Sanji sees Zoro approach from a long-ways off. His shock of green hair is unmistakable, even in a crowd. Speaking of, the crowd parts around him naturally, like water around a boat. They give him suspicious looks as he passes, and it isn’t until Zoro is within eye-shot that Sanji realizes why. There is a bundle of feathers in his arms. “What the fuck are you holding?” Zoro winces and pulls a face. “Yeah, so, I can explain." The bundle of feathers moves and the dirt-streaked face of a child peers up at him. The jumble of feathers aren’t just feathers, Sanji realizes with a jolt. They’re wings.

Sanji doesn’t know how he didn’t notice it before, is the thing. Of all the times he has seen Zoro shirtless (in battle, mostly) he just… never noticed. The problem is, once he has noticed, Sanji can’t seem to stop noticing. And neither can anyone else. In which Zoro has a nipple piercing and Sanji has a Problem.

They’d arrived at the island of Mae to catch the end of a brutal, bloody conflict between the island natives and a band of thugs from further inland. After helpfully settling the conflict, the townspeople of Mae offer to throw the Strawhats an island-wide party complete with food, dancing, music and free credit at the best brothel their town has to offer. Wherein Sanji smokes a questionable substance prepared by a local devil-fruit user and gets a little bit hornier (and a little bit looser with his inhibitions) than he ever intended to be around a certain swordsman.

“I am not a pretty thing,” Zoro tells him, scratching at her freshly shaved neck. Uneven strands of green hair, just long enough to barely brush the tips of her eyebrows, flop wet and graceless into her face as she turns to scowl at him. “And even if I were a pretty thing,” she adds, “I wouldn’t be yours. I wouldn’t be anyone’s, Cook.” Roronoa Zoro swore an oath that she would become nothing less than the greatest. The fact that she is a woman changes nothing.

“So, we’re gonna play it like that, huh, Cook?” “Oh yeah. We’re gonna play it like that,” Sanji returns, despite having absolutely no fucking clue what Zoro could possibly mean by that. --- Or: The Great Game of Gay Chicken Aboard the Thousand Sunny

Most days, Sanji considers himself a bundle of neuroses at best. He smokes a reasonable amount to distract himself from the anxious urge to play with his hair or bite at his nails or chew his lips, he wears layers and suits to avoid direct skin-to-skin contact he isn’t prepared for, and most importantly, he never ever looks at his back in the mirror. Usually these things work to keep him intact, to keep him here and sane and passably whole. But some days, they don’t. And that’s when Sanji needs it. Namely—the sex.

It’s like a high when the both of them resonate on that same frequency—two radios spitting static at each other ninety-percent of the time until they find overlap for one, just one, perfectly-played song. The music is brilliant and vibrant when it’s playing. It’s always over faster than Sanji ever wants it to be.