I know it’s cliched sorry and done to death but…what if there is only one bed?
we love cliches in this house!!!
x
The storm finds them half a day out and decides to stick around just for kicks. By the time the Sunny’s nosed into the harbour the sky’s already collapsed to a single colour and is wet and loud about it all. Nami’s got that particular smile she wears for bad weather which means that they’re going to survive it but boy is she going to make the universe pay interest. The hotel she shakes out of the town isn’t a hotel so much as a shack frail enough to shudder under the storm, but the options are pretty grim. The plaster walls, once white, have gone the colour of old bone and obnoxiously weak tea, but it’s dry and there are beds.
Singular, as it turns out.
Nami is all smirk. “Before you try to argue with me listen: there are three rooms for all of us. Luffy and Usopp with Franky. Chopper with Robin and me. That leaves…”
Her eyes land on them with the serenity and subtlety of a goddess arranging flowers at a fucking funeral.
Sanji shakes the rain out of his hair. “We can -”
“Share!” She finishes, bright as a lighthouse. “Yes. You’re adults. Sort of.”
Zoro’s “I’ll take the floor,” arrives on instinct, like a parry he trusts more than thought. Nami’s smile sharpens, ruthless. “You’ll take the deal.”
Luffy, hat dripping, manages to throw two very wet thumbs up. “Sleepover!”
“Eat first,” Sanji sighs, the word softened by a quick glance toward Zoro to catch whether he’s taken any water since noon.The swordsman’s eyes are already measuring corners: windows, door, the weight of the roof in this wind. He can’t help it, Sanji knows: he clocks spaces the way Sanji clocks time.
They invent a dinner out of other people’s scraps and the hotel owner'’s gratitude, Luffy devouring evidence that anyone'd ever been hungry while the rest of them work their way through bowls of something might be soup or might be stew.
When Nami finally shooes them all toward sleep with the kind of cheerful threat that implies tally marks and interest, Sanji grinds his cigarette out on the heel of his boot and follows Zoro up the narrow stairs into a hallway that smells worse than it looks. Their door sticks halfway, then relents with a noise that sounds like someone being strangled, and they would know.
Inside is a bed… not built for giants. A window fogs by the heat of breath, there’s a candle on the sill, a crooked chair, a scuffed chest. The bedspread’s the friendly shade of vomit, maybe. Most importantly, the room holds a single, unwavering truth: the bed’s going to be too much.
“Floor’s fine,” Zoro says again, voice firm.
Sanji kicks off his shoes and nudges them under the bed with his toe. Their eyes do the circling dance they do when neither wants to be the first to say stop. Sanji makes a disbelieving noise. “You’ll wake up with a sore back and then what? Then you’ll be a bigger bastard than usual and then I have to hear about it for six bloody hours. No thanks. Just share the damn bed.”
Zoro’s eyes narrow. “Yeah, that'll really solve the problem, Curls.”
Sanji rolls his sleeves back with unnecessary precision. His hands are steady but the movement still has the concept of something not quite sure. “Yeah? And what is the problem, Moss?”
There are a hundred wrong answers to that question, which Sanji is well-fucking-aware of because he's thought of all of them. He's been thinking all of them for months, now. He watches Zoro set his swords down with the care Sanji secretly adores, a ritual of angles and touch, and sits with his back to the wall, using the mattress edge like some kind of barricade. The candle flinches and settles.
“That I know what happens,” Zoro says finally. His voice has turned thin with the honesty that always takes him time to get to. “If I lie down next to you.”
Sanji can feel the shape of the words before they arrived, even as he leans on the bed, a picture of laziness that fools absolutely no-one. “You sleep. In theory.”
“You know I don’t. Not with… that close. Not with nowhere else to look.”
Rain hammers the roof with insistence and Sanji wants, badly, to make it easy, wants to drawl something obscene and let it be a joke they can make fun of. He also wants to walk right back out of the room and pretend he’s never felt the particular ache sitting under the Zoros' words. He compromises with a shrug that aspires to nonchalance and fails, fails, fails.
“Suit yourself.” He pulls back the blanket and slides in, the mattress exhaling around him. He faces the wall, one arm crooked under his head and watched the candle’s light over the plaster. On the floor, leather whispers then falls into the kind of quiet that isn’t. Zoro arranges himself with martial penance, cross-legged, spine against wood, jaw tight. Sanji holds still for a frankly heroic number of heartbeats.
“You’re going to break your back,” he mutters into the quiet.
“Better than breaking something else,” Zoro shoots back, but his voice is stiff instead of cruel.
Sanji rolls over. The candle threw Zoro’s face into planes: cheekbone bright, shadows under his eyes, mouth set with the sort of humourless patience Sanji’s always wanted to kiss out of him. “Explain.”
Zoro looks up, eyes steady. “You know what I mean.”
“I want to hear you say it.” Because it's true and it's been true for months now.
Zoro’s silent long enough that the candle sighs again. When he speaks it's careful, like he's letting the words carry the gravity of everything the bed represents. “If I’m there I’ll know how close you are. I’ll lie there and think about the weight of your knee when you roll. The way your hair smells. I’ll think -“ he stops, clears his throat, looking annoyance with himself roughening the edges. “I’ll think about moving my hand this much,” and he holds his thumb and forefinger a breath apart.
Sanji makes himself swallow against a throat that’s gone traitorously tight. “Big temptations” he manages.
Zoro gives a half-shrug, the kind that tries to pretend the truth isn’t burning a hole in him. “I’m not good at not doing things I’m thinking about.”
“You’re very good at lying still with swords in your lap for five hours. Feels like similar discipline.”
“That’s fighting. This is… the opposite.”
The room falters on its small quiet, Sanji turning the old word coward over in his mouth and finding that it tastes better than bravery. He pushes himself up on one elbow, hair falling into his eyes, and watches Zoro watch the floorboards like they might offer him a different outcome if he just tries long enough, looks long enough.
“I’m not gonna bite your head off for telling me you want me,” Sanji manages, quiet, because if nothing else he thought Zoro knew that already, could trust in that already.
“You should.” The corner of his mouth threatens a type of humour that never quite lands. “It’d be safer.”
“And what if I don’t?”
Zoro’s gaze comes back to him, heavy, a compass deciding north. “Then I start wishing.”
It comes out ridged with self-mockery, but Sanji’s known him long enough to hear the hurt under it. He’d been expecting a fight he could win with elegant cruelty and too many years of practice. What he has instead is a man sitting on a floor a foot from a bed, telling the truth and waiting to be punished for it. “Mosshead.”
Zoro blinks. “Yeah?”
Sanji does the smartest thing available to him and possibly the dumbest: he swings his legs out of the bed and crosses the distance in three slow steps, crouching until they’re level. The floor groans under the new distribution of weight. Up close, Zoro smells like wet leaves, like whatever soap Sanji bullied him into using last week.
“This is a worse idea than most of ours,” Sanji breathes and then - because if he hesitates he won’t - he leans in and kisses him. Zoro inhales like the first pull after surfacing, hand lifting, then stopping, then lifting again to brace lightly at Sanji’s waist. When Sanji’s mouth opens it does so on a tender sound that Zoro matches it with something low. When he pulls back their foreheads bump and stay.
“I hate how much I want this to be a bad idea,” Sanji confesses, half a whisper. “So I can be smarter. ”
Zoro’s laugh runs out of air halfway to evolve into something better. “When have you ever been smarter than me?”
“Daily. Hourly. Right now.”
Zoro's mouth quirks, soft. “Then get in the bed before my willpower gets bored.”
Sanji gets off his haunches and lets the bed receive him with warmth. It‘s be so easy to scoot to the wall and let the mattress remain an armistice but he slides back a handspan from the middle and leaves an invitation precisely measured. Zoro’s only a beat behind, then two, the pause less about reluctance than about respect. He blows out the candle and bends himself to the place beside Sanji like he’s folding into a stance that’s always existed for him, just for him.
The mattress moves lightly under Zoro’s weight. Sanji can feel him, a line of heat thirty centimetres away, then twenty, then the delicate catastrophe of ten. Their knees don’t touch. Their hands don’t touch. The quiet between their breathing does, though, and they lie there in careful parallel for the amount of time it takes a storm to remember itself. Sanji listens to the wheelhouse of his own idiot heart, to Zoro’s breathing even out into something he doesn’t trust for sleep, to the roof breaking and remaking a thousand times above them. He shifts a fraction and lets his knuckles find the space between Zoro’s elbow and his wrist, skin-to-skin.
Zoro exhales through his nose and slowly, slowly turns his palm until their hands could be the shape of not quite holding, maybe.
“Okay?” Sanji asks the dark.
“Yeah,” Zoro mumbles, the word mapped in relief rather than triumph.
Sanji doesn’t know when he falls asleep, only that he wakes once to the storm’s hand pressing at the window and found Zoro’s breath warm against the angle of his shoulder. He lets himself lie there, greedy, and takes it all in.
x
They wake to a room full of loud sunshine and the low, drowsy thrum of a building that’s still figuring out the morning. They’re more knot than men: Zoro’s arm is under Sanji’s neck, Sanji’s thigh is over Zoro’s hip and the blanket is half-off the bed like a wilted flag.
They hold very still for three long beats, both of them pretending they’re evaluating the day before Sanji ruins it by snorting into Zoro’s shoulder.
“What?” Zoro grumbles, voice rough with sleep.
“Your hair looks like the back end of a storm.”
Zoro shifts, the whole bed answering. “You drool,” he replies, which is both false and clearly deeply exciting to assert.
Sanji props himself on an elbow, the sheet sliding low on his spine and Zoro squints up at him, wrecked in the nicest of ways: soft jaw, skin creased, the kind of man you daydream about touching before you remember you’re allowed to.
“Morning breath,” Sanji warns, half-joking.
“Don’t care. C’mere.”
Sanji drifts closer in increments, terrible on purpose. One hand slides into Zoro’s hair, scraping his nails lightly over scalp to feel the way Zoro’s breath changes, the way his mouth opens a little on reflex.
“Manipulative,” Zoro accuses, but the affection in it ruins any hope of an edge.
“Observant,” Sanji corrects and finally leans into a kiss that bumps noses and lands twice before it sticks, a kiss with a laugh caught in the crux of it, Zoro’s hand finding Sanji’s ribs under the sheet and spreading there, thumb counting bone like he’s mapping the coastline. Sanji chases his mouth again, deeper, greedier, with none of the patience he talks about in kitchens. Zoro lets him lead for a breath and then stops pretending he isn’t awake: he flips their wrists, pins Sanji’s hand to the pillow not to hold him down but to keep him from flying apart. The bed groans and the floor answers and Sanji laughs into it, bitten off when Zoro angles and kisses like winning an argument. “Bossy.”
A heel thumps the footboard. The sheet gives up and slides to their waists; cool air meets heat where their stomachs touch. They both swear at the same time, quiet, breathless, half a laugh. Sanji noses along Zoro’s cheek, catches the corner of his grin with his teeth and bites just enough to be given consequences for. Zoro obliges by rolling just enough to bracket the other man. “If you wanna stop,” he tries which is stupid because of course, of course -
“Shut up,” Sanji mutters, already pulling him back in by the jaw.
It gets messy after that in the best, most unheroic ways. Zoro keeps finding new angles that make the bed complain and Sanji keeps discovering new ways to laugh with his mouth occupied. They keep missing the same breath and then getting it right by accident. A pillow goes to the floor with the softest protest. Sanji’s knee slides, finds purchase again hooked inside Zoro’s thigh and the sound Zoro makes will stay lodged under his ribs for the rest of their lives.
“Fuck,” Sanji says, a prayer and a swear, forehead resting against Zoro’s. “We’re terrible at this.”
“We’re great at this,” Zoro counters, chest hitching as Sanji’s fingers skate under his waistband and then retreat, innocent as arson. “We’re excellent at this.”
“Your standard for excellence is pretty fuckin’ low, Mosshead.”
“My standard is you.”
That earns him a blink, then another, then a kiss so sweet it risks structural damage, maybe. Zoro’s hand slides up, finds the base of Sanji’s skull, fits there like he’s trained for this.
“Okay,” Sanji whispers into his mouth, not to agree to anything in particular but to mark the moment. “Okay.”
“Yeah,” Zoro agrees, a rough echo. “Alright.”
Sanji shifts, curiosity burning where caution should be and drags his thumb along the edge of Zoro’s bottom lip, watching colour bloom back where his teeth have worried it. Zoro catches the thumb with his mouth and sucks, lazy, eyes targeted and unserious at the same time. Sanji’s breath goes indecent, laugh tangling with it and comes out like surrender. “Unfair! Dirty fighter.”
“You started it,” Zoro grins and kisses the complaint away.
They come up for air only when oxygen stages a mutiny. Sanji flops back, hair wrecked, smile too genuine to weaponise. Zoro collapses halfway across him like a satisfied cat, weight carefully distributed so he doesn’t crush anything Sanji would like to keep uncrushed. He noses the space below Sanji’s ear because he can, because he’s wanted to for a very long time, because he’s allowed to.
From the hallway Luffy bellows: “Breakfast! Are you awake? Are you kissing? Nami said - ow!”
“Five minutes,” Nami’s voice comes distant and dangerous.
Zoro lifts his head, gaze bright with the same glee he takes to battle. “We could give her a show,” he suggests, deadpan.
They untangle with the reluctant precision of two men defusing an explosive of their own making. Zoro finds the sheet, drapes it back like he’s doing something noble and not just stalling for one more look. Sanji sits up and the sunlight skims gold along his collarbone and Zoro can’t stop himself from touching where the light hits.
“Do we…” Zoro starts, and then the words get tangled on their way out. He swallows, tries again. “Is this…”
“Yeah,” Sanji says, simple, steady. He leans sideways and kisses Zoro’s temple with devastating domesticity. “We can figure the rest out after pancakes.”
“Pancakes,” Zoro repeats, like that's the part tripping him up the most here.
Sanji swings his legs over the side, stands and stretches long as he can, pausing only to throw a look over his shoulder. “Coming?”
Zoro gives him the laziest, filthiest smile a morning has ever survived. “Obviously.”
He catches Sanji’s wrist on the way, kisses the inside of it quick, a lucky charm, a secret, and lets go.
x
look sometimes u just gotta kiss a little about it!!
Tribute to Haru Urara (27.2.1996 - 9.9.2025). I wanted to commemorate her final, very eventful year! I'm sure we all remember her first ever win, in a race for senior horses, and the "incident" of fans all over the world donating over 2500 kilos of grass (and causing the donation website to crash). Truly, she was and is the Shining Star of Losers Everywhere. May you race the stars and win, Haru Urara!
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