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I.
There is a window.
It's as barred as everything else Sanji has known for the past decade or so, just as grimey and dusty and bleak as the cold stone walls and the little kitchenette they somehow, inexplicably, let him have.
But once a day, it throws a square of sunlight across the floor of his cell. Never more than that, only just light. It’s too high up to look outside properly, not even as his limbs grow longer does he ever see more than a square of sky.
When he is eight years old, Sanji looks up at that window, and he fashions it into a face, the metal bars a grin full of teeth, the wind getting in through a crack in the glass a peal of laughter, maybe a song, maybe a story.
Sanji likes stories.
He always did, he remembers sitting on his mothers lap, having her read from one of her books with the pretty pictures, tales of princes and princesses and witches and magic and maybe a talking animal or two. Sometimes, his mother would come up with stories herself, make up her own little prince, kind and gentle and with oh so much to look forward to.
He still likes stories, but his mother is dead, and he doesn’t know what happened to most of her books, and over the years his fondness of fairytales soured and rotted into an obsession.
There’s nothing to look at in this cell but the window, no one to talk to but the wind through that crack.
His brothers stopped showing up at random intervals when they all were thirteen. He still doesn’t know if they simply grew bored, if they moved on to more exciting things to torment, or if someone forbade them from coming down. A certain romanticism bleeds into that thought, bleeds with his own blood—The hope that one day they would come down to his cell to finally let him out only died that year, at thirteen.
Reiju still comes down, but never for long, and never with much to say. Her main purpose seems to be to bring him food, and he can’t be sure if she does it because it’s a task given to her, or because she wants to.
He guesses that no one would be doing it, if it weren’t for her. It’s a guess until he turns nine and she doesn’t show up for weeks on end. What starts out as concern for her quickly morphs into panic for himself, quickly morphs into desolation, quickly morphs into all encompassing hunger.
He screams until his lungs give out. He bangs against the metal bars until his hands are numb.
He feels like he has died several times over when she does come down those stairs again.
Reiju never offers an explanation for those weeks and Sanji doesn’t think it would do much to ask. He is certain she is acting on command. Surely she would tell him things, about her life, about the lives above, about the family that could not care less if he lived or withered away. She simply couldn’t.
Reiju comes back, and she doesn’t tell him things, but but she drops off food, and after those weeks of absence, she brings him recipes. Single scraps of paper, stained with oil and handwritten, that he is sure she swiped from the kitchen staff, though he cannot imagine her going into the kitchen unnoticed. It’s not her place and surely their family would take as much offense in her being there as they took with Sanji before they barred him from there entirely. He can’t decipher all of the recipes, doesn’t know all of the ingredients and can’t hope for Reiju to bring them down anyhow. But he keeps all of them in a stack he tries to keep neat.
She also starts to leave him stories.
She brings books, actual books, with more than lists and instructions Sanji dreams of following. Some of them he recognises from their mother’s shelves, some of the same buttery leather spines, the same detailed illustrations.
Some are new, come later, after Reiju must have realised that he tended to tear through everything she brings him, that he sinks his claws into every word on every page and internalises it into himself with a fervour bordering on insanity.
He has stacked the books alongside one wall. There are hundreds of them now, towering over him, always looking that close to tipping over and burying him under their weight. He thinks he wouldn’t mind.
He is sixteen, it has been years of just him, the square of light moving across the floor, the stories the wind tells and the ones on those pages when Reiju brings him a new book.
It’s one with multiple stories, Sanji’s favourite kind. He always tries to make them last, savoring every single story like it spans an entire book, but always ends up finishing them too quick anyways.
This one has heroes, it has gods whose names he has never heard in the North and can’t quite locate in any other sea. He can only situate them firmly in the past. Some of them end in tragedy, all of them in an all encompassing lesson for their heroes. Sanji reads them and it’s like he lives through them like he lives through every single story he read down here.
He fights a mythical lion. He descends into the underworld, tries to save the woman he loves, and fails. He is a monster trapped in a labyrinth, imprisoned for the sin of being born wrong.
It is there, when things change, with him and the square of light from the window, and this book.
Because Sanji becomes a boy with wings, unafraid to run from a cell, unafraid to soar and fall, because he loves the sun.
From that day on, he has always felt like he is waiting.
Every day, he waits for the sun to wander across the sky to where it could meet him, to spend those precious few hours with him in this cell that became a home. The face in the window becomes the face of the sun, the smile of iron bars becomes warm sunlight he longs to feel on his skin, the peals of laughter in the wind become whispers the sun wants only him to hear.
But even as he sits in the square of light every day it comes to him, he still feels something deep inside of him tug, feels it waiting for more. It wants more than this square of light. It wants more than a wall of stories. It wants more warmth, wants the wind in his hair. It wants wings to fly that belong to him, to Sanji, not to a story.
On his eighteenth birthday, Reiju sneaks down from the castle bustling with celebration, everyone too busy sending their three darling princes off into adulthood to notice their princess slip away.
Sanji hears her light footsteps on the stairs and he thinks he’s going to ask her for feathers to fly with before she is standing in front of him and he opens his mouth to ask: “Can you bring me the newspaper?”
He hides them in between his books. He doesn’t quite know why he is hiding them, no one but Reiju comes here, but he tucks them away nonetheless, tucks the world outside into the spaces between the lives he experienced and never really lived.
Reiju had brought him newspapers every once in a while even before. He thinks she did it in quiet rebellion, because in each one there were stories he could sense the involvement of Germa in. They didn’t want him to know what was going on in the castle, what this family he was no longer a part of did in a world he didn’t belong to anymore. As a child, he skipped over them, hated imagining what Reiju wanted him to glean from the violence he was being shunned from.
When he was nine years old, he read about a cruise ship in the East Blue, fleeing the invasion of a Red Line port, getting attacked by a notorious pirate crew in the middle of a storm. The storm had worsened, both the passenger ship and the pirate one capsizing, every single person lost to the waves. The paper mourned the civilians and employees on the cruise ship, celebrated the end to the notorious pirate crew and Sanji had wondered if every single one of those people would still be alive today if his family hadn’t been in that port town.
He skipped those stories in the paper after that, only paying attention to the grand tales even a government issued paper couldn’t resist spinning about Whitebeard and his conquests in the Grand Line. He was a child, and his mother used to read to him about a mythical blue ocean that held everything from everywhere that anyone could ever want and he thought, dreamed, that if anyone was going to find it, it would probably be Whitebeard, and then Sanji could read about it in the paper.
But now he is no longer a child, and he asks Reiju for the newspaper every time she comes to see him, and he starts paying attention to stories less grand than Whitebeard’s.
There’s other things happening, all over.
And the sun sees all of them.
The sun comes to meet Sanji in his cell for a couple of hours every day. But outside, it is always and everywhere. And at eighteen, for the first time, he thinks about wings, and he thinks about wax melting, and he thinks of the warmth that must have filled Icarus, right as he fell.
There is things happening outside, and he’s spent a young lifetime imagining all sorts of things happening to him.
He’s ready to stop imagining, he’s ready to fly. He would welcome the fall. If only he could feel the sun on his face once more before the wax melted.
Sanji is nineteen years old when he notes a throwaway quote in the East Blue part of the paper. Axe-Hand Morgan’s marine base had been infiltrated by some upstart. Meanwhile in the Grand Line, Alabasta was still in drought, and in the North a submarine started flying a jolly roger and Sanji will commit all of this to memory to ask the sun about. Soon. Soon he’ll get to ask.
A few weeks later he reads about notorious pirate captain Kuro being defeated—for the second time, but for real this time. He has never heard of the little island this happened on and the small paragraph doesn’t offer any other information. There’s another rookie pirate involved.
In the next issue there is a longer article about a duel on the planks of a seafaring restaurant. Sanji dreams about it that night, the restaurant, not the duel, though the small new pirate crew involved also feature in his dream, order heaps of rum after their fight, rowdy, loud and with oh so much to look forward to.
Wouldn’t it be funny, Sanji thinks, if he asks the sun about these little tidbits of information that have stayed with him, and it turns out to be the same people in all of them. If it all turns out to be part of a grander story?
He feels silly for the thought. It’s romanticism that belongs to the damp storybooks towering against the wall, not to the real world outside, in the sun.
He commits all of these mongrels of information from everywhere to memory, because for all he gathers about the world, he never quite knows where he is in it. The window keeps showing the sky, Reiju remains tight-lipped, and Sanji prepares to meet the sun wherever it sees fit. He will be ready.
He commits information to memory, and he commits recipes, quick ones, simple ones, and sometimes he allows himself the simple pleasure of imagining what those imaginary protagonists he keeps reading about, name and faceless as they are, would like to eat. He allows himself to think he might be the one to make it for them. Sometimes the thought leaves him jittery, giddy. Most times it leaves him feeling desolate and childish.
One morning when Sanji is nineteen years old, he wakes and something is different.
Nothing has changed, of course, it never does. His jaw aches where the mask chafes against it. The threadbare blanket scratches against the bare skin on his arms. There is hunger gnawing at his stomach, easy to ignore now, but quick to flare up with memories of those torturous weeks before the recipes, before the stories.
He looks at his square of light, and the sun whispers to him that it’s late, later than it should be. Reiju should have been here already.
Sometimes, terrifyingly, she has to leave on a mission she can’t tell him about. But after Sanji was nine years old, she has always managed to bribe some staff into taking over for her. They wouldn’t bring any stories, they wouldn’t even speak to him, but they would dutifully unlock the mask for a short while and leave him with food.
Reiju isn’t here, and no one else is here, and it’s late, and the sun whispers that there is no mission.
Immediately, panic rises within him. Those weeks ten years ago come back to him, vividly and terribly, as he wrestles the blanket off and jumps to his feet.
He has half the mind to yell, but he knows that no one is going to hear or that they are ordered to ignore him.
Only when he has silently paced the length of the cell several times—small, it has gotten so small, it seemed so big when he was seven years old and scared and grieving—does he start to listen.
The wind—the sun is whispering, as it always is, no doubt trying to soothe his panic with a familiar song. It is here, it was always here and will always be.
Beyond that, noises of battle.
Sanji has heard them before, when Germa needed its full manpower to invade, when the entire military force in the castle above descended on the poor fucks they decided needed to disappear. In those times, the noise had been distinct but quiet. Metal on metal, violence and bloodshed, tucked safely under a blanket of distance and Sanji’s inability to move toward it or away.
It’s not quiet now. It feels like he could reach into the air immediately in front of him and his fingers would come away bloody.
The wind picks up. The windowpane thrums against the metal bars. The sun whispers. It is time . It urges. Something is changing .
The panic blows away with the gust, leaving Sanji strangely lucid. He sees the square of light. He hears someone yell outside. He sees the dust particles that have been in this cell with him for twelve years, sees the sun, his sun, illuminating their dance like they are celebrating. It is time .
Sanji walks over to his things. He takes the blanket he wrangled off before, he spreads it on the ground, and he sets out to gather what he wants to take on it. There is not much, of course, less even that he could use or would even want to look at ever again.
In the end it amounts to this: His stolen stack of recipes. The anthology of myths. His mother’s favourite fairytale book, the one with the blue sea of everything. Sanji ties the blanket around these things, sits beside them, and he waits.
He doesn’t know how long it takes for the face to appear in the window.
There is a black head of hair, most of it under a strawhat that gleams golden in the backlighting of the sun. There are huge dark eyes gleaming bright. There’s a smile full of teeth as the windowpane is shattered.
“You look ready to leave,” the sun calls down to Sanji. “Need a hand?”
II.
“That’s all he brought?”
“He can understand you, Usopp.”
“That’s all you brought?”
“What’s that funny stack of papers, it’s all dirty.”
“Don’t just touch other people’s shit like that, Luffy.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s, um. It’s recipes.”
"That's a weird accent."
“Can you make them?”
“Get out of his face, oh my god—“
“I can try.”
“Try right now!”
“Luffy, maybe, possibly we should figure out how to get that contraption off his head first—“
“Oh, yeah, sure. Zoro!”
“Aye, Captain.”
“Do not just draw your sword on someone’s head. What is wrong with you?!”
“Well, how else do you want to do it?”
“Usopp can figure something out.”
“I can?—I mean. Yes, of course, I have already figured it out, I’ll get right to that.”
“Great! And then Sanji can cook the recipes and we can leave! And we’ll finally have a cook! I told you fighting those funny clone guys would be good .”
“You forgot the part where you actually ask him if he wants to stay with us as a cook.”
“Like Luffy would listen if he said no.”
“Sorry. I didn’t quite catch—“
“Right! These are the best swordsman, navigator and sniper soon to hit the grand line. And I am Monkey D. Luffy. I’ll be the king of the pirates, and you will be my cook!”
III.
There is a window in the galley.
When Sanji is twenty-one years old, he looks up from his recipe book, out of that window, and he thinks that the sun has made a home inside of him.
He used to sit in his little square of light and bask in it. He used to want to be selfish, to keep it all to himself. He used to imagine what it would feel like for even a second, used to envy Icarus for getting that brief moment of warmth right before the fall.
Now, Sanji knows that Icarus, in all his dedication and devotion, in all his recklessness, never actually had to fall.
Because Sanji knows devotion, has learned it intimately, has fashioned wings out of it to soar.
And he has learned that it doesn’t quite matter, what holds his wings together. He has soared, and he has fallen—And he has been caught.
Of course, he is not Icarus, he is not in any myth, not in any fairytale.
The galley door opens and the crew’s voices filter in before it bangs closed again. Sanji doesn’t bother to turn around, knows the warmth that entered the room from the whisper that came with it.
“Sanji!” Luffy calls, his arm already wrapping around his shoulder. “Do you remember that small farmland island after we left Little Garden?”
Sanji hums as he feels Luffy plaster against his back, as Luffy’s arms loop around his middle, as warmth fills him from the inside out. “Is this about the soup?”
“ Yes. You can make it later, right?”
“Sure.”
He doesn’t see the smile on Luffy’s lips, just feels it against the spot where his jaw meets his neck. “Thanks!”
The warmth lingers against him for just one indulgent moment longer, then someone yells Luffy’s name outside and in a heartbeat, he is back at the galley door.
He stops there for just a second and turns around as Sanji does the same.
Luffy is backlit by the afternoon sun, his brown eyes shine when they meet Sanji’s. “You coming?”
Sanji likes stories. He decided he likes this story that is neither myth not fairytale.
The sun loves him back in this one.