well i accidentally deleted it but fuck it we ball!!! someone asked for pet names so it's soft zosan hours baby!!!!!
x
It starts by accident which, honestly, is how most dangerous things start with them.
The Sunny’s moving easy through a bright and harmless afternoon, all blue sky and salt wind and the sort of peace that makes everyone on board faintly suspicious. Usopp and Chopper are arguing over whether a beetle could theoretically beat a shark and Sanji’s in the galley, halfway through lunch prep and one full cigarette into a very pleasant mood.
Which, of course, means Zoro appears. He never just walks into the galley: he materialises in it, like the room itself has developed a bad habit. One minute it’s just steam and chopping and the low hiss of oil in a frying pan and the next there’s a broad shadow in the doorway and the particular infuriating silence that means Zoro’s rocked up.
Sanji doesn’t look up immediately. “If you’re here to steal something at least wash your hands first.”
Zoro grunts the kind of grunt he uses when he knows he’s been accurately profiled and means to continue anyway so Sanji slices through an onion in clean strokes. The sun from the porthole catches on the knife edge everytime he lifts it and then he feels that familiar weight of attention.
Sanji sighs. “What?”
Zoro’s braced against the doorframe with his arms folded and shirt open at the throat, fresh from training, judging by the sweaty musk clinging to him. He looks annoyingly good for a man with all the elegance of a kicked door. “Hungry.”
Sanji snorts. “What a shocking development.”
“Thought maybe you had something.”
“I have lunch in forty minutes, same as every day.”
Zoro’s eye narrows a fraction. “That’s a no, then.”
“Correct, seaweed-brain.” He turns back to the board but he can feel Zoro still there, not leaving, just existing… harder. It’s stupidly domestic, this part of them: Zoro showing up before meals with all the patience of a stalking animal and Sanji pretending to object and then somehow, inevitably, feeding him anyway. It’s happened often enough now that the rhythm of it lives in the wood of the ship. Sanji reaches for the bowl at his elbow and fishes out a piece of roasted capiscum meant for garnish and flicks it toward the doorway without looking.
And then the whole world stops. The knife halts halfway through and Sanji stares down at the chopping board like it’s responsible for his tongue slipping.
He did not mean to say that. He means, obviously, that he uses endearments all the time, like sweetheart and darling and angel, princess and honey. They slip in and out of his speech like little blades wrapped in sugar and usually it’s part flirtation and part mockery and, sometimes, part instinct. He can call a fishmonger my dear and have it sound like a threat. But this? This is different and they both know it because he’s never called Zoro anything soft in his life that wasn’t sharpened first.
Zoro’s still chewing by sheer force of habit but he’s gone visibly unmistakably still. His expression has flattened in that dangerous, unreadable way it gets when something’s actually gotten under his skin. There’s colour climbing up the back of his neck and Sanji wants to fucking die. He clears his throat. “That was…”
Zoro swallows. “It was what?”
Sanji finds, to his horror, that he has no immediate lie prepared. “I call everyone that,” he says anyway because cowardice is an old, old friend at this point.
Zoro raises one eyebrow and it’s devastatingly, horrifyingly effective. “No you don’t.”
Sanji turns back to the board too fast and resumes chopping with enough force to qualify as aggression. “Well! Maybe I’m expanding my repertoire.”
“To include me.”
The onion under Sanji’s hand is no longer structurally sound. “You should feel honoured.”
Behind him, there’s the tiny scrape of Zoro shifting his weight. Closer? Maybe. The galley’s too small for this kind of conversation and way too warm, too full of scents and steam and the fact that Sanji can hear his own damn pulse in his ears.
“Love,” Zoro repeats after a moment, like he’s trying the shape of it without actually saying it to himself. “That’s new.”
Sanji’s mouth has gone dry. “Try not to get emotional about it.”
That gets him a rasp of laughter, quiet and still rough around the edges. “Right. Wouldn’t want to scare you.”
Sanji risks another glance only to find that Zoro’s looking at him in a way that should be illegal in enclosed spaces, like he’s found a thread and is deciding whether to pull.
Sanji drops his gaze first, furious at himself for it and finishes chopping in silence. He throws the onion into the bowl, stirs a pan harder than necessary and plates two slices of early bread he had not previously intended to share, shoving one at Zoro without ceremony. “There. Eat something and quit haunting my doorway.”
Zoro takes the plate, letting their fingers brush. Neither of them comments on that but when Zoro leaves he does it more slowly than usual and Sanji has to stand with both hands braced on the bench for a full minute afterward, staring into the middle distance while his brain repeatedly screams love?
x
It should end there but it doesn’t, of course, because once a line exists between them both of them are apparently incapable of not stepping on it.
Sanji slips up again two days later, this time on deck, where the weather’s turned downright filthy. The wind’s cutting hard over the Sunny’s rails and the sky above is all bruised grey and angry clouds. They’re between islands which means everyone’s gone a little restless and a little under slept, probably. The sea isn’t dangerous yet but it’s in one of those moods that makes the whole ship feel like it’s waiting to be tested.
Zoro and Sanji are tying down loose gear because if there’s manual labour to be done in bad weather they’ll somehow end up side by side turning it into a personality contest.
“You call that a knot?” Sanji snaps, hauling a corner tight. “My grandmother could do better and she’s dead.”
Zoro yanks a rope through a cleat with a little more force than strictly necessary. “Good for her.”
“She also had better balance.”
“You slipped twice.”
“I slipped because some asshole left the deck wet.”
“It’s raining, dumbass.”
“I know what rain is, sweetheart.” The word flies out sharp and bright in the middle of the argument and this time – this time – Sanji does mean to say it. A little. Maybe. In the sense that some petty vindictive part of him wanted to see what would happen and what happens is immediate.
Zoro’s hands stop, just long enough for Sanji to see the pause, the flicker, the way his shoulders go tighter before he resumes knotting the line.
Sanji’s own chest gives a treacherous little kick.
oh, he thinks. oh, that really works.
He should probably stop. In any sane universe he’d stop. Instead he adds, all false sweetness: “Need me to show you again? Since you’re struggling.”
Zoro straightens very slowly, rain beading on his jaw and running down the column of his throat. His hair’s damp at the temples, shirt sticking darkly to one shoulder as the storm light turns everything harsher, all edges and shadows. “Careful.”
Sanji’s grin is pure trouble. “Why. You shy?”
Zoro steps closer and, really, it’s just one single pace. But on a ship in bad weather? With the deck pitching underfoot and ropes singing in the wind? One pace is enough to change the whole atmosphere.
“Not shy,” he growls.
Sanji tells himself the jump in his pulse is the weather. “Then what?”
Zoro’s mouth tips at one corner, slow and dangerous. “Thinking.”
That… kinda throws him. “Thinking what?”
Zoro leans in just enough that Sanji can hear him clearly over the wind. “That if you keep talking like that I’m going to start thinking you mean it.”
Sanji’s mouth goes dry even though there’s absolutely no reason for that sentence to hit as hard as it does. He opens his mouth to fire something back – something smug or something quick – and gets nothing. Just a useless rush of heat all the way up his throat.
Zoro watches him fail with what looks suspiciously like satisfaction before he steps back and goes right back to the tarp like he hasn’t just detonated the air between them.
Sanji spends the next ten minutes tying knots so tight Nami later complains he’s trying to throttle the ship.
x
It happens in front of Law which makes it approximately ten times funnier and twenty times more embarrassing. They’re in the Polar Tang’s galley after a joint operation has gone sideways in the usual Straw Hat way: successful and loud and with maybe a little too much unnecessary structural damage which means Law’s made the tactical error of trying to debrief with them while they’re all still keyed up.
Sanji’s at the bench with a split lip and a much-needed cigarette, patching together coffee for everyone, Zoro leaning against the opposite wall, one sleeve dark with blood that’s mostly not his. He’s still wearing that expression he gets after a hard fight – too alert, too sharp, like his body hasn’t yet remembered it’s allowed to unclench, like he’s been dragged through the fight by the throat and come out wanting another one.
“The Marine unit regrouped faster than expected,” Law explains, voice clipped and precise, already fraying at the edges. He has the dead-eyed focus of a man trying to impose order on a natural disaster, which means he successfully wrestled Luffy into the infirmary. “Next time if I say wait for my signal –”
“Your signal took too long,” Zoro cuts in.
Law frowns. “It took eighteen seconds.”
“Yeah,” Sanji says, not looking up from the coffee pot. His own split lip pulls when he talks, making the words come out even sharper. “That’s long enough for a man to get stabbed.”
The room goes kind of still, even if not quiet. The Polar Tang’s never really quiet; somewhere in the hallway metal hums and pipes tick, the engine breathing through the walls. But the room itself – this little galley stuffed full of heat and antiseptic and post-battle adrenaline – stops dead.
Law blinks. Bepo, in the doorway with a tray of bandages, makes a tiny strangled noise and physically retreats backward out of sight.
Sanji finally glances over at Zoro properly, expression painted in all the false boredom he can manage, like he’s not about to throw a live grenade into the room and wait to see who loses a limb. “You’d know, darling.”
“Oh,” Zoro sneers, voice ugly with leftover fight. “We’re doing that still.”
Sanji flicks ash into the sink. “Doing what, Mossy?”
Law closes his eyes. The silence that follows has weight, sharpness, the sort of pressure in the air that makes normal people leave rooms and lock doors behind them because they know they’re not being cute. They’re doing what they do best: taking something intimate and grinding an edge onto it until it can draw blood.
Zoro pushes off the wall and crosses the room with that measured, dangerous calm he gets right before violence, each step easy, controlled, full of threat. “You wanna talk timing, sweetheart? Maybe next time don’t kick your way into a crossfire because you got impatient.”
Sanji’s smile turns bright and lethal. “Maybe next time if you listened to literally anyone with a working frontal lobe I wouldn’t have to.”
They’re close enough that Law can probably see the fight still burning in both of them under their skin, can probably see Zoro’s pulse jumping in his neck and the flush high on Sanji’s cheekbones from pain and temper and the heat of the stove.
Zoro’s gaze drops for the briefest second to Sanji’s mouth – split lip, cigarette smoke, the little smear of dried blood at the corner – then drags back up. “You sound stupid.”
Sanji laughs once, all teeth and no warmth. “Aw. Did I hit a nerve?”
“You nearly got your ribs opened because you can’t follow a plan.”
Sanji takes the cigarette from his mouth and points it at him like an accusation. “You looked like a fucking butcher out there.”
“And you looked like you wanted to get shot just to prove a point.”
The words hit hard enough that Sanji’s expression shifts, just slightly, into something worse, something meaner. His tone is silky and vicious. “Maybe if I didn’t have to spend half my time compensating for your suicidal bullshit I’d have more room to think.”
Zoro stops dead because, yeah, there it is, the actual wound underneath all the rest of it. The room seems to narrow around the two of them. His hands, hanging at his sides, curl into fists with a slowness that reads less like anger and more like restraint being physically manufactured in real time. “You don’t compensate for me.”
Sanji’s mouth curls. “That what you tell yourself?”
“You think I need you saving me?”
“I think,” Sanji snaps, stepping in so fast the coffee pot rattles on the stove. “That if I leave you unsupervised for five fucking minutes you start acting like your organs are optional.”
Zoro leans down into his space. “And if I leave you unsupervised you start mistaking recklessness for strategy.”
“Worked, didn’t it?”
“No thanks to you, pretty boy.”
“Oh, fuck off.” Sanji’s chest is heaving now, shallow and furious and embarrassed and – fuck, gleeful.
Law sets the clipboard down very carefully on the bench. “I want to be absolutely clear that I did not ask for any part of this.”
Neither of them looks at him.
Sanji turns back to the stove with jerky, furious efficiency and slams coffee into a mug, the spoon hitting ceramic with a sharp little clink. He shoves the mug across the bench toward Zoro without ever breaking eye contact, the gesture is so automatic it’d be domestic if it weren’t happening inside what feels increasingly like a hostage negotiation.
“New rule,” Law says flatly, picking the clipboard back up only because it gives his hands something to do while his soul leaves through his forehead. “The next person to be an idiot in my presence is getting sedated.”
Sanji cuts him a look over his shoulder, lip split, eyes bright and beautiful and perfectly murderous. Pretty boy is running on a loop in his skull, liquid gold. He could float, maybe. “You threatening me in my kitchen, doc?”
“This is not your kitchen.”
“You’re in it while I’m cooking. Close enough.”
From somewhere in the corridor, Bepo’s voice comes very small and careful. “Should I… come back later?”
“No,” Law says immediately.
“Yes,” Sanji and Zoro snap at the same time, still glaring at each other over the bench, still coiled tight from the fight, still bleeding a little, still too close. But now there’s something else threaded through it all, the mean intimacy of people who know exactly where to stick the knife because they know each other too well.
Law turns around and walks out.
x
The first real time either of them weaponises a pet name on purpose happens when they’ve only been together for about a week. ‘Together’ is a ridiculous fucking concept to attach to something that mostly looks like kissing in corners and standing too close in the galley and Zoro showing up in his bunk like it’s an accident, a week of not quite knowing what to do with their hands and a week of trying to act normal in front of the crew and failing in ways that are probably very obvious to Robin and a week of Sanji’s heart doing deeply humiliating things everytime Zoro touches him on purpose.
Tonight they’re in the galley after midnight and everyone else is asleep. Sanji’s got his sleeves rolled and is elbow-deep in cleanup; god forbid he let a kitchen rest overnight in anything less than divine order.
Zoro’s sitting on the bench, where he’s been ‘helping’ for twenty minutes… which in Zoro means eating slices of leftover roast chicken straight from the tray and occasionally handing Sanji a team towel without being asked.
Sanji’s pretending this is annoying and, tragically, failing. “You’re stealing,” he scowls, not looking over as he dries a pan.
Zoro bites into another piece of chicken with zero shame. “I’m quality control.”
“You’re a parasite.”
“Yeah.” He’s got one elbow resting on his knee, food in his hand and mouth softened at the corners in a way Sanji’s still getting used to. Zoro’s face isn’t built for dramatic tenderness, typically, but it’s there if you know where to look, in the looseness around his eye and the steadiness of his attention.
Sanji’s chest gives a painful little tug even as he turns back to the sink too fast. “Stop that.”
“Stop what?”
“Looking at me like that.”
There’s a quiet hush of skin on wood as Zoro slides down from the bench and moves in close enough that the heat of him changes the air at Sanji’s shoulder. “How am I looking at you?”
Sanji keeps his eyes on the pan because if he looks at him he’s going to combust and that seems like a lot of paperwork for Chopper. “Like you’ve got brain damage.”
Zoro laughs right against the shell of his ear before settling a hand at his waist, warm and broad and sure. “You’re cute when you’re trying not to be.”
Sanji goes still, not because of the hand and, honestly, not even because of the words but because of the tone and the quiet affection tucked right into the centre of it, plain as daylight. And Sanji – who can survive most things except earnestness directed at him – feels his whole nervous system short. “You can’t just say things like that.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Sanji returns quickly, which isn’t an answer and they both know it.
Zoro’s thumb shifts once against his hip, rubbing a small absent circle through the fabric of his shirt before, with the terrifying smirk of a man tossing a lit match onto dry grass, he drawls: “Alright, sweetheart.”
Sanji nearly drops the fucking pan – it slips in his wet hands and clangs against the sink, sending up a splash of soapy water. He catches it by reflex, but only just and Zoro snorts, low and startled. Sanji stares at him like he’s just grown a second head. “What did you just call me?”
Zoro’s grin turns slow and dangerous. “What, it’s only okay when you do it?”
Sanji opens his mouth and then promptly slams it shut. The problem is he likes it too bloody much. He likes it with a violence that feels medically concerning, in fact. On anyone else sweetheart would be too soft and too polished, too on-the-nose. On Zoro, though, dragged rough over his voice like something he had to wrestle into language? It lands low and hot and devastating.
“Don’t,” he says weakly.
Zoro’s grin sharpens. “Don’t what, sweetheart?”
“Oh, I’m going to kill you.”
“No, you’re not.”
And he’s right, which is the worst part, because two minutes later Sanji’s backed against the bench with soap still damp on his hands and Zoro kissing him stupid, not a coherent thought left.
x
It’s too easy for affection to slip out in the dark, which is grossly unfair because the dark makes everything worse with them, softer and sharper at once. Strips away the performance, leaving only breath and heat and hands. They’re in Sanji’s bunk, late enough that the whole ship has settled into sleep-noises: low wood groans and the sea brushing the hull and the occasional muffled shift from somewhere down the hallway.
They’ve been kissing for long enough that the edges are gone and that’s the thing with them now, when they’re alone. They start somewhere familiar – an argument winding down in the galley or a hand caught at a wrist or one of them saying something too quiet to survive daylight – and then suddenly they’re here, tangled up in sheets with no idea how they got from one point to the next except that neither of them knew how to stop.
Sanji’s on his back with his hair a mess across the netting, one leg trapped between Zoro’s, shirt half open and totally forgotten. Zoro’s only not crushing him only because every line of him is being held up on sheer control and stubbornness. It’s not enough control: Sanji can feel that much everywhere, in the way Zoro’s breathing is rougher than usual and in the tremor that starts in his shoulders whenever Sanji touches the back of his neck and in the way he keeps kissing Sanji like he’s trying to learn something by mouth and keeps getting distracted halfway through.
Sanji’s not doing much better. He’s got one hand in Zoro’s hair and the other flattened uselessly against his ribs and everytime Zoro drags his mouth down the line of his jaw his thoughts go white around the edges.
“Zoro,” he manages and it comes out like a warning and a plea at the same time.
Zoro answers by biting lightly at the hinge of his jaw, then soothing it with the flat of his tongue. Sanji’s back arches off the mattress before he can stop it.
“Fuck,” he breathes.
Zoro lifts his head just enough to look at him, moonlight from the porthole catching one sharp cheekbone and one dark eye and the damp, beautiful shine of his mouth. He looks wrecked already, more openly than Sanji ever sees outside moments like this, where there’s no room left for restraint to hide behind. And because he looks like that, because Sanji’s already too far gone, because everything hurts a little in the best possible way, the word slips out before he can cage it. “Easy, baby.”
Zoro freezes. Sanji’s entire soul leaves his body; he stares up at him in dawning horror, at the way Zoro’s mouth parts slightly and his pupil goes wider. For a second he doesn’t move at all, like the words have physically struck him.
Sanji wants to fling himself out the porthole. “I –”
Zoro kisses him, hard, until Sanji makes a helpless sound into his mouth, one hand clutching tighter in his hair. When Zoro finally breaks for air, they’re both breathing wrong. He keeps his forehead pressed to Sanji’s, eye shut for one beat too long. Then he opens it and says, voice wrecked beyond saving: “Say it again.”
Sanji’s heart stops, maybe. “No.”
Zoro’s thumb brushes once across the corner of his mouth. “Coward.”
“You’re literally on top of me,” Sanji mumbles and his own voice isn’t surviving this with any dignity either. “I think that disqualifies me from cowardice.”
“Say it,” Zoro repeats, quieter.
Sanji should refuse, should preserve some scrap of self-respect. Maintain the illusion that he isn’t one silly name away from melting into the floor. Instead, because Zoro’s looking at him like that and because the dark has made honesty too easy, he slides his hand to the back of Zoro’s neck and says, barely above a whisper: “Baby.”
Zoro shudders like the word landed under his skin before he buries his face against Sanji’s throat and laughs, once, soft and disbelieving and completely gone.
Sanji, who has now discovered a weapon far too dangerous for civilian use, lies there shaking with it. “Oh,” he says faintly, one hand stroking uselessly through Zoro’s hair. “Oh, this is going to ruin you.”
It does, a little.
x
After that, the concept of pet names start multiplying even though at first they arrive a little sideways. Sanji’s still the quickest with them because he’s always had a mouth built for ornament and injury in equal measure. Sweetheart and darling and baby slip out of him as easily as smoke, dressed sometimes in sweetness and sometimes in poison.
“You call that a knot, sweetheart?”
“Don’t bleed on my floor, darling.”
“If you track mud into my galley one more time, honey, I’ll fucking bury you at sea.”
Zoro’s slower with language, more careful which means when he reaches for softness he does it with the same seriousness he brings to everything else that matters, so the first few from him come rough and low and almost shy in their own stubborn way, but each one lands like a bell struck somewhere under Sanji’s ribs. Each one, over time, becomes less startling and more dangerous.
There are years of them after that, not neat or quiet but Straw Hat years. Years full of weather and blood and ridiculous islands and the thousand indignities of staying alive long enough to become yourself, and through all of it the pet names keep changing shape. At first they’re mostly private things, whispered in the dark and thrown over a shoulder in the galley or muttered into damp skin after a fight that ended too close and too raw and needed somewhere to go.
Sanji learns quickly that Zoro says love when he’s softest, in those stripped-down little moments where all the walls are still down and there’s no room left to hide. When Sanji wakes feverish on a winter crossing and finds a cool cloth being pressed to his neck, it’s Zoro’s voice that says, low and matter-of-fact: “Easy, love.” When Zoro takes a slash deep enough to turn the deck around him red and Sanji’s left stitching him in the galley with furious hands and a face like murder.
Zoro says sweetheart only when he’s amused or pissed off, which is horribly unfair. It shows up in arguments, usually.
“You gonna keep glaring at me all day, sweetheart?”
Sanji, of course, reacts to this by becoming instantly more hateful and approximately eighty percent more flustered. And then there’s darling, which only rears its head during battles or fights and sounds obscene coming out through gritted teeth and blood. Other crews hear it and never know what to do with it, that bizarre collision of tenderness and violence, two men cutting through a battlefield and calling each other names that should belong in bedrooms and kitchens, not war. For the Straw Hats, though, it becomes ordinary in the way only extraordinary things can when you live beside them long enough.
No-one comments anymore when Sanji snarls, “Move, babe,” as he kicks a cannonball clean off course.
And then time starts doing what time always does and just kind of… builds, until Luffy becomes King in a roar of flags and fire and impossible sun. There’s so much noise that day Sanji thinks at first he’ll never hear properly again – cheering from ships, seagulls screaming overhead, the crack and boom of celebration rolling over the sea. The world itself seems to shake with it. Luffy’s laughing like his chest can’t hold it, hat crooked, arm around Sabo, grin bright enough to blind. Sanji’s crying a little and absolutely no-one is stupid enough to mention it, Zoro at his shoulder. Luffy turns, still laughing, still crying himself, and points at them all with the wild certainty of a man who has remade the world and expects it to keep up. “We did it!”
Sanji laughs. “Yeah, captain. You did.”
Luffy grins harder. “No, we did.”
Something in Sanji’s chest breaks open with the force of it and he turns his face away before the emotion can fully humiliate him. Zoro, seeing it because of course he does, bumps his shoulder once against Sanji’s and until Sanji says, quietly enough that no-one else hears: “Told you, sweetheart.”
The sea’s gold. The sky’s endless. Luffy’s still shouting and the world’s alive with triumph and, months later when Zoro finally beats Mihawk, the world goes quiet in the exact opposite way.
Not silence, never that. There’s wind and there are waves and there’s the long exhale of a crowd who have just watched history being dragged screaming into being but around Zoro and the blade in his hand and the shape of Mihawk’s defeat, there’s a hush to the moment that feels almost sacred.
Sanji watches from the edge of the deck with his heart trying to punch through his ribs; he’s watched Zoro lose before, has watched him get back up from impossible things and call it practice. Has watched that dream carve him up and sharpen him and hollow out room inside him for only one destination.
He’s never watched him… arrive.
When it’s done, when the final exchange has ended and Mihawk has lowered his blade with that tiny, terrible acknowledgement only he can make look like a coronation, Zoro stands there breathing hard, blood down one side of his face, chest heaving and for one second he looks almost young.
Sanji moves before he knows he’s moving because nothing else exists except one man with a sword and shaking hands. He gets close enough to see the tremor in Zoro’s fingers where they grip the hilt and says: “Hey.”
There are a thousand things to say. congratulations. you did it. i knew you would. you scared the life out of me. i’m so proud of you i could choke on it. What comes out is: “Easy, love.”
Zoro blinks once, like the word has reached him slower than everything else before he laughs, small and disbelieving and plainly exhausted, and leans just enough for his forehead to bump Sanji’s for half a second in front of gods and rivals and history itself.
“Yeah,” he says. “Alright, sweetheart.”
It’s one of the most intimate things Sanji has ever been given.
There are harder years too, years when the names sharpen again and when sweetness becomes the knife they know exactly how to turn. They fight, sometimes, less stupidly than when they were younger and less often but no less ferociously because age has definitely not made them gentle men. It’s only made them more precise.
There are nights where the air goes cold enough to cut and Sanji says, with all the sugar stripped to steel: “Don’t patronise me, darling.”
There are arguments in little rented rooms on dangerous islands, in borrowed inns, in the narrow privacy of cabins and corners, where love sounds like a threat and baby sounds like a dare. The names don’t stop being pet names just because they’re furious, that’s the problem. Even at their sharpest, there’s too much knowing in them to mistake for anything else. In amongst it all, though, are homes half-built and left and rebuilt elsewhere. A kitchen that becomes theirs for one summer, a garden that lasts two years. A little house on an island with warm stone floors and shutters that bang in storms and a bed they keep coming back to between voyages.
The names settle into those spaces as naturally as bowls and blankets do, ridiculous domestic mutations born out of habit and laziness and making each other laugh at the exact wrong moment. Sunshine, once, from Zoro’s rough mouth on a day Sanji’s so fucking offended he almost drops a bowl.
Gorgeous from Sanji, while stitching a tear in Zoro’s shirt and trying not to smile at the scowl that earns him. Handsome said with complete sarcasm while Zoro’s muddy and bleeding and very much not fit for polite company.
Old man from both of them, increasingly without basis and increasingly with delight. There’s one winter crossing where Sanji gets a cough that lingers ugly and low for weeks. He keeps cooking through it because of course he does. One late night Zoro finds him in the galley at two in the morning, leaning one hand on the counter while the kettle boils and trying not to shake.
Zoro takes one look at him and says, “Bed. Now.”
Sanji opens his mouth to argue but Zoro steps in closer, lays a hand at the back of his neck, and says, so quietly it almost doesn’t sound like language: “Please.”
One morning Sanji’s at the outdoor sink washing greens while Zoro’s splitting wood nearby, shirtless and smug and irritating in the sun. A neighbour’s child – five, gap-toothed, sticky with mango juice – wanders in through the gate, watches them for a minute, and then asks, with all the brutal clarity of children: “Why d’you call him sweetheart if you’re mad all the time?”
Sanji nearly drowns himself in the washbasin. Zoro starts laughing so hard he has to sit down on the woodpile and the kid, unsatisfied, turns to him.
Zoro wipes at his eye and says, still laughing: “Because he likes it.”
Sanji throws a wet spinach leaf at both of them.
They lose people. Find people. Win things they never thought they’d live long enough to hold. Survive their own bodies, mostly. Learn how to care for each other in new ways as age changes the shape of pain. When Zoro’s shoulder starts bothering him in damp weather, Sanji rubs salve into it and says: “Hold still, baby,” like the word has always belonged there.
Morning in their home has sounds the Sunny never had. There’s no groaning hull and no endless hush of water against wood, no footsteps overhead crossing from one deck to another, no seagulls shrieking at the galley windows, no Luffy somewhere in the distance making breakfast everyone’s problem.
Instead there’s just the low creak of floorboards warming in sunlight and the whisper of leaves against the bedroom shutters. The faint clink of glass bottles from the bathroom where Sanji keeps aftershave and hair oil and a frankly unreasonable amount of expensive hand cream..
It is, all told, a very civilised way to wake up which is exactly why Zoro is ruining it. Sanji’s halfway upright, one leg already out from under the sheets, when a heavy arm snakes around his waist and drags him bodily back into the mattress.
“Absolutely not,” Sanji says with the weary dignity of a man who has been married for too long to pretend this is in any way surprising. Zoro makes a noise into the back of his shoulder that’s less a word than a philosophy, vibrating warm through the thin cotton of Sanji’s sleep shirt. “No. I’m getting up.”
The arm around him tightens. Zoro’s still half asleep, that’s the problem. Half asleep Zoro’s all instinct and stubbornness and sprawling, boneless menace, like a large warm animal with no respect for daylight or the obligations of the day ahead.
Sanji, unfortunately, knows from years of experience exactly how dangerous that combination is and braces his palm against the mattress to try to lever himself free. Behind him Zoro shifts even closer, pressing the whole length of his body to Sanji’s back with lazy, shameless determination. His chest is broad and warm and still rough with sleep, bare legs tangling with Sanji’s under the sheet. His hair’s a mess against the pillow, one forearm heavy over Sanji’s middle like a dropped beam.
“Zoro,” Sanji sighs.
“Mm.”
“That was your name. Not permission.”
Zoro’s mouth brushes the nape of his neck, bringing with it the scrape of morning stubble. “Stay.”
Sanji closes his eyes for one dangerous second because this is exactly how it happens. This is how an entire morning vanishes: one sleepy grab, one muttered word, one warm body arranged around his own so persuasively that all the good intentions in the world start to feel theoretical.
“No,” he says though with less conviction than before. “I’ve got things to do.”
“What things?”
“Breakfast, for one.”
“We can eat later.”
“Yeah, yeah, you say that now but in twenty minutes you’ll be sulking around the kitchen like I personally invented hunger.”
Zoro’s hand slides a little higher on his waist, fingers spreading. “Worth it.”
Sanji tries to peel the hand off him and Zoro lets him get two fingers loose before simply resettling with even more of his weight and making a satisfied little exhale into Sanji’s shoulder, the asshole. The sun’s already filtering through the shutters in pale gold strips, laying bars of light across the rumpled blanket and the abandoned heap of clothes at the foot of the bed, all terribly soft and inviting. Sanji should stand up and put coffee on and open the windows downstairs and check the bread dough and, you know. Be a person with a spine.
Instead, he says, because apparently he has no self-preservation whatsoever: “You’re very clingy in your old age, sweetheart.”
Zoro’s answer is immediate and smug despite the sleep still thick in his voice. “You love it.”
“I tolerate it.”
“Liar.”
“I indulge it out of charity.”
Zoro finally lifts his head enough to speak against Sanji’s ear. “That so, baby?”
That one still gets him. It always will, probably. There are words that never lost their edge, only changed what kind of wound they make and baby, from Zoro, in that low morning rasp, spoken like something obvious and owned, has long since stopped shocking him and has never once stopped working.
Sanji feels the traitorous smile pulling at his mouth and scowls at the wardrobe to compensate. “Don’t deploy pet names when I’m trying to maintain the standards of this household.”
Zoro snorts. “This household has me in it.”
“Exactly. Somebody has to compensate.” He twists, trying to turn enough to glare properly which means he makes the tactical error of ending up half on his back, pinned now under one of Zoro’s thighs and the full sleepy focus of his husband’s attention.
Zoro’s eye is open now, dark in the softened morning light, hair sticking up in every direction. There’s a crease from the pillow down one cheek and a scar at his chin that catches when he smiles which he is, faintly. He looks older, yes, broader through the shoulders, though softened at the edges by comfort and time. Lines at the corners of his eyes. Silver beginning in his hair if the sun catches it right. Sanji has had many years to get used to waking up to this face and remains, privately, offended by how little that has helped.
Zoro studies him with the calm satisfaction of a man who knows he’s winning. “You’re not trying very hard to leave.”
“I was, until a tree fell on me.”
“You’re so dramatic.”
“Says the man physically restraining his husband because he wants to sleep in.”
“Working, though.”
Sanji lifts his chin. “Debatable.”
Zoro’s hand slides from his waist to the small of his back, broad and warm and entirely too persuasive. “Is it?”
It is not, is the issue because Sanji has things to do, real things. There’s dough rising downstairs and oranges to check in the garden, hassling a supplier due before noon, plans for lunch, plans for dinner, plans for the shape of the day that have all been waiting patiently for him to grow a spine and start it.
And yet. And yet here is Zoro in their bed in the home they built, sunlight striping his bare shoulder, looking at Sanji like the whole day can wait because this is the first thing worth doing. There are worse ways to be ruined, probably, but none spring to mind.
“Fine,” Sanji sighs, with enormous reluctance and no real sincerity. “Five minutes.”
Zoro’s grin is immediate. Boyish, almost. Obnoxious, definitely. “Ten.”
“Five.”
“Twelve.”
“That’s not how bargaining works.”
“It does in bed.”
Sanji laughs despite himself. “Seaweed-brain.”
Zoro settles more comfortably on top of him, one knee bracketed between Sanji’s thighs now, all shameless sprawl and warm skin and victorious gravity. “You’re the one who married me.”
“Yeah,” Sanji says dryly. “One of my stranger hobbies.”
“That and feeding me.”
“That one’s less strange. You’re basically an outdoor cat.”
Zoro considers this. “Mean.”
“Accurate.” He reaches up anyway, because this too is habit now, and pushes a tangle of green hair back from Zoro’s forehead. His fingers skim the old scar at his temple, the line of his brow, the place just above his ear that still, after all these years, makes Zoro’s eyelid lower a little. Zoro leans into the touch without shame, weight going softer over him as his hand rubs once, absent and affectionate, at the back of Sanji’s waist.
Sanji scowls halfheartedly. “If the bread overproofs because of you I’ll make you eat the whole loaf.”
“Threatening me with bread in our own home,” Zoro murmurs. “Cruel.”
Sanji groans and lets his forearm fall over his eyes. “There should be laws against you before coffee.”
Zoro hums before dipping his head and kissing the corner of Sanji’s mouth, soft and brief and completely, entirely unfair. Sanji’s hand, of course, goes straight to the back of his neck and keeps him there long enough to turn one kiss into three and this… this is also how mornings disappear.
When they break apart Zoro stays close, forehead nudging Sanji’s jaw in that thoughtless, affectionate way he still pretends isn’t affectionate. “You know, for a guy trying to get up you’re doing a lot of kissing.”
Sanji runs a thumb along the edge of his mouth. “For a guy trying to trap me in bed you’re talking too much.”
“Mm.” Zoro closes his eye again, like he’s perfectly happy to drift there forever. “Then stop getting distracted.”
Sanji lets out a slow breath, half laugh and half defeat, and slides both arms around him properly at last. “Ten minutes,” he says into Zoro’s shoulder. “And then I’m getting up, love of my life or not.”
Zoro goes still for one tiny, telling beat at that. Even now, after all these years, sometimes a phrase catches unexpectedly, not because it’s new but because it’s true. His hand tightens once at Sanji’s back. “Yeah. Alright.”
Sanji smiles into his skin where he can’t be accused of it.
They lie there while the bread rises and their home fills with morning around them. They lie there while the light climbs and the day waits just outside the bedroom door with all its errands and meals and little ordinary labours. Eventually Sanji will get up, he always does. Eventually Zoro will follow, shambling barefoot down to the kitchen with sleep still in his shoulders and steal slices of toast straight from the board while pretending not to.
Eventually they’ll begin the day, but not yet. Not while Zoro’s warm and heavy in his arms, grinning against his throat like he’s won something.
x
me throwing law into any scenario fr. this one got Away from me sorry!!!
also for the record i fully buy into sanji using pet names but zoro's a different story!!!
gummygunk
izzy806
pixelskylines
jacobvanloon
areudirty
