Chapter 1
The rice balls were still warm when Sanji climbed into the crow's nest, which meant he had made them less than five minutes ago, which meant he had been standing in the galley at two in the morning thinking about the idiot upstairs. He decided not to examine that.
Zoro was sitting against the curved bench with his swords across his knees and his eyes shut. The bandages Chopper had wound around his chest the day before were already spotted through on the left side. The whole room smelled of iron and the sea, and faintly of the sake he was not supposed to be drinking.
"I know you're awake," Sanji said.
"I'm on watch. Of course I'm awake."
"You were snoring two minutes ago. I heard you from the ladder."
One eye opened. "Then why'd you ask?"
"I didn't ask. I stated." Sanji set the plate down on the bench beside him, harder than he meant to. Three onigiri, salted the way Zoro liked, a strip of grilled saba, a cup of miso with the steam still curling off it. "Eat. Chopper says you lost enough blood to fill a bathtub. He used a real comparison, by the way. He did math."
Zoro looked at the plate, then at Sanji, with the suspicion of a man who had been fed every day for months and still expected poison. He picked up a rice ball. He didn't thank him. Sanji hadn't expected him to.
Thriller Bark was four days behind them. Brook played violin on the lawn deck in the afternoons and laughed at his own jokes about not having skin. Luffy had eaten his way through a third of the stores and woken up every morning loud, hungry, untouched, as if a Warlord hadn't stood over him while he slept. Nami had already forgiven the island enough to complain about the humidity. The ship had gone back to sounding like itself.
Sanji had not gone back to sounding like himself, and it was beginning to bother him.
He lit a cigarette and leaned against the window. Below, the Sunny's lion head glowed pale under a thin moon. The sea was flat and black and quiet in the way that made old sailors nervous.
"Usopp asked me again today," he said. "What happened while everybody was knocked out."
Zoro chewed. "And?"
"And I told him what you told me to tell him. Nothing happened."
"Good."
"It's not good. It's a lie, and I'm a terrible liar to men. Women, fine. Men I have to look in the eye and I don't care enough to make it convincing." He tapped ash into the little tin he'd started leaving up here for himself. "He knows. Long-nose isn't stupid. He just doesn't want to know badly enough to push."
"Then let him not know."
Sanji turned around.
He had not meant to bring it up like this. He had meant to bring the food, make sure the moss-head ate it, and leave. He had done exactly that every night for four nights. Each night he climbed down the ladder with the empty plate and the thing he hadn't said lodged under his ribs like a fishbone.
"You hit me," he said.
Zoro's jaw stopped moving.
"With the hilt. Right here." Sanji touched the side of his own neck, the place that had stayed purple for two days and that he had covered with his collar. "I was in the middle of a very good speech, too. I was offering my life to a Warlord of the Sea with considerable dignity, and you knocked me out like a drunk at closing time."
"You were in the way."
"I was volunteering."
"You were in the way," Zoro repeated, flatter, and set the rice ball down. "He only wanted one."
"So it should've been me."
"Why?"
Sanji opened his mouth and found that the answer he'd rehearsed on the ladder had gone somewhere. He knew why. Because the crew needed a swordsman more than a cook; any port had cooks. Because Zoro had a promise to a dead girl and a man with hawk's eyes to beat, and Sanji's dream was a sea that might not exist. Because when he woke up in the rubble and walked through the dust, he had found Zoro standing in a lake of his own blood, still upright out of sheer spite, and the first thing the bastard said was nothing happened, and something in Sanji's chest had given way like a rotten plank, and he had not been able to name it since.
"Because I'm replaceable," he said instead. "You're not."
Zoro stared at him for a long time. Then he laughed. It was short and hoarse and it clearly hurt, because he folded over his ribs halfway through.
"Don't laugh, you'll open the stitches."
"You're an idiot," Zoro said, wheezing. "You really think that."
"It's arithmetic. Ask Chopper, he likes math now."
"Who cooks, then?"
"Somebody."
"Who?" Zoro straightened, slowly, and there was nothing amused left on his face. "Luffy? Luffy'd eat the ship. The witch would charge us for it. Usopp burns water. Robin..." He thought about it. "Robin might be fine. Doesn't matter. It'd be wrong."
"Food is food."
"No," Zoro said. "It isn't. You know that better than anybody. You told me once. That rock, with the old man. You told me what it's like when there's nothing."
The cigarette had burned down to Sanji's fingers. He dropped it into the tin and didn't light another one.
He had told Zoro that story on a night like this, months ago, before Water 7, before anybody had lost anything. Eighty-five days on a rock, and Zeff's leg, and the sack of food that had turned out to be all for the boy. He'd been drunk. He'd assumed Zoro was drunker and would forget. It seemed a stupid assumption now. Zoro forgot directions, names, which way was north. He did not forget the things people handed him in the dark.
"That has nothing to do with this," Sanji said.
"It has everything to do with it. You'd starve yourself so someone else eats. You'd do it with a smile and make a speech about it." Zoro picked up the rice ball again and looked at it instead of at him. "I'm not going to stand there and watch."
"But I'm supposed to?"
Silence.
"That's what you did to me," Sanji said, and his voice did something he didn't authorize. "You decided I'd stand there. Well, not stand, I was unconscious, which was very considerate. You decided I'd wake up and find you in pieces and then lie to everyone about it for the rest of my life. Do you have any idea what that was like? You were standing in it, Zoro. All that blood. You were standing in it and you told me nothing happened."
The swordsman didn't look up. His thumb moved over the rice ball, pressing a dent in it.
"Something happened," Zoro said quietly.
Sanji waited.
"It was bad." He said it simply, the way he said everything. "His pain. Luffy's. All of it at once. I didn't think I'd come out the other side." A breath. "I thought, if I'm going to die anyway, at least the cook's not going to be the one doing it."
"Why me specifically?" Sanji meant it to sound sharp. It came out much too close to a real question.
Zoro looked at him then. It was the look he gave an opponent right before he understood their style: patient, considering, slightly irritated at having to think.
"You'd have made it a whole thing," he said. "With the speech. And then I'd have to listen to the girls cry about it for the rest of the voyage. Way too much noise."
Sanji kicked him.
Not hard. Not anywhere near the bandages, a precise, reproachful tap to the shin with the side of his shoe that he would have used on a waiter who brought the wrong wine. Zoro grunted.
"You're injured, so I'm going easy on you."
"That's going easy?"
"You'll know when I'm not."
"Looking forward to it," Zoro said, and the air in the crow's nest eased by a few inches, like a sheet being let out.
Sanji sat down. Not next to him, he wasn't insane, but on the far end of the curved bench, close enough to steal back the miso if it went cold. The moon had moved behind the mast. The barbells Franky had built for the crow's nest gleamed in the corner, the heaviest of them still lying where Zoro had dropped it four days ago, before Chopper caught him and threatened to tranquilize him with something meant for elephants.
"Next time," Sanji said, "you don't get to decide for me."
"Next time don't stand in front of me."
"I'll stand where I want. I have very good legs. They're for standing."
Zoro made a sound that might have been a snort. He finished the rice ball and started on the second one, and for a while the only noise in the crow's nest was chewing and the creak of the mast and the sea talking to itself against the hull.
"It was good," Zoro said eventually, through a mouthful.
"What?"
"The fish."
Sanji stared at him. In all the months since the Baratie, the marimo had never once said a single thing about the food. He ate like a furnace and grunted and held out his bowl for more. Sanji had come to understand the empty bowl as the compliment, and had been, if he was honest, a little proud of how well he could read it.
"Say that again," he said. "Slowly. I want to remember the date."
"No."
"I'll write it in the log. Nami-san will be my witness."
"I'll deny it."
"You can't deny the log, it's an official document."
Zoro closed his eye, chewing. The corner of his mouth was doing something Sanji was going to think about later, probably at a deeply inconvenient moment while he was trying to julienne carrots. He decided, for the second time that night, not to examine it.
He stayed until the miso was gone and the sky behind them had gone from black to the color of slate. When he finally gathered the plate and stood, Zoro was asleep for real, head tipped back against the window, one hand still resting on Wado Ichimonji's hilt. The bandages had not bled any further.
Sanji looked at him for a moment longer than necessary. Then he took off his jacket and dropped it over the idiot's shoulders, because the crow's nest got cold before dawn and Chopper would blame the cook if the patient caught a chill.
That was the only reason. He'd say so if anybody asked.
Nobody asked. In the morning, Zoro came down to breakfast with the jacket folded under one arm, handed it back without a word, and held out his bowl.