents that have breached from the inside and bled and burned closed, a jag of blistered skin along the collar where the fire’s licked. 

“Fucking hell,” Zoro breathes.

The mouths under his skin slow from thrashing to twitching and the biggest one gives a long, miserable click and flattens a fraction. Sanji’s breathing like every inhale costs him a fight. Then he laughs, sharp, cracked clean down the middle. “You stupid fucking – you shouldn’t have stopped me.”

Zoro grinds his teeth so hard his teeth sing. “You were going to kill yourself.”

Sanji’s face is bright with fury and something darker, worse. Something Zoro never wants to see again. “I was killing it. That’s the same fucking thing now.” Sanji shoves at him, hard, but Zoro doesn't give ground. Fire flares hot off his leg again, orange and weak, but close enough to blister skin. “Move or I swear I’ll burn through you to get to it.”

Zoro’s voice comes out a growl. “Then burn me.”

For half a second, Sanji means to: Zoro can see him make the choice, the way the fire rolls hotter, the scent of singed cloth and hair sharp. He snarls, “This is not living. This is fucking rotting. And you’d rather trap me with this thing than let me go.”

“I’d rather have you breathing!” Zoro barks, fury snapping any hope he has of keeping his voice even. Keeping his heart from beating out his damn mouth. “I’d rather hold you here, pissed off and calling me names, than put you in the ground because you can’t take one more day!”

Sanji’s laugh is a wreck of a thing, even as he shudders. Even as the skin around his ribs shifts and changes, sucking in like something’s bitten down. “That’s selfish as fuck.”

“Yeah,” Zoro hisses, stepping in until their foreheads nearly touch, breath shoving into the space between them. “It’s selfish. I’m selfish. You think I’m gonna just let you –” He breaks off, teeth gnashing. “I’m not losing you to this thing and I’m sure as hell not losing you to yourself.”

Sanji’s fingers fist in Zoro’s shirt, knuckles gone white. “So you’d rather keep me like this than let me burn out clean.”

“I’d rather keep you!” Zoro snaps. “Full stop. You want to call that selfish? Fine. You want to call it a leash? Fine. But you’re not going anywhere until we know for sure. Fuck. We need to find the vendor again.”

“And what?” The words come out like they’ve been punched, ugly and bruised. “Refund the parasite? It’s mine, it's me, I’m fucking stuck with it –”

“Sanji!” Chopper darts in, medkit already open, the crew on his tail. “Oh gosh, your burns, don’t move –”

It’s too sudden, too loud, too much movement, too close: Sanji flinches sideways at the burst of action, head snapping, human teeth bared for the soft inside of Chopper’s forearm. Zoro slams him around the ribs, hauling him back so the bite closes on air, hand slamming the mouth down and sending Chopper yelping into Robin’s waiting hands. 

The crew freezes from where they’ve crowded around. Nami’s staff swings up without a clear line of thought. 

Luffy steps forward last, shadow from his hat cutting his face in half. “What’s happening.” Flat. Not a question he needs answered, just a line drawn.

Zoro doesn’t look at him. “He’s hot, not thinking. Give me a second.”

Under his palm the mouth tests the throat, the teeth flexing through, breaking skin like it can feel the captain’s heat from here, hungry after being burned so badly. Sanji’s breathing’s ragged and the mouth splitting through his neck stays locked shut, but his own teeth are still bared, canines sharp against split lips, jaw working like he’s fighting himself. His gaze snags on the line of Zoro’s neck and he jerks it away with visible effort, eyes clenching shut.

Jinbe’s voice is quiet, clinical. “When did this start?”

Zoro doesn’t answer. Can’t: a mouth bites through under his collarbone and he’s not quick enough to push it back. Not quick enough to hide any of this anymore. Zoro can feel the shift, the moment they all realise they aren’t looking at their cook anymore, not entirely. The thing on his ribs pulses once under Zoro’s palm, almost smug, like it knows the crew’s just joined the audience.

Usopp swallows audibly. “That’s… inside him? That’s been there? He’s got teeth inside him?!”

 Sanji makes a brutal sound, a sharp ugly thing. “You’re all looking at me like I’m a bomb.”

“Because you are,” Nami snaps. She doesn’t put her staff down, just tracks the mouth arcing through skin like she’s tracking a wave. Like she’s tracking a new threat.

“The island,” Zoro says, hollow. He digs his thumb into the soft stretch of skin under Sanji’s ear, on the ring of teeth already splitting through there. “We need to go back and find the person who gave it to him.”

Luffy doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to. “We’ll go back.”

Usopp’s throat bobs again. “Right now-right now?”

“Right now,” Luffy says, firm. He still hasn’t looked away from Zoro’s hand on Sanji.

Zoro opened his mouth to argue, to say give me a day, give me a deck, give me some ice but nothing comes out. He’s just watched Sanji try to burn out his own brain. He’s just felt human teeth hunt their doctor.

There isn’t a single fucking defense that doesn’t start with a lie.

Nami’s already barking bearings to Jinbe while Usopp’s hand hovers near his slingshot. Robin’s arms keep a calm but solid line between Chopper and Sanji.

Luffy’s gaze stays rooted to him. “We need to put him somewhere where he can't hurt anyone.”

Zoro hesitates, long enough for everyone to see it. Then: “Yeah.” The word sits like lead in his chest, his mouth. 

Sanji tilts his head back against Zoro’s grip, eyes slitting open. “You can’t fix me.”

“You try that bite again,” Zoro says, low enough for only him to hear. “And I’ll put you in the ocean myself.”

The mouth under his palm clicks, lazy, like it doesn’t believe him.

The ship turns her nose for shore and Franky peels off to check lines. Usopp goes to help with trembling hands while Nami’s voice bites through wind and canvas. Chopper hovers at the edge of Zoro’s reach, brave and scared. Robin’s gaze weighs every angle and clearly finds no good ones.

Zoro keeps his hand where it lives now, sternum, centre mass, feeling the parasite flatten for him, polite and bored again. He can feel the crew adjusting around the danger the way a hull adjusts around a hole: automatically, grimly, forever.

He wants to say he won’t hurt you but he can’t. He says the only thing that’s true: “I’ll keep him from you.”

No-one argues and, god, that hurts worse than any bite.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

They put him in the infirmary because it has a lock on the door and Franky swears it can be reinforced. Jinbe stands in the frame like a plug until it shuts.

Sanji sits on the bed with gloves off, wrists red from the icy brine. The heat coming off him is wrong still. The crew forms a half-circle. Captain in the middle.

“Explain,” Luffy demands.

Zoro doesn’t look away from Sanji’s face. “It’s a colony. It anchors along nerves and… something. Muscle, I guess.”

Nami’s voice is a blade. “And when were you going to share this fascinating update with the rest of us?”

“I should’ve told you,” Zoro says and he means it. “I wanted to.”

Chopper edges forward, torn between anxiety and triage. “Can I examine him? I need vitals. Weight. B-bite sites.” His ears droop a little on the last two words.

“Later,” Zoro promises, gentler than he feels. “Cold first. Brine.” He nods at the bucket he’s hauled down. “It slows when you ice it.”

“You’ve learned it,” Jinbe remarks carefully, like he’s not sure what to make of it.

“Law helped,” Zoro says because if he doesn’t say it now it’ll rot in his throat. “I uh. I called him.”

A ripple hits the room and Chopper’s eyes widen. Usopp whispers, “Oh,” like a bad guess turning true because typically if Law’s gotten involved then it’s Big. Luffy doesn’t blink, expression unshifting.

“What did he say?” Chopper asks, small but steady.

“No guarantee on cure. Extraction will probably kill him. Containment only.” Zoro keeps his hand where it has to live. “Don’t let it… hunt. Hunting’s worse. Ice and salt. Keep it away from the spine and neck. No fire. It gets excited when there’s fire or heat.” 

Jinbe folds his arms. “Then we contain him. Until we reach the island.”

Sanji’s laugh is thin and reedy. “You’re gonna put me on another leash then?”

“We are,” Zoro says and lets the honesty burn. “Not for you, for it.”

Sanji’s mouth curls, bitter. “Same fucking difference.”

Luffy steps closer, gaze tracing the knot. He says, no violence in it: “You should’ve told me.”

“Yeah,” Zoro agrees and it doesn’t get easier the second time. “I should have.”

Luffy nods once. “Jinbe, keep us on course for the island. Franky, reinforce the door. Robin, if we need extra hands, you know.” He turns to Chopper. “Get what you need. But don’t get close until Zoro says.”

Chopper looks torn. “I can check his pulse from the ankle,” he offers, thinking fast. “I can… monitor from there.”

“Good.” Luffy looks back at Sanji and for a heartbeat he’s just a boy who loves his cook, his friend. Then it’s gone again. “No fire, Sanji.”

Sanji’s doesn't look at any of them. Just the floor. “Yeah.”

Usopp hovers by the hinges, voice wobbling. “Is he gonna… do that again? With the teeth? With all the teeth?”

Zoro doesn’t lie. “If we don’t manage it, yeah.”

Usopp swallows, nods too many times. “Okay. Okay. I can, um, make a trap for the door. Just in case. Not to use! Just… in case.”

Nami’s staff snaps shut. “We’ll find the vendor. We’ll get a name for this thing. If there’s a way to hurt it, we’ll buy the whole stall.”

“A word, Zoro?” Robin asks in a way that says she’s not asking. Zoro cuts Sanji a reluctant look and drags his hand away, watches the mouth snap at air as he follows her out. 

They cram into the kitchen because it’s the only area big enough to hold a conversation this enormous, and it feels fitting, in a way. Zoro stands with his shoulder to the bulkhead, his bites aching. Jinbe stays guarding Sanji. 

Nami doesn’t ease them in. “Do we keep him aboard?”

Usopp’s voice shakes as his eyes dart between them. “You mean, like, keep him keep him? After the… teeth? Like, we all saw the teeth, right?”

Robin’s hands fold. “Question one: risk to crew. Question two: risk to civilians. Question three: prognosis. Question four: logistics.”

Luffy sits atop the table, his elbows on his knees, mouth flat. Chopper’s hooves hover over his bag, his voice small but firm. “He’s sick. We don’t throw a sick crewmate away.”

Nami’s stare is pure flint. “You don’t bring a bomb into a market either.”

Franky blows out a slow breath, settling his hand on Robin’s side. “Okay, but when he went fire-guy out there? That wasn’t sparring anymore, that was straight-up kill. He’s been brutal lately, you throw some extra teeth in? We could use that kind of weapon on our side.” 

Robin’s gaze flicks to Zoro. “Prognosis.”

Zoro forces his jaw to unclench. “Law says there’s no cure. It’s… integrated. Parasitic, stuck in his nervous system or whatever. Cold slows it, salt might help, pressure keeps it off vital areas. It eats… him, if it doesn’t get enough from somewhere else. The biggest problem is the… hunger. We need to work around that.”

Usopp blanches, taking a good step or two back until he bumps into Franky. “Like, feed him? Okay, uh, we’ve got stores, right? Fish, pork, hell we can get a whole damn cow for him.” 

Zoro doesn’t look up from where his thumb’s running along the grain of the table. “He’s already tried. Doesn’t… he said it doesn’t work the same.”

Chopper exhales slowly, steadily, figuring this out in real time. “Because animal muscle tissue isn’t a match for what it’s fused to.”

Nami frowns. “Meat’s meat.”

Chopper’s voice steadies further as he goes into doctor mode, like he’s grateful for have something technical to lean on. “Not when you’re talking about something integrated with a human circulatory system. It’s not eating like we do. It’s extracting nutrients directly from the blood supply… iron density, haemoglobin structure, certain proteins and hormones unique to human tissue.”

Usopp goes even paler. “So… it’s not just taste. It’s chemistry.”

Chopper nods. “Right. And once it’s had the right chemistry it’ll recognise anything else as inferior fuel. At best, it’ll dull the hunger for a few hours. At worst, it’ll trigger aggression… no doubt it’ll tear at Sanji’s tissue to get what it wants.”

Nami’s gaze cuts to Zoro. “And you knew that too.”

“I knew that too,” Zoro mumbles. He’s hyper aware of the bites in his skin. How much deeper the teeth would’ve sunk if he’d let them. How much the teeth would’ve torn, human-and-not-human alike, and how un-human the human teeth are becoming.

To her credit, Robin’s voice stays level. “Feeding criminals in combat is still feeding people. There is a moral cost. There’s also an operational cost: bounties, attention, escalation… the parasite is hardly loyal to our ethics.”

Chopper looks between faces, teary. “If we starve it then it might just eat him faster. He’s already losing weight.” His voice catches. “He tried to burn it out today. He’d do it again. But it’s… a lot. A human can lose about half a litre of blood, maybe another half and walk away if it’s slow enough. Maybe we can –”

“It’s not slow.” Zoro doesn’t reach for the bite marks on him, but his fingers twitch like they want to. He knows the facts already: it wouldn’t be slow, not if the parasite really got going. It’d be fast and lethal and torn tissue, eaten tissue and what even constitutes a full meal? It’s been living mostly starved in Sanji’s body… how much would it take to fill it up enough to stop it from rattling the ribcage? And then how long until it would need to eat again? 

He pictures it without meaning or wanting to: Sanji pinning someone down, teeth set and working until the thing goes slack with satisfaction. Pictures the way it’d flatten under his hand after, lazy and warm, purring without a sound. 

Pictures Sanji’s breathing easing for the first time since this began.

Franky’s fingers drum once on the table, other hand cupping his girlfriend like a comfort. Nami sets her thoughts down like numbers, clinical. “Alright, the risk to crew’s already proven. Risk to civilians is apparently guaranteed if we dock and he’s, what, hungry?”

Usopp’s hands twist in front of him, restless and anxious. “If we keep him then we need rules. Real ones. What happens if Zoro’s knocked out? What happens if Sanji gets hurt and it gets worse? What happens if we’re in a crowd?” He’s breathing too fast and Robin lays a few hands across his shoulders, patting him until he can slow it back down. 

She nods, approving the shape of fear naming itself. “There must be hard limits.”

Luffy frowns down the table, folding his arms over his narrow chest. “We aren’t chucking Sanji away. But I don’t let my crew die for one crewmate. Not even our cook.” 

Nami’s jaw eases a fraction, only just. “Then we need a plan we can live with.”

Robin counts it out on her fingers. “Containment. Feeding. Triggers. Consent.”

Chopper startles. “Consent?”

“We can’t force him to be a weapon,” Robin explains, soft but unflinching. “Nor can we force him into Law. He has to choose his risk.”

Usopp nods too fast. “Okay, okay, containment. We keep him away from crowds, from, uh… kids? No shore leave unless he’s… unless he’s fed, god. That’s a totally normal thing to say. Someone shadows him always, right?”

“Me,” Zoro says instantly. 

Nami rolls her eyes. “Yeah? You ever sleep, big guy?”

“I’ll manage.”

“Yeah, not good enough. We rotate. Jinbe, Franky, Robin… anyone who can hold him or stall him if they need to.”

Franky hesitates with a skewed mouth, like it hurts him to even consider speaking the words he’s about to speak. “So, the feeding thing? That might be a problem. I mean, he could knock off a Marine or two and it’d be better for the world, probably, but. Like, where are we drawing the line here? Bounty hunters? Dumbass pirates who come for us?”

Robin answers the engineering question like a moral one, glancing up at him from under her fringe. “We feed the enemy only when the alternative is civilian harm or crew death. We do not create fights to feed him. We do not dock and hunt. We do not make it a habit.”

Usopp winces. “That’s still… we're still talking people, man.”

“We are,” Robin agrees.

Chopper scrubs his face. “I can monitor vitals. Weight. Dehydration. Organ stress. I can… I can try cooling compresses, herbs to blunt the fever spikes. But sedatives are dangerous. I’m scared if I slow Sanji, the parasite will move faster.”

“Triggers,” Nami sighs. “What’s our hard line here?” 

“Biting crew!” Usopp says immediately, thrusting his hand into the air. “Definitely biting crew!”

“Fire above the chest,” Robin adds carefully. “Any attempt to burn it at the head or throat.”

“Loss of time,” Franky suggests. “If he blacks out. If he can’t remember minutes? That’d be super fuckin’ bad, I reckon.” 

Chopper whispers: “Loss of language? If he stops answering his name.”

Zoro can almost hear his own heart in his wrists. “You’re talking like this ends with a stretcher or a body bag.”

Nami meets his glower unflinchingly. “It does.”

Luffy’s voice cuts through, low. “It doesn’t end with the sea. We don’t drop him. If he wants to leave, he says it. Not us. If Traffy says he can help and Sanji says yes then we take him. If Traffy says he can’t help… then this is our life until I say it isn’t.”

Usopp lets out a breath that is anything but relief. “And if, uh. If the worst of it happens?”

The room looks at Zoro as a whole and he feels exposed, awful and skeletal, but he forces himself to hold their stare until it hurts. “I put him down.”

Nami gives one sharp nod like tallying a column. “Okay. Protocols?”

Robin slides a blank sheet between them like a treaty. “Assignments. Anchor locker as a controlled room, Jinbe to reinforce the door. Franky can build restraints. Cooling system for the locker… does this make sense?” 

“On it,” Franky mutters, pressing a kiss into her hair.

Nami’s mouth flattens. “You said it likes fire, right? So no cigarettes on board. No open flame unless he’s quiet and someone’s with him. He gets no short sleeves, no short legs, no exposed skin if we can help it.”

Usopp groans and lets himself slump over the table. “Oh, he’s gonna hate that.”

“He can hate it right here,” Luffy says sharply. 

They’re one breath from breaking in two. Zoro can feel it, the line between love and live with stretched so thin it sings. Wails. 

Luffy stands and the room stands with him because that’s what they do: they follow him. “We keep Sanji. We write the rules. We follow the rules. We go back to the island, get everything the seller knows. Then we call Traffy. With Sanji. If he says no, I listen. If he says yes, I carry him myself. Until then… Zoro, you don’t leave him.”

“I won’t,” Zoro promises, hoarse.

Luffy’s eyes are very clear. “And if he goes for anyone again before you get there, you break him. You hear me?”

“Yeah. I hear you.” Zoro stares down at the places the crew’s love has just been reshaped into rules and knows the parasite will learn the shape of those rules as fast as it learned his pulse.

Jinbe’s shadow filled the doorway, his voice quiet. “He is asking for water.”

Robin stands, mouth kind. “I’ve got it.” 

They spill off the galley in twos and threes, voices drifting as they branch off, Franky for the hold, Nami for bearings, Chopper to make a list. Luffy doesn’t move until the room’s empty and Zoro doesn’t either, because he knows what’s coming. 

They end up under the stairs, out of the wind, close enough to hear the ship shift around them in the way ships do. In the way the Sunny does. Luffy doesn’t pull punches, has never been in the habit of doing so. Lacking preamble is something they’ve always had in common. “It listens to you.”

Zoro doesn’t even pretend not to know what this conversation is leaning towards. “It doesn’t listen to anyone. But… yeah, sometimes.”

“I don’t feed civilians,” Luffy says. Simple. “Blood, meat, whatever it ends up being. I don’t feed our crew. But we keep Sanji. So when there isn’t a fight –”

Zoro can feel the weight of it settle in his chest, every damn choice that’s led them to this one. It feels disgusting and awful, revolting and terrifying, and he forces it to sit in his chest anyway.

“You handle it,” Luffy finishes, simple, like a sword set gently in his hand.

“Handle it,” Zoro repeats around a swallow. 

“Whatever keeps it from hunting us, or from killing him. Ice, salt, rules. Enemies, if they come. And when they don’t… you make sure it’s your problem before it’s anyone else’s.”

Zoro’s jaw tightens. “You’re asking me to choose who gets fed to him.”

“I’m telling you I’m not choosing.” Luffy’s voice is level as the keel. His eyes are narrowed, watchful, calculated. “I’m captain. I point us. You stand in the worst place and keep us safe. That’s what you do.”

Zoro looks past him to the deck, the rail, the bright, ugly day remaining. The bites on his shoulders and his face and his collarbone and that awful ghost click of teeth he can hear even when it’s quiet. “And if I can’t, if there’s no-one to throw at it, if the hunger’s bad, if I can’t find anyone who deserves it or if it’s not enough –”

“Then you call me. And I’ll say the same thing.” He holds Zoro’s stare until there’s no room to duck it. “No civilians. No crew. No dying for pride. Keep him breathing, keep them safe. We stop him when we need to.”

Zoro makes himself nod, because he can’t make himself talk. He knows what stopping would entail. Knows that Luffy would help, they would all help, but it would be him that would swing the final blow.

Luffy nods as well, not approval, just acknowledgement and they stand with it a moment longer, the ship creaking like it understands as well. Then Luffy turns for the ladder, already calling orders into the wind.

Zoro stays under the stairs, hand on the rail, counting boards like beads until the click in his head levels out. The order sits in him like iron: be the leash, be the butcher, be the wall. 

He goes to find Sanji.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

When they reach the island they end up putting him in the rowboat because there isn’t another choice: they need to see the vendor and nobody wants to keep Sanji on board until they know the outcome. 

Nami doesn’t say a word when Zoro jerks the boat loose but she tosses a rope down like a sentence and looks pointedly at the horizon. Robin stands at the rail with her hands folded and expression dry and Luffy watches them both with the heavy calm he wears when he’s choosing to trust his crew even though it hurts.

Zoro takes the oars and Sanji drops into the seat, petulant, shoulders high, nothing but open black water ahead. 

“Hands where I can reach,” Zoro warns and Sanji rolls his eyes but shoves his arms out, letting Zoro loop Nami’s rope around his wrists with one quick knot, a mean little insurance policy. He rows the whole way in, listening to the gentle click of teeth in time with stroke and pulse together, learning both like a song. 

At some point he changes tempo just to spite it but it follows along anyway. 

“You planning to march me through the market like this?” Sanji drawls. “Cuffed? Sounds like a date.”

“Sounds like you’re still breathing,” Zoro shoots back and means it like a threat.

A harbour lantern swings on the headland, throwing heat across the boat and the teeth lunge for it by reflex, a cresting wave of mouths that break skin to snap at air, swelling up the breastbone. Zoro slams them down, the heel of his hand grinding hard enough to make Sanji’s breath stutter badly. “Off the neck.”

Sanji lets the resulting silence do most of the antagonism and the rowboat chops through a band of colder water, the smell of kelp coming up wet and heavy. Zoro feels heat bloom in the air like a pre-burn buzz, mouths trilling and rising to greet it like sea life to wreckage. Zoro plunges his hand into the ocean and slaps the wet palm across to Sanji’s face, letting the shock of it hiss into both of them and the parasite recoils, clicking fast, annoyed. “You light up this boat and I’ll drown you before it catches.”

“Worst date ever,” Sanji mutters and slumps down further, letting his skin transition back to a normal temperature.

They can see the island properly now, a scatter of lamps at the market’s edge, the pale line of the tide. Zoro rows harder until his shoulder complains, until the rowboat skates over sand. Zoro tidies it up, keeping the boat braced flat until they climb out onto a beach, moving over it through the crooked alleyways leading back to the market, where they’d been warned not to take anything from that goddamn stall. 

The parasite stays low, stroppy but alert, like the island itself is a smell it recognises. Sanji walks like a man balancing something breakable and hungry under his ribs, which isn’t untrue, and Zoro matches him half-a-step behind, counting both of their heartbeats and refusing to let either of them set the pace alone. 

The markets are still buzzing even into the evening, stinking of fish and aglow with harbour lights, heat off stone. There are people and heartbeats and pulses everywhere and Zoro braces himself for it, hand winding tight around the rope, keeping his palm flat on the centre of Sanji’s back as they climb steps. The press answers to strangers like a tuning fork, turning towards a laughing woman, a drummer boy, towards a hawker shouting over pancakes. Zoro feels each single twist under his hand and rolls them back to neutral, pulse by pulse, until the thing skulks low again. 

A kid bolts from a stall and bounces off of Sanji’s hip, sending Sanji’s weight shifting unexpectedly, two sets of teeth snarling – 

Zoro yanks him sideways hard enough to bruise, into his own shoulder. “Eyes front, Curls.”

Sanji’s voice comes out tense, like he’s catching the recoil of his own actions. It’s a front, horror masked with fire. “Jealous?”

“You mean keeping it from chewing on people?”

“That too.” 

They cut through the market’s spine, winding under trussed octopus hanging from hooks and mint braided into garlands. Every time a crowd pulse swells the parasite tilts that way and every time Zoro steers it back it learns a little faster, like a mutt testing a leash.

The seller of the silvery herb’s stall gapes open like a mouth, bundles hanging from beams crisscrossed with sea-grass, glowing jars lining the walls like preserved eyeballs. The man behind the counter looks up slow, recognition souring his face. “You came back.”

Sanji doesn’t bother with a greeting. “What was it?”

The old man’s gaze tick to the bruised crescents along Sanji’s jaw, lingering like he’s counting. Watches the rope strung between Sanji’s wrists and Zoro’s hand. “Instructions were clear.”

“Answer the question,” Zoro growls, letting every inch of his height and muscle make itself known, his spare hand dropping to his swords for an added bonus.

The vendor makes a show of dusting his tray. “I sell herbs. Purchasers do what they like. Weather is warm tonight. You may not want to stay out too late.”

Under Zoro’s palm, the thing rolls toward the heat of the hand at Sanji’s ribs, a perfect ring of teeth rising to greet him. Zoro grinds it flat but another surfaces lower, eager, drawn to another person’s presence, pulse, warmth. 

“What was it?” Zoro repeats, filthy.

The man’s mouth bends, not quite a smile. “Names call things closer.”

“Give me a useful superstition, asshole.” He leans in until his shadow swallows the jars.

The vendor starts weighing a pinch of something for a passerby who takes one look at Zoro and flees instead. “It drinks what you make most of. Heat. Motion. Attention. If you chew it cold, it moves on. If you kiss it to flame…” He taps two fingers, gentle, against the inside of his own wrist. “Wicks take light.”

Zoro feels Sanji still beside him. “Let me guess, if you rip the wick out, the lamp goes dark?”

The man’s head tilts. “Hands. Breath. Balance. Quick deaths are mercies.”

Sanji’s smile sharpens. “You knew this and you sold it to me anyway?”

“I sold you leaves. You did the rest.” His gaze dips to Sanji’s legs like he can hear the flames locked away there. “You are a stove that walks. You should have known better.”

“Right, right,” Sanji knocks his hip against the stall, leaning into it with an expression on his face that Zoro knows better than to trifle with. “Shame you didn’t mention it comes with a bunch of teeth, hey? S’not like pirates get dental insurance.”

The vendor’s smirks at him properly, truly interested. “Ah. A colony already crowned. Then there’s nothing to –”

Sanji slams his fingers into the vendor’s apron, ripping him around the counter and into the nearest gap in the maze, the rope snapping tight as Sanji’s palm turns, heel up, the jag of teeth in the centre snapping open like a trap. Zoro falls neatly in step behind until the vendor's smashed into a terracotta wall.

“Oh, I’m done with riddles,” Sanji hisses, “It has been a very long week. You talk or you feed it.”

The vendor smiles like a dare. “It won’t want –”

Sanji clamps down on his neck, not a warning nip: the mouth in the palm tears, clean and decisive, teeth latching onto the man’s neck until the man’s yelp cracks in half, until his hands scrabble for purchase on the wall, until blood slicks between Sanji’s fingers and runs down his wrist. 

“Watch the artery,” Zoro warns, holding back his grimace at the way the teeth work once, twice, efficient as fuck as it bears down into skin and whatever grows underneath. Sanji ignores him so Zoro counts to five before he yanks him away, the mouth clicking in displeasure as it’s dislodged, taking skin with it. Sanji’s tongue darts out and licks his palm without taking his eyes off the man.

The vendor’s hands grab at his own neck, at the rivulets of blood against his skin. “You can’t kill it,” he spits, “It’s in him. All you can do is feed it enough that it doesn’t take the rest.”

“Yeah, not an answer,” Zoro breezes, stepping in to crowd him good and proper, drawing Kitetsu. “Name it. What rock was it dried on. Where did you pick it up. What else grows there.”

The man snarls at him. “Crowns in rings. Harvested near a vent seam. Basalt shelf. You burned it. You taught it to climb. You made it faster.”

None of those words mean anything to Zoro but he locks them away for someone it does. “Give us the rest. Now.”

The man spits at him, swearing something nasty. Zoro cocks his head at Sanji, considering. “Still hungry?”

Sanji’s on him before the vendor has a chance, palm locked back over his throat until the man chokes on it, blood faster, quicker, meaner, dragging him across the wall until he’s a breath away from human teeth and then there are human teeth, raking a strip off with far too much ease, far too much speed. The man’s hand flings into the air, desperate and Sanji lets go enough to drag him back to his stall. Zoro checks every single jar, opens a few little black pots to one to find shreds of the silvery herb within them. He sweeps all of those pots into the bag so they can destroy them. He keeps his eye locked to the vendor, to the maw of his neck so that he doesn't have to watch Sanji do whatever he's doing with the scraps of skin that came free.

Zoro inhales. “Tell me where this seam is. Draw it. And then you’re going to write every damn name this plant has in every mouth in this ocean.”

The vendor's shaking as he does, getting half the paper damp with blood as the map take shapes, pencil scraping over paper. When the map’s done Sanji hooks his hand in the vendor’s apron, just enough to pull him close, enough to get him flinching away. “You try to sell anything ever again and I’ll come back.”

Zoro tugs the rope enough to haul him away before the next bad idea gets teeth, literally. He can’t stop tracking the way Sanji’s pupils are still too wide, the blood from fingers to forearm. 

“That can’t happen again,” he forces out as they wind back through the market and Sanji snorts, anger curdling into something else then back again. 

“You let me do it.”

Zoro doesn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Yeah, he deserved it. But that’s the last free bite you get. Hands up.”

“You know, things grow when you feed them,” Sanji says almost conversationally, like he’s discussing a little herb garden or something, even as Zoro tightens the rope around his wrist until they can’t move at all. It doesn’t make the mouths stop cresting through skin. It doesn’t make the teeth in his mouth any more human. 

It doesn’t make Zoro’s own bites stop aching as the shore lights fall behind them in a smear.

They find the rowboat again and aim it towards home, the Sunny’s mast light a single coin out on the dark ocean, small and stubborn. 

They stay in the rowboat for longer than strictly necessary, the lantern they’ve brought painting light across ribs and oars. They’re sitting so close Zoro can almost feel the place where the parasite has latched to Sanji’s spine, almost feel it in his own fingers, like a ghost ache. His palm’s braced to the safe point at Sanji’s shoulder, pressure steady, the way you keep a wild thing from bolting.

“You can’t keep me leashed forever,” Sanji says quietly, hands twisting in the rope as much as he’s able, not to escape, just. Restless. Trapped. 

“You think I want it like this?” Zoro mutters. “You think I don’t wake up wanting to cut it out and let the ship bleed with it? I’m not choosing for you. I’m choosing with you while you’re not in your right mind.”

Sanji’s mouth does something sad, bitter, something that bares a hint of increasingly not-human teeth, jagged on the canine. Sour and wretched and turned in on himself. “Then this is what my life will be, huh? Keeping me in a glass case? You gonna hold my hand for every damn step in case your new pet gets ideas?”

Zoro’s breath hitches as anger finds the line and walks it, before he can shove it back. “We take this to Law. We see if he can help. If not… then yeah. If that’s what it takes to keep you – everyone – safe.”

Sanji’s broken stare flicks to his face, something pained and helpless cutting through any previous frustration. “I don’t want to live like this.”

“I don’t care how you want to live.” Zoro feels the words as he says them, tasting how hideous they are. How cruel. He still can’t bring himself to take them back. “I care that you live until we can figure this out."

The frustration and the agony and the fear don’t have anywhere to go. They just sit between them, hot as the healing burn on Zoro’s forearm, as bright as the new blister rising in the shape of Sanji’s heel from earlier in the week. Sanji leans his head back and glowers at the moon like it might offer a different ending if he just looks hard enough.

They stay there until Sanji’s pulse stops trying to climb into Zoro’s fingers and the teeth stay down on their own, obedient or waiting, Zoro can’t tell. Maybe he’ll never be able to tell. The oars creak and the water shoulders the hull and, beyond them, the Sunny bobs. 

Sanji narrows his eyes at his leashed hands, at the blood, at the bandage peeking out from Zoro’s shirt where his teeth had sunk through. “I thought I got out, you know. Thought I slipped it, got away from the – the fucking mutations.” He flicks two fingers at the heart of his throat. “Joke’s on me. Turns out I’m a monster now anyway, just like the rest of them.”

“The rest of who?” Zoro frowns at him, the shape and context of Sanji’s words unfamiliar, but Sanji shakes his head, looks away, refuses to answer. “Curls –”

“You can’t do this forever,” Sanji cuts in, an echo of a previous conversation that sounds a hell of a lot like I’m scared I’ll make you try.

Zoro’s palm finds his collarbone and holds steady. “Guess you’re underestimating how stupid I can be.”

That earns him the corner of a smile, brief and wrecked, dying fast. The lamp in the distance grows a fingernail bigger. Zoro’s hand doesn’t move. A wave shoulders them and the rowboat shakes; Zoro steadies them with a twist that lives in him now. A mouth tests Sanji’s neck like a cranky child.

The sea looks painted around them. Oars dip, lift, drip. 

“What if I’m never me again,” Sanji says finally, finally, voice barely audible above the gentle waves rocking them. His expression is hard to decipher in this lighting but Zoro isn’t imagining the wet shine to his eyes.

Zoro inhales to steady himself. To steady them both. “Then it’s you and.” 

He does the math he hates: days into weeks,feedings into bandages, how much he can allow before his hands shake, Luffy’s words. The math will never add up. More blood than any man should have to spill to keep another breathing, a kill in the dark, a fight. Watching Sanji fade, if they get it wrong. Watching him bear the weight of what he’s become, if they get it right. Every column makes the sum heavier but when he pictures the alternative – Sanji gone, Sanji burned out, Sanji empty – there just isn’t a number big enough to make it worth it. 

He sets the oars in their locks and reaches across the narrow boat, his thumb travelling to find the shape of Sanji’s jaw in the dark. “Hey.”

Sanji goes very still, no flinch but no trust either. Zoro leans in slow enough for the other man to stop it if he wants to, letting the kiss be deliberate. No rush to hide in, no fight to disappear under. The press under his palm against Sanji’s jaw shifts the instant their mouths meet, parasite teeth biting hard into the hand that chooses to cup Sanji’s jaw. There’s a scrape catching against his lower lip – there you are – a pinprick of salt-copper he swallows without moving.

He doesn’t pull back. He lets the thing feel it isn’t a mistake. He lets Sanji feel it, too.

When he does ease away, Sanji’s eyes are blown wide, not with heat but with fear. Zoro keeps his hand on the other man’s chest and feels the teeth purr in the quiet clicks he’s memorised. Every touch teaches it. Every concession trains it. He’s chaining himself to that lesson on purpose.

“Listen to me,” he says, voice low and intentional: “I’d choose you every damn day, teeth and all.”

Sanji looks at the water so he doesn’t have to look at Zoro, tears falling free. His hands flex once in the ropes and still. “You’re going to regret this.”

“Probably,” Zoro agrees and picks up the oars again. “But I’d regret ‘nothing’ more.”

He rows until the Sunny grows larger, all their new rules waiting like ropes for them to hang themselves on. He feels the bite from the teeth still hot on his palms, blood warm on his lip and understands the life he’s buying here: brine buckets, ice, scheduled feedings, a monster that’ll keep learning him until it can find him in a crowd.

He rows forward anyway.

Above the slow pull of the oars, the Sunny waits on the horizon like gallows.