Chapter Text
Zoro had spent a good portion of his life sleeping, he’d even go so far as to say he was known for it. He slept heavily, frequently, and unfortunately it wasn’t that uncommon for him to go to sleep in one place and wake up in another. Waking up surrounded by the far-away familiar feeling of a ship rocking underneath him wasn’t what he’d expected the last time he’d fallen asleep. When he’d done so while airborne in the cook’s arms, he hadn’t expected to be waking up at all.
The first thing he noticed was that his face still hurt, but it was a different kind of hurt. It wasn’t like there was something inside that needed taken out, instead it was more like a hole desperately trying to heal itself without the means to. It hurt so much he had a hard time sitting up, but he was able to, and the pain slowly started to mellow out.
He sat still, letting himself get used to it, until he saw a strip of yellow in the bed from the corner of his eye and realized he wasn’t alone.
He picked up the blanket and revealed a massive snake as it tensed, coiling tightly as it was suddenly exposed to the cold, tongue flicking out in his direction.
“Why the hell are you in bed with me?” Zoro didn’t know what to do with this situation, but he was at least glad that Yubashiri was here, wherever here was. Clearly on a boat, which was a setting he hadn’t been familiar with in ages.
He could see lines of light through the wooden door across the room, and also that the room was empty aside from the bed he and Yubashiri were lying in. He wasn’t restrained in any way, had all of his swords, and the bed was quite comfortable. Until he reached the door it didn’t occur to him that he may have been a prisoner.
“Hey!” He exclaimed when the handle didn’t turn. “Why the fuck is it locked?” He pulled once, twice, and then lifted his foot with a mind to kick it open.
“Don’t! Don’t break it!” He heard the cook’s voice from outside and enough relief washed over him to give him pause. If the cook hadn’t been on this ship with him, he would have sunk the thing and taken a dingy to wherever in the world he was or die trying.
He felt a wave of anxiety when the door handle clicked as if it was being unlocked, and his heart stopped when it swung open and there he was with the sun shining in behind him.
“You’re awake,” he breathed.
“You’re here,” Zoro’s tone mimicked his.
For a moment, they stood, took each other in. Zoro had never gotten used to the sight of him, never got bored or complacent with him. At first it brought out the worst in him, but now it was supposed to bring out the best, and so far it had done its job. If they spent a lifetime together, would that eventually end? Would he wake up one morning and find that that stunning, bewitching sight of this man had become part of the mundane?
He pushed the thought away. It wasn’t important right now, and he was supposed to be staying out of his own head.
“Of course I’m here,” Sanji said, “I’d never leave you.”
The word’s made Zoro’s heart wrench and the possibility that this wasn’t real started to set in. He believed Sanji felt something for him now, but he was never this kind. Could this have been a dream? Could it have been the afterlife?
Sanji hugged him and he felt it, felt the tickle of his hair when he buried his face in his neck, felt him squeeze tightly, his chest heave as he sucked in a deep breath. He squeezed him so tightly that it ever so slightly hurt and Zoro remembered that the left side of his face also hurt like hell. So this wasn’t a dream, nor any immortal paradise. It had to be real.
He placed his arms gently, slowly on Sanji’s back, closed his eye tightly, felt it sting with tears
“I was so afraid I was going to lose you,” Sanji said, and Zoro’s heart twisted. The words were whispered so softly with a devastated crack at the end. Zoro still wasn’t used to the cook talking to him like this, even though he knew things had changed, they’d grown, they were supposed to be something now. It still felt almost world-breaking, and Zoro finally recalled the reason for that.
“How long was I out?” He had to ask. Sanji pulled away and stepped back, but kept his hands on Zoro’s upper arms, kept looking at him like if he looked away Zoro was going to drop dead or disappear.
“I uh… had some drugs that helped me keep you out cold for a while,” Sanji said, betraying some guilt, “the painkillers aren’t that good and I didn’t want you to be in agony when you woke up. So you’ve been asleep for about five days, I was hoping that might give it some time to heal so it would hurt a little less by the time you woke up.”
Zoro raised his hand to his left eye, much like he would have before, and the pain was immense but it was also dull, and constant, not sharp and amplifying into something unbearable before fading out into non-existence again.
“Why was I locked in?” Zoro asked. “Is someone else here with us?”
“Well, technically you weren’t, your friend was. It just happened to go into the same room you were sleeping in after it escaped the sack I had it in, and I didn’t want to get eaten alive in my sleep. So I locked it in,” Sanji explained, sounding a little bitter.
“So… we left Heilen,” Zoro wanted to make sure he had everything straight, and started by stating the obvious. The fact that the boat was visibly in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight was enough to answer that question.
Sanji nodded to it anyway. “Forever,” he added, “you can never go back.”
“…that’s fine,” Zoro said, and it really, really was.
“It’s just you and me?” Zoro asked. “You took me away on your own?”
Sanji nodded again.
“And you brought Yubashiri?” Zoro couldn’t help approaching the subject, because the prospect made him feel perhaps more gratitude than anything else Sanji had done for Zoro, despite how long that list was.
“Don’t get all warm and fuzzy about it, I could tell you liked that nasty thing and I didn’t want there to be any reason you’d need to go back there,” Sanji huffed, “I also brought everything I found that was in any way related to a sword.”
Zoro was quiet for a moment, right up until Sanji was visibly impatient for a response.
“I love you,” Zoro said, because if Sanji could embrace him and tell him how afraid of losing him he was, Zoro could look him in the eye and speak that truth with sincerity.
“You’d better,” Sanji huffed without missing a beat, coaxing Zoro to laugh. That wasn’t the response he expected but it at least felt right. “I mean it, it took me two hours to get that demon to go into the stupid sack and it was the worst thing I’ve ever had to do in my entire life.”
Zoro cringed at that, laughter coming to an abrupt stop. Not because he felt bad that Sanji had to rastle a giant snake, but because the words made him recall all of the other terrible things that Zoro had put him through on that island. Things he’d already apologized for and wasn’t supposed to linger on, but was stuck on just the same. He didn’t know what else to say but how sorry he was, but he wasn’t supposed to say that, and he wasn’t supposed to stay in his head either. He didn’t know what the fuck to do, had no clue how to get past these next few moments let alone the rest of his life.
“But I love you too,” Sanji mumbled, and Zoro’s internal crisis was put thoroughly on hold, “I don’t know how much right I have to say that, but after all this, I’m pretty fucking sure it’s true.”
“What if we don’t worry about rights and what’s earned…” Zoro said, carefully, largely because he was pretty sure “tried to kill him” was a fair enough counter argument against the prospect of loving someone. But it was also one he wasn’t keen on contending with.
“That sounds good. Like a clean slate…” Sanji nodded, “…no one else here to tell us we can’t have that, right?” he shrugged. A small, humored smile graced his lips and Zoro wanted to kiss them.
“When can I take the bandages off?” He asked, because he could feel that one of the wraps was fastened diagonally in a way that intercepted with his mouth. Kissing would have probably been weird for Sanji with it in the way.
“Not for a while,” Sanji said, “but when we change them, I’ll bring a mirror so you can get an idea of what’s under there.”
“Is it bad?”
“It’s not great,” Sanji said, “they took a lot, but it could be worse.”
“Well, at least I won’t be out of your league anymore,” Zoro said, and somehow, even after everything it was easy. Pushing his buttons was always easy, always second nature.
“Ha-fucking-ha,” Sanji stuck out his tongue, then turned and started to walk away. Zoro’s eyes followed him as he went to the railing, and noted for the first time that he had a cigarette between his fingers.
“I thought you quit?” Zoro followed after him, concerned.
“This is my last one,” Sanji said, “I still had some left over, and being on this boat waiting for you to wake up was a pain in the ass.”
Sorry you had to do that for me. Zoro thought, wondering if he should say it out loud or not— the cook kept shooting down his apologies, even though there was so much he’d been wrong about.
“By the way,” he said instead, “how did I survive? Who on that island would have saved me?”
Sanji didn’t answer that question immediately, so Zoro decided to wait. He leaned against the railing and looked out at the ocean, felt the wind blow against his back and found that familiar peace in it, the sort he hadn’t felt in decades.
“It was Luffy,” Sanji murmured, and Zoro looked at him, surprised and confused.
“We wouldn’t be standing here together if it weren’t for Luffy,” Sanji spoke softly, and Zoro didn’t understand, couldn’t make sense of it, “if not for him I would have lost you,” he said.
Zoro decided not to press for the details as to why, because in the end, despite the lack of clarity, it was simply the most believable thing in the world. Of course Luffy could still impact their world, even from far beyond the grave.
“If not for him, we never would have met,” Zoro reminded.
“Yeah,” Sanji nodded, “quite the matchmaker, our captain,” he was smiling with his cigarette between his teeth, and Zoro understood the return to smoking decision now more than ever. His heart skipped a beat as his head traveled back in time twenty years, back to a similarly sized caravel with a sheep figurehead.
“But really, who fixed me?” Zoro asked. “Everyone there hated me, so I gotta know.”
“It was a guy whose arm you cut off, his name was Sven,” Sanji said, “he did it because Luffy saved him and his mom a long time ago. He was repaying a debt.”
“Oh?” Zoro had a hard time recalling who he was talking about. He’d taken a few limbs, and he didn’t recognize the name Sven. “Weird,” he said, deciding it wasn’t that important. Whoever it was, he’d never see them again.
“Hey, Cook,” he said in a nervous mumble, “do you really think you and me can make it?” He asked, because they still had so much to overcome.
Sanji shrugged.
“It’s about time we started trying,” he said, and pushed off the railing, apparently to go somewhere else, but kept talking, “all I know for sure is I haven’t actually gotten to have proper sex with you yet, so I’ll at least stick around until I’ve seen what that’s like.”
“Oh, we could do that now,” Zoro suggested.
Sanji stopped walking and looked back over his shoulder.
“You’re still healing and there’s a snake in your bed,” he reminded.
“You have a bed, right?”
“You’re still healing,” Sanji reiterated, and then kept walking, and Zoro wasn’t sure where he was going but he had every intention of following him around forever. According to Sanji, he wasn’t supposed to be thinking like that, but it wasn’t like he could overhaul his entire personality in favor of healthier attachments in a few days.
“My face is healing, everything that I’d need to screw you is doing just fine.”
“Don’t say screw.”
“Screw,” Zoro said, then stopped in the doorway of the room Sanji had walked into. He wasn’t familiar with this ship, so he’d assumed Sanji was headed for the kitchen because it was his default space to exist. But when he actually looked around that wasn’t where they were.
“This is a cabin,” he observed.
“Yeah, it’s mine,” Sanji sat down on the bed, “get in here and shut the door so that beast of yours doesn’t get in.”
Zoro did as he was told, and as he approached Sanji, he didn't feel like he was walking so much as falling, and he landed squarely in Sanji's embrace, with his legs around his waist and arms around his neck and mouth pressed tight up against his.
"It's November fourteenth, by the way," Sanji said against his mouth, "happy belated birthday."
"Oh, nice," Zoro buried his face in his neck and breathed in deeply, "my first ever birthday sex at forty-two."
Sanji squeezed him closer and his whole body shook as he laughed, and for while they didn't move forward, because it seemed that Sanji just wanted to hold him tight. That was fine. Even though Sanji had ensured it would almost certainly be much longer, all Zoro needed was an hour or so left in his life, and right now he could have perceived it as having all the time in the world.