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Sanji rises before the sun does. He goes up to the deck and lights a smoke, breathing in the fresh morning air and the soft purple of the twilight, slowly but surely concealing the plethora of stars that decorate the sky. The island that they will be docking at later in the afternoon is nothing but a blur of green and colorful roofs to the North.
He does not finish his cigarette. No, before the sun could peek out of the horizon, he drops his cigarette over the edge and goes into the galley.
Having been a line cook for the Baratie for the better half of his life, he has been accustomed to waking up in the wee hours of the morning, prepping the day’s meal. Fortunately for him, the Strawhat Pirates do not have as refined of a taste as the Baratie’s menu, though they make up for what they lack in complexity with sheer volume, thanks to their beloved captain.
That doesn’t stop him from spoiling them, though. Sanji offers only the best for his family. He’s in a good mood today, so he spends some time carefully picking the ripest tangerines to make creme brulee for the girls as he waits for the rice to cook on the stove.
Making food for eight is no easy task, especially when one of them eats for three if not more, so really, Sanji makes food for fifteen. So he steams the creme brulees and ensures that they’re sweet and tangy. He makes pancakes and enough bacon to feed a village. He spends time seasoning rice and slicing up seaweed. Everything will be perfect.
Work is good. Work feels nice. His mind doesn’t wonder as kneads his sour bread dough, and that was the worst thing for it to do this early in the day. Sanji likes the early morning, when the whole world revolves around him and his food, as nothing else had ever been as important.
– –
Zoro awakes with the sun. He is not surprised when he rouses alone, hammock below him empty, and hears the indicating sounds of a lone pair of footsteps in the galley. He goes up to the deck, and sees Sanji’s silhouette behind the door, waltzing around the kitchen. He does not go in, instead, he picks up his weights and goes up to the back of the ship by the stern, and watches the sun rise.
He sits on the deck and meditates, basking in the cool and still air. Then he works out. It’s a routine, and a fixed one.
When he finishes, no one is up yet, but the sun had fully risen a while ago, and the smell of something sweet cooking has wafted and engulfed the deck. He does not bother to change, simply wiping his face and neck with the raggedy towel and making his way into the galley.
Sanji does not greet him. Well, he only offers a hum in acknowledgement because he’s busy mixing something–probably Nami’s pancakes–so Zoro makes himself comfortable on the couch, content with watching him work.
Sanji works in perfect precision. Cooking is an art, he would always tell him, and that Zoro would never understand. He never tried to, though. He enjoys his cook’s gifts all too well, and the way that he gets easily riled up whenever he acts dense.
After a while, Zoro gets bored, so he stands up and makes his way to the cook, silently wrapping his arms around his waist from behind, burying his face in the nape of Sanji’s neck.
“You’re bothering me, Moss Head,” he said.
Zoro smiles. “Good morning.”
Sanji hums, slightly leaning back into his touch, not minding him in any way.
Zoro presses a kiss into Sanji’s back and shifts to rest his chin on his shoulder, nudging their cheeks against each other. Sanji runs cold, especially in the morning, and Zoro enjoys the way that he shudders whenever he gets too close in proximity.
He looks down on what Sanji is working on. To his surprise, it was not batter in the bowl. Instead, it was filled with rice. As Sanji has busied himself with sculpting and pressing a mound of rice from the bowl in his hands, carefully shaping them into perfect triangles.
“Furikake?” Sanji offers softly.
“Sure,” he nods, watching Sanji roll the mound in flakes before carefully wrapping it in nori.
Then Sanji takes it between two fingers, and holds it up to Zoro’s awaiting mouth.
“It tastes like shit,” he says, eating out of Sanji’s hand.
He takes another bite, and Sanji rests his head against Zoro’s, blond locks falling over his eyes. Zoro pays no mind, favouring what just could be the best onigiri he has ever had in his life.
As he takes the last bite, Zoro purposely moves his teeth so it grazes Sanji’s finger, and he does not pretend to hide his smile when he blushes.
“You smell,” Sanji says, not at all minding when Zoro hugs him a little tighter and presses a wet kiss to his cheek. Then again, he laughs, and reaches up to card his fingers through the mess of green. It tickles. It makes him shiver, and so he exhales into Sanji’s collar, pressing another soft kiss through his shirt.
Another hand snakes up to Zoro’s own circled around his waist, unravelling them. Sanji turns around, and he’s now leaning against the kitchen counter, one of Zoro’s hands still resting on his hip.
“Let’s go upstairs,” Zoro mumbles, digging his fingers in. Of course, the crow’s nest was the best place for any privacy in this boat.
“I’m cooking, you idiot,” Sanji whines, unravelling himself out of Zoro’s embrace. “Plus, it’s not like we have time.”
At his fallen expression, Sanji flicks Zoro’s earrings. “Okay. Let’s go out tonight. We’re celebrating.” They haven’t been able to get enough time alone together for the past month or so, as the last time they’d docked, it had been a short visit, as they were quickly driven out by some marines, and the only time they’ve been able to steal were short moments like this in between.
Zoro lights up. He knows it infuriates him, because Sanji immediately frowns.
“Don’t be so irritating. You look stupid. You’ve got something on your face, Moss Head,” he murmurs. Sanji reaches and mindlessly wipes a grain of rice from the corner of his mouth. “Brute.”
But Zoro is taken, in no way paying attention to his actions, when he’d rather stare at his cooks eyes, and the slope of his nose, and his lips.
“Happy anniversary,” Zoro says mindlessly.
Sanji scoffs, though takes his hand. “Can’t believe I’ve put up with you for this long.”
Zoro smirks. “I’m the one that’s survived this.”
And he enjoys the way that he twitches with irritation, a vein making itself known on his temple. “You startin’ a fight? I’m not giving you any more rice balls!”
“Not if you've been a good boyfriend,” he shoots back. He enjoys this way too much.
“Hey, I won’t hesitate to stab you, Shitty Swordsman!” He’s picked up a knife from somewhere.
“Yeah, bring it on!” he yells.
“Come on!”
They were this close. It was basically already happening. Zoro’s already grabbed Sanji by the lapels of his shirt, and he knew that Sanji had been rearing in for a kick, when a mouth appeared by the kitchen counter. His blood has pumped into his brain, and he can hear his heart thumping rapidly in his chest.
“Boys,” came Robin’s voice. “Some of us are still sleeping.”
They jump apart. Sanji’s face turns red, and he ducks his head, turning back to the counter.
“Robin. I’m sorry for interrupting your beauty sleep, my dear. We’ll be on our best behavior.” And truthfully, Zoro is holding back a cackle.
The mouth smiles. “I won’t bother you again,” she says so cryptically.
Sanji sighs in relief when she disappears. “That’s a close one,” he says. “Good thing she didn’t send her ear out.”
“‘Cause you never shut your mouth,” he quips.
“You say something?”
“Nothing,” Zoro smirks.
Sanji sighs, exasperated, and heads to the stove. “I don’t feel like making rice balls anymore. If you’re going to stick around, you better be useful. Put the bread in the toaster.”
“What?” he says, astounded. Damn, that cook. “What do you mean– My rice balls–”
– –
It is mid morning when he finishes breakfast, and the crew has gathered around the table, chattering and laughing, with Luffy at the head.
“Good morning, my sweets!” He greets the girls enthusiastically.
“Good morning, Sanji!” Nami says with equal energy. He lights up. She must be in a great mood today.
He serves the girls first: pancakes with blueberries and maple syrup accompanied by a sunny-side up and tangerines that he peeled. Then he spends five minutes serving Luffy’s breakfast, as it takes up five plates by itself. Usopp, Franky, and Chopper aren’t that picky, so he’s given them the same breakfast as the girls sans the delicately peeled tangerines.
Zoro goes last, and he wastes no theatrics placing the plate of three onigiris in front of him. “You better like it,” he says.
Zoro grunts in return, stealing one of Luffy’s bacon slices.
Robin invites him to the library. He listens intently as she pours over a few volumes of a mythology book they picked up a few islands ago. Nami joins in, and she and Robin end up reading together, so Sanji leaves them to be.
He hears Franky, downstairs, with Usopp in the workshop. It sounds painful and tiring, so he blends up watermelon juice and delivers it to them.
“Refreshing!” Usopp says. “You know, it reminds me of this one adventure–” He disregards Usopp, and turns to Franky.
“Super, dude!” he says, giving him a wink and a thumbs up.
Sanji adds that to his mental list of personal victories, and goes back up, content.
He considers waking Zoro up from his nap in the crow’s nest to help him wash the dishes, but decides otherwise, because he doesn’t feel normal today and doesn't want to bother Zoro. So he eats time washing and drying the dishes, sorting them in their proper places in the cupboards.
He takes inventory in the pantry. He’s running out of flour and cocoa powder. He cleans the countertops. He makes pudding for Chopper, who starts blushing and blubbering from the sweetness, and before he knows it, it’s almost noon, and he goes back to work.
They have lunch before docking down to the island. Sanji serves meatballs and gravlax and at least five pounds of barbeque just for Luffy.
He goes around the table and treats them with Shirley temples. It had surprisingly become one of Luffy’s favorite drinks, and he does not miss him sipping out of Franky’s glass as soon as he finishes, nor does he miss Zoro pouring in rum into his own. Seriously, at this time of the day?
He does not protest. Instead, he readies the creme brulees for the girls from the fridge and picks up their dirty dishes.
“Tangerine!” Nami gasps, lighting up.
“Only for you, my love,” he smiles.
“This is nice,” Robin says. “Franky, won’t you try some?”
He’s been wanting to use that recipe for a while now, but the tangerines had taken so long to ripen the past few months. He adds their enjoyment to his list.
Once they dock, Luffy, Usopp, and Chopper are the first ones out, running towards a house with a funny-shaped roof they spotted hours ago. Nami barely manages to remind them that they were going to meet back at the ship by sunset when they disappeared off into town. Franky, Robin, and Nami herself follow out not a while later.
By the time they left the port, Sanji went up to Zoro with the third creme brulee ramekin in hand, who was now napping by the stern.
“You dead, Moss Head?”
“Don’t you wish,” he murmurs, eyes still closed.
“Why don’t you make another dessert for the girls, huh? Waste your time on something better.”
He frowns. There’s something in his tone that Sanji can’t put his finger on. He plays the sentence over in his head, then again. Then again.
“What?” he smirks. “You jealous, Moss Head?”
Zoro frowns, looking away, and Sanji’s face falls. “Holy shit, you are.” He’s convinced that he would be laughing, at any other circumstance, but he’s astounded. Embarrassed…Flattered…
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Sanji chooses to present an irritated face. “Leftovers,” he says, roughly setting down the ramekin in front of him. “Here’s your shitty creme brulee. I’m going to change.”
They don’t talk about the fact that it’s perfectly bruleed, or that he’d taken the time to garnish it with mint. Fucking Moss Head.
Sanji has one of the biggest wardrobes in the crew, only rivalled by Nami’s. So no one can blame him when he pulls out five different pairs and lays them down on the couch. He spends five minutes going over each one of them, draping them over his body in the mirror, and mis-matching them up.
After careful consideration, he settles on a dark green dress shirt and a vest, along with a tie, which he purposefully knots loosely because he knows how it drives Zoro crazy.
Robin keeps a hairdryer in the bathroom. He dampens his hair and uses her round brush to blow out his hair and make sure that his bangs are fluffy and smooth and falls perfectly in front of his eyes. He even considers using Franky’s pomade, but changes his mind when he sees the EXTRA-SHINY label on them. Far too flashy for his taste.
He spends another five minutes staring at himself in the mirror. He’s wearing his favorite pair of shoes and a pair of pants he got to iron on the previous island. He looks nice. He looks the best has felt in the past week. Content, he makes his way up.
“Moss Head,” he says, climbing onto the deck.
Zoro turns around and stops in his tracks. Sanji tries not to squirm under his wide-eyed stare. It puts him on the spot. It’s intimidating, to feel like he’s being inspected.
But knowing Zoro, he’s probably pulling apart his clothes in his mind.
“Stop staring,” Sanji says, fixing his cuffs.
“You look stupid,” says Zoro, gulping.
Sanji smirks. He knows that tone. He’s completely won over him. It’s alright. Though he won’t admit it, Zoro looks good. He’s wearing a shirt that defines his muscles and Sanji himself can’t stop looking.
“Come on.” He offers his hand. “Let’s go.”
–
They find a shitty bar on the far side of town. Dingy and rowdy and dirty enough out that they were sure none of their crewmates would ever suspect to look for them there. They take a table, instead of sitting at the bar. A booth, even. Tucked in the corner of the establishment.
“To two years,” Sanji toasts, offering his gin.
“Two years,” Zoro agrees, toasting his beer.
They kiss. A lot. They’re short, chaste, but very far from sweet. Zoro wraps one arm against Sanji’s waist, and he scoots closer in return.
“No one still knows,” Zoro says, pulling away. He brushes one of his thumbs over Sanji’s lips.
“They can’t know,” Sanji says, looking away.
They’ve had this conversation before. Multiple times. The first, when they’d been making out for the first time in a pantry after an argument, and Sanji had pulled away from Zoro so quickly at the sound of Usopp’s voice that he had knocked his head on the shelf and bruised it.
It wasn’t Zoro, he made it very clear to him from the start. It’s just–
“–Not the time yet,” Zoro says, well rehearsed.
“Shut it, Moss Head,” Sanji says. “Not yet.”
Zoro kisses him again. This time, sweeter. He takes his time, both large and calloused hands cupping his face, like he was fragile china. He inclines his head to allow Zoro to press kisses along his chin, and hooks his arms around his neck.
A loud thump interrupts them, causing them both to jump away. A barmaid has slammed a mug of beer on their table.
“If I give you a drink on the house,” she says, obviously irritated, “would you both stop doing that? You’re scaring away my customers.”
Sanji blushes and stutters. It’s embarrassing to be called out like that. And by a lady! If he knew that she was watching, he would never have done that.
He steals a glance of Zoro. Maybe.
But Zoro, that alcoholic, had agreed and taken his free drink, gulping it down like an ape. The alcohol’s cheap. It’s stale and doesn’t taste as good as he likes it to be,and Zoro must’ve noticed his expression, because he says: “Next year we’ll go someplace better.”
Sanji scoffs, though the back of his neck flushes at the mention of a ‘next year’. “As if you’d know how to treat a gentleman right. Mosshead, your idea of a good date is going to the beach dunking me into the ocean.”
He frowns, that blank, confused expression that he can’t help but think is adorable for someone so strong. “But you liked it.”
He did. Somehow, Zoro had found a beach and remembered his way to it, and they’d spent that afternoon eating by the sand and playing in the water. It was one of their earliest ones, and Sanji knows that it was the first time he felt truly enamored by the man before him. And the one thing that Sanji remembers from that evening was how beautiful Zoro looked under the sunset.
“That’s not the point, asshole!” he lashes out.
Zoro crosses his arms. “I don’t see a problem.”
“Your idea of a good time is shitty alcohol and making out–!”
Still, the alcohol kept coming, and by the time the sun’s gone down, Sanji abandoned his gin for Zoro’s beer. He’s tipsy. Zoro’s lost as ever.
They don’t own up to their promises. They kiss again. More. It gets rougher, and Zoro doesn’t hesitate taking Sanji’s face in his hands and pulling him in. Now their teeth are bumping against each other, and Sanji is half-under Zoro in the booth chair, when Sanji realizes that their mugs are empty and asks for another round.
He’s sure the owner is sick of them, and the barmaid has been giving them death glares, but he does not care now. He feels his body buzzing with vibration. The warmth of the liquid courage in his veins. They drink more, and the sunlight has now turned a dark orange through the window.
“No,” Zoro argues, sloshing his mug around. “I said it first.”
Sanji’s offended, frankly. “As if a brute like you would have the emotional capacity to say ‘I love you’ first! No, I did!”
Honestly, Sanji barely remembers. He knows it’s some time after Skypiea, though. They’d been dating for almost a year by then, and he knows that he’d been wracking up the courage to say it, but he doesn’t really know when it started. Though he would never ever acknowledge it if Zoro did say it first.
He sneers. “Says you.”
“Says who?” he yells.
“I’m not the emotional illiterate scumbag, you cyclops!”
“Who the fuck are you calling a cyclops– Do you even know what the word means?–”
They fight. Swords are pulled out. Kicks are pulled. It’s the most excitement any of them has felt in the past two weeks, and they’re smiling between each blow passed.
The owner kicks them out, and shuts the door behind her.
Sanji crosses his arms on the ground. “It’s your fault, you brute.”
Zoro stumbles over his feet, landing on his butt. “What’d you start a fight for, huh?”
“Me? You’re the guy who can’t keep his temper in control–” Sanji stood up now, rolling his sleeves up clumsily.
Zoro huffs. “Can’t you stop being insufferable–”
“I’ll show you insufferable, Moss Head–”
–
It’s Usopp, actually, that ends up finding them in a heap beside some closed shop. The road is wounded now, after a drunken fight. The few people that had stood by the street had long gone, intimidated by the two intoxicated men fighting like a whirlwind. Far too nervous to intervene.
He calls for Nami.
“Sanji!” Nami stumbles, hooking his arm over her shoulder. “Usopp, come help me.”
“Nami!” he hiccups. “The mosshead’s drunk… *hic!* He got us kicked out…”
“What did you do?” she demands. “You’re never this drunk. I mean Zoro, but not you, Sanji.”
Usopp is struggling to support Zoro behind them, so Nami hooks one of her arms below Zoro’s. “What were you two even doing, this far out of town?”
He hiccups again, stumbling on his feet. “Celebrating,” he croaks.
“We haven’t done anything the past week,” says Usopp.
Sanji scoffs. “My survival! I’m a victim!” he declares. “A victim!”
“Seriously,” Nami sighs. “You two are unbelievable!”
“Tell me about it,” Usopp says.
Somehow, in thirty painful minutes, they manage to get them back into the ship. Everyone else had already been back for hours at this point, and it was Robin that managed to prevent Luffy from sending out an emergency alert for his two missing crew members.
They dump Sanji and Zoro unceremoniously in their hammocks.
“Jeez,” Nami says, brushing her hands together. “You two…”
Robin enters with two cups of water. Sanji’s awake enough to drink with a single prompt, but Zoro needed to be sat up and handed the water before he could even register the fact that he was drinking in the first place.
They leave them alone soon after. Sanji knows it’s just them two, because he hears their voices and footfalls upstairs, and the only thing below him was the sound of waves lapping.
He lets his hand fall beside the hammock. “Zoro,” he says.
Zoro intertwines their fingers together.
“You drunk,” he says playfully.
Zoro grunts again.
“Don’t blame me when you wake up with a massive hangover,” he mumbles.
Shitty swordsman.
“I love you,” he slurs quietly.
And did that not warm his heart? Zoro’s bluntness. His inability to go around a topic, to never say what his heart meant. Sanji is incapable of doing. And he says it so painfully mundane. As it is as natural as calling him the shitty cook that he is.
Fuck the beer. It’s making him think things.
“Good night.” Sanji squirms in his hammock, before squeezing Zoro’s hand. “I love you,” he murmurs. He lets go, and falls into sleep.