Archive of Our Own ^beta

1.

Sanji awakens to the feeling of his heart drumming through his chest, loud-hard- painful thuds that echo in the hollow chambers of his ribs. It’s electric; it’s defibrillation and reignition; it’s the rattling of music down in his bones.

Somehow, he knows, Luffy is back.

The battle rages on so Sanji takes the stranded geisha with him, backtracking through the remains of Onigashima as walls and floorboards go up in flames around them. He helps girls climb over low-lying pyres with a hand held out, smoke in his lungs, choking on it. His heart is on a caffeine-high, and nicotine isn’t helping. His fingers are shaking when he lights another cigarette.

Sanji falls, vision swimming, chest violently pounding. His knees bruise on the floor; geisha gasp and gather around him, delicate hands tugging and pulling at his suit, begging him to rise. 

Luffy is using me like a trampoline, he thinks in delirium. The burning woodgrain of the pleasure hall floors form pretty patterns as they ash under his cheek. His heart pounds in his ears. Arteries pumping. Blood boiling hot. Ifrit Jambe licks at his heels, extremities numb with cold, breath shallow and smelling of smog. His heart is cleaving out of his chest. His ribs are cracking open, blooming outwards, pretty white petals of flower shoved out bloody and raw from the force of the drumbeat inside, he knows, but no matter how hard he looks through the blurry tears there is no thick, red heart outside his body. Just inside. 

And the world goes dark.

2.

The next time Sanji awakens, he’s roped tight in iron-silk and getting his face smashed in by the only arachnid he’s ever found gorgeous. 

“Welcome back, Sleeping Beauty,” Black Maria coos, running one claw-sharp nail along the soft underside of his jaw, tilting his face up to meet hers. “Nice to see you return to us. Will you call Nico Robin for us now, pretty?” Flaxen hair falls across her cheeks and bare shoulders as she speaks, lips painted red, and she’s beautiful and deadly and terrifying, yet Sanji’s heart doesn’t stutter.

He doesn’t know if the steady, dull thump-thump-thump can even be called a heartbeat anymore, after the rushing adrenaline-high pain he’d felt just seconds earlier.

Black Maria’s expression falls, upper lip curling into a sneer. “Too shy to speak, pet? How about we discipline you some more.” She rears her arm back, brass knuckles glinting in the lowlight, and Sanji feels the earth-shattering crack of it driving into his nose just as clearly as the first time.

Fuck. 

This isn’t a dream. This isn’t him reliving his worst-best memories in a fit of insanity before death. He’s in the same place he was hours ago, even though he already called Robin for help, even though she already saved him, even though he already found Zoro and fought Queen and almost-died then did die—

And he’s back here.

“Robin!” he yells into the transponder snail, voice scratched and stretched to tatters. “Help me! Please! Help me, Robin!”

Familiar, he goes through the motions; no time to think now, with the raid, with King and Queen in the performance hall, with Luffy above them willing to die and die again. When Law finds him and thrusts Zoro at him, Sanji does as he did before. First aid and fighting. Autopilot motions; muscle memory kicks. It’s only when Queen rushes him in a fit of invisibility and hurts the geisha from earlier that Sanji snaps out of it.

Ifrit Jambe runs blue up his leg, bioluminescence illuminating the area around them, sending the woman’s wavy hair and bloodied face into a water-like cast.

“I know you’re here!” Sanji calls to his enemy, sharpening his observation haki. Queen flickers to life without any strain. 

“Fancy new trick you’ve got there, Vinsmoke,” Queen sneers. He tosses his brachiosaurus neck around, but before he can lash out Sanji is there— breakspeed, blink of an eye, millisecond fast. The crack of Queen’s neck snapping rings out too late, after the sight of it falling sideways and lifeless in half, bootprint grilled onto the ochre hide. The geisha screams. Sanji gathers her in his arms before the dinosaur falls onto her. 

This is why he came back, surely. There’s a thrill in his veins, deserved pride and reckless arrogance at how easy that was. If only he’d figured out Ifrit Jambe earlier into his fight. If only he’d begrudged to use those maligned genetic superiorities before. And then the geisha’s blood dribbles warm onto his neck, where her forehead rests from when she passed out from the force of his run, and he’s iced. Cold drips down his back and grim reality sets in. He will not be like his brothers. He will not fall victim to his own killing prowess. 

Sanji finds the hideout where the other geisha have hidden and sets the pink-haired woman sleeping in his arms among them. “It’s not safe here,” he tells them. “The building’s going to burn down soon. Follow me.”

They are skeptical, of course. He just delivered them one of their own, unconscious and injured. When O-Some wakes up— that’s what he learns her name is— a dove gray mouse nosing at her cheek, she tells them he saved her. How she deduced that from what little she saw of the brief encounter, he doesn’t know, but far be it from him to doubt a lady, especially one whose actions are in his favor. 

Sanji gets them out into the courtyard by the time the building goes up in flames, and the drumbeat rhythm starts up in his chest again. 

He can’t breathe. He leans up against a wet willow tree, watching the pleasure hall dissipate into smoke, pillars clouding the clear night sky. He lights a cigarette and closes his eyes, willing the heart-attack throbbing away, but the adrenaline only heightens. 

Is it Ifrit? he wonders, slumping against the tree. Is his newest power killing him? Red-blooded passion for blue flames, but perhaps a bit too much for his human heart? That’s a relief. He’s human after all. No matter how impenetrable his skin or how fecund his cells, the core of him is still soft and squishy in the way his mother always wanted. Organs and tissue and human arteries that can’t pump blood fast enough to keep up.

He’s done his part. Queen is down, the girls are okay, and Luffy is taking care of Kaido up in the sky. He’s okay with dying here.

The bark is rough on his back as he buckles, ear hitting the dirt hard, adding a tinnitus ring under the pulse-pounding rush, and his skull hurts as his brain sloshes against it on impact. 

Ow. 

And then he dies.

3.

The third time Sanji feels Black Maria crack his nose, he realizes there might be something going on here.

“Robin!” he calls into the transponder snail, tired and already dreading this loop. Is it a Devil Fruit? Has someone, between this interaction and when he invariably dies from Ifrit— at least, his working theory will remain that Ifrit Jambe is running his heart into overdrive and triggering failure, unless he learns better— used some fucked up time-related devil fruit to send him back to this moment, each time he dies?

That must be from one of the monster girls here, right? Which ones had touched him, or gotten near him, or even just breathed at him wrong? But that can’t be right either. All these women with snakes for heads and scorpions for bodies received their powers from SMILE fruit, so they can’t have eaten a Devil Fruit as well. There could be someone else hiding in their midst, but that seems an awfully resource heavy plan for the Tobi Roppo to invest in just him, especially when the time loop benefits neither of them.

Sanji thanks Robin when she frees him, as usual, and takes off down the hall. Did the person who infected him catch Sanji in his haste to get Zoro to the performance hall? Should he retrace his original steps or try something new? Or was it not a Devil Fruit at all?

Sanji is not self-centered enough to assume his new level of Jambe is powerful enough to warp space-time itself, and no one else would have the ability to do so… unless it’s some bullshit technology from Queen. 

Sanji heads to the performance hall, anger flushing his better sense away. Forget the timeline, forget the currently dying Zoro, it’s all he can do to even remember himself.

Yet, somehow, halfway across the building from where he was the past two times, Law finds him again.

Sanji hears the familiar tenor shout his moniker and his feet move before he processes it. Law is a familiar weight on his shoulder, perched daintily with one leg crossed over the other like a man at his leisure. Zoro is a deadweight on his other. “Warn a guy, next time,” Sanji grits out, and Law tells him Zoro is dying, so do wrap him up, and splint his legs and arms and, you know what? Just splint everything.

“You’re the doctor, asshat, not me!” Sanji’s yell echoes in the corridor, but Law is already gone. Whatever. At least he doesn’t have to double back this time. It’ll be a straight shot from here to the performance hall, if he can just find another empty room to bandage Zoro.

“Wha…?” Zoro mumbles when Sanji sets him flat on a wooden plank in a dirty corner of Onigashima. 

“You’re dying is what, dumbass. Just hold still and concentrate on staying alive.” 

Sanji lights his cigarette and gets to work. Boards and bandages and the shallow tub of ointment Chopper packed for him, all wound neatly over Zoro’s limbs. Dressing a ham would be easier than this.

He’s quicker than the first two times, almost efficient, and it’s a matter of minutes before Sanji is holding both King and Queen at bay while Chopper pumps Zoro full of those experimental endorphins. 

Sanji’s body starts to twinge, as it has the last two times he did this, dermis rearranging into something resembling an exoskeleton. Now, he clocks the feeling instead of becoming nauseated by it. Ifrit Jambe could end the fight here, certainly for Queen and probably for King, but Sanji still has his suspicions about that being the thing that kills him in the end. He dodges and ducks and weaves instead, near-invisible.

Sanji skywalks up Queen’s neck and grabs his tail of straw-blonde hair, voice shrill in the dinosaur’s ear. “Whatever the hell you did to me, fix it now!”

“What did I do, Vinsmoke?” Queen snarls. He flings him around but Sanji holds tight, even as King swoops in close like a pelican aiming to snatch a fish out of torrential waves. “You’re the one who’s depriving me! Show me your little suit Judge made you!”

“Fuck you,” Sanji says eloquently. “And your stupid time travel bullshit. Put me back! Turn it off!”

Queen actually laughs. “Are you deranged? Have you gone crazy?”

King finally manages to get a good hit on Sanji, and it’s like being bisected in his Raid Suit all over again. That feels like eons ago. Sanji has lived the same four hours twice already, and is on his way to completing a third. Sanji thumps to the ground and counts down the time until the ceiling comes into focus again, dark at the edges, and strength returns to his jellied limbs. He can feel the intestines in his gut un-implode and bloom back into proper shape.

“What the hell did you mean, time travel?”

Sanji looks up and sees Zoro standing above him, returned to the battlefield not in glory but just to see Sanji wretched on the filthy, booze-stained floor. 

“Nothing you would understand,” Sanji spits out, and pulls himself together. 

Luckily for them, their opponents are arguing about how King almost took his so-called partner’s head off trying to pluck Sanji away. They never sort it out. Sanji and Zoro take turns rushing the two, supporting each other. Sanji darting in and out with an unprecedented speed, and Zoro with his heavyweight power getting in solid hits. By the time they split off from each other, battles diverging, they’re in a better spot than they were the first two times.

“For the last time, I don’t know anything about your time travel bullshit! I hope you never figure it out as long as you don’t show me your Raid Suit, Vinsmoke!”

“I told you to stop calling me that!”

The fight is harder without his blue flames. He still outspeeds Queen’s perception, but the heat of Sanji’s Diable Jambe is barely enough to burn the dense, brachiosaurus hide. Sanji saves O-Some but wastes precious minutes trying to down Queen in ways that would have been easy last loop. When Queen finally goes down, Sanji’s arm is broken-yet-reformed, there’s closed lacerations on his face, and his lovely burgundy suit is stained with fresh blood despite not having any visible wounds. 

And Sanji still doesn’t have his answers.

Loathe as he is to believe Queen, he didn’t seem like he was lying. He doesn’t have familiarity with time travel beyond science-fiction and the future-flung Akazaya Nine, the same as Sanji. 

Maybe if he doesn’t die, if he’s careful, Sanji can avoid looping back again. Maybe he’ll come back here to Onigashima 10, 20, even 30 years into the future with a death sentence, but by then he’ll be happy to have this time returned to see his friends. Sanji has always been a dreamer, and that’s a rather nice dream. He hasn’t touched Ifrit Jambe once this loop, so surely that’ll come to fruition, soon, right after the world stops spinning and he just… takes a little… nap…

Sanji awakens to the rhythm of his heart beating out of his chest. 

It hurts.

And he knows he’s done for.

4.

If Ifrit Jambe isn’t what kills him, then what is?

The pounding in his chest is always what does him in, blood pressure spiking and breath shortening in panic-attack precision right before he dies and loops back around. Is that not a death knell, but a signal for whatever powers are bringing him back in time? Is it a timer? 

Even the loop where Sanji didn’t pass out from his fight with Queen, the jackrabbiting of his heart still picked up and did him in, perfectly on time. The moon at its zenith in the sky, the fire dripping molten through Onigashima. It's always the same moment. Perhaps a Devil Fruit after all, purposefully keeping him contained within these four hours. Or not a time loop at all, and just an illusion? Either way, he has two options: find the Devil Fruit user and either kill or threaten them until they dispel the trick, or try to brute-force his way out of this. 

Dying might be worth a try. 

Sanji bites his tongue as Black Maria pummels him, over and over and over again. Blood is hot and heavy in his mouth. Fills the back of his throat, as he gags on the metallic tang. If this is how he goes, he’s glad it's in the clutches of a giant, beautiful woman. A death anyone would be jealous of. 

Sanji lets himself fall unconscious, wakes blearily to more beatings, and drowns in sleep again to Maria’s complaints about how he refuses to call Robin. 

His heart does not pound. His blood does not sing. It’s barely been an hour, and he falls cozy into dreamless death, all fuzzy and dark like a blanket over his eyes. 

5.

Dying does not work. Sanji almost doesn’t recognize it, because he gasps awake again to Black Maria still beating the shit out of him, but the rush of clean air on his tongue, untainted by blood, and the telltale coo as the arachnid calls him her pretty pet are proof enough that he’s looped around again.

So the trigger to his time travel isn’t the bell of a clock striking something-past-midnight, but his own death. His options shift: either find the Devil Fruit user, or figure out how to stop the heart-attack that kills him each time. 

He’s back to square one. Ifrit Jambe isn’t the thing killing him. Is it his new exoskeleton and genetic enhancements that start to kick in during his fight with Queen? If so, it’s too late to prevent those. Sanji signed his fate the first time he put on that damned Raid Suit weeks ago. 

Tracking down the Devil Fruit user it is, then.

Once Robin saves him, Sanji goes down the same path he did the first time, catching every Beast Pirate who isn’t artificial-zoan nor has a permanent smile etched onto their face. 

“Which one of you trapped me in a time loop?” 

“I don’t know! I don’t know anything! Let me go!” They cower and cry and beg, and Sanji kicks them unconscious when it's clear they’re ordinary pirates. No one that could hold a candle to anyone on his crew, and no spark of recognition that signals the correct Devil Fruit user. He’s cleared out nearly the entire corridor when Law shouts for him.

Law barks out his usual orders from up on Sanji’s shoulder. Already bruised and exhausted from the rooftop fight, he stiffens but doesn’t resist when Sanji prevents him from leaving by tightening an arm around his thigh.

“You can scan this whole area with your power, right?” Sanji asks. “Can you check if there are any Devil Fruit users hiding around here?”

“That’s not how my powers work, Black Leg. There isn’t anything unique enough about most Devil Fruit users for me to pick that out, especially with so many SMILE fruit users present. Plus it’d be a tremendous waste of my stamina.”

“Says you,” Sanji scoffs. He loosens his grip anyway so Law can hop down from his shoulder, shoes clacking on the floor. He should probably thank the man for humoring him when he could have just as easily teleported away and left Sanji stranded with Zoro, like usual. Sanji adjusts Zoro on his other shoulder, readying himself to find the room he usually uses to patch the swordsman up, but Law is still watching him.

“Is there someone dangerous here?” Law asks him, voice low and eyes narrowed.

Sanji shrugs. “Not that I know of. Just keep a lookout for time-loop based Devil Fruits, would you, and send them my way?”

“As far as I’m aware, that doesn’t exist. Are you under the impression you’re stuck in one?”

“Look at you, smart boy. Yeah,” Sanji tells him, too tired to be anything but dry. “This is my fourth time seeing you today. And patching this loser up.” He slaps the back of Zoro’s thigh where it hangs down his front, and Law winces at the noise it makes. Sanji knows, however, that there aren’t any broken bones in that area, because he’s done up the man’s bandages thrice before. 

“You’ve seen this battle through to the end?”

“Nope.”

“Figures, that whatever happened wouldn’t leave you any more useful,” Law mutters to himself. Sanji feels a retort forming on the tip of his tongue, but decides this isn’t the time to fight.

“Look, I’ve gotta get going before this guy dies, so just let me know if you see any freaky Devil Fruit users later. See ya.”

Law nods, grip shifting on his longsword as he backs away. “See you, Black Leg. If you make it through this, tell me more about that new Devil Fruit user, whoever it ends up being.”

Sanji gives a two-fingered salute, and then they part. He’s a little impressed at Law’s smooth acceptance of the situation, despite how strange it is. Maybe he should have bargained some extra time out of him to help patch up Zoro too. No matter how many loops he does this in, Sanji doesn’t think he’ll ever get better at bandaging the man up in any way that doesn’t resemble a roast ready for cooking.

The performance hall is also a place full of ordinary Beast Pirates, SMILE fruit users and others alike. The one who tagged him with their Devil Fruit powers could be here. It’s a struggle fending both King and Queen off while he aims for the Beast Pirates, jumping around the room too fast for the visible eye, searching for the right person. He’s distracted by the glimmering puddle of some slime logia user when a rush of wind bowls him over, the force of a just-miss hit sending him ass over teakettle across the floor.

“What the hell are you doing?” Zoro yells at him around the hilt in his mouth, all three swords raised to block the iron-glint of King’s pterosaur wing. A sense of deja-vu overtakes Sanji, lying wretched on the booze-stained floor. He hopes this doesn’t become a habit for future loops.

“None of your business,” Sanji says. And then proceeds to state his business: “I need to find a Devil Fruit user. Someone trapped me in a time loop.”

“Is that even possible?” Zoro jumps back, shoulder-to-shoulder with Sanji, now on his feet and dusting off his suit. They face the lead performers down together, familiar. 

“Clearly, if it happened to me! The only chance they had to catch me was in the hallways or down here, but I can’t find them.”

“Why would they just be waiting around for you to find them? If I was the guy, I’d get away as far as possible so you wouldn’t ever be able to find me again.”

Sanji flexes his hands, trying not to tear at his hair in chagrin. Zoro’s right for once, the filament lights of his brain slowly flickering to light in a rare display of acuity. 

God fucking damn it, how did Sanji not think of this earlier? Of course the Devil Fruit user would be able to wade through the boroughs of their own power, of course they would be just as aware of the time loop as he. They could be all the way across Onigashima by now, hidden away into some corner where Sanji would never think to look. This is the worst game of hide-and-seek he’s ever played. That’s a bold statement, considering he once got two of his loose baby teeth yanked out by his eldest brothers during the game as a child, left crying with the keratin-white beads gifts in his palm. 

Sanji contemplates, briefly, letting himself die right here to start over. Then he activates Ifrit Jambe and revels as the light of blue flames dances with shock in Zoro’s single eye, and grins at him.

“Try to keep up,” he swaggers, and flies forward in a blink-and-you-miss-it line of clean blue and burgundy. Queen’s body snaps in three places in the space of two seconds, and he’s down. Sanji skids to a stop behind the body, smoking like a shot gun, black char marks carved into the floorboards where he’s stopped. 

Sanji flips the perfect fringe of his now-smoldering hair and looks back at Zoro. To his disappointment, instead of staring shocked and trembling at his feat of absolute kickassery, Zoro just smiles something animal and crazed around the sword in his mouth. “Neat party trick, Cook. Looks like I’ll actually have to try to pull ahead this time.” Then he’s off, nowhere near Sanji’s speed but still pretty damn fast, shoving straight into King’s massive body leaving nary a cut.

“Shit,” Sanji breathes. “What the hell is that guy made of?”

“Whatever it is, it’s stronger than steel,” Zoro pants, “or anything I’ve ever seen.”

Sanji remembers a conversation from eons ago, on his first go through Onigashima. Before or after crushing his Raid Suit, building his resolve, calling Zoro to kill him… somewhere in there, Queen taunted him. King is a Lunarian, he’d said, whatever that meant. Zoro couldn’t kill the man because of that, apparently. But Sanji knows better. Zoro wouldn’t lose this battle, no matter the opponent. 

“Hey, Lunarian!” Sanji calls, and the result is instantaneous. Bingo. King stiffens as gasps and whispers run through the hall, from the thin semi-circle of enemies and allies alike who dared get close enough to this fight. 

“Where did you hear that?” King hisses, and Sanji gives him a lazy smile. He jabs his thumb back at Queen’s slumped body. 

“Your little friend’s pretty talkative. How’s it feel, relying on your species for your strength? Good? You proud of it?”

“You know nothing,” King tells him, and it’s ragged. Raw and snake-like. It’s also true. Sanji, blue-blooded and sea-cook raised, swift-footed and silver-tongued, has no idea what the hell that means, but he’s not above pretending he does. 

Sanji grasps at straws, at bits and pieces from the books Reiju procured for him as a child, myths and legends. The All Blue and Devil Fruits. People who lived on the moon then died out. “Oh, don’t I? Then I don’t know why you hide your face, or no one else on this entire island— the entire country of Wano— looks like you?” It’s a mediocre jab, half a shot in the dark, but it still does the man in.

King is before him almost before Sanji can blink, wings folded away, flames smothered out against his back, knife-sharp beak cutting through the luxurious fabric of his suit.

“Cook!” Zoro’s shout rings out, panicked, and Sanji would be flattered if he wasn’t offended on principle. 

“I’m fine!” he tells him. “Did you catch—”

“Yeah, I saw!” 

King rears back, pterosaur wings flapping bat-like and giant, a leathery wind taking the breath from Sanji as he goes to punch through him again. Sanji, still intact under his tattered suit, pale skin unbroken despite the rapidly regenerating organs crushed underneath due to blunt force trauma, smiles up at King from under his lashes and watches Zoro cut a clean line through the tip of one wing.

King’s screech shakes the earth, agony and despair. Unhinged more than pained.

He falls back and Sanji stands, digging his lighter out of his pocket.

Zoro glances at Sanji out of the corner of his eye as he steps forward to fight King, gaze unwavering on the patch of unmarred skin on his stomach despite all sense assuming he should be dead. It’s a demand for answers. Sanji will give them to him later, or maybe never, depending on his mood and whether he ever gets out of this time loop.

6.

Sanji has determined his best bet now, if he can’t find the Devil Fruit user, is to deduce the cause of these heart attacks so he can simply stop dying. That means he’s in need of a doctor.

Robin saves him and Sanji rushes to the performance hall, feet pumping, time itself snapping at his heels like a rabid dog as it ticks down. He falls when Law teleports perfectly to him yet again, appearing then landing atop his back.

“Genuinely, fuck you,” Sanji mutters into the waxed wood floors. 

“Your swordsman is—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know the drill.” Sanji shoves the two off him, getting to his knees to wave Law off. Law looks down at him with sterile curiosity, mental dissection in a matter of seconds. 

“Do you, now?”

“I’ll splint him up all good. Now get out of my face.”

Law runs off to wherever it is he always goes after this conversation, though it’s obvious he’d like to stay and interrogate him. 

The Surgeon of Death is a doctor too, yes, but not one Sanji wants to divulge his situation to. Perhaps it's more sentiment than the situation warrants, but Chopper will always be Sanji’s first choice. Given his earliest memories are of the sun-white lights of operating theaters and the sharp scent of disinfectant; test-tube blood and test-tube biopsies; the grating beep-beep-beep of his mother’s heart monitor, this level of aversion is justified. 

The issue now, which he hadn’t thought of earlier, is that he must contend with Zoro.

Every single loop Sanji spends an exorbitant amount of time clumsily treating Zoro’s wounds, and then the man takes up even more of Chopper’s precious attention while Sanji holds Kaido’s lead performers at bay. There’s a logical solution that comes to mind here, but one that raises the taste of bile to his tongue.

Sanji carries Zoro out of the way, to the same dark corner of Onigashima between a crumpled stairwell and a demolished sitting room. He lays him down on the same wooden plank, passes his hand over Zoro’s eye to close it when he stirs, and abandons him there to die.

Chopper doesn’t question it when Sanji shows up empty-handed. 

Why should he? Sanji is the only one who knows there should be another person here. There should not be guilt eating away at him, because the things that happen in time loops aren’t real anyway. They reset. 

“I always knew this would happen,” Chopper sobs, tiny hooves doing little to stop the flood of tears washing down his furry face. “I knew the smoking would get to you eventually! And now— now you’re going to have a heart attack, and it’s all because y-you didn’t listen to me, you… bastard!”

“What do my lungs have to do with my heart?” Sanji mutters, chewing on the filter of his current cigarette. If this is what kills him, he’ll enjoy a pack or two now while he can, thanks.

Sanji thanks his own self from five minutes ago for relieving Marco of his sentry duty, having held the lead performers at bay until he arrived, to go help the samurai around the hall. He might wilt from the mortification of having a second doctor level another disappointed look at him. It takes Chopper so long to get his sniffles under control that Sanji’s already dispatched Queen with a surprise attack and moved on to King, trying to concentrate on the barest flicker of that flame on his back.  

“I can make medicine that helps with blood clots, but I don’t know how much it’ll help now!” Chopper shouts at him, “We should put you under observation!”

“Can’t you just make something to slow my heart down?” Sanji shouts back.

“No! Why would I do that!”

“So that I don’t go into cardiac arrest?”

“You’re going into cardiac arrest?!”

“I just told you that!”

“No, you—” Chopper makes a garbled, animal-like sound, grunts and chatters and cute little squeals. 

Sanji narrowly dodges a brutal assault from an iron-like wing, springs into a handstand to knock back a barrage of attacks. Sweat beads down his face, getting in his eyes. King is an entirely different beast compared to Queen; Sanji doesn’t know his attack patterns yet, the way he holds himself, the appendages he attacks with. It’s all he can do to stay alive and hold a conversation at once. Sanji launches himself back, leg held up in a tapestry of blue flames, warding King off. They watch each other, panting, assessing. Queen is a shifting ochre wall, not-quite-dead and slowly awakening, Sanji’s haki tells him. Shit. 

“You dumbass, do you think those are the same things?” Chopper finally screeches at him.

“How was I supposed to know they weren’t?” Sanji snaps. He stomps down the embarrassment. Now isn’t the time for distractions. Any more distractions.

“List your symptoms for me, one by one!” Chopper demands. “I can’t trust you anymore!”

“Increasing heart rate.” A leg raised to block King’s sword with the underside of his shin, snapping it down and twisting— and parting once more. “Short breath.” Rushing an opening, morphing into a roundhouse kick. “Chest pain.” Darting back to avoid the counterblow. “Everything pain, fuck—”

There’s a sound that Sanji doesn’t recognize at first, foreign to his own ears. Then, he realizes, oh, that’s the crack of his spine. 

That’s the crack of his spine as something heavy slams right into it at point-blank range, worse than an avalanche and crushing his lungs in the process. That’s the crack of spine that shoots limpness like lightning down to his legs. Sanji lies on his front, face pressed straight into the floor, a heavyweight crushing him like a hydraulic press on his back. It squeezes against the exoskeleton that’s still fragile and chrysalis-new. His internal organs feel like popping balloons. 

“Finally doing your job, Queen?” he hears. And then King’s flames burn right into him, slow against the constantly regenerating healing factor hastening the stem cells in his body. Push and pull. Burn and regrow. Burn. Regrow. Burn. Burn. Burn.

Burn.

7. 

Sanji wakes up to the dulcet tones of a modern Arachne’s singer’s voice and decides to never take on both King and Queen alone again.

Fuck. Fuck, that hurt, that fucking hurt, that hurt like a motherfucking bitch he— he can still feel it. The heat; the ash. The woodgrain sandpapering against his eaten-away cheeks. 

Black Maria’s punch is a welcome release from his mental hell. Hopefully she bashes his brains in so hard he forgets the memory entirely, lest he suffer a new addition to his night terror roster.

“Robin,” Sanji calls, halfway to sobbing, throat catching wetly on the words. “Save me!” 

This time when Law drops Zoro off in his hands, Sanji diligently bandages him up, the neatest he ever has.

“Chopper, I’m going to die in a few hours— no, no questions right now, just help me. My pulse gets fast, and I can’t breathe, and I feel like someone’s taking a stick and beating my heart like a drum.”

Chopper gapes at him, hooves still raised over Zoro’s prone body. He looks like the next words out of his snout will either be to call a doctor— another doctor— or a formless wail, so Sanji closes it gently with one hand. 

“Not now. Please. Just tell me what my symptoms mean.”

Chopper bites his hand. Sanji pulls back with a yelp to see a perfect semi-circle of flat little reindeer teeth beveled into the leather glove. 

“I need more information!” Chopper says. “I need tests, and scans, and my stethoscope. I can't just diagnose you like this! What do you mean you’re going to die?”

Zoro, at their feet, groans something that sounds like a whimper.

Sanji steps away, swallowing thickly. Guilt is cotton in his throat. 

“Figure him out. Give him that thing so he can fight— whatever. Send him back out there with me.”

Sanji turns on his heel and is gone, wind whistling in his ears faster than Chopper can respond.

Kick; block; pivot; dodge. Bide his time, wait for the perfect opportunity to use Ifrit Jambe. There, when Queen is looking away—

King rushes him.

The edge of his foot glances off the skin of Queen’s flank, blue flames searing a dark line down the side. Sanji bounces off a wall, lying winded on the floor for a few precious seconds where he gets a boot planted flat on his back, the glint of a sword pointed at his face. 

“You’re getting on my nerves, Vinsmoke,” Queen hisses from somewhere behind them. “Why’d you hide that little trick for so long? Going easy on me?” He chuckles, laughter booming from somewhere deep in his mile-long throat. “Well, I’ve been going easy on you too!” There’s the whir of machinery that Sanji now recognizes as Queen transforming into his hybrid form: part man, part beast, part modern-miracle-of-technology. 

“This wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t toying with the boy,” King rumbles. He sounds irate. The silver of his sword arcs up, elegant, poised to take off Sanji’s head.

Splinters against the burnt-raw scaffolded musculature of his cheek, fire on tendon on wood, burn regrow burn regrow burn burn burn—

“Get off me, Lunarian!”

The words ring out, panicked, wielded like a shield but landing like a lance. 

King stumbles back.

“How did you know?” He asks, lock-limbed. 

“It’s obvious,” Sanji blurts out, “anyone with a pair of eyes could tell, just looking at you, you’re not fooling anyone.” 

He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He spits out anything within reach out, getting him away, getting King to just leave him alone. Sanji stumbles to his feet, each breath ravaging his lungs, and it almost feels like his heart is tripping over itself again. This isn’t the same as that final drive towards death, though. This is just plain fear. 

“Liar,” King accuses. 

“Then how would I know?” 

The white of King’s eyes flares, wide and creature-like, under the shadows of his leather mask. That is also fear. 

Sanji doesn’t have time to react when King barrels forward, more raw strength than technique, but he doesn’t have to. Zoro is there, swords bared like fangs, scowling around Wado Ichimonji between his teeth. 

“Chopper wanted to talk to you,” Zoro grunts. “Fuck did you do this time?”

“Can it, Mosshead. Think you can hold down the fort on your own for a minute or two?”

“Better than you,” he spits out.

Sanji flips him off as he darts away, even though it goes unseen behind the curtain of sparks spraying from clashing blades. 

Marco is with the little reindeer when Sanji lands gently in the midst of a mess of medical equipment. Perfect. Of course they had to drag the man in. Sanji braces himself stiffly as the two give him the fastest checkup Sanji has ever seen anyone perform. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Chopper tells him, concerned. The blood pressure pump in his hand wavers. “I don’t understand theres… there’s nothing wrong with you.”

“Scientific bullshit,” Sanji explains solidly. Chopper looks at him with distress. “Don’t worry about that part. Isn’t there any reason for the heart attack? Or how to stop it?”

“It wouldn’t be a heart attack, with your symptoms. But no, I don’t understand. You said your heart rate kept speeding up unreasonably high? Did you take some sort of drug?”

“Not my sort of vice,” Sanji tells him, “but no, not that I’m aware of.” He taps out a new cigarette, lighting it carefully and relaxing with the hit of nicotine. That was a thought. Maybe someone slipped him something earlier. A hallucinogen. This certainly feels too real to be a dream. 

Marco shrugs when Chopper lets out a distressed huff, toeing at the floorboards. “If it really is a pharmaceutical issue, your ship’s doctor is more equipped to handle it than I am. Other than that… well. Does it have something to do with that big ol’ oaf calling you a Vinsmoke?”

“No,” Sanji snaps simply. He forces himself to unclench his jaw; keep his hands loose.

“We don’t know,” Chopper tells him, tears in his big eyes. “I’m so sorry, Sanji, I don’t know what’s going on!”

Sanji sighs softly. “Hey, it’s alright. You did your best.”

He takes another drag of his cigarette and blows the smoke out towards the ceiling. Revels in the pocket of peace. Then turns back to the fight.

Next time, Sanji decides, cringing already, he’ll have to get a second opinion.

Trafalgar Law, his life is now in your hands. Do with that what you will.

Sanji shoots back into the foray, blocking one of King’s attacks with a wall of blue flame before it can slice through Zoro’s side, already distracted with Queen.

“Vinsmoke,” King snarls, “there you are. Leave this one to me,” he instructs Queen. “I want his head.”

“Hey, you bastard! I already called him!”

“Looks like I’m in demand,” Sanji comments lightly, and Zoro just grunts from beside him, code for shut up. 

In the following tussle, Zoro manages to strongarm Queen through a series of walls while King clamps his beak around Sanji’s torso like a vice, flying out of the building and high into the night sky, readying to piledrive him straight into the rocks below. 

Sanji kicks out, managing to burn one eye just in time for the pterosaur to squawk and drop him. He tumbles to the ground and somersaults neatly across the terrain, then springs to his feet and dusts himself off. “Well, nice to meet you too. I can see why you and the swordsman always go for each other.”

“Say it to my face again, Vinsmoke,” King tells him.

“What? You a masochist or something, Lunarian?” King’s face twists with pain. Sanji pins him with a look of disgust. “Yeah, that explains the BDSM gear. Getting off in the middle of a fight is nasty work, don’t you think?”

“Do you ever shut up?” King asks flatly. “And I thought Queen’s own blubbering couldn’t get any worse.”

Sanji grins, flipping his fringe in a practiced, smarmy motion. “Ooh, am I getting on your nerves? Hate a mean, hot blonde?”

“Queen is not hot,” King intones.

“I don’t see you denying I am.”

“I’ve had enough of this, boy!” King darts forward, fast for his size, still with pterosaur-precision. Sanji jumps back, exoskeleton sliding into place, hardening into finality. They blitz each other; dodged hit after dodged hit, a game of speed. King slows down to aim a more powerful attack and Sanji disappears, functionally invisible without exertion. His stamina is rapidly depleting. Sanji needs to wrap this up soon, or buy some time.

King darts in, exchanging the defensive flame on his back for increased speed and attack power, and Sanji kicks off the sky to plunge and tap off his unlit back, cracking the leather armor. 

King catches himself in midair, halting his freefall back towards the earth with his downy black angel wings held aloft. “Figured it out?” he snarls. “Think you found some sort of weakness to exploit, boy? You wouldn’t be the first to die to one of my people afterwards, high on complacency.”

“Not that I don’t believe that, but I feel like there’s gotta be some reason you’re the last one of your people left.” It’s another shot in the dark, a cruel one, but Sanji’s never been above using his words as weapons. It does the trick. King’s fists tremble with sparking rage, and Sanji is more than happy to fan the flames of that anger. “Where’d they all go, King? Where did you go?”

“Shut up! Imbecile! Brat!” 

King corkscrews upward, blinded, fury and grief layered masks on his face, and Sanji easily twists out of the way of his sword. Sanji kicks off the air, pivots, gets his thighs around King’s neck and twists. Pop. The leather mask cracks at the neck, at the seam of his profile, and snaps off in pieces, revealing, quite possibly, one of the most beautiful faces Sanji has ever seen twisted into hideous agony. 

King shakes him off like a dog with water, white hair splayed out. The dark of his skin is stamped with the crown of a laurel down one side, ever the victor; perhaps ironic. 

“You wouldn’t know,” King starts, wounded, hand raised almost protectively before himself. “You don’t understand what it’s like to have your race hunted for sport, to be captured and tortured like that.”

Sanji could respond to that. No, he doesn’t understand, humans who look like him haven’t been hurt in that way. He hasn’t been captured for that— for other things, certainly, caged since— no, before birth even. Tortured similarly. But this is time loop number who-the-fuck-knows and he’s had no luck with Chopper, and the faster this is over the faster he can die and go find Law next time around, so Sanji’s only response, while King monologues on and on, is to launch forward with almost all the speed of a laser and stamp the sole of his lovely leather loafers onto King’s soft throat. 

Burn, burn, burn.

Burn.

After the fight, King fallen off the island and down into the waves below, Sanji lays on his back and stares up at the galaxy in the sky. Onigashima mid-flight towards the flower capital has a beautiful vantage point to the stars above. They look close enough to touch, if he reaches out. White-white-white stars. His mother told him, once, that they were the result of someone pulling a blanket over the sky when it was bedtime, and poking pinprick holes through it so they could still see. Sanji, at age three, used to imagine that mysterious, all powerful stranger as himself. He would, with his chubby little digits, messily drape his downy duvet over the outlines of the sunny sky, quill and ink-blackness over blue, and use the sharp end of a safety pin to poke stars through. He would probably prick himself in the process; rubied beads of blood to accompany the stars, bandages across his fingers to accompany the bruises across his ribs. 

Sanji almost falls asleep, dirt at his back and night over his chest. Then, a crack of black lightning breaks through the sky, cleaving the starry blanket into two. Sanji jolts upright, haki pinging wildly. The familiar staccato of his heart starts to sing. Up, there, up on the roof, in the midst of boulders and demolished earth, a white figure has started to rise, haki crackling around it like electricity.

Sanji knows, with a certainty so strong he feels it in his very soul, that it’s his captain.

Luffy supposedly died and now rises again, sky parting for him like the heavens themselves are making way for him to resurrect. 

His rubber heartbeat sings, dances, plays music like the beating of a hundred-thousand drums.

And Sanji’s heart beats in tandem with it. 

8. 

Law finds him, as he always does. Sanji doesn’t know how he does it. Some twist of fate, perhaps, some anchoring event within these loops in the same way that Robin always saves him and Luffy always… does whatever that was. 

Sanji is trying to ignore it, for now. He has more pressing matters to attend to.

Before Law can dump Zoro in his arms and leave again, Sanji locks his arm around his thighs like before, belting him to Sanji’s shoulder.

“I’m stuck in a time loop and need your help,” he blurts out. 

“...I don’t see why I would be your premier choice for help in this.”

“I’m looping because I’m dying. You’re the doctor, aren’t you?”

Law’s eyes narrow. “Let me down.” Sanji’s grip loosens, allowing Law to hop gently off; he adjusts Zoro’s weight on his other shoulder. “Do I have to take your word for this, or do you have any real proof?”

“You believed me the last few times,” Sanji mutters. “But yeah, whatever. You’re here to tell me to splint Zoro up real good because you’ve got other things to take care of. Want any more predictions?” Law looks about to respond, but Sanji smiles without humor and says, “Tough luck. I’m not a fortune teller.”

“Pleasant today, aren’t you? Alright. I’ve chosen to believe you.”

Sanji breathes a sigh of relief. He turns on his heel, and Law follows him to the backroom he always uses on this side of the building to patch Zoro up. He sets the swordsman flat on a wooden table, lights a candle with his lighter then his cigarette with the candle. “The majority of the time I die,” he starts, “It comes out of nowhere. I feel like I'm getting a heart attack before I pass out and it rewinds.” Sanji lists his symptoms simply, just as he had with Chopper.

Law hums, tapping one inked finger onto the elbow of his crossed arms. “Firstly, those aren’t the symptoms of a—”

“Heart attack,” Sanji finishes with him. “Slip of the tongue, my bad. Forgive my imprecision.”

Law ignores the waspish tone, likely chalking it up to stress. Instead, he leans back against the creaky wooden walls, cobwebs dusting his shoulders from the unused space. His smile is lazy. Intrigued. “Look who wasn’t bullshitting about time travel. You’ve talked to me before.”

“Chopper, actually. This is my first time talking to you, Traffy. Call it a last resort.”

“Flattering.”

Zoro groans from his place on the table, stirring in his slumber. Law moves to go to him, but Sanji bars him with an arm. 

“Go back to sleep, Marimo,” he calls over to the swordsman, the words gentler than Zoro normally warrants. This too, will reset though, so he allows it, as though the tone of his voice will do anything to ease the sting of what must come next. To Law, he whispers, “He’ll die. Then come back next loop, anyway. I need you now, more than he does.”

“Normally the patients don’t triage themselves,” Law tells him, voice equally as soft. But he steps back, leaning against the wall once more. Together, the two of them stand and listen to the sound of Zoro’s breathing slowing, life stifling and fading before their eyes. 

“I’ll be your second opinion,” Law tells him. “And when I forget this ever happened, I expect you to remind me.”

“Last resort,” Sanji corrects. “And you have a deal.”

Law adjusts his hat, then arranges Kikoku carefully besides the cooling body in the room, the only place elevated. In the dim candlelight, he prints his thumb onto the underside of Sanji’s wrist and presses two fingers to the pulse at the base of his throat.

“You couldn’t use your Devil Fruit?” Sanji asks, stiffening against the cold of the fingers.

“I prefer to save my stamina where I can. Now hold still.”

Sanji lets the man perform his interrogation, lets him manhandle him without restraint, lets him and his shitty pine-tree cologne, somehow still sharp under the tang of blood and sweat, invade his space and tries not to think of North Blue doctors poking and prodding him in the dark of his nightmares. He doesn’t hate Law, but he’d be lying if he said he found the man pleasant, either. 

It’s when Law’s hands start slipping the jacket of his lovely suit off that Sanji panics. He grabs those hands, cold and chapped even through the thin of his gloves; surgeon’s hands. “Just use your Devil Fruit,” he snaps, and can’t determine if it’s steady or trembling. “You don’t have to be saving your stamina for anything, we’ll only be here for another few hours anyway.”

“And then I’ll die and you’ll reset,” Law says. “Alright.” 

He shakes Sanji’s hands off and steps back, a respectable distance away. Sanji shivers and tries not to feel small and vulnerable. Law holds out on hand, palm down, fingers domed, and a light starts to gather at the epicenter underneath. “Room,” he rumbles, and a sphere expands outwards from there, growing to encompass Sanji in a blue light. It’s a bit like being underwater. Cyan-pthalo-cobalt ripples, magic or waves, ocean or Devil Fruit, casting the area around him into stark relief. Sanji can feel parts of himself he didn’t know were tense, untensing. “Scan.” The light enveloping him shifts, a thin ray of energy parsing him from head to toe. When the room dispels, he doesn’t feel any different. 

Law mutters some esoteric Northern vulgarity Sanji has only ever heard come from the mouths of sailors employed on the Germa flagship as a child, before machines and motors made rigging and snail maintenance obsolete practices. As hard to find as catpiss in shitstained snow. It sounds more poetic in their mother tongue. Rhymes, even. 

“Nothing’s wrong with you,” Law says.

“Some scientific bullshit,” he explains. “Don’t worry about that.”

“I’m less worried and more intrigued. I don’t suppose you’ll also remember to remind me of this, when you're out of your time travel situation?”

“Nice try. It’ll be a cold day in hell before you get me under your scalpel, Traffy.”

“Hell is always cold,” Law tells him plainly. Sanji is unsure whether this is a reference to a mythos he only half-remembers, or the good doctor’s own personal beliefs. “I’d like to hold you under observation, see what I can find in the next few hours that might cause you to go from an eerily healthy individual to a dying one.”

Not unlike what Chopper had suggested. Sanji regrets coming to Law, but it’d be a waste to start over again.

“Fine,” he consents, and that must be all the permission Law needs to teleport Kikoku into his hand, unsheathe the longsword, and poise it delicately over Sanji’s sternum.

“This won’t hurt.”

True to his word, it doesn’t. Law summons a room and makes it gentle. The cursed blade’s steel cuts through him cleanly, slicing through his body with all the elegance of Sanji’s favorite knife paring buttery salmon. When the room departs, Sanji’s heart is beating slow and strong to the rhythm of his natural pulse in Law’s hand, cubed like gelatin. 

Law holds it out, an offering. Sanji laughs. He feels he’s been given a dead bird by a cat, only the fluttering of his heartbeat, uneven with surprise, is painfully alive. He steps back and wards it off with his cigarette-hand. Law pulls it closer to himself almost protectively, like he can’t believe Sanji would do him the dishonor of not wanting to see his frankly freakish handiwork. 

They proceed, after a moment, like nothing odd has happened. Law asks, “How long do you have until you die?”

Sanji does the math, counting on the tips of his fingers. “Three hours, maybe a little longer.”

Law nods. He sits against the floor, dust and thin entrails of dilapidated spiderwebs giving chase, and gestures for Sanji to sit too. “When was the last time you slept?”

Sanji tries to do the math again, but fails as the exhaustion suddenly hits him when he sits. He’s been awake for at least a day straight, body but not mind resetting with each loop, and that’s without counting all the preparations for the raid the night before, the week before, everything before. He’s been running on fumes ever since Whole Cake, and now he’s running on the barest wisp of his own fraying sanity. His head thumps back against the wall, eyes struggling open. A tsunami of fatigue laps at his feet, trickles up his spine. Crack. Burn. Regrow. A crewmate dead on a tabletop a few feet away. A pirate-surgeon holding his soon dead heart a few inches away. Luffy, on the rooftop, dead-dead-alive, but no, he’s too tired, he doesn’t want to think of that anytime soon. From all systems go-go-go for weeks on end to the endless refresh of death.

“Rest now, Black Leg,” Law’s low voice murmurs, and it’s enough to guide him like a shade to the river of sleep.

When Sanji wakes up, it’s to the sharp ache of pain in his heart; when Sanji wakes up, he’s feeling perhaps five million times better than he was before, despite how short a time it was.

“Finally awake?” Law asks, but the words don’t warrant a witty retort back. Sanji is in too good of a mood.

Instead, he uncurls from his fetus-like position with his back against the wall and cheek against the ground, and stretches his neck and limbs out. Even his muscles feel more limber than before. Law watches him from where he sits, one leg drawn up, the other perpendicular and bent on the floor; his arm rests on the knee of his raised leg, longsword propped up between it and resting against his clavicle. Law’s golden eyes glint as he watches the beating heart in his palm, now picked up in pace to an unimaginable degree. 

“Learn anything new, Doc?”

Law shakes his head almost imperceptibly. “The next time you loop, find me again, and tell him this isn’t medical. Our scans will come away with nothing, until suddenly they don’t. Everything in your body is a chaotic, jumbled mess— it isn’t natural. Your heart is driving it.”

“Layman’s terms?” Sanji asks, smiling despite how grim the other sounds. He taps out a new cigarette, holding it between his lips as he goes to light it. 

“If I had that answer this would be easy,” Law tells him neatly. “Your heart is the problem. There’s no drugs, no anxiety— unless you were panicking in your sleep, but looking at you now I doubt that— nothing. The working theory would be psychosomatic, if that added up.”

“But nothing adds up,” Sanji surmises. “I remain, as ever, an unknowable mystery.” He sighs. Smoke curls up through the air in front of him, gray little dancers wisping upwards in his vision. “The ladies love a man who keeps them guessing.”

Law snorts. Sanji’s grin widens, he can feel it when he brings a hand to his mouth for his cigarette, and suddenly the pine-blood-sweat scent of the doctor’s cologne isn’t so nauseating anymore. He’d always loved the fresh evergreen and snowy bluster that rustled through his windows as a child.

Together, they pass the next minutes in silence. 

Sanji can feel Law’s surgeon’s hands on his bare heart as it pumps away between his fingers. They watch the image in morbid curiosity. The squid-spill ink sprawled across Law’s knuckles, DEATH illuminated by candlelight, now wrapped just so around Sanji’s own heart, is laughable. Gothic romance turned comic by Sanji's eighth death. There’s something poetic in it, maybe, if he kneads the dough of this story long enough. Delivered by Northern hands, raw and bloody as a squealing newborn; cradled into tattooed death by them too. Sanji has died seven other times but never like this.

Somewhere in between all that, similar hands clothed in nitrile cut into his bones and tried to implant the same strength his siblings were already born with, titanium-diamond skin. Somewhere before all that, similar hands looked inside his mother’s poisoned womb and fitted him into something different: more, less, worse, better, nothing at all.

Law stays with him this time, throughout the night, Sanji’s heart cut out into his palm, watching it kick up one notch then another, giving chase like it has something to run for, like a carriage horse pushed beyond its limit. 

Sanji watches himself die in a North Blue surgeon’s hands and is a phantom of himself: 21, and six, and in utero all over again. 

9. 

“Is it psychosomatic?” Law asks.

Sanji shakes his head, then thinks better of it. “Well that’s what he— you— thought. But there’s nothing to prove it.”

Law drums his fingers on the hilt of his longsword. His furred hat is resting in his lap, brim stained wine red with dried blood. The matching spot against his temple has tousled his hair. Sanji sits beside him, both facing the table where Zoro lies, alive-again now dead-again. 

He let Zoro die in this one too. Heard his breathing slow and stop, knowing that by the next loop he’ll come back, as always. The same way Sanji does. The same way Robin always saves him and Law always finds him. The same way Luffy always dies but never dies, because he comes back, always-always-always, and takes Sanji’s heartbeat with him.

Maybe it’s time to think about it.

“A few hours from now,” Sanji starts softly, pinching the edge of his fringe with his thumb, “Luffy is going to die up on the rooftop, fighting Kaido, and then he’s going to come back. It’s all… electric. Like a thunderstorm of haki, up there.”

“And this relates to your condition?”

Sanji shrugs. “My heart rate usually starts picking up around the same time, so who knows. Maybe.”

“It’s our only lead thus far,” Law says, and whips off the floor, securing his hat back onto his head. Sanji stands too, watching as Law pockets his own heart for safe keeping. The void in his chest aches to be filled, but he lets the doctor have his way.

“Why exactly are you coming with me?” Sanji asks, following the other’s lead down the hall. 

“Call it intuition. I don’t exactly know what’s going on, but I can hazard maybe a quarter of an accurate guess. We’re going to find your captain.”

Law may be able to teleport them up to the roof, but there’s no guarantee it wouldn’t be directly in the path of an incoming attack, so they race to find the familiar staircase instead. Sanji, fingers over the hole in his chest, focusing only on following Law’s long strides, almost runs face-first into a wall of blue blubber.

Law skids to a stop beside them. Jimbei, hair curling loose and mussed down his face, kimono disheveled, is facing off against a man in a mask. A Tobi Roppo, Law tells him, don’t waste your time, Black Leg. But the masked man is saying something. Something about Luffy’s Gum-Gum fruit, liberated by Red Haired Shanks from a Marine warship. Something about a dream, and a god, and a hands-clasped prayer for freedom for slaves and all those enchained.

Sanji remembers the books Reiju brought him while interred in the dungeons, snuck in from not only the library but from local bookstalls trampled under Germa’s boot as it sailed from land to land. Picture books; bound recipes; thick and dusty tomes he couldn't hope to read at age seven; folk tales scrawled under illustrations and stolen straight from felled houses, still sticky with dust and the fingerprints of the dead. The name Nika, he realizes, is achingly familiar. 

The North Blue is a place infamous for its strife. The East is the most peaceful of their seas, the West the most colorful. The South is poor. The North has been wartorn for as long as any living creature there drew breath. Perhaps the cold fronts impelled from that side of the treacherously raised Red Line brought with them anger. Charcoal tempers with flint as trigger, war breaking at the slightest drop of a pin. Few regions there enjoyed tranquility, and what halcyons did exist were only omens for disease. Silent killers, fearful quiets, the boom-bang-crack cacophony of canons and bayonets. There’s a reason Germa’s naval kingdom of mercenaries found so much work up North, cycling between one explosive nation and the next. Such a place is the perfect breeding ground for myths of hope to seed, propagating what sparse light they can to desolate lands.

Sanji remembers seeing the hand-inked image of a God dancing before a sun behind the bars of his childhood cell, running his scraped-raw fingers over the word freedom and feeling the weight on his head like a brand. 

Surely, it can’t be.

But Luffy is up above him, soon to be dead, soon to be alive-again, soon to be a maelstrom of lightning-crack haki dancing in the epicenter of a typhoon, rubber drumbeat heart taking Sanji with him, up so high he loses oxygen in the metaphoric heaven and dies. 

“Sanji,” Jimbei glowers, yanking him out of the way of a finger-pistol so close that it tears through the stitching at his shoulder. “What are you doing? Get out of here if you won’t fight!”

“You’re wasting time, Black Leg!” Law warns, but Sanji shakes his head.

He can’t explain it, but he’s figured it out. Almost. Not quite. Maybe. His pulse is thudding heavy in his arteries. The next time the Tobi Roppo lunges for him Jimbei isn’t fast enough, and the fingers go straight to Sanji’s ribs and bounce off with a metallic clang, bent wrong. The resulting banshee scream pounds into Sanji’s ear as the man crumples to the floor behind him, cradling the broken hand close to his chest. 

“Could you always do that?” Jimbei asks, mild with shock. 

Sanji shrugs. He jogs back to Law, who’s watching him with a level of intensity usually only reserved for specimens meant to be delicately dissected, pulled apart one film-thin layer at a time. Sanji holds strong against the urge to shudder and keep his distance. He is no longer a child. This is not a man who he’ll let hurt him. “Gonna keep sending me those bedroom eyes, Doctor, or are we actually doing this?”

“That’s a word for it,” Law mutters, golden gaze flickering back to the Tobi Roppo. They continue their ascent, but not with any amount of peace. “Care to explain what all that was earlier?”

“Maybe next time,” Sanji says lightly, which is code for never. 

“I’ll figure you out one of these times. For now, if you won’t tell me then at least tell your archaeologist. I’m sure she’ll know more about that folk god.”

“I could be thinking about Luffy and his Gum-Gum fruit.”

“I doubt that, unless— well. Do you think Straw Hat is your god?”

Sanji doesn’t answer. He glares at the billowing feathered coat before him, flapping behind Law as his long strides eat up the stairs two at a time. He watches, in real time, image created in stark focus thanks to the warning from his observation haki, as a giant pink figure comes crashing through the wall and cannonballs through, crossing the wreckage and taking Law with it. His snow leopard-print hat goes flying through the air, and a cobalt feather or two from his coat gently floats down where they land, secured by static friction against Sanji’s hair.

Was that red blur latched onto the pink Eustass "Captain" Kidd? Was the pink an Empress of the sea? 

Sanji catches Law’s hat, skywalking over the chasm left in the wake of that disaster, a dozen steps ripped straight out of the staircase. A few seconds later, the hat in his hands turns into one bloody and bruised Trafalgar Law standing a hair's-breadth away, panting, eyes wild. 

“I’m going to take care of that,” Law huffs, “and make sure that idiot, Eustass, doesn’t knock down the whole palace trying to tame that old hag.”

“Don’t call women hags,” Sanji interjects. Law stares at him flatly.

“Get up to Straw Hat on your own, and figure out what the hell is going on. Talk to Nico Robin next go around. And don’t forget our deal.”

Before Sanji can even confirm, Law teleports away again, and the snow leopard hat reappears in his pinched grip. Sanji spins it around, watching the furry print shift in the light. He places it on his head. Sweaty. Blood caked onto the rim. Not his style. He sets it on a wooden stair post and keeps running.

When he finally makes it to the rooftop, he just manages to dodge the sight of a massive azure dragon curving around Onigashima. Sanji finds nothing but barren terrain and a small figure in the distance. White like moonlight, crackling with the force of his own will: Luffy. 

Come back to life all white and red in time with the acceleration of Sanji’s own heart, soon to die in Law’s pocket.

Sanji goes to him, feet pumping, blood singing in his own ears. Excitement runs through him like sparkling electricity, belied by something noxious and heavy slinking behind. The presence before him is ozone-thick, pressurized power, viscous in his lungs. He’s swimming through it. Lightheaded, his feet slow then stop, staring up at the figure using cold, hard rock like a trampoline, bouncing off rubber boulders as even the sky bends to his will. He feels, suddenly, a little like crying.

The little figure in his book looked like that, brown-black ink on singed pages, lines thin then thick with the unsteady scrawl of human-hand, dark blotches where the pen paused, overwhelmed with reverence. Is that what this is? Reverence?

God, Sanji learns, is a man by the name of Luffy. His captain, Oh, Captain, chosen by the slender fingers of sun, plucking him out of time. 

It doesn’t make sense, yet nothing has ever made more sense. Of course Luffy, who Sanji has always likened to sunshine because of his bright disposition and insistently sunny smile, stubborn like fusion-cores and heated as one too, would be the type of person who would grab that little image out of a North Blue book’s pages, by the wrists of a bird-boned runt of a child, and bring something as ridiculous as prayers for a magical God of freedom to life. 

Sanji wipes at his eyes, swallows down the lump in his throat. When next he looks up, the opaque carmine pupils of God are staring right into him.

It bounds towards him, this bright white figure reflecting the moonbeams like a second sun— Luffy— no, Nika. The pressure heightens, weighing even the air in his lungs like lead. It’s terrifying. It’s exhilarating.

“Sanji!” Nika giggles, teeth sharp and white, hair curling around his sun-kissed face like smoke off the tail of a cigarette. His hands, when he reaches out to hold Sanji’s own, are calloused but squishy, the same rubbery make as Luffy’s. “What are you doing up here, silly? Everyone else is supposed to be down there!”

“Came up to find you,” Sanji chokes out, words thick in his throat. 

Nika’s hands squeeze his own limp ones. Sanji expends active brainpower to remind his fingers to work, to squeeze back. “Did you bring me food?” Nika asks, head cocked to one side, bouncing lightly off the unsteady rubber ground the same way Sanji does as he skywalks on air. 

“Sorry, Cap. Didn’t have the chance.”

Nika pouts, though the edges of his mouth twitch with amusement. “I’m hungry,” he whines. “Sanji, I’m hungryyyyyy.”

The resemblance is uncanny. Sanji smirks, wry. “I didn’t know Gods got hungry.”

Nika-Luffy ignores him, easily distracted by the dark void under the lapel of his suit jacket. He pushes into Sanji’s space, fingers digging into the empty cube where a heart should be— pounding hard, thudding like the desperate last death-throes of a bluefin before it’s butchered on the block— and Sanji tries not to wince. At the twinge of pain that comes from having someone dig into your insides, but also at the warm yet icy sensation of the clouds encircling God brushing against his skin.

Suddenly, he feels too real.

“What happened to you?” Luffy-Nika gasps, eyes comically wide. “Did you lose a fight? Did someone steal your heart? Wait, wait, wait— was it Traffy? It looks like his power!”

“I need your help,” Sanji tells him. God shoves his face into Sanji’s own, smile bright. Light effusive. 

“Duh, I’ll help you! Whatever you need, of course I’ll help! Kaido’s gone somewhere, so we got plen’y of time!”

He sounds drunk. God sounds like Luffy on his sixth mug of the strong stuff they save for post-country-saving banquets, loose-lipped and affectionate, high on life and painkillers and clapping his hands in childish glee at every mediocre joke. God also sounds like he won’t be able to help at all.

He’s too real.

Red on white on brown, hair and clothes a cloud around him, glowing inexplicably from within, phosphorescent, dashing all Sanji’s previous musings about re-reflections of moon-reflected-sunlight. Nika glows; Nika is sun and freedom and real, right here before him, with his fingerprints still stained with blood from rooting around Sanji’s heart cavity, thumbing at some debris on Sanji’s forehead with a dopey grin.

“You’re killing me,” Sanji tells him, blood thrumming in his ears, skull pounding, heart so fast and hard he can barely feel anything but himself. 

“What?” Luffy giggle-cackles-laughs. He flips over, slow-motion, like a fish through water or a man through space. 

He doesn’t get it. Luffy doesn’t get it. Luffy doesn’t know he’s killing Sanji, until his laugh booms from his chest to Sanji’s, taiko-drum reverberations conducted through the air like copper, and Sanji slumps against the scar tissue cross on his chest. 

“Sanji?” Luffy laughs, worry shining in those carmine eyes, holding his face up with rubbery hands caked with blood under the fingernails, squeezing Sanji’s cheeks like he’s a toy, as he slides faster and faster into unconsciousness, heart long gone over the edge.

10. 

The tenth time Sanji gets his face smashed in by Black Maria, he still wants to take her out for a picnic. No one can say he’s not a romantic. No one can also say he isn’t trying not to think about the surreality of his last loop.

Sanji contemplates, feeling his nose crack and blood gush down his chin, if he should just let this run its course and loop again until he feels steadier. Then he remembers Trafalgar Law telling him to reach out to Robin, and the thought of getting to see that beautiful face assuage his worries drives him into action.

This time, when she shows up, Sanji is ready.

His body still twinges, not Raid Suit readied yet, Ifrit Jambe still minutes off— if he tries now before the exoskeleton dovetails into place under his skin he’ll just cremate himself alive, down to the bone, ashy black dust up to the knob of his knee— so as soon as Robin sets him free he activates Diable Jambe instead and uses the increased speed to grab her, one arm under her knees and another at her shoulders; hoping the surprise of it allows them a clean getaway. They pass Brook on the way out, his hollow eyes startling in his skull. Sanji looks over Robin’s stunned stare to call out to his oldest crewmate.

“Sorry Brook! You should head out of there too!”

Sanji doesn’t set Robin down until they reach the hallway, leaving the screeching and squealing of furious arthropods and human lungs behind. “Well, that was startling,” she says, one delicate hand on his shoulder to steady herself.

“All for good reason,” Sanji promises. “I may have a problem that requires only your tender assistance, my dear.”

“Color me intrigued.”

Robin’s eyes narrow, a smile starting to curve her full lips. Before Sanji can even begin to lose himself in the sight, tension melting out of his shoulders, they’re assaulted instead by Law and Zoro’s sudden appearance above him. 

“I’m going to actually kill you next time,” Sanji snarls, and does as he did before, belting Law to his shoulder by his thighs. “You: stay. I need your help. Time travel shit. If you complain after you’re the one who told me to find you again, then I’ll kick your skull in.”

Law blinks down at him, golden eyes wide like a cat’s. “Hello to you, too, Black Leg. To what do I owe the honor of getting to experience you with an entire log shoved up your ass?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Sanji lets him down, and Law hovers near him, sufficiently hooked by his terse words. “What is this about time travel, now?”

“I’m also curious as well.” Robin says. “What could possibly be going on in that golden head of yours?”

“Many, many things, my love. But I’ll spare you the dirty details.” He winks, salacious. Robin’s smile remains unchanged. 

The room he always uses is a bit small for 4 adult bodies, but it’s quiet and now almost comforting in its familiarity. Robin perches beside Zoro’s dying body on the table, one bronzed leg crossed over the other, the hem of her short kimono riding up her thighs. Sanji sits at her feet while Law sits a few feet away from him, leaning against the wall. It’s the same spot he’s always partial to. 

“And you believe this Sun God Nika is our Luffy?” Robin asks, recounting the last of his tale. Sanji nods in confirmation. 

“Hell of a story,” Law tells him. “Now where’s the rest of it?”

“Quiet down.” Sanji commands, exhaustion weighing his words. He shifts where he’s sitting cross-legged and neat, elbows resting on his knees. “You’ve had your turn at solving the mystery already. Let my beautiful Robin try instead.”

“The surgeon has a point,” Robin says. She leans her weight back on one hand, hair falling over her shoulder, seemingly undisturbed as she jostles her own crewmate’s dead body with the motion. “You’ve omitted some details.”

Sanji cools, chastened. His emotions are sluggish in his chest. The ovals of his nails are cracked as he digs them into the floorboards. 

“Come now,” Robin sighs, and a hand sprouts from the ground to tilt his chin up with graceful fingers. “The next loop around, we’ll forget anyway, yes? Sanji, you were brave enough to call for my help earlier— what happened to all that courage?”

He swallows around the thickness in his throat. Softly, voice a rough mess, he mumbles, “I’m afraid I lost it somewhere between deaths 2 and 8, my angel.”

Robin’s eyes soften. “I’m here to help, Sanji. Never to hurt you. Never to worsen your pain, when I can see how much you’ve suffered through already.” The sprouted hand slides along his jaw, cupping it, and Sanji leans into the uncalloused softness and the flower-garden scent. He closes his eyes.

“I know. Sorry. I just… It isn’t a very fun story.” When he opens his eyes Robin is smiling at him.

“We’re familiar with those, aren’t we, Traffy?”

Law tenses when they both turn to him, having just watched their interaction with no small amount of curiosity. He lowers his hat over his eyes but nods. Affirmative. 

Sanji does his best to recount what he can, choosing to tell the tale in as stoic and detached a manner as he can muster, skimping on the details. It benefits no one if he breaks down sobbing partway through and wastes all their precious time before the loop resets. 

“That’s what Queen’s been using against you in all these fights?” Law asks when he’s finished, jaw tight, looking more agitated than expected. 

Sanji levels him with a lazy smile, as steady as he can under the circumstances. “Have moral qualms about emotional blackmail, do you?” 

Law glares at him, vicious, more than the quip warrants. Robin clears her throat from before them; says, “As a reminder, we are stuck, for the moment, in a circumstance where you could disclose anything without worrying about the consequences of a permanent confession.”

“He would still remember,” Law says, voice taught. “All it sounds like is that you want to know my secrets.” Then he sighs heavily and scrubs a hand down his face. Chooses his next words with no small amount of hesitation. “It’s nothing. Just… you weren’t there on Dressrosa, Black Leg, but you weren’t wrong about what you said before you left. About Doflamingo.”

Sanji can faintly recall spitting out something to Law about him having personal investment in the Warlord before taking off for Zou. The connections snap into place quickly, quietly, circuits aligning.

“Hard to fight at your best when you keep getting trauma flashbacks, huh?”

Law rolls his eyes, raising a finger at him in a vulgar gesture, serif-printed A inked above his knuckle.

“Now, now,” Robin chides, eyes glimmering. Her sprouted hand still strokes Sanji’s cheek; plays with the curtain of his fringe. “It seems to me that your altered bloodline elements may have something to do with your continued deaths, especially since they only recently activated. The real question is: what does that have to do with our captain?”

“Is he even your captain anymore?” Law asks. It’s not a taunt, just clinical. Sanji feels a surge of protectiveness at the misgiving anyway, despite the fear he felt just standing before Nika earlier. 

“I feel terrible your own crew has to suffer a prickly mortal for a captain instead of a God,” he mutters, and Robin’s fingers pinch his cheek.

“He has a point, Sanji,” she says. “We don’t know for certain what happened. If your assumptions are correct, then that means Luffy’s Gum-Gum fruit is actually a… mythical Human-Human fruit, perhaps? There have been many cases of zoan-type Devil Fruits taking over the personality of their owners once awakened. It’s often a grotesque fate.”

A chill runs up Sanji’s spine. Ice-water dashed upright like a glacier melted in reverse. 

“And then there’s the matter of whatever’s connecting you two,” Law interjects. “Queen worked with your father, didn’t he—”

“Judge is not my father.”

“He worked with Judge in the past. That means he probably knows more than he’s letting on, about what kind of experiments they did on you. You said you have, what? A little over two hours left now? I say you go after the guy, rile him up into talking and get as much information out of him as you can, and get back here to us.”

“What, by myself?” Sanji snaps. “Trafalgar Law, Captain of the Heart Pirates, Surgeon of Death, sending the dying man off like an errand boy. Last time you helped me out, you know.”

“This time I’ll be too busy resuscitating your swordsman to play babysitter.”

“That’s unnecessary. He’s already dead.”

“Not quite. If this is the breakthrough you need to solve this, then I doubt any of you will be happy to leave the time loop with a dead crewmate.”

“Oh, how thoughtful,” Robin coos. 

“This isn’t supposed to be the last one,” Sanji says. “That was the whole point of the…”

“Sharing your story?” Robin purses her lips into a serious expression, the dip of her cupid’s bow deepening. “If it’s any consolation, if this really is your last loop then I would be happy to gather us three together again to reset the balance. I don’t believe the surgeon or I have cleared our debts the least.”

Law sends Robin an incredulous look, like he can’t believe she volunteered him for something like this. Then, he turns to Sanji with a sour face and restates his request to go after Queen.

“Go to hell,” Sanji tells him calmly.

“Sanji,” Robin calls brightly, the sprouted hand on his cheek popping out of existence with a flutter of flower petals. “Fetch.” 

“Woof.” 

Sanji stands, dusting himself off and stretching his legs, exoskeleton creaking. “Kiss for good luck, my love, my angel?”

He knew the answer before he asked. Robin smiles at him, the sort of smile older women give to men much too young for them, flattered and mysterious and powerful; Sanji lives for the condescension. The crook of her eyebrow alone could power him through a thousand more deaths. 

Before he goes, he catches sight of Law’s face, jaw slightly ajar and staring at him like Sanji’s the dumbass here. 

“Jealous?” Sanji asks, placing a cigarette between his lips.

“Your relationship just eludes me,” Law answers, jaw clicking shut. “Every minute I spend with your crew is one where you give me a bigger headache.”

Sanji smirks. “Aw, come on, you know you love us.”

“Untrue, forever and always.”

Robin’s giggle, watching the conversation ping-pong back and forth, is just as perfect a sendoff as a kiss would have been. Sanji blows her one through the air anyway, and steps out of the room.

He shakes himself out, nerves firing, settling into place. Off to Queen he goes.

He tries not to think about what happened the last time he faced Kaido’s lead performers without Zoro. He tries not to think about anything at all, as he holds up his Raid Suit canister and dangles it tantalizingly before Queen.

“You want to test yourself against this? Come fight me alone, without your bird-brained backup.”

“Fine with me!” Queen cackles, lumbering after Sanji like a dog with a bone, following him down the distant corridors with a shot bullet here or there, trying to singe Sanji and missing. “What do you want, Vinsmoke?” he finally asks once they’re mostly alone. “Curious how I know Daddy dearest?”

“Maybe I’m looking for embarrassing memories to tease him with,” he answers, trying not to gag at the words. 

“Tough luck!” Queen screeches with glee. “Put on your little suit, and then we’ll talk.”

Sanji hesitates. His exoskeleton has already snapped into place, his genome permanently altered, his epigenetics activated without reversal, and yet he’s still scared of ruining himself with that damned suit. If this really is the last time he loops, then surely Luffy wouldn’t want him to come out of this a monster. But he may not come out at all otherwise.

Sanji dons the damn suit.

Queen stomps with excitement, brachiosaurus feet shaking the very foundations of the corridor. “Yes! Yes yes yes yes yes! Now, show me what you got, Vinsmoke!” 

“I did what you wanted, now talk!” Sanji yells back, breathing stifled under the black mask. Under the entire skin-tight suit, anxiety crawls like bugs along his arms and up his neck. He is not like his brothers; this will not do him in.

“What’s there to talk about? You wanna know how your Daddy wasted a third of our funding chasing after some pipe dream?” Queen’s mechanical arms whip around, slamming into the walls as Sanji darts out of the way. “How he made you, his test-tube babies, based on my prototypes for artificial Devil Fruit enhancements—” A thick, muscle-corded tail nearly takes Sanji’s head off as another pneumatic limb tries to hold him in place. “I’ll forgive him for being an idiot, but never a plagiarist!”

“Devil Fruit enhancements?” Sanji pants. Trying to draw out more, whatever he can, even as he steams and suffocates in this stupid suit. “Your arms are made with, what, Devil Fruits?”

Queen scoffs. “Clearly not— that was yet another failed project on the way to that fucking Clown’s SMILE fruits. Which are already just failed replications of that old man’s synthetic Devil Fruits.”

Sanji lets out a low whistle. “Damn. The whole lot of you were failures, huh? Makes me feel better about where I stand.”

“Like you could even compare to us,” Queen hisses. His tail lashes angrily behind him, knocking into a column and sending dust raining down on them. “This is just the nature of science: one million failures before one success. And I’ve had my success.” He raises his arms up, mechanical hands whirring and gnashing together. “Clown had his. Judge has you lot. And where’s Vegapunk? Holed up on some government facility, being monitored like a hawk, still tinkering away at his pie-in-the-sky hypothesis about dreams, like the senile old man he is.”

“Dreams?” Sanji ventures, hoping Queen is feeling either generous or irritated enough at Vegapunk to share more.

“Dreams, dreammatter, dreamstuffs, whatever. Can you believe the guy? Only an idiot would try to quantify something like that. While he was off playing government dog and Caesar Clown was off shooting up on Punk Hazard, or whatever the idiot does, I figured out the real secret to modifying anything to do with Devil Fruits. And clearly, Judge did too.” Queen’s eyes flash behind his sunglasses, and a wicked grin unfolds across his unsettling dinosaur snout.

“Judge doesn’t mess with Devil Fruits,” Sanji says, cautious. “Germa 66 is all science.”

“Oh, idiot boy,” Queen croons, “What do you think you are? What do you think Judge stole my research for? 

“You know how to augment Devil Fruit modifications so that they stay stable, little Vinsmoke? With the only thing that keeps them at bay. A sweet little thing like you, you’ve heard the story, haven’t you? You eat a Devil Fruit, and the Ocean Devil gets mad at you, and steals away your ability to swim.”

A little beep goes off at his earpiece. Concentrated oxygen floods under his mask. Oh.

Oh. 

He isn’t breathing properly.

The Raid Suit comes to life, steadily monitoring his heart, his breath, making sure his vitals are stable, all as Sanji tries his damndest to fend off the incoming panic attack.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he chokes out. 

“You aren’t very smart, but what more should I expect from one of Judge’s barely human hybrids. It’s a miracle you’re even sentient. No,” Queen tells him, “You make your little test-tube babies with synthetic Devil Fruit cores and distilled bloodline elements, then balance it all out so it doesn’t eat up the human fetus from the inside with whatever fragments of the Ocean Devil you can get your hands on.

“You ever tasted your own blood, kid? Was it salty? I’ll be the first to tell you: that’s not normal.”

Sanji goes lightheaded. He knows the tang of his own blood, running from his nose or from a split lip. Salty-tangy-bitter with sweat. Of course he’s never tasted anyone else’s blood. Of course he intimately knows his. 

Salty. Tangy. Bitter.

That’s normal.

He’s not— he’s not a fucking Devil Fruit hybrid.

“You ever seen a Devil Fruit?” Queen asks. “They all have those little spirals on them. Curled into the golden ratio, just like nautiluses. Just like your silly eyebrows.” He lumbers forward, smile stretching inhuman across his snout, and Sanji realizes with startling clarity that he’s enjoying the distress Sanji’s in. Sanji hasn’t had the upper-hand in a very long time; Queen is toying with the son of a man he hates as some twisted form of fucked up retribution. 

Sanji pulls a coward’s move: he runs.

He doesn’t fight Queen this time, even though he knows he always wins. He can’t be around him for a second longer. Instead, he takes off down the hall, back to where he knows the others are, vision unsteady, heart pounding in his chest, unable to tell whether it’s his own despair or just Luffy-Nika making music with his arteries. 

Robin waits for him outside the room. She’s leaning back against the wall, a pile of snapped bodies at her feet and keeping a lookout for more, when Sanji almost barrels right into her. The sight of her wide eyes and her flower-garden scent calm him enough to deactivate the Raid Suit. It slides off his body like water and back into the canister, which clatters to his feet loudly, echoing in the hall. 

Robin catches him when he falls to her, one arm around his back and the other at the nape of his neck. She guides his chin to hook over her shoulder. 

“Are you hurt?” she asks, and he feels more limbs sprout to inspect him for injuries.

“I’m fine,” Sanji rasps, trying to push himself away, but Robin holds tight.

“Stay with me for a minute. Feel my breathing? Mirror it.”

She runs her fingers through his hair, stroking up from his nape in massaging movements. Sanji tries to mimic the rise and fall of her shoulders and chest, breathing slowing down until they synchronize. Her other hand rubs comfortingly between his shoulder blades.

“What happened?” she asks softly, her voice tickling his ear.

Sanji buries his face into her neck. “He… he knew things about me. About what I am.”

“Not who?”

Sanji shakes his head.

“That’s alright,” she whispers. “That’s okay. We’re all monsters here. You’re in the arms of a devil right now.”

He stays there for a bit longer, and Robin lets him. Sanji’s heart hurts in his chest. Thuds loudly against the inner walls of his ribs. It’s not because he’s delighted the gorgeous Nico Robin is embracing him, nor because he’s panicking; it’s because above them all, Luffy is alive again. Sanji is oddly grateful for it. For the connection to his God-captain, from even here, knowing they’re connected. It’s a comfort.

When Sanji straightens up after a short few minutes, pulling away reluctantly and drying his face, Robin smiles at him and holds out her arm to take, nodding to the entrance of the hideaway. Sanji takes her arm, and together they step back into Trafalgar Law’s makeshift operating room.

Law stands beside the table, Kikoku in hand, coat discarded somewhere behind him and sweat shining upon his brow and bare, tattooed chest. His button-up is discarded at the foot of the table, turned from turmeric-yellow to maroon by the amount of blood it was so clearly used to mop up. Zoro sits up on the table, pale, shiny new stitches criss-crossed over his ribs, his arms, his bare legs; every inch of skin Sanji can see, which is quite a lot. Zoro’s old robe has been used as something of a modesty shield, lying wrinkled across his lap. His bronze skin is smeared with red from a poor clean up job, and some blood still shines in wet, thimble-sized puddles along the table. 

Zoro and Law both turn to look at them when they enter, sporting twin looks of exhaustion. 

“Black Leg,” Law mumbles, eyes assessing him from head-to-toe. “You look like shit. Please tell me you’re not in need of immediate medical assistance.”

“Other than the fact that I’m dying? No.”

“Fantastic. Now, what did you find?”

Sanji balks, eyeing Zoro with apprehension as though he’s not the one Sanji has known the longest between all of them. Unoffended, Zoro just rolls his eyes. In a voice that’s raw and faint, he rumbles, “Traffy filled me in on everything. Might as well just spill the rest.”

“I hate you,” he tells Law without much emotion. Then he recounts his encounter with Queen, including all the gorey details of his newly revoked personhood. 

“I didn’t realize that was possible,” Law murmurs, rubbing his thumb along his beard. He sat down during the explanation, the same place as always. Kikoku rests in his lap in a way that’s likely comforting. “What Devil Fruit could they have isolated to give you these specific powers?”

“Or what combination of Devil Fruits,” Robin says. “I have a few in mind already.”

“Guys. Focus.” Sanji is tired. His heart hurts, it’s getting harder to breathe, and his extremities are getting numb and cold already. His fingers are shaking so hard he can’t even light a cigarette anymore. He lets Robin do it for him when she sprouts a hand on the wall, nodding gratefully at her as he hands the lighter off. 

Law sighs. He tips his head back onto the wall behind him, resting his hat lower over his eyes as though to shield him from what dim candlelight they have in here. “How the hell are we supposed to know if this relates to Straw Hat?”

“You said Vegapunk was tinkering with the idea of dreammatter as it relates to Devil Fruits?” Robin asks. At Sanji’s confirmation, she crosses her arms over her chest and frowns pensively at the ground. “Nika is the god of sun and freedom. Both of these things are not very often linked in theology, though it’s not difficult at all to see where a link might have been formed. 

“We’re unsure where exactly these myths may have originated, seeing as that Tobi Roppo mentioned hearing them from enslaved fishmen in Mariegoise. And yet, you also recall seeing similar tales in the North Blue. This implies either trade between those areas, some kind of path for these stories to travel, or… well. That Nika the god really existed, and all these people across the world individually happened upon him. Considering the Red and Grand Lines barring most inter-Blue trading, the latter seems surprisingly plausible.”

“Why is it surprising?” Sanji didn’t catch all of what Robin said, the edges of a headache creeping along his skull, but he gets the gist of it. “I saw Luffy up there. Nika. Whatever. That was a God if I’ve ever seen one.”

“You may not have grown up with traditions of religion in Germa 66,” Robin says gently, “but gods are often more mythological figures than reality. The anthropological answer is that these figures exist to provide answers to natural phenomena such as disease or storms, from a time before science allowed us to understand such things, or to simply bring hope to communities. They’re a coalescence of the needs of the community. To put it another way…” Robin smiles sideways at him, one finger held up. “You can consider gods to be the result of people’s wishes and dreams. Vegapunk’s hypothesis about dreammatter would slot nicely into here, wouldn’t it? As Devil Fruits, so are gods.”

“That makes sense…” Sanji says, but he’s still having trouble following it all. His cigarette is limp in his fingers, and he still hasn't taken a drag yet. He slides down the wall, wood rough on his back even through all his layers, and sits heavily on the ground. From beside him, Law shifts his hat so his eyes are visible again.

“That’s a fair point of view, Nico Robin, but you’re missing one thing in your analysis.”

One of Robin’s perfect eyebrows arches up. “Oh? What would that be?”

“Faith.” Law’s golden eyes are bright despite his exhaustion. “You’re too reliant on your pathologizing. You don’t understand the bone-deep wishes of people who do believe, who’ve felt God at their side before.”

“Are you a believer, Surgeon of Death?” Robin’s smile is probing, and perhaps would be combative to others. 

Law shrugs. “I believe as far I can, then pray blindly for the rest. All I know is that some things don’t always add up, when you’re cynical like that. Black Leg saw God up on that roof. Who am I to argue with that?” 

Sanji’s head lists to the side, blackness creeping into the edges of his vision. He’s getting tired. Death is closing in yet again.

“No,” a new voice says. Zoro has spoken up for the first time this entire conversation. Sanji forces his eyes open and sees the swordsman staring at him, single eye sharp and insistent. “Cook. Hey, cook. Look at me. Whatever you saw up there? I don’t care if you think it’s god or not. That’s still Luffy.”

Sanji can’t hold on any longer. The pounding gets louder, harder, more painful, and it all rushes past his ears as his vision goes black.

11.

Sanji awakens with a goal in mind. 

He goes through the motions, familiar, rote by this point. Robin-Law-Zoro. Fighting Queen in the performance hall, Ifrit chasing blue up his leg, knocking the dinosaur out then— with no small amount of satisfaction, still aggrieved at the last loop— stamping his burnt footprints across his snout. He leaves King for Zoro, when the man wakes up. 

By the time Sanji makes it all the way up to the rooftop, he’s made brilliant time. It’s barren yet again, but this time without the livewire crackle in the air. There is nothing alive here at all.

Sanji finds Luffy cratered in a clearing, dust and debris scattered about, not even breathing when he takes off one leather glove to hold a finger under his captain’s nose. Not even the faintest stir of air. 

Sanji sits beside him, legs crossed neatly. He removes his suit jacket, folding the material into a square of thick, soft material, and slides it under Luffy’s head. His hair is damp with sweat and blood. Sanji runs his fingers through it, combing out the snarls while he waits. Watches a faint breeze start to wind through the strands, the edges leeching of their dark color. Like dipping a pen in water, ink seeps out of Luffy’s hair, pigment leaving it colorless and white. Sanji feels it turn between his fingers, curls floating, half-cloud half-divine. It’s warm and icy. When Sanji pulls his hand away, frosty crystals line his pinkened fingers. 

A grin stretches slowly across Luffy’s lips.

His chest startles, snapping from concave to convex, like there really is a drum inside. Sanji lays a hand over his own heart, feeling how it tries and fails to follow the uneven metronome of Luffy’s own, like a child running after its siblings with stubby legs. Clumsy. Sluggish. 

Haki snaps around them like lightning, black cracking through the sky, thunderous, pounding, ear-drums aching with the blows. Luffy spasms on the ground. Sanji has never seen someone have a seizure before, but this must be what that is: unsteady-jerky-painful movements, head banging back onto the earth, limbs locked up. The ground morphs to rubber under his feet, and Luffy’s body turns into something looser too. Still spasming, but less stiff. Stretchy limbs elongating and shortening with the rhythm of his own heartbeat. It’s every song Sanji has ever heard and more. 

Luffy springs up from the ground in one strong motion, cartwheeling through the sky, giggling in one big rush of breath as his lungs suddenly start working again, finally alive-alive-alive again.

Sanji scrambles to his feet and watches Sun God Nika, his captain Monkey D. Luffy, laugh like a maniac, high as a kite. He bounces from boulder to boulder, trampolining up higher than Sanji would have thought possible, until he’s just another speck among those stars. He runs up against the moon just like the image from that book back North, limbs akimbo in dance, in joyous run, spinning against the backdrop of reflected sunlight. Sanji calls for him. “Nika!” he says, voice catching in his throat, blood cold as he yells for God-not-God. Whatever you saw up there, it’s still Luffy. 

“Luffy!” Then louder, confidence building, blood warming, no longer so choked up: “Luffy!”

A rush of air blitzes past his face, the ground springing at his feet, and all of a sudden Luffy is before him with a delighted grin.

“Saaaanjiiiiii!” he calls, voice falling over itself in high-pitched glee. “What are you doing up here?” Luffy laughs. Grabs Sanji’s bare hands and steadies him on the wobbly terrain, dances. Pulls Sanji along and manhandles him through the motions, really, as his feet trip and tumble over the spongy earth, and then Luffy springs off with a flick of his feet and carries Sanji up-up-up with him, spiraling above the ground. Sanji, lock-limbed, counts his breaths and skywalks, tapping off the air where he can to steady himself.

Luffy’s grin widens, face open and shining with happiness as Sanji half-plays along with his dance. Less a waltz and more a flailing of limbs. 

“Isn’t this fun?” Luffy asks, carmine eyes vortexes as he leans in. He flattens a palm over Sanji’s chest, spreads his fingertips warm over where Sanji’s heart is threatening to beat out, and the persistent pain calms a little. 

“Yeah,” Sanji says, breathless, words stolen from his lips by the wind. He’s having trouble remembering why he came up here. Focus. Focus. 

“Where’s Kaido?”

“Down in the palace— no, wait, Luffy, don’t go, not yet.”

“But I need to beat Kaido.” Luffy smiles at him, innocent, head cocked to one side like a bird.

Sanji swallows thickly, mouth dry, courage caught in his throat. “I need your help. Luffy, Kaido can wait. You can beat him and save everyone else later, but right now I— I need you. Help me first?”

Sanji feels ill with it. Feels sicker than he ever has been before, feverish and panicked, anxious nausea leaden in his gut. How dare he, asking the lynchpin of this revolution to put Sanji’s own life above everyone else’s down there, above the entirety of Wano’s? But he remembers Luffy drenched in the sticky syrup-rain of Whole Cake Island, sweet and unsettling, eyes dark and fierce as he demanded to know what Sanji actually wanted. As he demanded that Sanji be selfish, and then smiled at all those terrible parts of him.  

That was not a fluke. Luffy’s eyes, still opaque carmine, still cloudy with Godhood, light with a protective fire under the joy. 

Luffy grins at him, just as dark and fierce as Whole Cake. “Of course I’ll help you, Sanji! What is it? What’s wrong? What do you need?”

Sanji is so relieved he doesn’t know whether to cry or to laugh. Instead, he just sputters out something nonsensical and dips forward, leaning his forehead against the icy warmth of the crown of Luffy’s cloud-halo hair for an indulgent second before he pulls back. “I’m stuck in a time loop, and whenever you come back like this, my heart speeds up so hard it hurts and I die.”

Luffy settles a hand over Sanji’s heart. “Does it hurt now?”

“No… No, it doesn’t. It’s still beating harder and faster, but it doesn't hurt as bad now.”

“So you’re already getting better? That’s great!”

“I don’t know,” Sanji confesses. “I don’t get it. Why it’s better now or why…” Luffy waits for him, grin patient as he bounces them through this sham of a dance, somersaulting through air.

Last time he came up here he was so terrified he couldn’t breath, air vacuumed out from his lungs. Now he’s peacefully speaking with the same boy that jumps around his kitchen and causes a ruckus as he steals food, launches himself onto his back and waits for the ocean to drag them both under until Sanji pulls them back. 

He’s closer to God than he ever thought he’d get, yet simultaneously not. It's just Luffy. 

Sanji thinks he understands what Robin was getting at, earlier. God as a coalescence of prayer; Luffy as a coalescence of all his dreams. His childhood wish for freedom, for a family who loved him, for the All Blue which has always been about nature and wonder and magic. And here he is. Lightning and dancing and resurrection. A song in the shape of a wish.

Maybe this is why he’s trapped here, in this never ending loop, chained to God’s own heartbeat. Chained to this cyclical death-resurrection, some ouroboros of incomplete resolve. Sanji was made to be a Devil Fruit, somewhere between a human and a dream and the Ocean Devil itself, and he is as all dreamers are, beholden to Nika. Beholden to God by his own will.

“I’m not human,” Sanji tells him softly. “Judge made me into a Devil Fruit. Or tried to, at least.”

“That’s silly,” Luffy says. He pokes Sanji’s cheek. “You’re Sanji!”

“I’m a fucking science experiment that shouldn’t even be sentient. He… he made me into something that shouldn’t exist…” An abomination that goes against the laws of nature. If that’s what his brothers are, then surely that’s what he is too, isn’t it? Unnatural, unreal, something which should be dead.

Luffy stretches back, suddenly, then with the snap of rubber his head butts right into Sanji’s face.

“Ow, Fuck!” Sanji yelps.

“You’re such an idiot! I just told you that doesn’t matter! You’re Sanji. You’re my cook.” 

Sanji stares at him, at the serious eyes betraying the goofy grin on his face, at the haloed curls floating around his cheeks. Luffy doesn’t care. Of course he doesn’t. He’s never cared. No matter what happens, he has that surety of self— that unshaken certainty within him, of his dreams, his wishes, his desires, his core Luffy-ness. No matter what happens, he always falls face-first into it. Even now, demigod, fully God, something else entirely, he’s wholly immersed himself in the Nature of who he is. Dancing with Nika, laughing with Nika, feeling his heart race under the rubbery canopy that Sanji’s own fingers are spread across, warm and hatched scar-textured skin. It doesn’t hurt him, this Nika-ness. It’s adrenaline. It’s life. It’s what brought him back.

So Luffy is not God— he’s a man who ate God in the form of a fruit. Just like Sanji is not Prometheus’ human-fire. Just like Sanji is a man who ate fruit in the form of a dream, in his mother’s womb near-death, the leftovers of all his brothers’ scraps. 

Sanji lets his heartbeat run, and run, and run, play and dance with Luffy’s own through the night sky, fast and hard and killing him but never painfully.

“Luffy,” he tells Nika, “I’ll play with you. But after this, you have to let me go. We have work to do, right? Delivering freedom to everyone around us?”

“That’s my dream,” Luffy says, smiling something dopey and fond. “I want everyone to be free and happy, just like me!”

Sanji laughs. He squeezes Luffy’s rubber hands like toys and feels affection bubble up in his chest, bright and vivacious, and has fun. He loves being up here, with Luffy, with God, with his captain, getting to toss and tumble around in the sky, dancing to a song emanating from the very cavity of their chests.

“Yeah, Cap, I know. And I’ll help you with it, just like with becoming Pirate King. Just like how you’ll help me find the All Blue.”

“Alright,” Luffy says. “Play with me now, and then I’ll see you on the other side.”

So Sanji goes. Dying and yet more alive than he’s probably ever been before. Giggling and playing like children in the playground of a pin-pricked-blanket night sky and trampoline earth, backlit by the gently watching moon, and suddenly he’s a little kid again, and he’s not dying, he’s just going to sleep.

“Bye, bye,” Luffy-Nika calls as Sanji’s eyes close with finality. “Find me next time you want to play!”

0.

This is his last loop. Sanji knows this with the same level of certainty he knows that Luffy will beat Kaido up on that roof.

“In another life, I would have loved cooking for you,” he tells Black Maria solemnly, and her brass-knuckled fist stops just short of his face in sheer confusion. Then he takes a deep breath and yells for Robin.

“Thank you, my love!” he calls out to her as he runs away, and as he catches a glimpse of their skeletal companion too: “Thank you, Brook!”

Sanji is nearing the performance hall when he stops in his tracks, observation haki flashing, and catches Law and Zoro. This time in his arms, thank you very much, and not on his shoulders or back. He sets Law down as he goes through his usual spiel, already distracted as he readies to move, but Sanji grabs him before he can leave. 

“Law,” Sanji calls, holding his hand tight in a vice-grip. “...Thank you. And be careful.”

Law looks at him strangely for a moment, golden eyes glinting under his furrowed brows and the shadowy brim of his hat. Lifetimes pass within those two seconds, and Sanji almost thinks Law remembers everything that’s happened over and over again, but then he seems to shake himself out of it.

“I wouldn’t worry about me, Black Leg,” Law tells him, mouth twisted into a smirk. “Stay safe, yourself.” He gives Sanji’s hand a quick squeeze then tears off down the hall.

Sanji watches him go and knows that, for his own conscience, he’ll have to find the man once all this is over and relay a few key points of this whole time travel thing. The bare minimum to fulfill his end of their should-be-null deal, even though Law will surely push him on it more once the time comes. That’s a later problem.

Now, Sanji neatly bandages Zoro up to the best of his ability, resembling a slightly slimmed roast ham now, rather than the egregious bulk he’d started his loops with. The rest progresses as normal. Sanji doesn’t want to tamper too greatly with these events, knowing he won’t get a do-over. Yet, sometimes he still can’t help himself.

Even though Sanji has no need to slip a transponder snail under the swordsman’s haramaki while he bandages him up, even though he doesn’t need to call Zoro— doesn’t need to ask to be killed, since he knows he won’t lose himself, even if he’s doing his pathetic best to believe he’s still Sanji under all the experimentation— he still does. 

Plus, Zoro is on his way to his closest brush with death yet, and Sanji hates to see a crewmate suffer. Even the mosshead.

“King’s a Lunarian,” he says as soon as Zoro picks up. “Attack him when his fire goes down, he’s faster but less durable.”

“Huhhh?”

“I’ll explain later. See you—”

“You’re being weird as hell, you can’t just say that and leave! How did you know?”

“I just said I’ll explain later, you brainless swordsman!” 

Zoro grunts, tinny from the small mouth of the transponder snail. He doesn’t say anything more, and Sanji wonders if he should even go through with the old promise, but Luffy’s certainty of his personhood battles against Sanji’s own creeping fears. He wants to believe, and someday he will, if his captain has anything to do with it, but just in case… he should have some sort of contingency plan.

Sanji tells Zoro to kill him, if he comes back wrong. If he ever doesn’t act like himself. Just in case.

Zoro doesn’t respond; the only sounds from the other end of the line are the metallic clashing of swords and occasional grunts of exertion. Sanji clicks his tongue, irate, and yells into the snail. “Whatever, we’re wasting time! Get back to it, Mossy.”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Zoro finally says, voice ragged, “but don’t die out there, Curlybrows.”

“Worry about yourself,” Sanji snaps. Then he clicks the call off and turns back to Queen.

It’s not a difficult fight. Ifrit Jambe kicks to life with a flick of his heel, and Queen is predictable after nearly a dozen of the same fight. Sanji dispatches the dinosaur, bathed in blue; helps O-Some and her pet mouse, who he learns goes by the darling name of Chuji; tries to help the other geisha, leading them out to evacuate, when the strain of time travel, even reset, lassos onto him. He’s still exhausted, running on fumes, vision swimming before his very eyes. The last thing he sees before he passes out, body recoiling from the effort of snapping back and forth from raw and untouched to activated exoskeleton so many times, is an adorable dove gray snout nuzzling him in concern.

Later, without the looming threat of death and the repeat of a time loop, he comes back to consciousness. 

Sanji awakens to the feeling of his heart drumming through his chest, loud-hard-thump-thump-thump, music rattling down into his bones. His arteries sing with it. Dance with me, play with me, laugh with me. You and me, we are made of the same stuff:

Hearts and dreams and hands-clasped-tight-together prayers for freedom. 

And it doesn’t hurt. It’s who he is.

Somehow, he knows, Luffy is back.