Aah Zosan @strawhatmay - Tumblr Blog

Zoro realizing he actually really likes when Sanji snarks and insults him... maybe he overhears him insulting someone else and gets a little jealous and has no idea what that feeling is... just totally unaware of how much they've actually been flirting without realizing. LOVE your characterizations, especially Zoro.

snarking is a love language fr <3

x

The market smells like everything at once.

Salt off the harbour, sharp and clean. Fish guts and tar from the docks. Sweetness from pyramids of sun-warmed fruit. Spice smoke curling from skewers on little braziers. Too many bodies packed too close under faded awnings, everyone talking like their voice is the main attraction.

Zoro’s got three crates stacked in his arms and a fourth wedged under one elbow, edges biting into his skin through his shirt. Sanji had called it efficient load-bearing. Zoro had called it bullshit. Somehow, he’s still the one carrying them.

“You know,” he mutters, hitching the crates higher. “There’s this ancient invention. Two wheels. Handle. Cart.”

Sanji’s walking backwards in front of him, weaving through the crowd like he’s got eyes in the back of his stupid blonde head. His blazer’s slung over one shoulder, shirt sleeves rolled, tie loose, infuriatingly at home in the chaos. “And deprive you of the chance to build character? Tragic. Besides, you’re always saying you’re good with heavy things.”

“I meant swords.”

Sanji’s eyes flick over the crates, blue and sharp. “And yet here you are, bonding with turnips. Look at you! Growth and extra Vitamin C.”

“Don’t need it,” Zoro grunts. “I’ve got steel.”

“Steel doesn’t stop scurvy, dumbass.”

“Steel stops anything if you swing it hard enough.”

Sanji’s laugh gets lost in the noise of the crowd; they move like they always do on supply runs, with Sanji half a step ahead, drawn toward anything that smells like ingredients and Zoro trailing behind like a surly pack animal, occasionally redirected with a hand to his sleeve or a short shove at his shoulder when he starts drifting the wrong way.

Their bickering loops between them easily, familiar as the weight at Zoro’s hip. A stall piled high with figs and dripping honey pastries makes Sanji brake without warning and Zoro’s too focused on not clotheslining a random kid with his crates to anticipate it; he plows right into Sanji’s back. The top box knocks into Sanji’s shoulder, wobbling.

“Oi,” Sanji laughs, reaching back automatically, palm flat against Zoro’s chest to steady both of them. “Watch it. You trying to kill me with produce now?”

The contact is brief – just a warm hand, fingers splayed over his sternum through thin cotton – and gone before Zoro can do anything about it but his breath still catches like it forgot its line.

He adjusts his grip again, scowling, ignoring the weird echo under his ribs. “I’m trying to get this over with. You’re the one sightseeing.”

“I am curating,” Sanji corrects, peering at the pastries with a critic’s disdain. “None of you heathens appreciate the difference.”

“Luffy appreciates anything edible.”

“That’s the problem.” Sanji sighs, tragic. “We're trying to elevate his palate, not encourage him to eat the table.”

Someone at the stall says something about pretty ladies and first taste free and Sanji lights up like a neon sign, immediately pivoting into some overblown, leg-swooning performance. Zoro tunes most of it out, knowing it’s just words like whipped cream, all sugar and no weight. It’s background noise. What isn’t background noise is the way Sanji turns back a moment later, grin sharp and satisfied, clearly waiting to see if Zoro will complain.

“Admit it,” Sanji says, folding his arms, weight balanced easily on one leg. “You’d be lost without me.”

“You talk too much,” Zoro mutters, a little rougher than he means to.

Sanji’s mouth curls. “Wow, cutting as always. Really getting some new material in there.” He flicks ash onto the cobblestone and saunters away toward the next row of stalls, fully expecting Zoro to follow and Zoro… does.

The crowd swallows them again: vendors shouting special offers, gulls screaming overhead, kids darting between legs. The sun sneaks in strips between awnings, hitting Sanji’s hair every few steps, turning it bright at the edges. The crates dig into Zoro’s arms to the point where his shoulder aches so he fixes his glare on the back of Sanji’s head, focuses on the familiar swing of his shoulders, the stupid little kick in his walk like he’s keeping time to some song only he hears.

Sanji tosses a comment over his shoulder about finding decent saffron on a backwater island like this. Zoro grunts an answer that might be words or a threat and the market swirls on around them, noisy and bright and ordinary.

The spice stall turns out to be nearly impossible to miss, draped in violent strips of cloth, every shade of red and gold like someone’s skinned a festival and nailed it up. Open sacks spill mountains of colour across the planks and the air’s so hot with scent Zoro can almost taste it on the back of his tongue.

He stops when Sanji stops, baskets biting into his forearms, handles digging hot little grooves into skin. He shifts his grip, annoyed at the weight, annoyed at the crowd, annoyed at everything. “Five minutes, in and out.”

Sanji already sliding sideways into shape, elbow on the counter and hip cocked, posture loose and lazy like he’s got nowhere else in the world to be. Zoro recognises the stance; it’s the one he uses when he’s about to talk someone out of their wallet and into a smile.

The stallholder straightens like he’s been waiting all afternoon for this exact idiot to appear. “Well, if it isn’t trouble.”

Sanji’s mouth curves, slow. “If it isn’t overpriced.”

“Bold words from a man who smells like butter and arrogance.”

“Careful,” Sanji warns, picking up a jar and tipping it, letting the contents slide against the glass. “I’m pretty decent with a knife.”

Zoro shifts his grip again, sweat sliding under his haramaki. He clears his throat but no-one looks at him.

“These chilies are too dry,” Sanji continues, rolling one between thumb and forefinger. “You storing them under your ego?”

The stallholder throws his head back and laughs. “And you always this cruel to strangers?”

“Only the pretty ones.”

It hits Zoro like a punch from nowhere, something hot and mean sliding under his ribs and digging in. He takes a step closer, shadow falling over part of the stall. “We need rice,” he says, clipped.

Sanji waves him off without turning. “In a minute.”

The stallholder leans forward on his elbows, clearly enjoying himself. “Your friend’s impatient.”

Sanji flicks a glance back, that little sideways look he gets when he’s about to be a dick. There’s a smirk already at the corner of his mouth. “That’s his natural state.”

Zoro feels it then – an ugly, constricting knot under his sternum.

Sanji’s voice has gone into that register he uses when he’s having fun, all sharp and warm, attention focused like a spotlight. Zoro’s used to that being aimed at his face, his swords, his mistakes. Insults sparking off his skin like flint, the two of them circling, snapping, snapping, snapping.

This isn’t that. This is Sanji choosing someone else to light up.

“These saffron threads,” he drawls, lifting another jar up to the greenish awning light. “Fake.”

“They’re authentic.”

“They’re offended.”

The stallholder presses a hand to his chest. “You wound me again.”

“Try recovering.”

Zoro’s teeth grind. He takes another step forward. “Curls,” he says, warning baked into it but there’s nothing, not even a flick of an eye this time.

The stallholder’s gaze skates over Zoro and away, just like that. Background noise. Pack mule. Extra. “So, chef, what d’you want?”

Sanji leans in just a little closer to the counter, the hairs at the back of his head catching the light and Zoro hates that he notices. “I want spices that don’t lie to me.”

“I never lie.”

“You just exaggerate.”

“Only when I’m impressed.”

Zoro’s fingers dig deep into the basket handles until the wicker bites and his forearms burn. The heat behind his ribs crawls up his spine, sharp and irrational, this sense that there’s a fight he’s not allowed to step into. His brain, unhelpful, supplies a flash of the galley: Sanji snarling at him over a cutting board, flour on his cheek, eyes bright as he tells Zoro he’s doing something wrong. The spark in that. The way it always, always feels personal, specific. Now there’s that spark again but pointed at some stall clown in a loud vest and too-bright smile.

Zoro suddenly, violently, hates that guy’s teeth. He snaps: “Are you done flirting or are we sleeping here?”

Sanji finally turns, eyebrows arching under the hair that falls across one eye, that stupid little curtain he never pins back. “What’s your problem?”

“My problem is you forgetting why we’re here.”

The stallholder laughs, open and easy. “Relax, swordsman. He’s just talking.”

Sanji’s smile flicks even sharper. “Yeah, try it sometime.”

That lands clean and hard, right under Zoro’s ribs; his breath misfires. talking isn’t what i’m bad at, he wants to sneer. It’s talking like Sanji. It’s saying shit that makes people’s faces do that. It’s knowing to stand, where to lean, how to tilt his voice so strangers light up.

It’s not that he can’t, it’s that he doesn’t and apparently people notice.

The stallholder slides a little pouch across the wood, string, stamped paper label, the whole thing smug. “On the house. For entertainment.”

Sanji accepts it with a grin that Zoro has seen a hundred times and never on someone else. “See, Mossy? You are useful.”

Zoro feels something in his chest go quiet and cold, like a wound crusting over too fast and he just – steps back. Doesn’t say he’s leaving or bark an order, doesn’t wait to see if Sanji follows.

He just shoulders past a kid with a bag of oranges and pushes into the river of the market crowd, lettint bodies close around him. Voices, colour, smell – fish, sweat, engine oil, sugar – hit him all at once but none of it sticks. His focus has narrowed down to a hot, jagged line of thought that doesn’t feel like him. He stalks past stalls and noise and hands waving samples in his face. Someone tries to sell him knives but he glares hard enough that they blanch and look away.

The ship comes into view sooner than he expects, sweet figurehead smiling at the horizon, gangplank pulled up just enough to deter idiots. Zoro trudges up and drops the baskets by the rail harder than necessary, stomping over to plant his hands on the railing and lean forward into the sea breeze. His chest heaves like he’s just gone ten rounds instead of walking home and muscle memory wants to call it a battle high but it isn’t. There’s no clean edge to it, no satisfaction, just this awful buzzing under his skin that refuses to settle.

The longer he stands there, the madder he gets. The sea wind whips at his hair and the ship rocks under him in that slow, lazy way she has when there’s nothing on the horizon, normally so grounding. Today, though, it feels like someone tugging a rope he’s already halfway strangled himself with.

Nothing stops the loop in his head.

The stall. The idiot with the spices. Sanji’s mouth, curved sharp and pleased and aimed at someone else.

“Idiot,” Zoro mutters and he’s not sure which of the three he means. but it kinda scrapes his own throat on the way out regardless.

Feelings, for him, have always come in three flavours: hit it, ignore it, or drink until it stops mattering. Efficient. Simple. If it isn’t in one of those piles, it doesn’t exist. Whatever this is keeps slipping out of his hands so he does what he knows and lines it up like a problem: Sanji’s loud, always has been. Sanji flirts, always has. Sanji treats the whole world like it’s standing outside his restaurant, waiting to be fed and yelled at.

Always. Has.

So why the hell did today feel like a punch to the gut?

He’s seen Sanji lay it on thick with waitresses, princesses, random women on docks. Hearts in his eyes, stupid poetry, hands pressed to his chest. Zoro’s rolled his eyes, maybe grumbled then gone back to training because it’s fake. Everyone knows it, Sanji included.

But at that stall… there had been no show. No gushing, no swooning. Just Sanji leaning in with his voice sharp and warm at the edges, grinning like he meant it. All that back-and-forth, insult and counter, the exact rhythm Zoro’s used to catching with his teeth and throwing back. Except this time Zoro hadn’t been in the conversation at all. The laugh that came out of Sanji hadn’t been for him.

He grinds his molars until his jaw aches. “This is stupid,” he tells the ocean and the ocean keeps breathing, utterly indifferent.

He drags both hands over his face, thumbs pressing hard into his eyebrows like he can knead the whole thing out of his skull but it doesn’t move. Everytime he blinks he sees Sanji’s hand brushing the guy’s when he took the pouch. Sees Sanji not flinch, not snarl, just… letting it happen..

Something ugly and tight shifts under his ribs and he hates it.

Bootsteps hit the gangplank behind him, sharp and irritated and very, very familiar. Sanji walks like he’s late to yell at someone. The thud as the sacks hit the deck’s enough to make a seagull take off from the figurehead.

“You just left,” he snaps, not even bothering with hello. His voice is frayed at the edges, exhausted and furious. “D’you have any idea how much I had to carry by myself?”

Zoro thinks good, he’s pissed too.

Zoro can work with anger. When he does turn the words come out sharper than he planned. “You seemed occupied.”

Sanji’s eyes go flinty. “Occupied doing my job?”

“Looked like you were auditioning for island idiot of the year,” Zoro bites out.

There’s a flash of something hurt and raw before Sanji’s expression slides over it with anger. “Excuse me?”

The rope in Zoro’s chest pulls tighter and it’s good, some vicious part of him thinks, because if he has to feel this weird then Sanji does too. “You heard me, all smiles and mouth and attitude. You looked ridiculous.”

“That’s literally my personality, moss-for-brains.”

“Well maybe your personality sucks today.”

That one lands. Zoro sees it hit in the the brief tremor in Sanji’s jaw and the way his shoulders jerk like someone’s just drove a nail through his spine. His voice comes out wearing the tone that usually means someone’s about to leave with fewer teeth. “You wanna run that by me again?”

Zoro should stop. This is the point where, in a spar, he’d pull a hit instead of driving it home but this? This isn’t a spar. He doesn’t know what it is. He only knows he’s so full of this sour, stinging feeling that if he doesn’t pour it out on something he’s going to fucking drown in it.

“You’re loud,” he snaps, shoving words into the space between them like knives. “You don’t shut up. You flirt with anything that breathes and then act like it’s everyone else’s fault.”

Sanji laughs once, sharp and completely humourless. “You’re mad because I talked to someone?”

“I’m mad because you wouldn’t shut up!” Zoro fires back and, sure it isn’t the whole truth but it : the only piece that sounds like a real complaint.

“That’s rich coming from the man who gets lost walking in a straight line,” Sanji spits as he takes a step into Zoro’s space, shoulders squared and eyes blazing. “God forbid someone in this crew has basic social skills.”

“You call that social skills?” Zoro barks. “You were two seconds away from crawling over the counter.”

“I was negotiating!”

“You were showing off.”

“So what if I was?”

There it is, there’s the question he’s been choking on since the market. So what if he was? Sanji can do whatever he wants. Talk to whoever he wants and laugh at whoever he wants. It shouldn’t matter. It sure as hell shouldn’t feel like someone stole his favourite sword.

The real answer claws up his throat – because it wasn’t for me – and he slams the door on it so hard his ribs hurt. “It was embarrassing.”

Sanji stares. “For who?”

“For me,” Zoro snarls, without thinking and this time they both freeze.

A seagull cries somewhere above and the Merry creaks and, between them, the word hangs, ugly and naked.

“Why the hell would it be embarrassing for you?” Sanji demands. “Last I checked you were busy pretending I don’t exist.”

“Because you’re ridiculous,” Zoro snaps, doubling down. If he stops now he’ll have to think and he can’t – he can’t do that. “You act like the whole world’s a stage and you need an audience.”

Sanji’s mouth curls, mean. “Yeah? Better a stage than a rock. At least I’m doing something.”

“I’d rather be a rock than a damn street performer,” Zoro spits back. “The way you were draped all over that counter? You looked like you were willing to sell yourself for a discount.”

The words are out before he can catch them and Sanji jerks like Zoro actually hit him, colour dropping clean out of his face before it floods back in a violent red. “Say that again,” he says, very softly.

Zoro’s lungs burn. “That’s what it looked like.”

“Because your eyes don’t work!” Sanji explodes. He steps in, chest almost touching Zoro’s, jabbing a finger hard enough into his sternum that Zoro rocks back half a step. “I was working. I was getting us decent ingredients in a back alley tourist trap run by a con artist. That’s called doing my job, you absolute asshole!”

“You were leaning over the counter -”

“I was leaning over to check the quality, you fucking idiot!” Sanji yells, loud enough that his voice almost – almost – cracks. “I’m sorry I don’t negotiate with my fists like you do!”

“You weren’t negotiating with your brain either!” Zoro shouts back and there it is, something inside him snapping. He can feel his voice rising, words tumbling out hotter and less controlled than any sword swing. “You were too busy batting your eyes and giggling like some -“”

“Oh, fuck you,” Sanji snarls, actually shoving him now. “You don’t get to call me stupid because my skillset doesn’t involve headbutting problems.”

“It’s not stupid when you do it with women?” Zoro throws back and Sanji blinks, caught off guard for half a second. “You pull that hearts-in-your-eyes crap on every girl we walk past and I’ve never seen you lay it on like that! You were actually laughing.”

“So what if I was laughing?” Sanji demands. “You want to put me on a quota? Sorry, Mosshead, I only laugh with women, please consult my schedule before I speak to a man in your vicinity -“

“That’s not what I -“

“You get punched in the head one too many times and suddenly anyone enjoying my company’s a fucking crime?”

i enjoy your company, Zoro’s stupid brain supplies, unhelpfully but he shoves it down.

“You were enjoying his company,” he snarls instead.

Sanji stares at him like he’s lost it. “Yeah, that’s how conversation works, you barbarian.”

“It’s not how it works with me,” Zoro snaps, and his temple is throbbing. His throat feels raw. He never yells like this, not at Sanji, not at anyone. Sparring, sure. Insults, sure. This is different. This feels like he’s been holding his breath for hours and only just realised it.

Sanji’s eyes widen, just a fraction. He reels back like Zoro hit him again, but this time it’s not anger in his face, it’s something blurred and startled that Zoro can’t stand to see.

“Well newsflash,” he snaps, armour slamming back into place. “The whole fucking world doesn’t revolve around your schedule. Sometimes people talk to me because I’m useful or because they like me. Maybe, just once, it’s not about you and your bruised ego!”

“Guys!” Nami’s voice cuts in sharply and they both whip their heads around. She’s standing a few paces away, hands on her hips and eyes like sharpened glass. Her expression is murderous.

“Stay out of it, Nami,” Zoro snaps automatically.

“Yeah, this is between me and the walking bush,” Sanji adds.

“Wrong,” Nami says crisply, marching right up into the blast radius. “You’re on my ship, screaming like seagulls with head trauma, and I can hear you from my damn bunk so now it’s my business.”

Zoro realises, distantly, that his hands are shaking again. He curls them into fists so hard his knuckles pop. “He started it.”

“Don’t you dare,” Sanji snarls at the same time. “He basically called me a fucking whore for getting a good price on saffron.”

“Both of you, shut the hell up!” Nami snaps, voice cracking like a whip and they shut the hell up.

Sanji’s staring hard at the boards now, teeth sunk into his cigarette filter, jaw jumping. There’s a flush on his cheekbones that Zoro can’t tell is anger or humiliation or both or nothing or –

Nami sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Okay, timeout. Sanji, go cool off. Take a shower or whatever. Zoro… you don’t leave the deck until you stop looking like you want to stab yourself with your own swords out of sheer emotional incompetence.”

“I’m fine,” Zoro grinds out.

Never one to disobey Nami, Sanji clicks his tongue and turns on his heel. The sacks creak as he hauls them back up. For a heartbeat, Zoro thinks – hopes? dreads? – he might look back but he doesn’t. He disappears down the hatch, smoke and hurt trailing in his wake and Zoro’s fingers curl like they miss the weight of a sword.

“What the hell, Zoro?” Nami scowls from behind him. “You’re not usually so damn stupid.”

“He was acting stupid.”

Nami comes to lean on the rail beside him, casual, like they’re just admiring the view. Her bracelets clink softly when she folds her arms. “He was shopping.”

“He was flirting.”

“So?”

He cuts his gaze over, to where the morning light throws sharp lines across her face. Her eyes glitter, already too knowing for his comfort. “So he doesn’t do that with everyone.”

She raises an eyebrow, delicate. “Yes he does.”

“No,” he shoots back, that awful, certain word jumping out before he can soften it. “He flirts with women.”

Nami stares at him for a long beat. The wind lifts a strand of her hair; she tucks it behind her ear, still watching him. “How’s that different?”

He opens his mouth but nothing comes – it’s like trying to explain a stance when all you’ve ever done is feel it. The words just don’t line up. He gestures, frustrated, like the answer is hanging in the air just out of reach. “When he talks to women it’s all stupid hearts and stupid poetry. When he talks to me it’s…” He stops, because the rest of the sentence feels like stepping off a cliff.

Nami’s eyes brighten, the way they do when she’s just spotted a profitable trade or a powerful secret. “Oh, so you finally recognised it.”

Zoro stiffens. “Recognised what?”

“The way he flirts with you.”

The words land like a falling mast: Zoro’s body reacts before his brain can, heart slamming against his ribs, breath stuttering, heat crawling up the back of his neck like someone just dumped boiling water down his spine. “That’s not – no. He hates me.”

Nami crosses her arms tighter, hip bumping the rail. “Then why does he only talk like that with you and people he’s interested in?”

He can feel his teeth grinding, can feel the pain that shoots up his jaw and it’s still not enough to ground him. “He talks like that because I piss him off.”

Nami presses. “And whatever poor guy's been dragged into this mess?”

His mind flashes back against his will: Sanji leaning on the counter, posture loose. Sanji’s eyes lit up and mouth curling around only the pretty ones with that infuriating little smile. The exact way he does with Zoro when they’re two seconds from trying to kill each other for fun. His chest tightens, painfully.

“That was different,” he insists, but the protest sounds thin even to his own ears.

Nami’s expression gentles around the edges, victory wrapped in real concern. “Zoro… you realise this is what jealousy looks like, right?”

Zoro’s stomach drops like he’s missed a step on an invisible staircase and now there’s nothing but air. “No,” he says immediately, too fast. “No, it’s not.”

“Then what is it?” she asks, maddeningly calm.

“I don’t know! But it’s not that.” He turns away from her fully now, putting his shoulder between them like a shield, both hands braced on the rail. The metal is cool under his palms, grounding and completely useless.

“He’s annoying,” Zoro says, like listing Sanji’s flaws will pull him back into safer territory. “Loud. Smokes too much. Picks fights when he’s bored. Kicks me awake. Smells like garlic and those stupid fancy soaps.”

“And?” Nami prompts, unrelenting.

“And he shouldn’t be doing that with other people,” Zoro snaps.

She blinks, slowly. “You hear yourself, right?”

He swallows, throat dry because he’d gotten used to it, without even noticing, has built invisible routines around it. Morning insults over coffee versus midday arguments over training, Sanji’s voice in his ear during storms, sharp and steady. All of it, constant as the sea. And then in the market, that same tone – sharp and playful and interested – turned somewhere else. The stallholder just got a piece of something Zoro hadn’t even realised he’d quietly started thinking of as his.

His grip on the rail tightens until his knuckles ache. “This's stupid,” he mutters but it sounds more like surrender than denial now.

Nami studies his profile, the tense line of his jaw, the way his shoulders are braced like he’s taking a hit. “If it’s stupid why does your face look like you just watched him jump ship?”

“I don’t want anything from him,” he insists blindly, automatically, the first words that jump into his mouth. He doesn’t even really know what he means – what’s to want, really?

She tips her head, fox-like and curious. “Nothing at all?”

His mouth opens and, like a fucking traitor, his brain serves up a list. He wants the mouth aimed at him again, sharp and bright and right there. He wants Sanji’s eyes back on him, not some stranger with a spice stall and nice cheekbones. He wants that glint that says fight me and keep up and sometimes, very rarely, good job. He wants Sanji on his side of the board, not wandering off to play with someone else.

He clamps his teeth shut.

Nami’s blatant curiosity morphs into something less sharp before his eyes, something gentler, maybe. Like she’s trying to meet him somewhere. “Okay, let’s play a game of hypotheticals. Ready?”

“No.”

“Too bad.” She folds her arms on the rail, her gaze drifting to the horizon, voice gone almost casual. “What if the guy you're yelling about had, I dunno, kissed him?”

The question hits like a punch to the lungs and for a split second his mind goes there, against his will – Sanji’s mouth tilted up to the stallholder’s, fingers still wrapped around a jar of saffron, laughter swallowed into somebody else’s teeth – and Zoro’s whole body spikes hot and cold at the same time. His jaw locks. “I’d cut him in half.”

Nami’s smile is all teeth. “Oh? Which one?”

He grinds out: “Both of them.”

Her eyes flick to him, glinting. “Yeah, not really how most people react when their friend gets kissed.”

“He’s an idiot,” Zoro snaps. “He’d probably fall for some smooth-talking moron and get himself killed.”

She hums. “We’re pirates. Every crush is a risk.”

His pulse stutters at crush because, god, does he hate that word. It’s always sounded like such a stupid concept and right now it feels too small and insignificant compared to the big, dumb, unwieldy thing chewing through his chest.

Nami leans a little closer. “Okay, let’s try this one on for size. Imagine Sanji flirting with guys the way he doesn’t with women, the way he flirts with you. All that attention, all that… focus.”

He can see it too easily: Sanji’s weight slanted toward someone, any someone, giving them that full blast of hands being busy and mouth being quick and eyes being bright and locked. Sparring but with compliments instead of kicks. His grip on the rail creaks and breathes in, sharp. The air tastes like salt and rust and something bitter inside his own mouth.

“That’s jealousy, Zoro,” Nami says quietly. “Wanting something someone else is getting. Wanting it to be you instead.”

His hands are shaking again, tiny tremors that travel from knuckles to elbows. He stares down at them like they belong to someone else. “It’s not –”

“Oh, come on,” she says, sharper now. “If that guy had touched him, what would you have done?”

“Cut his hand off.”

“If that guy had made him laugh like that?”

“Thrown him overboard.”

“And if that guy had taken him into an alley?”

“Found the alley,” Zoro snaps, voice low and dangerous. “And burned it down.”

Nami lets that hang there, heavy and smoking. Her face is perfectly impassive. “Right. And you don’t want anything from him.”

He wants to argue. He wants to say that’s different except somehow it keeps not being different. He thinks of Sanji beside him in storms, cigarette ember bright in the dark, of the way Sanji’s eyes find him in a fight, quick and assessing, like he’s checking a piece of essential equipment. Of the way his shoulders drop a fraction when Zoro walks into the galley late at night and just sits there while he cooks.

His voice comes out rough so he clears his throat and tries again. “I’m used to him talking to me like that.”

“And you like it,” Nami suggests gently. “You don’t know what to do with it, maybe, but you like it.”

He glares at her. “You’re enjoying this way too much.”

“Am I?” she says, light but not unkind. “Or am I just watching you finally catch up to what the rest of us have been seeing for months?”

His head snaps toward her. “What?”

She smirks. “You really think nobody noticed the way you two orbit each other? The way the whole ship feels when you’re going at it? The only surprising thing is that you’re surprised.”

A wave slaps the side of the Merry, spray lifting in a cool kiss of mist and Zoro’s skin feels hot under it as he drags a hand down his face, fingers catching on his earrings. All he can hear is the unwelcome sound of his own heart pounding every time his brain replays Sanji leaning on that stall and giving someone else that look.

Nami pats his arm, surprisingly gentle. “You don’t have to figure all of it out tonight. Just… maybe stop lying to yourself about why it sucks. And try not to stab anyone over it until you’re sure you mean it.”

She heads back toward the galley, leaving him alone with the rail, the sea, and the heavy, infuriating knowledge sitting in his chest but Zoro stays there a long time, breathing, listening to the Merry move through the water and the faint sounds of life below deck.

Sanji with women he recognises. That’s a script he’s watched a hundred times. Bar stool, barmaid. Dock, pretty passerby. Market, bored shopkeeper’s daughter. It’s all the same: Sanji’s eyes go heart-shaped, his voice gets syrupy, his body tips just that fraction closer. Compliments like machine-gun fire. Pet names that sound like he pulled them out of a hat, big gestures and theatrical sighs. Offers of coats, chairs, the whole damn ocean, probably.

And every single one of them bounces.

The women smile, roll their eyes, humour him. Sometimes they slap him. Sometimes they flirt back, but it’s shallow, harmless. Not real.

And Sanji – well. He never leaves with any of them. He never disappears down an alley or follows anyone into a room and comes out looking changed. He flirts, he gets yelled at, he simpers, he gets hit. Then he’s back on the ship, cigarette in his mouth, bitching about ingredients like nothing happened. It’s background noise, now. A bit. A routine.

It’s safe.

Zoro leans more weight onto his arms, staring down into the black water until it fuzzes at the edges.

Sanji had leaned on the stall like he owned the street. Elbow down, posture loose, mouth sharp. He’d thrown jabs, not roses. Every line had teeth. Every smile had edge and his eyes had been interested, not glazed over in that dumb Nami-swan way. And the guy hit back, not like the women do, rolling him off with a flick but like he was sparring.

Zoro remembers the quick flash of Sanji’s grin when the guy called him trouble. That real grin, the one that shows up in fights and in the galley, the one Zoro secretly files under mine even if he’s never put it into words before.

He’d seen that smile turned outward. Away from him.

To be fair, heMs never actually thought about it before, the idea that Sanji could want someone, enough to go past the routine and drop the stupid gushing act. Enough to use the real parts, his sharp brain and quick tongue, that disgusting amount of attention he gives to things that matter to him… enough to aim them at somebody who wasn’t crew, wasn’t safe.

He can’t put language to it, but that’s the splinter under Zoro’s skin: not just that Sanji was flirting with a guy but that, for the first time, Zoro’s dumb lizard brain went oh. He actually could want someone.

He grinds his teeth, annoyed at the thought and more annoyed at himself for thinking it. Jealousy. The word feels too small and too fucking slimy for the thing in his chest, but he can’t quite kick it away either. There’s no other word for i don’t want him looking at anyone else like he looks at me.

He runs through it again, trying to prove himself wrong, imagines Sanji with him on deck, in the galley, shoulder-to-shoulder at the rail during watch, insult for insult and spark for spark. That knife-flash grin and that same sharp attention, like Zoro’s a problem worth his full focus. His stomach twists, rough, because if the way Sanji talked to the stall guy looked like what Sanji does with him –

Then what the fuck does that make what they do?

Worse: he hates the way some treacherous corner of his mind keeps circling a different image entirely, Sanji leaning in like that across a counter, but it’s not a stranger there. It’s him. Half a step too close, breath warm, mouth still sharp but smiling right into Zoro’s teeth.

Zoro jerks his head, like he can shake the picture loose.

“No,” he mutters to the empty deck. “Absolutely not.”

The sea doesn’t answer.

He pushes himself off the rail, rolling his shoulders out like he’s been standing guard too long. He tells himself tomorrow he’ll be normal. He’ll insult Sanji’s cooking. He’ll pick fights. He’ll act like this was just another stupid market day.

He’s a swordsman. He can ignore one stupid feeling. Behind his ribs, though, the wrong, new part of him – the part that clinched when Sanji laughed at someone else – doesn’t believe it for a second. So he does what he’s always done with things he can’t solve: he shoves it down, goes looking for a weight to lift or a monster to cut, and leaves the realisation sitting there, heavy and patient, waiting for the next time Sanji points that sharp, real, interested attention somewhere that isn’t him.

x

The bar they pick for the night is loud enough that Zoro shouldn’t be able to hear his own thoughts, and yet. It’s a packed, half-drowning kind of place, with low wooden ceiling stained by old smoke and lanterns hanging unevenly, walls sweating with salt and spilled beer. Everytime the door opens, a gust of sea air and shouting spills in.

Sanji’s in his element.

He moves around the table like the bar was built for him specifically, swanning to the counter and leaning halfway over to talk to the bartender, palming extra plates, coming back with a tray balanced on fingertips. He’s got his cigarette tucked behind his ear because the bartender’s told him off already and he’s made it a point of pride to ignore the rule without directly breaking it.

Everytime he passes one of the waitresses or barmaids, the volume around them spikes.

“Ah, mademoiselle, you’ll put the stars out with that smile!”

“Your hands look far too delicate to be carrying heavy plates. allow me!”

“I swear I can make something better than whatever swill they’re serving you, just give me a kitchen and five minutes!”

The women giggle or roll their eyes or throw a napkin at his head. A few preen, some swat him away but all of them smile.

Zoro waits for the twist in his gut, that burn he’d felt at the spice stall but it doesn’t come. He just feels… tired. Mildly annoyed. A little embarrassed, the way you get when your idiot friend is doing a bit you’ve seen a hundred times.

This, he knows, is theatre. The compliments are polished and the way Sanji frames his face with his hand is rehearsed. The way he leans too far over the table is exaggerated, asking for a smack or a shove and laughing when he gets it. Zoro has watched him turn it on and off like a tap, stepping into a place and checking for danger, then coating every other sense in perfume and sugar so nobody looks too closely at the knife hand.

It’s not that it’s fake, exactly. It’s just that Sanji himself isn’t in it, not the part Zoro’s learned to recognise, anyway.

“You look less murderous tonight,” Namj says mildly, sipping her drink. “Congratulations.”

Zoro grunts. “He’s just working.”

Nami’s mouth tilts dangerously. “Is that what we’re calling it?”

“He’s not…” Zoro gestures at Sanji, who is currently bowing to a table of older women like they’re royalty. “That. He doesn’t mean that. It’s just noise.”

Usopp leans in, eyes bright. “Hey, hey, is this about Zoro’s little crush?”

Zoro doesn’t even look. He just nudges Usopp’s chair with his foot hard enough to make him squawk and grab the table. Luffy, who has been listening to all of this between bites, tilts his head. “I think it’s nice!”

“It’s not nice,” Zoro snaps.

Three sets of eyes land on him and he purposefully looks away, scowling into his drink. On the other side of the bar, Sanji laughs at something, a startled, unguarded laugh that Zoro knows to be his real one, lower, rougher, full of teeth.

It lodges under Zoro’s ribs.

Because he’s heard that laugh on deck. In the galley. In the middle of an argument that got so stupid they both forgot they were angry halfway through. He’s heard it when Sanji kicks him in the side and Zoro makes a joke about his aim. He’s heard it in the middle of a storm, soaked through, hair plastered to his face, when Zoro bet him five thousand berries he’d fall on his ass first.

He’s never heard that laugh aimed at a stranger before.

That’s our laugh, a traitorous part of him thinks, and he wants to slam his head into the table because that’s insane and wrong and Nami is absolutely going to say I told you so if she ever hears it.

“Bud,” Usopp grins, eyes alight with glee. “Your grip.”

He looks down to where hand’s clenched so tight around his cup his knuckles have gone white and forces his fingers to relax. “It’s fine,” he says.

Sanji chooses that moment to weave back through the crowd, balancing another tray and room seems to bend around him automatically; people shift, make space, like the tide moving around a rock. He drops plates on the table one by one with the flourish of a magician. “Meat for Luffy, something tragic and leafy for Nami-swan, fried heaven for Usopp and a bowl of whatever alcoholic sludge they had left for seaweed-brain.”

Luffy beams. “You say the nicest things!”

They dig in. For a while, the noise of slurping and crunching and arguing about portion sizes fills the air. Zoro eats automatically, muscles remembering what to do, while his brain does what it’s terrible at: it thinks.

Nami’s voice ghosts back: he only talks like that with you and people he’s interested in.

He stabs a piece of meat harder than necessary and, across the table, Sanji’s hand darts out to smack his chopsticks. “Oi, Don’t murder the damn skewer.”

“Don’t tell me how to eat.” Zoro glances up and catches the glint in Sanji’s eye, tiny and weaponised. It’s satisfaction, bright and mean and stupidly pleased, like a cat that’s finally got the canary to twitch. His mouth’s curled too, crooked and smug, nothing pretty about it, all angles and teeth and Zoro knows that mouth. He knows that expression down to the millimetre, exactly how far the right insult can tilt it and how high it can climb, how it looks when Sanji’s really got him, when Zoro falls for something and Sanji lights up like a match.

The jealousy from earlier shifts under his skin, changing shape like hot metal being hammered. It’s still sharp and uncomfortable – still a blade – but the edge turns. It’s not just that he doesn’t want Sanji handing their sparks to someone else but that he wants more of this. More of being the one Sanji turns that real grin on and of being the reason his voice drops with that particular knife-edged fondness he smuggles into insults. More of being the one who makes his pulse jump, who drags that bright, dangerous focus across the table and pins it in place.

The thought slips in uninvited, fully formed and vile: What if he did that and meant it? What if Sanji looked at him with that same bright attention and wanted something with it? Wanted to lean in? Wanted to see what Zoro would do if, instead of an insult, he put his mouth on – Zoro chokes on his sake. It goes down wrong, burns up his nose and he coughs, eyes watering, lungs seizing like he just took a hit straight to the chest.

Luffy yelps and slaps his back, enthusiastic enough to rattle his ribs. “You okay, Zoro?!”

He wheezes: “Fine,” voice shredded and it feels like a lie all the way down.

Nami’s watching him over the rim of her glass like she’s gor front row seats. “Allergies acting up?”

“Shut up,” he grinds out but the thought doesn’t leave. Now that it’s surfaced it multiplies, spreads, hooks itself into little memories and starts stitching them together into something he doesn’t want to look at. What if that quick little smirk Sanji gets when he’s about to say something really cruel was just for him, not for the whole damn table? What if he leaned in close, not to hiss insults in his ear, but just to see how far Zoro would let him come before he broke? What if he did with Zoro what he pretends to do with barmaids and never follows through on?

What if Sanji kissed him?

Sanji’s fingers curled in the front of his shirt, knuckles white because he always overcommits. That relentless mouth, usually so busy running itself, finally shut on something useful. His weight pressed along Zoro’s front, long and hot and real, the scrape of stubble against his upper lip, the sharp little breath he’d make when Zoro grabbed him by the hip, by the waist, by the stupid tie, anything to hold him there –

Across the table, Sanji squints at him, cigarette clamped between two fingers. “You’re making a weird face.”

“This's my normal face,” Zoro snaps a little too fast, a little too defensive.

“Exactly,” Sanji snipes but there’s a tiny furrow between his eyebrows now, like concern trying very hard to hide behind habit. His eyes flick down, pausing for a fraction of a second on Zoro’s mouth before snapping back up like nothing happened.

Zoro feels that tiny detour like someone just scraped a blade along a live wire. His mind, already flailing, throws more fuel on itself: imagines catching Sanji mid-rant. no warning or wind-up. Just reaching out, fisting a hand in the open collar of that stupid shirt and hauling him in. The split second of shock, all teeth and vowels, before Zoro drowns it – before he presses their mouths together hard enough to steal the insult right off his tongue, how quickly Sanji would go from fighting it to fighting with it because that’s what he does with everything. How he’d chase Zoro’s mouth back, furious and bright and unbelievably alive. Hands gripping Zoro’s arms and chest and hips, that sharp tongue saying his name without any insult attached. Just Zoro, low and wrecked.

His heart slams against his ribs so hard it feels like it’s trying to get out. He drops his chopsticks and they clatter against the plate, loud as a gunshot.

“Oi,” Sanji snaps automatically. “Have some respect for the cookware, you gorilla!”

Zoro doesn’t answer. He’s busy pressing the heel of his hand against his sternum, like he can physically shove his idiot traitor heart back where it belongs because he finally, finally understands the shape of the thing digging its claws into his ribs. It’s not just frustration or habit. Hell, it’s not even just jealousy. It’s want, big and stupid and entirely too late, and it’s got Sanji’s name all over it.

x

He stays awake for hours, staring holes into the Merry’s ceiling until the knots in the wood start to look like faces. The ship rocks in small, lazy swells, the kind that usually knocks him out in minutes but tonight it just makes everything worse. Every creak in the beams feels like a thought he hasn’t had yet and every soft slap of water against the hull lands in his chest instead of outside of it. Above him, a lantern throws slow shadows, the shapes of ropes and beams shifting with the sway. He lies flat on his back, hands folded under his head like dead weight, and tries not to think about the moment his brain quietly ruined his life.

It doesn’t make sense and it shouldn’t matter. More importantly, it can’t matter. Sanji is… Sanji. A walking heart-shaped catastrophe, all long limbs and loud opinions, hearts in his eyes for any woman with a pulse. All that dramatic bullshit about a lady’s tears are a crime! and I’ll never let harm come to a woman and the way Zoro’s watched him snap a guy’s spine clean in half for being too rough with a girl.

The thought of liking Sanji – wanting him, wanting his attention, his mouth, all that relentless focus pointed at him for more than a fight – feels like a weapon he doesn’t remember picking up. He tries to handle it like a sword anyway, because it’s all he knows: examine, test the balance, decide if it’s useful.

The facts are there, stark and unavoidable, that Sanji’s a man who likes women and Zoro generally doesn’t even want things from people outside of a good fight. The fact is there’s nowhere for this to go except for the box in his head where he keeps things he doesn’t touch. His first loss to Mihawk lives there, still bright-edged and bitter, sitting with the look on Kuina’s face the last time she beat him. The sound of steel missing flesh by a hair when he wasn’t fast enough. It’s simple, really. He just takes the thing, names it unnecessary, slams the door and hammers it shut and sits on top of it until it stops rattling, he’s good at that. Fuck knows he’s made of that.

He rolls back onto his back to stare up at the ceiling again and imagines putting the feeling in the same box. Sanji, all sharp teeth and smoke, laughing at him and the stupid, humiliating lurch in his gut at the idea of Sanji doing that to someone else.

He lies there, listening to Luffy snore and the faint sound of the sea and feels the emotion slam itself against that imaginary door like something that really, really doesn’t understand the concept of stay.

By the time the sky outside the porthole starts shading from black to deep grey, his eyes burn and his jaw aches from clenching and it turns out that the plan has not made him any less miserable.

He drags himself up on deck like a man climbing out of a bad dream, with his swords still strapped on. The early light’s too clean, air too sharp. The horizon is a knife-edge of silver where the sun’s thinking about starting trouble. The island sits off their port side, white stone and red tile and a smear of colour already waking up along the docks. Seagulls wheel and scream like they’re arguing about who owns which fish.

It should be a good morning. It’s their last day in port. Instead, all he can think is that if he crawled under a pile of weights in the hold and stayed there until they set sail then maybe this feeling would shake loose like sweat.

Sanji’s already in the galley, steam fogging the low ceiling. The clink of plates and the rhythm of Sanji’s footsteps weave together into a kind of domestic battle music. Usopp has one arm braced across the door frame, physically holding Luffy back with the efficiency of long practice. “No, you wait.”

“But Usopp –”

“You’ll get it when Sanji says,” Usopp groans.

Sanji’s in the centre of the chaos like it all orbits him with a pan in one hand and a spatula in the other, moving like he knows exactly where everything is without looking, each motion clean and unhurried.

Zoro’s chest gives an ugly little kick and he hates that he notices how solid Sanji’s forearms look when he flicks his wrist to flip an omelette, muscle shifting under pale skin, tendons sharp. The way his long fingers curl around a handle, knuckles grazing the bench as he sets something down, the casual precision with which he handles knives even when he’s not thinking about it.

Zoro feels the abrupt, hot spike of want that punches through his carefully constructed denial and sits there, bold as anything. He scowls, like that’ll scare it off.

Maybe this, he thinks sourly, is what he gets for letting his guard down in towns. He ignores his surroundings, he gets stabbed. He ignores his own head, suddenly the cook’s stupid neck is interesting.

He shoulders past Luffy and Usopp, grunting something that might be morning and drops into a seat at the table hard enough that the legs squeak on the floor.

“Don’t break my furniture,” Sanji says automatically without turning around.

“Make sturdier chairs,” Zoro mutters.

Sanji throws a look over his shoulder, one eyebrow arching. The sunlight cuts across his face, picking out the faint purple under his eye and the smudge of ash at the corner of his mouth. Zoro’s stomach tightens in a way that isn’t hunger.

“Someone woke up charming,” Sanji drawls. “Lose a fight in your dreams?”

Zoro reaches for a mug. “Just hate seeing your face first thing.”

Something flickers in Sanji’s expression. “Whatever. Food’s almost done. Try not to sulk into it or it’ll curdle.”

He turns back to the stove, flicking his cigarette out the open porthole with a practiced snap, movement that’s all competence and zero wasted effort. It used to irritate Zoro, how smooth he is in here but now it just makes him feel off-balance. He wraps his fingers around the empty mug, eyes fixed stubbornly on the wood grain of the table and reminds himself that he has a plan. It’s a shit plan, sure, but it’s his: keep it down, keep it quiet, keep away from whatever makes it worse.

Too bad Nami has other ideas. The galley door bangs against the stopper, the sound sharp enough to make Zoro’s teeth clench. He looks up from his plate, halfway through forcing down fish he can’t taste, and finds her framed in the doorway with a ledger under one arm and murder in her eyes.

“Good,” she says, clapping her hands once. “You’re both here.”

Zoro’s stomach drops like the ship just hit a trench. Sanji, at the stove, doesn’t turn fully around, but Zoro sees the subtle stiffening in his shoulders. The cigarette between his fingers pauses on the way to his mouth.

“We’re low on staples since someone decided to skip market duty yesterday. We still need more flour and probably more staples. We barely got anything yesterday.” Her gaze slides between them,cool and sharp, calculating, taking in the way Zoro can’t quite meet Sanji’s stare and the way Sanji is stirring the pan like it owes him money. “You two are going back.”

The words land like a thrown knife.

“No,” Zoro says immediately, too fast, fork clattering against the plate.

At the same time Sanji says, perfectly in sync: “Absolutely not.”

They turn on each other like it’s muscle memory, Sanji’s eyes already sparking, storm-blue and furious. Zoro can feel his own hackles go up in that familiar, stupid impulse to meet fire with fire instead of backing down. The air in the galley tightens around them, thick with the ghost of yesterday’s shouting.

Nami doesn’t even blink. “Yes.”

Sanji snorts. “Please. Like I want to spend another afternoon listening to him sulk.”

“I don’t sulk,” Zoro snaps.

“You stomped off,” Sanji says, spinning around fully now, spatula in hand like a weapon. “In the middle of a conversation. With the groceries.”

Zoro’s jaw tightens. “You were the one flirting with half the island.”

The accusation comes out before he can stop it, ugly and raw in the small room and Sanji’s eyes flash, anger flaring up to match. “Oh, we’re doing this again?”

Nami pinches the bridge of her nose, like she can physically hold a headache in place. “Nope, we are not doing this again.”

“You started it,” Sanji fires at Zoro, ignoring her. “Storming off like a child because someone talked to me.”

“You weren’t just talking,” Zoro growls. The heat is back in his chest, that same twisting spike from the market jabbing at his ribs.

Sanji steps closer, chin up, smoke curling sharp around his face. “And what exactly was I doing, then?”

Zoro opens his mouth and the real answers crowd his tongue, useless and impossible: you were laughing, you were looking at him the way you look at me when we fight, you were giving away something i thought was ours. He can’t say any of that.

Nami steps in before he can choke on a reply and both of them fall silent on reflex, months of nakama obedience snapping into place.

“We need food,” she says, slow and deliberate, enunciating each word like she’s explaining arithmetic to particularly stupid children. “Actual food, not just meat and cigarettes. You two are the best options. Sanji won’t let us buy garbage and Zoro can carry half the market without complaining –”

“I am complaining,” Zoro mutters.

The silence that follows is not agreement.

Nami smiles, all teeth and menace. “I could always send Luffy.”

Images flash in quick succession: fourteen bags of candy, no rice, Luffy trying to ride a cart like a skateboard, Nami’s fist connecting with Zoro’s skull when the bill arrives.

Sanji exhales smoke toward the ceiling, jaw tightening. “Whatever,” he says, but it sounds more like fuck, fine than indifference.

Nami, satisfied in that terrifying way only she can be, claps her hands again. “Bring back receipts and everything on that list or I’m taking it out of your personal stashes.” She leaves with the efficiency of a storm changing direction and for a moment, the only sounds are the low hiss of the pan and the ship’s soft creak around them. Sanji doesn’t look at him. Zoro doesn’t look at Sanji. The smoke curls lazy between them like a third, unwelcome party to the conversation.

Zoro grabs his swords because he doesn’t know what else to do with his hands, stepping out in a way that feels less like leaving a room and more like stepping out of a ring mid-round.

Twenty minutes later, there are three empty crates stacked by the gangplank, the sun beating down on the deck and the island noise drifting over the water. Zoro, against all better judgement and every screaming instinct he has, is still there, waiting.

The sun sits low and mean over the harbour, throwing long stripes of light across the deck. Tar and salt and drying rope bake together into that particular port smell that usually puts Zoro in a decent mood: work to do, money to spend, a ship to come back to.

Not today. Today the air feels too hot in his lungs. The crates in his arms eat into the soft skin of his forearms but he lets them because the bite of wood is a simple pain he understands. The rest of it – this tight, sour thing crawling around under his ribs whenever he looks at Sanji – is not.

Sanji stands a few paces away, list in hand, cigarette hanging unlit from his mouth. Zoro can feel the distance like another person standing between them.

“Vegetables first,” he says, finally. His voice is flat, all the fizz stripped out. “Then flour, then a few spices and we can go.”

Zoro snorts, the sound coming out harsher than he means. “Your boyfriend waiting for you?”

He hears it as it leaves his mouth, too sharp and petty and close to the bone, and wants to grab the words out of the air and swallow them back down.

Sanji’s head snaps up. “Excuse me?”

There’s a beat where Zoro could fix it, could say i didn’t mean it like that or i just meant that stall idiot or just shut up entirely and let it die here. But pride and embarrassment and that weird, acid jealousy hook into his tongue and tug until he doubles down instead.

“Your spice guy,” he mutters, shifting the crates so he has an excuse not to look directly at him. “You seemed like you were having fun.”

He hates how small that sounds. How close it is to a sulk. It’s not the sharp, clean hit he usually goes for and Sanji just. Stares at him. There’s a flicker in his face Zoro can’t read – surprise, maybe, or hurt, or calculation. Then it’s gone, shuttered behind something cooler. He laughs, thin and brittle and sharp enough to cut your mouth on. “Fuck, you’re still on that?”

Zoro’s shoulders go up. “Just saying.”

“Yeah,” Sanji replies, voice dropping a few degrees. “You do a lot of that.”

There’s an accusation there he doesn’t know how to defend himself against.

you say things without thinking

you don’t care where they land

you’ve already made up your mind

The gangplank thuds under their boots and Sanji lands on the dock and keeps on walking, coat flaring slightly with each step. It’s not his dramatic stomp but worse because it’s so damn controlled and measured, like he’s decided exactly how much of himself he’s willing to spend on Zoro today and that amount is very, very little.

Zoro lengthens his stride to keep up, the crates stacked high enough that he has to look around them to track Sanji’s back. He keeps doing the thing he told himself he’d do: he gives the other man space. He doesn’t bump shoulders or walk close enough for their arms to brush. He doesn’t poke him in the ribs or hook his foot around his ankle or say you’re walking too slow just to hear Sanji spark back.

The market swallows them whole as soon as they leave the dock, all colour and heat and sound. Stalls spill onto the stone and awnings flap overhead, people shouting about fresh fish while others haggle over bolts of cloth. Normally Sanji would already be in his element, commenting on everything and dragging Zoro from stall to stall with a constant stream of banter. Today he walks like a blade through water. “Try not to get lost on the way to the fucking cabbage.”

Zoro’s jaw ticks. “You’re the one who gets distracted by every shiny tomato.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that,” Sanji fires back. “I wouldn’t want to embarrass you by enjoying myself.”

The word hits right where it did on the deck. Embarrass. Zoro wants to say that’s not it, that it was never about Sanji enjoying himself but about who he was enjoying himself with. He grits his teeth. “That’s not –”

“What?” Sanji cuts in, eyes fixed straight ahead. “Not what it looked like? Because from where I'm standing this whole thing looks a lot like you had a problem with me talking to a guy.”

Zoro’s chest goes tight. “I don’t care that it was a guy.”

“Oh,” Sanji says, bitter and bright. “So you just have a problem with me, then. Great, love that.”

“No, I didn't –”

“Save it. You made it pretty clear how you feel about my personality, remember? I’ll keep it to myself.” He speeds up, slipping through a gap in the crowd with the easy grace of someone who’s been dodging sailors since he could walk. Zoro has to shoulder his way past a crate of oranges to keep him in sight.

Every part of him that knows how to fight is screaming at him to close the distance, to grab Sanji by the collar and yank him into some alley and snarl the truth in his face: that it pissed him off because it looked like the thing they do, the thing that’s theirs, and for a second he thought he’d lost it to some smug idiot with a spice rack. That it wasn’t disgust, it was jealousy and that’s somehow so much worse he doesn’t know what to do with it.

Instead he clamps his jaw shut and keeps his mouth around the only defence he has left: silence. He walks half a step behind, crates digging into his arms, watching Sanji’s shoulders from a distance that feels much bigger than a few feet. The back of Sanji’s neck is a straight, pale line between his collar and his hair, tense enough that Zoro’s fingers itch with the stupid, useless urge to rub his thumb along it, see if the tightness would ease.

They hit the vegetable district, under a tangle of faded canvas awnings that turn the sunlight green and gold. Crates of produce spill into the lane: cabbages stacked like skulls, citrus glistening, wilted herbs half-heartedly misted with dubious water.

Sanji veers to a stall without announcing it, run by an older woman with forearms like tree trunks and a scattering of knife scars across her fingers. She beams when she recognises Sanji. “Ah! Long-legs! You again.”

“Ma’am,” Sanji says, and there’s a ghost of his usual charm there, but it’s thin, strained. “Your lettuce looks like it survived the apocalypse.”

“Storms,” she sniffs. “Everything’s storms now. You want better, you grow it yourself. I see your pack mule is extra quiet today.”

Sanji’s mouth twists. “He’s allergic to conversation.”

“Ah,” she hums wisely. “Man trouble.”

Zoro nearly chokes. Sanji actually startles, eyes widening for a split second before his expression snaps back onto that cool, unimpressed line. “Can we just get the cabbages?”

They haggle. Normally Zoro would tune it out, mind drifting to the weight of his swords or the stretch of his shoulders, half-listening in case Sanji got too excited and needed dragging away. Today he can’t not hear it or, more truthfully, can’t not hear what’s not being said and the way that Sanji’s not flirting. He’s just… efficient. Brutal, almost. Plays hardball, calls prices ridiculous, taps the heads of the cabbages like he’s judging skulls for structural integrity. There are no pretty compliments or sly smiles and Zoro should be relieved, maybe, but the knot in his chest pulls tighter.

He did this. Spat the word embarrassing at Sanji’s face, and now the man’s folding all his shine down into a neat little box and tucking it out of sight.

“Fine,” Sanji says at last, snapping a price. “But if they wilt before I get them aboard, I’m coming back to yell at you.”

“Promise?” the woman grins.

Sanji’s smile is brief but it doesn’t reach his eyes and hey move on. Flour’s next, easy and impersonal. They don’t even have to talk to do it: Sanji gestures and Zoro lifts. The stallholder grumbles about pirates and Sanji tosses a food’s legal tender line over his shoulder; Zoro doesn’t add anything. Lets the joke hang between Sanji and a stranger like that’s where it belongs.

By the time they’ve loaded two crates with vegetables and one with flour the sun’s climbed higher and the only thing left is whatever spices Sanji’s decided make the cut.

The stall looks exactly the same as yesterday, the smell hitting Zoro like a cleaver. He tenses, stupidly aware of this place in a way he doesn’t want to be, even as Sanji stops at the edge of the stall’s shade. The stallholder looks up and his whole face lights. “Well, well, if it isn’t my favourite culinary menace.”

Yesterday, Zoro would’ve rolled his eyes. Today he stares very hard at a crate of dried chilies and pretends his pulse isn’t climbing.

Sanji sets his hands on the counter, fingers spread. “You overcharge for coriander. Somebody has to keep you honest.”

The stallholder laughs, eyes crinkling. “And you underpay with insults. We’re even.”

Zoro tightens his grip on the crates and focuses on the grain of the wood against his palms, tells himself to stay the fuck out of it and give Sanji room. Keep it in the damn box. Sanji slides into the rhythm easily, the sharp back-and-forth, the mock irritation, the quick hands lifting jars and putting them back exactly where they were. “How’s the cardamom?”

“Fresh.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

Zoro stares at the stall to their left, to where someone selling pickled things yells about vinegar. A kid runs past, laughing. None of it lands properly, all the sound coming from the wrong direction.

“What about you?” the spice guy asks, nodding at Zoro. “You gonna glare at my stock again or’s that extra?”

Zoro’s jaw flexes. “I’m just carrying stuff.”

Sanji’s voice goes a shade quieter. “Quarter kilo of the good chili and half of the coriander seeds. Two of your better curry mixes. And if you’ve got real saffron this time I might not tell every restaurant in town you’re a fraud.”

“You wound me,” the stallholder grins.

“Good, maybe you’ll stop lying about your paprika.”

Zoro watches Sanji from the corner of his eye, tracking the way he keeps some distance – no leaning on the counter this time or casual brush of hands. Sees how his mouth never quite curves into the full, bright grin Zoro is used to pulling out of him. Sees the way his gaze flicks Zoro’s way once, quick and sharp, before snapping back like it got burned.

The deal finishes. Money changes hands. The stallholder, still trying to lighten the mood, leans forward. “You want me to show you around the rest of the market later? I can get you a real good deal on eel.”

Sanji goes stiff, mouth twisting right in time with Zoro’s stomach. He says, flatly: “Give me the saffron.”

The man hands it over, face faltering and Sanji tucks it into his pocket with surgical efficiency, nods one single time and turns away.

“Thanks,” Zoro mutters, the only neutral word his brain produces.

The spice guy waves him off, still looking contrite. The market’s noise wraps back around them, but their little bubble stays jagged and wrong. Sanji’s still a pace ahead, still not looking at him. Zoro keeps his mouth shut by force, stuck in the stupid loop he’s created: jealous when Sanji spends his fire on others and gutted when he holds it back around him.

He doesn’t know how to step out of it without stepping forward and that’s off the table. Sanji’s made it very clear how he hears Zoro’s bullshit: as judgment. As disgust. As the same kind of shit he’s probably heard for years and Zoro would rather cut his own tongue out than double down on that.

They clear the main crush and hit a narrower lane between stalls, quieter, half-shadowed. A breeze sneaks through, cooler. It should feel like a relief.

“Oi,” Sanji says abruptly.

Zoro looks up to where the cook’s stopped dead in the middle of the lane, one hand still in his pocket and the other hanging loose at his side. There’s a flush to his face that isn’t just heat; his jaw's clenched. “We’ve got what we need. You can stop acting like the job requires you to ignore me.”

Zoro’s tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. “I’m not ignoring you.”

“You haven’t said more than three non-insult words to me all morning and one of them was boyfriend.”

“That was an insult,” Zoro mutters before he can stop himself.

Sanji’s eyes flash. “Yeah, no, I got that.”

They’re starting to draw looks. A pair of old men at a nearby stall glance over, then very pointedly turn away, the way locals do when they see something that might turn into a fight and don’t want the paperwork. Sanji looks around once, mouth tightening, then grabs Zoro by the wrist and just fucking hauls him sideways, between two closed up booths, crates and all. Zoro could dig in his heels easily but doesn’t. His body goes obedient before his brain catches up, following Sanji into the narrow cut between stalls.

It’s barely wider than his shoulders, all rough boards and the faint smell of old fish. The sky is a thin strip overhead, crisscrossed by laundry lines and prayer flags. The noise of the market dulls to a muffled blur.

Sanji lets go of his wrist and rounds on him, planting one hand on the wall beside Zoro’s head to box him in without seeming to care that Zoro’s bulkier and armed. His eyes are very clear and very angry. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Zoro swallows. The crates feel ridiculous in his arms now, like stage props in the wrong play. “We got your stupid spices.”

“This isn’t about spices,” Sanji snarls. “This is about you suddenly acting like I’ve got the plague.”

Zoro looks away, down the alley. His teeth grind against each other to stop himself from saying anything other than: “I’m not.”

“You’ve either been up in my face starting fights or pretending I’m a ghost so pick one, asshole!”

“I’m just giving you space,” Zoro snaps and immediately wants to bite his own tongue off.

Sanji blinks. “Space,” he repeats, like it’s a foreign word.

“To… do whatever,” Zoro mutters. “Talk to whoever, flirt with… whoever.”

There, he said it. Pulled the scab off in one go. Sanji’s expression fractures for a second – surprise, hurt, naked offence flickering too fast beneath the anger to catch properly. “Oh, so that’s it. You think I’m disgusting? You think I shouldn’t – what, look at a man? Joke with one? Let him say I’m pretty for five fucking minutes?”

The word pretty hits Zoro like a thrown plate. His chest feels too small for his lungs. “No, that’s not –”

Sanji’s hand curls against the wall, knuckles whitening. “Then what? Because from where I’m standing, you’re either pissed because it was a guy or you’re pissed because it was me, both of which are real fuckin’ –”

“I’m mad,” Zoro bites out, furious. “Because it was us.”

Sanji’s mouth shuts with a click. “What the fuck’s that mean?”

Zoro’s pulse is in his throat, every instinct he has screaming at him to shut up, to make a joke. To pick a fight. To do literally anything except walk off this edge. He hears himself do it anyway. “What you were doing with him, the… insults. That’s what we do.”

Sanji’s eyes narrow. “We fight.”

“We talk,” Zoro corrects, louder than he means to. The crates wobble; he adjusts them without looking away. “We’ve been doing that since we met. You yell, I yell, you call me whatever, I call you whatever, you threaten to kick my teeth in, I threaten to throw you overboard. That’s –”

“Abuse,” Sanji cuts in dryly, but there’s a tremor under it.

“That’s ours,” Zoro barrels on. “That’s you and me.”

Sanji’s face does that thing again, anger and confusion and something warmer flickering and trying very hard not to surface. He inhales deeply, face turning carefully blank. “And what if I told you it looked a lot like the way we talk ‘cause that’s how I flirt when it’s real?”

The word flirt lands in Zoro like a blade point-first, air gone thin. The crates in his arms might as well be feathers; he can’t feel them properly anymore over the roaring in his ears. There’s a beat where he could do the easy thing, where he could scoff and call Sanji delusional. Pretend it’s a joke and punch his way out of this narrow little trap. Instead every stupid, reckless part of him that’s been simmering since yesterday grabs the opportunity with both hands. “Then I’d say you were wasting it on him.”

Sanji looks at him like he’s never seen him before, stepping in so close Zoro’s back crunches further into rough stone. The crates creak between his chest and his arms. Sanji’s hand’s still on the wall by his head and his other floats up, hovering in the air like it’s fighting with itself.

Zoro’s heart is a fucking drum.

“Well,” Sanji says, voice low and lazy on purpose. “If I’ve been wasting it on the wrong person…”

His gaze drops, blatant, to Zoro’s mouth and Zoro feels it like a hand, every instinct he has for danger and every instinct he has for want pulling in the exact same direction. Two fingers lightly tap the corner of Zoro’s mouth, a ridiculous, delicate little touch. He clearly expects Zoro to flinch; Zoro can feel it in the way Sanji’s shoulders hold loose but ready to snap back, all bravado balanced on a hair-trigger retreat. This is Sanji at his most defensive: hit himself first, so no-one else gets to.

“Try me,” Zoro hears himself say, ragged and honest and entirely too fast.

Sanji kisses him, sharp, a fast, testing press that’s more weapon than affection. He stays taut, all on the surface, ready to laugh it off the second Zoro jerks away and then he starts to pull back – see, joke’s over, you failed, forget it – and Zoro, operating entirely on impulse, chases him. The crates hit the cobbles with a heavy thud, flour and vegetables shifting, but his hands are finally free. One clamps down on Sanji’s hip, fingers digging into the sharp line of bone and the other shoves into the hair at the back of his head, holding tight like it’s the only solid thing on the ship.

He kisses back, too hard, angle wrong, teeth crunching. Sanji makes a strangled what the fuck noise into his mouth, and Zoro realises with a bolt of horror that he has absolutely no idea what he’s doing and almost breaks it, but Sanji’s fist catches his shirt, yanking him right back down.

“Oh, no you don’t,” he mutters against his lips, breath hot and furious. “You don’t get to drop that and run.” His other hand slides up to the back of Zoro’s neck, thumb settling under his ear, fingers curving into the short hair there, directive, tilting Zoro’s head until the whole world suddenly lines up. He leans in again, slower this time, and Zoro meets him halfway.

Sanji’s mouth fits over his properly now, warm and insistent and alive. He softens the pressure a fraction, and Zoro copies him without thinking. The angle’s better, their lips slotting together like a new stance that finally makes sense. Sanji presses, then eases, testing, and Zoro moves with him the way he would in a spar: push, yield, push back. It’s clumsy around the edges, teeth grazing, breath messy, but there’s a rhythm in it he recognises from everytime they’ve ever tried to beat the shit out of each other.

He tightens his grip in Sanji’s hair, dragging him closer, and that gets him a hit he didn’t expect, a shudder from Sanji, a tiny, bitten-off sound against his tongue.

oh, Zoro thinks, dazed and savage.

Sanji surges up into him like something finally snapped. Fingers glide up Zoro’s side, catching on old scars before fisting in the back of his shirt. The hand at Zoro’s neck keeps him right where Sanji wants him, thumb stroking once, rough and almost affectionate. The kiss breaks for a second – just enough for air – and then Sanji’s back on him, teeth catching Zoro’s lower lip, sucking it, dragging a groan from Zoro that’s completely involuntary. He feels heat pool under his skin, a hot, insistent pull low in his gut. It’s the same rush he gets mid-fight when someone finally proves they can keep up, except it’s all pressed into Sanji’s mouth, Sanji’s hands, Sanji’s body slotting perfectly against his like some idiot puzzle piece he didn’t even realise he was missing.

Sanji laughs into his mouth, breathless and wrecked-sounding, and deepens the angle again, licking into the seam of Zoro’s lips like, yes, here, open up, pay attention. It’s messy and hot and way too much. His back’s starting to ache from the wall and his grip in Sanji’s hair is probably flirting with painful but he doesn’t care. Everytime he thinks okay, that’s enough Sanji drags him right back under, kissing him harder, chasing another sound out of him like he’s collecting them.

He has no idea how long they stay tangled like that – seconds, minutes, a lifetime. Zoro couldn’t name a single person on the whole damn island right now if you held a blade to his throat.

It’s just… Sanji. Sanji’s mouth, hot and slick and relentless, Sanji’s hand on his neck, thumb rubbing a distracted pattern into his skin. Sanji pressed against him like he’s been waiting to do exactly this and is making up for lost time.

Finally – finally – Sanji tears his mouth away, dragging in air like he’s just surfaced from a dive. He doesn’t go far; their noses brush, foreheads almost touching, breaths tangling. Zoro chases him a centimetre without meaning to and Sanji pins him there with a look. “Timeout. Before we traumatise the entire vegetable district.”

Zoro’s lungs burn. His hand is still welded to Sanji’s hip and he – he can’t even speak right now.

“For the record,” Sanji murmurs, words slow like he wants them precise. “I don’t flirt like that with everyone.”

Zoro’s heart stutters. He clears his throat and manages, weak: “You don’t say.”

“This? The real shit that gets under my skin? The part where I slam you into a wall and nearly dislocate your jaw trying to make you shut up with your mouth?” He swallows, throat working right under Zoro’s nose. “You’re the only idiot I want to waste it on.”

Zoro stares at him. “Good,” he croaks, because apparently that’s all his brain will give him right now.

Sanji snorts, breath puffing against Zoro’s lips. “Good?”

“Yeah.” Zoro’s hand slides up, thumb brushing the corner of Sanji’s mouth, feeling the damp heat there, the faint tremble. “I’m not interested in sharing.”

Sanji’s breath catches and for a second, they just look at each other, both of them flushed, breathing hard, pressed together in a narrow gap that smells like spices and saltwater and them. Then Sanji’s mouth crooks into a helpless, wrecked little grin. “Me neither,” he says, soft as a blessing, and drags Zoro down into another kiss.

x

poor stallholder was probably so hype to have a hot leggy blonde chatting him up then this mossy-headed fucker comes along like >:(

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