Chapter Text
The air of the New World felt different than any ocean Zoro had known. He couldn’t have explained it if someone asked, he wasn’t eloquent enough for that. The air tasted the same and the stars overhead were the same stars he’d navigated by his whole life. However, there was something profound to the darkness out here that wasn’t present in the first half of the Grand Line or the East Blue.
Zoro had the second half of watch tonight. He’d relieved Robin twenty minutes prior and was now sitting in the Crow’s Nest while the rest of the crew slept below, swords across his lap and his one eye open for threats in every direction. He didn’t mind it. He’d always been better at watching than at sleeping during the night.
Zoro heard the hatch open and didn’t tense. He’d been aware of someone approaching for the last thirty seconds. There was only one person on this ship who moved like that, each step precise and deliberate even when they thought no one was paying attention.
“Hey,” Sanji said, as he climbed the last rungs into the crow’s nest.
He heard rather than saw Sanji settle, the clink of ceramic and faint steam accompanying him.
Zoro kept his eyes on the dark line of the horizon.
He was braced for the muffled clatter of whatever snack Sanji had abandoned on the bench beside Zoro, for the parting shot that always came and then his footsteps retreating. That was how it always went. Sanji would approach and then remove himself, like a tide that came in just far enough to wet your feet before pulling back.
Instead, Zoro heard the soft rustle of fabric.
He turned his head at that. Sanji had settled onto the bench beside him, close enough that Zoro could feel the warmth radiating off him. He was pulling the edges of a blanket close around his shoulders. He tugged a little before throwing one end of it over Zoro’s lap, keeping the other end tucked around himself. He didn’t say anything as he did so, didn’t make it a thing, instead he settled back against the wall and offered Zoro a mug of tea with the same matter-of-fact efficiency.
They sat in silence. Below them, the Sunny rocked, swaying with the waters of the New World. Zoro drank his tea and waited for the other shoe to drop the way it always did with Sanji. When it didn’t, he waited some more but Sanji was still there.
“You’re not leaving,” he pointed out.
“I know I usually do. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about actually,” Sanji replied, looking out at the dark water, his hands wrapped around his own mug.
Zoro looked at him properly for the first time since he’d come up. The moonlight caught the sharp line of his jaw, the curl of blond hair against his cheek. He looked tired.
“You don’t have to—”
“I do. I’ve been doing this thing in my head for two years where I plan what I’ve wanted to say to you. I wrote it down about eight thousand times, so if you could just… let me say it.”
Zoro nodded silently in reply. Sanji was quiet for a long moment, turning his mug in his hands. When he finally spoke, his voice was even.
“I was cruel to you. Not just cold, not just distant, but cruel. I said things and I did things specifically to make you not want to be around me. I pushed you away and then I told myself it was for your own good or that it didn’t mean anything or that you probably didn’t notice.”
Sanji exhaled slowly before continuing.
“I’m so so sorry. I’m not going to pretend I did nothing wrong. I have a lot to make up for there.”
Zoro didn’t say anything. He kept his hands around the mug and let the warmth seep in.
“I spent two years on that island and I had a lot of time to think. More time than I wanted, honestly. I kept coming back to this thing you said to me once, maybe a week before Sabaody. You said… you said, ‘I’m not going anywhere, so you can stop running’. You remember that?”
Zoro remembered. He’d said it in the middle of a fight, one of their stupid shouting matches that had gone somewhere neither of them had expected. He’d been furious and exhausted and the words had come out before he could stop them. Sanji had gone completely still and then said something cutting and walked away.
“I thought about that a lot, about how I responded to it. I went out of my way to make you regret saying it because you scared me. You’ve scared me from pretty much the beginning. Not because you’re frightening, you’re just—”
Sanji paused again, seemingly trying to find the right words.
“You’re the only person who’s ever been able to actually see me and I didn’t know what to do with that.”
“Cook—”
“I’m not finished.”
He glanced over briefly before his eye returned to the water.
“I know I’ve put you through a lot. I know that I’m asking you to trust something that I’ve given you every reason not to trust. I understand that. I just… I have feelings for you that I’ve been trying to stomp out for years and I’m done trying. Whatever we’ve been doing, whatever this is, I don’t want it to just be something that happens in the dark between fights. I want to actually try. With you. Properly.”
Zoro looked at the side of his face. He knew how much that had cost, knew that Sanji had probably spent two years rehearsing this and was still barely holding himself together saying it out loud. The cook took a deep breath before continuing.
“There are still things I’m not ready for. I’m not ready to tell the crew. Not because I’m ashamed, not the way I used to be, but because I want us to be solid first. I want to know what we actually are before I have to explain it to anyone else. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah, it makes sense.”
“But eventually, that’s where I want it to go. I want that. I want to be yours, out in the open. That’s the goal.”
Zoro turned to look at him fully then. His heart felt like a complicated tangle of warmth.
“Come here,” he said.
Sanji blinked.
“I’m right here.”
“I know. Come here.”
Sanji paused and then carefully shifted closer. Zoro moved the blanket, resettled it over both of them more deliberately before he put his arm around Sanji’s shoulders. He felt the slight tension in the cook’s body, the moment of held breath, but then he exhaled and leaned into him, resting his head on Zoro’s shoulder. Neither of them said anything for a long moment before Sanji broke the silence in a careful tone.
“You haven’t responded,” he said finally.
“I’m getting there.”
“You’re maddening.”
“You like it.”
Sanji didn’t argue with that, which was answer enough.
Zoro turned his gaze back to the horizon, felt the solid warmth of Sanji against his side and tried to sort out the inside of his chest into something he could put into words. He’d had feelings for Sanji that he hadn’t looked at directly for a long time. He’d learned early on not to want too much. Not because Sanji wasn’t worth wanting, but because wanting things that kept removing themselves was its own kind of training in futility.
He wanted to say, ‘I love you’. The words were sitting right there on his tongue, but he didn’t say them. There was such a thing as too much honesty too fast. Sanji had just handed him something fragile and important and the last thing Zoro wanted to do was tip them both sideways.
“I’ve wanted something real with you for longer than I’m willing to admit,” he said instead.
He paused, working through the next part carefully.
“But you have to know that it’s going to take me a minute to stop waiting for you to walk. Not because I don’t believe you, just… I’m used to a version of this where the closer we get, the harder you push back. That’s going to be in my head for a while. It’s not an accusation. It’s just how it is.”
Sanji was quiet for a long moment.
“That’s… more than fair. I earned that.”
“I’m not punishing you for it.”
“I know. That somehow makes it worse.”
Zoro huffed something close to a laugh.
“You’re exhausting.”
“You literally just said you wanted to be with me.”
“Doesn’t make you less exhausting.”
Against his side, Sanji made a sound, helpless and short. His hand found the inside of the blanket and then Zoro’s knee, fingers curling there like he needed something to hold on to. Zoro covered Sanji’s hand with his own.
They stayed like that, watching the New World breathe in the dark. The temperature had dropped slightly and the blanket was good but the warmth of Sanji pressed against him was better. Zoro thought distantly that he should be paying attention to the horizon, to the dark water, to his responsibilities. Then he thought that he’d spent enough years paying attention to everything except this and perhaps he could afford fifteen minutes.
“I’m sorry,” Sanji said eventually, his voice was quieter.
“I’m sorry. For the things I said, the times I acted like you didn’t matter and then let myself lean on you anyway. All of it. I’m going to do better.”
“I know.”
Sanji lifted his head slightly. In the dark, his eye caught the moonlight. The expression on his face was so open it was almost difficult to look at him directly. Two years ago, Sanji wouldn’t have let Zoro see that. He would have shuttered it behind something sharp before it could be witnessed.
“You’re very calm about this. Suspiciously calm.”
“I’m always calm.”
“This is different though.”
“Maybe I just trusted we’d get here eventually, Cook.”
Sanji stared at him, his mouth doing that thing it did sometimes: the helpless, fond curl at the corner with a splash of redness across his cheeks that meant Zoro had said something “ridiculously romantic” as the cook put it.
“Unbelievable,” he muttered, but there was warmth in it.
Zoro pulled him a little closer and felt Sanji settle more fully against his side. The blanket stayed tucked around both of them, the warmth trapped between their bodies.
At some point the silence shifted from full to easy. Zoro kept his watch, eyes moving at intervals across the dark water, the curve of the horizon, the sky. Sanji’s breathing had slowed without Zoro marking exactly when it happened. His fingers were still loosely linked with Zoro’s under the blanket. When he looked down, Sanji’s eye was closed.
He’d fallen asleep in the crow’s nest. Here, against Zoro’s shoulder, tangled up in a blanket that smelled like cedar and sword oil.
Zoro didn’t wake him.
He shifted carefully, until they were both leaning back against the inner wall of the crow’s nest. The blond stirred but didn’t wake, only turned slightly so that his back was against Zoro’s chest, his breathing deepening again immediately. Zoro pulled the blanket up around his shoulders and curled one arm around him.
This was not something they had done before. There was a whole category of things they had never done before, he was realizing. Most of them had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with ordinary intimacy, with the kind of domesticity that came from sharing a blanket on a cold night.
He looked at the horizon. The New World waters rocked the ship gently on the dark water, carrying all of them forward into whatever came next. Against his chest Sanji slept like he hadn’t slept well in a long time and had finally found somewhere safe enough to let himself.
I’m choosing you.
Yeah, Zoro thought. Yeah he was.
~*~*~
The sky was going grey at the edges when Zoro felt him stir.
Sanji came awake slowly, which was unusual for him. He was normally alert the moment his eyes opened, already half-composed before consciousness had fully returned. This time he blinked into the grey pre-dawn like someone surfacing from very deep water, his body still loose, still warm from sleep.
He didn’t tense, that was what Zoro noticed first. The old Sanji would have gone rigid with the panic of being caught wanting something, would have manufactured distance immediately, would have been across the crow’s nest before Zoro could draw a breath. This Sanji went still for one beat, then settled back and exhaled.
“What time is it,” Sanji said, his voice rough with sleep.
“Early. You’ve got probably forty minutes before you’d need to start breakfast.”
Sanji groaned, quietly.
“You could have woken me.”
“You needed the sleep.”
“…Was I that obvious?”
“You fell asleep mid-conversation.”
“I didn’t fall asleep mid-conversation, I—”
Sanji shifted to look back at him, actually looked at him and then seemed to abandon the protest. He looked, for one unguarded moment, very young.
“Okay, I was tired.”
“No shit.”
The grey light was growing. Somewhere below, a gull cried once and then was silent. Sanji was looking at him with that new directness, the one Zoro was still getting used to, the one that didn’t flinch away. His hair was disordered from sleep and there was a faint crease along his cheek from the blanket.
“Morning,” he said, like he was trying the word out.
“Morning,” Zoro said.
And then Sanji kissed him.
It was nothing like the frantic kisses in the bunkroom. It was soft and unhurried, Sanji’s hand coming up to rest against Zoro’s chest. Zoro kissed him back with the same unhurriedness, his hand finding the curve of Sanji’s jaw. They stayed there for a moment in the grey pre-dawn light while the ship rocked gently beneath them. When they broke apart, Sanji’s forehead dropped against Zoro’s, the two simply basking in each other’s space.
Sanji pulled back enough to look at him. There was something in his face that Zoro couldn’t quite name. Something that looked like wonder, like he hadn’t quite believed until this moment that this was something he actually got to have.
“Tonight, can I— is this something we can do again?”
Zoro looked at him, at the hopeful quality of the question.
“I’ve got the second watch again. You can come up then.”
Sanji kissed him once more, brief and warm. Then he was up, shaking out the blanket with practiced efficiency, folding it and returning it to the corner storage. He ran a hand through his hair, straightened his jacket and became, by degrees, something more like the cook who would descend to the galley, make breakfast and pretend to be ordinary.
He paused at the hatch.
“Moss.”
“Hm?”
“Thank you for last night, for listening and for… for not making me feel like an idiot for any of it.”
Zoro looked at him steadily.
“You’re not an idiot.”
The corner of Sanji’s mouth curved, quiet and real.
“I’m working on believing that. See you at breakfast.”
The hatch closed and his footsteps descended. Zoro was alone in the crow’s nest as the grey light turned slowly gold.
He listened to Sanji’s footfalls fade. In a little while there would be the distant sounds of the kitchen. The crew would wake by degrees, pulled toward the smell of breakfast the way they always were.
Zoro leaned back against the curved wall where Sanji had slept and looked east at the gold edge of the coming sunrise, at the wide unknown of the New World ahead of them. He brushed his fingers over his lips, thinking about the way Sanji had kissed him soft and unhurried and without apology.
There would be a period where some part of him would be braced, where some old reflex would be waiting for the familiar feeling of Sanji pulling away. That was just what he’d gotten used to. It would take time to get unused to it and that was fine. He was patient when it mattered.
He didn’t know what the New World had waiting for them. These would be seas that tried to kill them and islands that tested them and enemies that would make everything before look like sparring practice. There would be hard days and bad days and days when they drove each other absolutely insane (because they were who they were and that was not going to change).
But Sanji had climbed up to the crow’s nest and stayed.
Zoro watched the sun come up over the New World. Somewhere beneath the watchfulness and the old reflexes that would take time to unlearn, there was a solid and uncomplicated certainty that he was heading into something real with Sanji.
He was looking forward to it.