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This is not when or how Zoro planned to get married.
If you’d asked him – which, thankfully, no-one did – he might’ve pictured something stupidly simple, some no-name port between nightmares with a half-decent bottle of sake and a ring pressed into Sanji’s hand behind a dockside bar while Luffy terrorised the local buffet.
Instead, there’s an exploding cliff and a split harbour, half a dozen ships comprised of Marines and hired guns, plus one very pissed-off Admiral with a magma fruit making the sky look like it’s on fire.
So, you know. Close enough.
“ROOM.”
The air warps, blue light spider-webbing over the smoking plaza. Gravity gets weird for a second and bullets take a sudden interest in the clouds instead of his organs, which is probably one of the better parts of the day. Zoro’s swords sing in his hands but he doesn’t slow down. He’s breathing hard, ribs aching where a fist dipped too close earlier but the rhythm’s good: slash, turn, kick, breathe. There’s a Vice Admiral in front of him with two swords and a bad attitude so Zoro breaks the man’s stance in three exchanges and his nose in the fourth.
Behind him, Sanji laughs and the sound cuts through the chaos like a flare.
Zoro doesn’t have to look to know where he is because he can feel him through the heat at his back, through the whoosh of a flaming kick whipping past his shoulder, through the specific crunch Sanji’s boots make when they meet a jaw.
“Watch your right, Moss,” he snaps and Zoro shifts just enough to let a spear slide by so Sanji can take the wielder’s teeth out.
“Got it,” Zoro grunts, pivoting, blades crossing. “Left’s open.”
Sanji’s already there, heel arcing past Zoro’s hip to catch a Marine in the temple; the guy drops like a cut rope. Three years together and the rhythm’s sunk right down into his bones. Some fights, it almost feels like cheating.
Zoro grins, sharp and feral even as the Admiral’s heat presses over the plaza like a bad storm. Luffy’s up there somewhere, yelling and laughing and trying very hard to get himself killed, which is pretty par for the course. Then the ground bucks. An explosion tears up half the street on their right, stone shrapnel whipping wildly through the air. Zoro turns on instinct, swords up just in time to see a chunk of building the size of a sea king’s molar shear off and arc down toward Sanji.
There’s no time to reach him. None. All Zoro can see is the calculation skim across Sanji’s face: distance, options, who’s in the blast radius. Then he moves the way he always does: toward danger first, toward everyone else’s safety second and only then toward his own survival.
He plants his foot to leap and Zoro’s stomach drops.
“No,” he hears himself snarl. “Don’t you –”
Blue light flashes and the boulder jolts sideways mid-fall, clipped by something invisible, smashing into a pile of already-broken masonry instead of Sanji’s skull. Sanji himself lands in the spray of dust, spins, kicking a Marine in a move that’s half instinct and half frustration.
Zoro’s heart’s hammering like a drum line in a thunderstorm. For a second, it really hits him exactly close that was. How many times this has almost been it. Punk Hazard. Dressrosa. Wano. Too many islands, too much sea, too many near-misses. They made it to this hellscape together, sure, but every single day he’s aware that they might not make it out together.
He carves his current opponent down with ugly efficiency, boots skidding in blood, and bellows across the plaza: “LAW!”
“Don’t yell while I’m concentrating, you idiot!” Law snarls back from somewhere on the far side. “I am extremely busy.”
“Yeah?” Zoro kicks a Marine into another Marine and scowls as the Vice Admiral gets back up. “Be busier. Marry us.”.
Some poor Marine trips over his own feet and eats gravel. A cannon shot goes wide and detonates late in the sky, blooming harmlessly over the ruined street. Even the Admiral’s next swipe of searing energy above them stutters for half a heartbeat. Somewhere above them, on a shattered ledge, Luffy’s battle-laughter breaks into a delighted, incredulous: “Eh?!”
Sanji whirls on him so fast his coat flares, flames licking off his heel as he kicks through a Lieutenant’s shield. “What?!”
Zoro doesn’t flinch. He plants his feet in the cracked stone, Wado arching up to catch a descending spear, sparks spraying. He points Kitetsu flat and shameless straight in Law's general direction.
“You heard me,” he says and it hits him, as the words leave his mouth, how easy they are. How long they’ve been sitting in his chest just waiting for a hole in the noise. “We’re getting married. Now.”
Sanji makes a sound like someone's just set the Baratie on fire for fun. He springboards off a shattered column, leg arcing overhead and heel dropping like a comet into a captain’s sternum, sending the man flying into a wall hard enough to crack it. “You can’t just scream that across a battlefield!”
“I just did,” Zoro snaps back, dragging Wado free of a Marine’s halberd and cutting the shaft in half like it’s paper. “And I’ve been trying to do this since Wano but everytime I open my mouth, the world throws another giant asshole in a stupid fucking hat at us.”
He ducks under a slash, coming up inside the Admiral’s guard and feels the pressure of the clash reverberate all the way down his bones. “No more waiting.”
He’s yelling, sure – he can hear his own voice tearing up his throat – but beneath the battle-rage there’s this clean, bright strip of truth, sharp as a new edge. He’s tired of almost.
Almost saying it after the raid, when Sanji’s body was wreathed in hellfire and he still tried to stand like his leg wasn’t screaming. Almost saying it the night Sanji woke up clawing at his own throat, eyes wild, breath coming in knives and Zoro held him until the shaking stopped. Almost saying it in some no-name port, cheap sake between them, a stupid little ring bought with bounty money pressed into his palm.
He is so damn done with almost.
Sanji lands in front of him, breath knocked out of him in a rough exhale. There’s blood dried at the corner of his mouth, hair coming loose in wild, damp strands and his chest is heaving under the open line of his shirt. His eyes – too blue, too bright – are wide and stunned.
Zoro has to physically stop himself from reaching out and dragging him in by that hideous shirt to kiss him right here and now.
“We're literally under fire,” Sanji grits out, voice threadbare with disbelief. “You’re concussed.”
“Probably,” Zoro concedes, blades ringing as he parries a blow that makes his arms vibrate. “Still want to marry you.”
For a second, just a second, Sanji’s face folds like someone cracked the shell down the middle, something raw and old and aching in that flash. Something that looks a hell of a lot like i’ve wanted to hear that for years and thought i never would. It hits Zoro harder than any punch.
Cannon fire shakes the dock. A gout of lava sprays overhead as Jinbe vaults up from the harbour, water curling around his fists, and slams a shockwave that sends the molten rock hissing harmlessly into the sea. He rumbles: “Perhaps you could… multi-task?”
“Jinbe’s right,” Usopp yells, clinging to wherever he’s clinging, sniping. “Get married or kick ass! Think of the crew!”
Sanji’s eyes flare, spinning into a flaming roundhouse that sends three men sprawling. “Oh, we can do both.”
“Then say yes,” Zoro growls, stepping into another clash with the Vice Admiral, haki screaming. He can taste metal and smoke; his lungs burn. There’s a flicker of blue at the edge of his vision as Law drops out of thin air with so much grime on his face. He looks like death propped up on caffeine and sheer rage.
Kikoku’s tip bites into the busted street before Law grinds out: “What did you just ask me to do?”
“Marry us,” Zoro repeats, straightforward as a vertical cut. He bats away a stray blade aiming for Law’s ribs without even looking.
Law's eyes do a flat, incredulous slide from Zoro, to Sanji, back to the Admiral locked in with Luffy, to the crowd of Marines currently trying to slaughter them.
“Roronoa,” he says, in the incredibly calm tone of a man whose mind has snapped and is now being held together with tape and petty vengeance. “I am currently keeping an entire naval strike force from turning your captain into paste. I am redirecting artillery with millimetre precision. I am not officiating your wedding.”
“You’re a captain,” Zoro shrugs, wiping blood off one blade with a flick. “You can do legal shit, right?”
“This isn’t legal shit,” Law snarls. “This is – this is – what even is this.”
“Please,” Robin says, from her mast, eyes soft. “It would be so romantic.”
“Absolutely not.” Another explosion rocks the bay. One of the Marine ships lurches, half cut, half melted. Bepo careens by in the background, screaming something about focusing.
Zoro claps a blood-slicked hand on Law’s shoulder, just hard enough to jolt him. “You’re here, you’re marginally responsible, you’re the closest thing to a notary we’ve got. Marry us.”
“I am a surgeon,” Law hisses. “Not a marriage registrar.”
Sanji shrugs. “Same difference, cut us apart if one of us bails, right?”
Luffy hits the ground between them in a skid of rubber and broken stone, grinning like a delighted child in a candy store that’s on fire. “Traffy! You should do it! It’ll be fun!”
“Fun,” Law repeats. A vein throbs visibly in his temple as another volley of cannon fire slams somewhere.
Zoro shakes a Marine off his shorter blade with a twist and jerks his chin toward Sanji, voice rising over the chaos. “This is as calm as it gets.”
He doesn’t say the rest out loud – i want to call you my husband before the sea takes one of us – but the thought burns in his chest like a brand and Sanji hears it anyway, Zoro can tell. Something in his posture loosens; his shoulders drop half an inch, like he’s exhaling a knot he’s had there since the North Blue.
“Asshole,” Sanji mutters, voice going rough around the edges but he doesn’t say no, so. A win is a win.
Nami, mid-swing with her clima-tact, stops long enough to screech: “Are you serious right now?!” Lightning still blasts off her staff, zapping the Marines who've made the mistake of pausing to look.
Usopp pops up from behind a collapsed wall, face streaked with soot, eyes the size of dinner plates. “So, wait are we doing this? In the middle of a fight?! I didn’t emotionally prepare for this! I don’t even have confetti!”
Another cannonball whizzes overhead and Luffy kicks it back with a delighted whoop, rubber leg snapping like a whip. “Let's go!”
“ROOM,” Law snarls, and slams Kikoku down. The world lurches again, space snapping tight and then tighter still, like someone’s cinching a belt around the whole plaza. The edges of the battlefield smear, the Admiral’s next attack stretching into a slow-motion smear of light against a curved wall. Cannon thunder drops half an octave and explosions growling from far away and right in his ear at the same time.
The air tastes like ozone and blood. Every hair on Zoro’s body stands on end. In a blink, everything’s moved even closer: the Straw Hats yanked inward, the Heart Pirates dragged with them, Marines unlucky enough to be nearby folded into the same small circle of warped reality.
Zoro’s balance dips, his stomach flipping like the deck just dropped. He plants his feet, blades out, riding the vertigo.
Law looks worse: he’s a pale smear at the ROOM’s centre, cloak whipping, chest heaving. There are dark hollows under his eyes and someone else’s blood splattered up his jaw, but his hand is steady on Kikoku’s hilt. “You have thirty seconds.”
“Plenty,” Zoro says and swings around to find Sanji right there. This close the damage is considerably worse: he’d already clocked the limp and the drag in Sanji’s kicks but he hadn’t seen the slash along his ribs, ugly and wet, darkening his shirt. The fabric clings to his side, blood soaking through. His beautiful, precise hands are trembling around his lighter, knuckles scraped raw.
Zoro’s own grip honestly isn’t much better. His fingers are buzzing with impact, wrists throbbing, shoulder singing with a half-healed strain. His heartbeat’s roaring in his ears. “You still with me?”
Sanji makes a strangled sound. “What kind of idiot proposes in the middle of a war zone?”
“The kind who knows we might not get anything else,” Zoro answers and it’s almost startling how easy the words are now that they’re out in the air. “Marry me, Sanji.”
The world shrinks.
The Admiral, the cannons, the screaming Marines, the flickering edge of ROOM are all just. Gone. There’s only Sanji’s face, too pale under windburn and ash, eyes so wide and wet like someone’s just kicked a chair out from under his chest.
“Say please,” he croaks, because he’s awful and he doesn’t know what to do with kindness when it isn’t dressed up as a joke.
Zoro’s lips twitch into a smile; he can’t help it. His throat feels tight but his voice comes out steady, the way it always has when it comes to Sanji. “Please,” he says, and means it more than he’s ever meant anything in a life full of promises.
Sanji laughs a broken, bright little sound, shoulders shaking once like something cracked inside him. “Yeah, okay. Fine. Yes.”
“Fine,” Law mutters, pinching the bridge of his nose like he can physically hold his brain together. He sighs but it comes out more like a growl. “By the power vested in me by absolutely no recognised authority anywhere –”
“That’s the spirit!” Luffy hollers, luminous grin splitting his face, rubbery arm snapping out to deck a Marine who gets too close.
Robin clasps her hands to her heart. “Beautiful.”
Zoro’s hands are steady when he holds one out and Sanji looks at it like it’s a cliff edge before he swears, softly, and takes it, their fingers slotting together the way they always have, blood slick knuckles and all.
The battlefield blurs.
“Zoro. Sanji. Do you swear to try not to get each other killed more than the environment already does, to protect each other’s idiotic lives, to share whatever passes for resources on your circus of a ship and to tell each other when you’re bleeding out instead of suffering in silence?”
Sanji chokes. “That’s your vow?”
Law narrows his eyes, considering, then tacks on: “Do you also promise to talk about your suicidal plans with at least one responsible crew member before enacting them?”
“Is that legally binding?”
“It is to me,” Law snaps. “Say it.”
Zoro straightens automatically, spine remembering old dojo lines. Wado’s hilt is solid under one hand; Sanji’s fingers are solid in the other. He squeezes both. “Yeah. Yes, I do.”
Sanji chokes, wet at the edges now, wrecked, but it merges into a laugh. “Yes,” he says, looking straight at Zoro like the rest of the battlefield doesn’t exist. “Obviously yes.”
Zoro’s throat does something undignified so he can blurt: “Wait.”
Sanji whips around so fast he nearly decapitates a passing Lieutenant. “Zoro, if you back out now I swear to god I will –”
“I’m not backing out.” Zoro's hand is already moving, reaching up to his ear, to the earrings that he's had forever. Muscle memory. Weight he doesn’t notice until it’s gone. He hooks one and twists until the metal tugs against cartilage, until it unlatches and he can drop it directly into Sanji’s palm. “Sorry, I don’t have a ring on me.”
For a heartbeat, the battle noise goes muffled as Sanji looks down at his hand, at where the earring sits. It looks… much more symbolic than it has any right to. “Zoro,” Sanji says quietly and there’s a whole speech in that one word.
Nami, still holding off half a squad with her clima-tact, shrieks: “Can you hurry up?” but her voice is thick, like she’s one good lightning bolt away from sobbing.
“Five seconds,” Law growls, knuckles white on Kikoku’s hilt. The ROOM flickers again. “Move it.”
Sanji lifts the earring between thumb and forefinger. His hands are shaking. “What if I lose it?”
“Then we go get it,” Zoro says. “From the bottom of the sea. From wherever, don’t care.”
Sanji laughs, weak and helpless before he takes the earring and just – pushes it through his lobe, in one swift movement that has Usopp gagging and Law wincing in startled horror. Blood gathers around the earring post, bright and thin and Zoro can’t look away. It’s his, in Sanji. Warm from his own skin, now sitting against Sanji’s pulse.
Law’s shoulders jerk as he shakes his head, ROOM’s edge stuttering in kind. He looks like he’s about to cough up blood. “Any objections? Too bad. I now pronounce you two complete idiots. You may kiss and then go kill something before I change my mind.”
“Works for me,” Zoro shrugs.
Sanji comes willingly, stumbling the last half-step, laughter bubbling up broken and giddy and the kiss is – yeah. Yeah, it’s worth every near-death, every delay, every sleepless watch on the lawn deck.
Sanji tastes like smoke and iron and adrenaline, like burned sugar and black coffee and all the stupid small domestic things Zoro never thought he’d get to have. His mouth is hot and demanding and a little shaky; he kisses back like a starving man who just realised the food is real. Their noses bump. Zoro’s teeth catch on his lower lip and Sanji swears into his mouth, a hiss and a laugh tangled, before he chases the sting.
Someone wolf-whistles. Someone else – Usopp, judging by the pitch – starts ugly-crying. Nami yells something about dowries that Zoro pointedly ignores.
Luffy’s voice rides above all of it, as always. “Married!” he howls, delighted, before sling-shotting himself at whichever Marines are left.
Zoro doesn’t care about any of it: the only thing that matters is the press of Sanji’s chest against his, the slide of fingers in his coat and the way Sanji grins into the kiss before he breaks it, wild and bright and unbearably soft.
“You’re insane.”
“You said yes,” Zoro points out, slightly hoarse.
“Yeah,” Sanji mutters. His eyes flick down to Zoro’s mouth and back up, voice going smaller, truer. “Guess I did.”
Something huge and terrifying and gentle cracks open under Zoro’s ribs and he’d like, very much, to stay here in this moment a little longer, to memorise the exact weight of it, the exact sound of Sanji saying yeah like that, the exact angle of his smile.
But they've never been that lucky. The Admiral slams another attack into ROOM and the barrier shudders violently along with the ground's mean little jumps. Law staggers, one knee buckling, a raw curse spat between his teeth as he drags the distortion back under control. He snarls: “If you’re done kindly get your married asses back in formation.”
Zoro laughs, can’t help it. The sound comes out bright and sharp and a little feral. He steps back but keeps his fingers tangled with Sanji’s for one last beat, for as long as he can. “You heard the man, husband. Time to go.”
Sanji jerks like he’s been hit. His ears go scarlet. “Call me that in front of the Marines again and I’m filing for divorce,” he warns, kicking a nearby Lieutenant in the head without even looking.
Zoro smirks, rolling his shoulders, feeling the familiar weight of swords and the adjusted weight of gold. “You’d have to survive to do that.”
Sanji’s grin flashes, sharp and hungry, the old predator edge now with something warmer behind it. Flames lick up his leg. “Oh, I fully intend to.”
They move back into the storm, into the crush of bodies and the scream of steel and the crack of cannon fire. And it’s the same dance they’ve been perfecting since they met: Zoro carving forward, Sanji dropping from above, kicks and blades overlapping, circling, covering.
Out of the corner of his eye, Zoro catches Luffy glance back toward the ROOM’s heart and clocks the way Luffy’s manic grin softens into something else: trust, bright and fierce, anchored on Law.
“Thanks, Traffy!” he hollers, like this is all some big game and he absolutely knows Law will carry it through to the end. Law doesn’t turn his head but Zoro sees the way his mouth twitches.
Maybe later there’ll be a quiet port, sake that doesn’t taste like someone filtered it through socks, a bed that isn’t bolted to a ship. Maybe he’ll sit on some dock at sunset with Sanji’s legs thrown across his lap, listening to him complain about menu options and colour palettes and fucking cake like they aren’t both wanted men.
If this is how he goes out someday, fighting like hell with Luffy screaming and Law holding the sky together and Sanji wearing his earring and calling him husband in the middle of a war… he can live with that.
Preferably for a very, very long time.