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The festive atmosphere, Sanji thinks, is somewhat soured by Zoro screaming like an animal. Arlong Park has fallen, and the feeling of floaty relief has grown into a full on celebration as the sun sets. Special ingredients and dusty bottles of alcohol are pulled out of secret places, a bonfire crackles on a sandy stretch at the edge of the village, music and delirious laughter comingle in the air—it’s the feeling of people locked away for eight years finally stretching their legs. Sanji has tried fresh calamari on a bed of greens, and shark fin soup, and sweet tangerine liqueur followed by a terrible local wine, and he’s feeling, in the best way, like a bobbing cork in the waves. But it just throws a damper on things, when he’s chatting up another gorgeous woman and the swordsman starts wailing out in agony from the doctor’s house as if he’s being sewn back together. Which, of course, he is.
“There’s a nice view at the edge of the orchard,” Mizuki—no, Minori—says, smile tugging at her mouth, and Sanji’s in heaven; he’s bobbing his way up to the moon. Mizuki has the cutest dimples he’s ever seen; she’s a vision; she’s asking him: “Do you want to go see?”
Zoro screams impolitely in pain from the open window behind them.
Sanji glances back over his shoulder. “I’d love—” The scream just keeps going. The lung capacity this man has is frankly uncanny.
“Do you—”
Sanji tries to summon that floaty feeling again as the scream comes to an agonizing end. Minori forms a silent little “wow” with her mouth.
“Well, that was certainly—” Sanji starts, and Zoro makes a softer sound of distress.
“So if you—”
“He’s being awfully attention-seeking, I think.”
Mizuki looks taken aback. “Who’s attention seeking?”
“No one—nothing,” Sanji says hastily. “Let’s focus on M—” He bites off his own word. “Let’s focus on you. You were saying something. You first, please.”
“Minori,” she says flatly. This is a moment where Sanji can either admit that he forgot her name, or play it off smoothly. He opts to play it off.
“What?” he asks. Masterful.
“Right. It might be easier to talk somewhere more private?” She wrinkles her nose apologetically—that’s cute too. It’s so cute. Sanji’s in hell.
“Oh absolutely, I—” Sanji takes a long sip of terrible wine. Now it seems too quiet. It’s easier to tell how things are going when Zoro’s treating them all to a live indexing of his pain levels. “The thing is I really just need to hear—” he gestures over his shoulder, “--that guy scream a few more times, and then I’m good. I’m so good. I want to hear all about you.” He summons a winning smile.
“Ok?”
“Just one more screaming bout. He might be yelling now? There’s a pitch modulation.” Sanji moves a flat hand to illustrate the different scream levels.
“Uh huh. I’m gonna—” She gestures with her tankard. “It was good talking to you.”
“It is good. Let’s keep talking.”
“I’m going to catch you later, actually.”
“How about I catch you now?”
“Later.”
What is Sanji doing? Why is this angel leaving? “I’ll be right here. For two days minimum, if you ever—”
She giggles. “Got it, got it. Noted. I know where to find you.”
“This is my spot.” What is Sanji saying? Why is here next to the doctor’s house his spot? His spot should be out on the edge of the orchard with a gorgeous red-tinted sunset and also a Minori—Mizuki?--who is now giving him a wave as she disappears into the crowd. She’s out of sight incredibly fast. Angels truly do have wings. Maybe Sanji could catch up—he could find her again, make it up to her—
Zoro screams like the sound is being torn from him.
Sanji lets out a long sigh and turns to the open window.
The thing is, Sanji’s seen the swordsman fight to the death twice now, and he never made so much of a sound of complaint. So this just seems unprecedented. Sanji draws closer to the house; the doctor is muttering something about the stitches being almost done, but he’s pretty sure the doctor’s been saying that for an hour at least. It would be nice to know how much longer it’s actually going to take. What did Mihawk put in that blade of his?
Sanji sits down on the wood porch and lets his head thud gently back against a pillar. He sees a freckling of stars across the twilight sky and waits.
Hours later, darkness has fallen heavily over the town, and the party is still raging. Usopp is inexplicably piling tables on top of each other in the town square, and people are dancing on the packed earth, and Sanji balances another earthenware bowl in the crook of his arm as he winds his way through the crowd.
“Oi! Luffy!” he yells approvingly when he sees that the captain has somehow turned himself into a human swing for a couple of kids, noodle arms dangling from a tree branch, and Luffy roars back in joy before he flings himself up.
The doctor’s house is quiet now. At first it was a profound relief, when the doctor finally exited and gave him and a surprisingly serious Usopp an update—the stitches are done, the doctor was waiting for the swordsman to faint but somehow he didn’t, all that’s left to do is wait for Zoro to gain his strength back. But now the doctor has a plate piled high with food in the middle of the revelry, and Usopp is stacking tables, and the lack of screaming is unsettling.
The lantern light that seeps out through the windows is dim. Sanji maneuvers the front door easily with his foot, finds the medical room by the smell of antiseptic and dried blood. There’s a clean side table at least, and Sanji sets down the bowls one by one—stew from a cauldron over the fire, rice from Nojiko’s pot, fresh sliced melon, a fish that Sanji had easily scaled and seared when Genzo had brought out a few from his ice box. It doesn’t really matter to Sanji that the swordsman eat, but everyone else is being surprisingly cavalier about it, like all Zoro has to do is sleep this off.
“You still with us, Marimo?”
Zoro is facing away from him on the small bed, his large shoulder rising and falling in sleep.
“Marimooo,” Sanji draws out in monotone. He uncovers the stew and lets the steam rise, presses into a potato chunk with the spoon to make sure it’s soft. “Mihawk got you down so bad you can’t eat?”
Zoro grunts in annoyance, and Sanji grins at the bowl.
“Come on. Sit up. You won’t get better without a good meal.”
It’s not a position that Sanji ever really explicitly planned on finding himself in—sitting on the side of a bed whose sheets are creased with lines of blood and pus and coaxing a bleary pirate into eating pieces of expertly fileted fish. Zoro’s patterned shirt lays open, and his chest down to his green haramaki is thickly muscled and horrifyingly stitched—Sanji avoids considering both qualities the way you step over a mess on the kitchen floor when your hands are clean.
“S’good.”
Sanji hums in satisfaction. “I know.”
“Feels weird to eat fish now,” the swordsman rumbles, closing his eyes with the effort of swallowing.
Sanji breaks off a delicate piece of fish meat for himself and shrugs. “If you hadn’t sliced and diced that octopus, I’d be dead. So think of it as me returning the favor.” Sanji takes another bite, licks the greasy remnants from his fingers and realizes that Zoro is watching him now. There’s just so much presence to him. It’s odd. No one should draw this much attention without saying anything. Sanji returns to deboning the fish. “Let’s do the stew next,” he says decisively.
When all that’s left of the fish is delicate bones, Sanji trades out the bowl, and he can feel the swordsman’s eyes on his back, on his hair-shadowed face as he breaks the potato and carrot chunks into smaller bits, on the line of his slacks against the white sheet.
“You like stew?”
Zoro lets out something of a laugh, then seems to regret it, closing his eyes again. “It hardly matters,” he says, pain laced.
“Of course it matters.”
“Beggers can’t be choosers.”
Sanji wraps a small towel under the bowl to keep it from burning Zoro’s hands. He’s learned the hard way that patrons usually don’t have quite his heat tolerance. “Maybe no one should be a beggar.”
Zoro’s doing that looking at him thing again.
“What?” Sanji says finally, eye contact as aggressive as he dares. Zoro raises an eyebrow. He doesn’t blanch. Sanji’s the one who glances down at the stew again, gives it an angry stir.
Thankfully, the process of eating scant spoonfuls of stew and keeping it down seems to demand all of the swordsman’s attention. Sanji retrieves the rice to mix in once there’s room in the bowl, folds his leg comfortably in on the sheet while he waits. When Zoro loses steam, Sanji scrapes a few thick spoonfuls for himself from the bottom of the heavy bowl. It’s excellent.
Two nights later, Cocoyasi is still celebrating, and Sanji is doing great. He’s kissed three women tonight, maybe more if you count chivalrous kisses on the hand, and all three of the women are giggling about something over near the dessert table while Sanji drains another glass of cider, which must mean they’re really into him, and he’s yelled out his devotion to Nami several times, so even though he can’t find her anymore he’s pretty confident that that’s going great too. The lights around the town are a sheen over his vision, the crickets and the crackling of the bonfire loud in his ears.
“My compliments to the chef!” someone cries—another lucky lady ready to be swept off her feet, no doubt.
“Coming, beautiful!” Sanji calls winningly. He gets a little tangled in his own legs as he gets up and lights a cigarette to compensate.
He’s sweeping his eyes over the crowd when a plate on a dish-laden table catches his attention. It’s small and rather unassuming next to the other platters—cubed melon draped in paper-thin sheets of ham. Sanji moves in to get a closer look; cigarette smoke hits the back of his throat pleasantly before he lets it stream back out. It’s a beautifully arrayed dish, small edible flowers from the nearby fields tucked in between juicy green melon pieces. Who was it who wanted to try this?
“Luffy!” Zoro yells somewhere nearby, followed by a burst of general laughter. That’s right. It was Zoro.
Sanji grabs the plate clumsily, and melon juice pools on one side to wet the flower petals. He carries it over to where Zoro’s been stationed on a front porch with bandages across his chest and takes hold of a pillar to sit next to the swordsman. He’s looking remarkably elegant before his foot slips out from under him and he crashes down on his ass.
Zoro barks out a laugh. “Steady there.”
“No one asked you,” Sanji snipes, stubbing out his broken cigarette in annoyance.
“Didn’t think you were a lightweight.”
Sanji rubs his twinging lower back in annoyance. Zoro is the worst, actually. His earrings chime against each other when he throws his head back to laugh, and he’s probably going to try to steal Nami from her rightful place as Sanji’s forever beloved, and one time he looked at Sanji when Sanji was stirring stew. “Shut up. Have some melon and ham.”
“Have some what?”
Sanji, motivated by dislike and at least one bottle of cider, stuffs a melon cube squarely into Zoro’s mouth. Zoro makes a sound of protest, and Sanji claps the flat of his palm over his mouth.
“Good, isn’t it?” Sanji says.
Zoro stares daggers at him while he chews. Sanji turns his attention back to the plate in his lap and feels a bit melty, thinking about tangy sweetness anchored in dry-cured ham.
“What was that for?” Zoro starts, and Sanji stuffs another melon cube into the swordsman’s mouth. Zoro protests louder, consonants muffled.
“I’m a chef. It’s my job,” Sanji mollifies, juice running down his wrist bone.
“S’not your job,” Zoro seethes, cheeks bulging, and Sanji covers the swordsman’s mouth with his hand again.
“Chew before you speak.”
Zoro looks like he might kill him. It gives Sanji, briefly, a shivery feeling of satisfaction.
“You need to get your strength back, Marimo.”
Zoro swallows. “I don’t need to be hand fed. By you of all people.”
“What do you mean by me?”
“You’re a girl-crazy loon.”
“I’m a gallant hero of the people,” Sanji snaps.
“You can’t be heroic for ten seconds.”
This time, Sanji presses his thumb into Zoro’s mouth with the melon while Zoro glowers at him, and Sanji feels triumphant. This is winning. Something wet probes the pad of his thumb before he pulls back and turns dismissively to the plate again.
“Chew. You have terrible manners.”
“This is torture,” Zoro says thickly, clearly enjoying the fruit. Sanji picks up a smaller piece for himself, and the first bite is a nice little burst. Briefly, it’s pleasant for both of them. Zoro takes a few pieces for himself from the plate while Sanji ponders the merits of honeydew versus cantaloupe.
“If I wasn’t worried about my guts spilling out—” Zoro starts.
Sanji picks up the biggest piece he can find and stuffs it into Zoro’s mouth. He presses punitively against Zoro’s lower lip while the swordsman glares at him with melon in his cheek, drags his thumb to the side until a glossy line of juice runs to his jaw. “I’m eating,” Sanji says primly. “Have some manners.”
Sanji wakes up with his face pressed into something warm and gently moving. He has one leg draped pleasantly over someone’s lap, and there’s a strong arm holding him secure, steady breathing in his hair like whoever he’s straddling is asleep too. It smells like honeydew and sweat. Sanji’s still out on someone’s porch, and the dry heat of morning is annoying, but there’s a liquid contentment in him, a soft network of cotton bandages under his hand. He must have really gotten lucky with the women last night. He falls back asleep before he can precisely remember.