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“There is something wrong with Straw Hat, isn’t there? ” Law asks one day, weeks after Dressrosa.
He’s still on painkillers after their last clash with the Marines on the way to Wano. His gaze is slightly unfocused, and he leans on the railing as if he isn’t entirely sure of his balance.
“There’s a lot not right with Luffy,” Sanji replies, amused by his bluntness as much as puzzled by it. “You’ll have to be more specific, Torao.”
“I would be, if I knew what exactly isn’t right about him,” Law mutters, squinting into the midday sun.
Sanji smiles at him, a little mockingly. He knows perfectly well what Law means - he just can’t resist teasing him.
“Luffy has a habit of driving sane people mad,” he says, mostly rhetorically, wondering when exactly Law began to feel it. Was it now? At Marineford? At Dressrosa, when five thousand roughnecks called Luffy their pirate father? Or maybe right from the start?
Law’s saffron eyes drift down to the Sunny’s lower deck, where Luffy, loud and ridiculous, is running back and forth with Momo and Chopper squealing in his arms. Law’s tense, searching gaze fixes on the pale yellow circle of Luffy’s straw hat.
He often looks at him that way - intense, wary, with a deeply rooted doubt, as if expecting a trick at any moment. As if trying to find in Luffy something that would ease his vigilance, answer his questions, and let him finally turn away. And when it never comes, Law pulls his cap low and clenches his teeth.
Law is already hooked, and he knows it. He thinks it’ll pass. He hopes it will. But Sanji can already see how slowly, painfully, against his own will, Law is being drawn toward the center of gravity called “Luffy” - that giant gravitational vortex that pulls everything around into its orbit before swallowing it forever.
Law is a proud man, captain of his own ship, his name is known across the seas. But deep down he’s still just a boy - broken long ago, and broken beyond repair. He doesn’t know what to do with the weight of gratitude pressing on him now. He can’t reconcile himself with what Luffy has done for him, with the fact that he has nothing to give in return. Sanji sees that fracture in him too clearly, that deep rift split open like a wound, begging to be filled.
Sanji understands him all too well.
“I thought it was because he’s a D,” Law says at last, when Sanji already thought that their conversation was over. “But I’m different. The other D’s I’ve met - they’re different. They all bring chaos, but not like this. There’s something not right about Straw Hat,” he insists again.
It’s the first time Sanji has seen Law struggle so much to put his thoughts into words. He nudges him with an elbow in encouragement, about to change the subject neither of them likes.
And just then, Luffy turns toward them.
He waves and grins - as always, wide from ear to ear, incapable of doing anything halfway, even smiling. And a faint, involuntary shiver runs through Sanji when, under the brim of the hat, Luffy’s eyes seem for a moment to glint red.
“Sometimes,” Sanji says quietly, reluctantly. “Only sometimes, there’s something not right about him.”
***
Wano is where everything falls into place.
Kaido’s colossal body crashes down from the heavens, and Luffy’s hair is white as milk. It floats in the air, free from gravity’s pull. His wide red eyes shine with wild, incomprehensible joy. He laughs - loud, roaring, manic - so hard it borders on madness. His laughter drums against Sanji’s chest like some ancient, primeval rhythm, with something deep inside urging him to bow his head and drop to his knees. But Luffy’s gaze won’t allow it.
There’s something not right about Straw Hat, Sanji remembers.
He looks into Luffy’s face, lit by something inhuman, something profoundly and hopelessly otherworldly - so close to the edge of the divine it’s terrifying. He looks at him and decides: no. There’s nothing wrong with Luffy. Luffy is just Luffy. His captain. The man he chose. The man who chose him.
And so it will be until the end of their days.
Luffy keeps laughing, as if he knows exactly what Sanji is thinking.
***
And still - here’s the joke…
Who would have thought that the footsteps of a god descending to earth would sound like the carefree shuffle of flip-flops across a wooden ship’s deck?..