The now-infamous Monkey D. Luffy is as stupid a lover as he is a captain. Roronoa Zoro thinks he should have expected as much.

"Whoever heard of a gay pirate?"

"I'm pretty sure there are gay pirates."

"Other than you, Zoro!"

The swordsman snarls. "Well there's you, isn't there."

"Oh," Luffy says, stuffing his right pinky up one of his nostrils. "Yeah, right. I forgot."

"How the hell do you forget something like that?!"

"If you're gay," the idiot says, "can you still poo?"

It takes everything Zoro has not stab him into another dimension.

"EHHHHH?! YOU TWO ARE—"

"Damn it," Zoro says, hitching his upper lip and sitting back on his elbows. Luffy looks up from where he's seated atop the swordsman's hips, blinking at their anthropomorphic physician for a second.

"Oh. Hey, Chopper."

"DON'T 'HEY, CHOPPER' ME!"

Zoro hrumphs to himself, hefts his arms back behind his head. "I don't feel like dealing with this," he says, closing his eyes and tilting his chin back.

"Eh, you mean we're done?" Luffy sits up a little and Zoro has to purse his lips. Choppers still staring, making noises like a garbled sirens as bell-shaped tears leak from his eyes. "You really are lazy, huh?"

Zoro knees him in the back.

"Just get off already!"

Zoro never wears a rubber on the pretense that Luffy is made of rubber so why the hell would he. The fact of the matter is that it's something like fucking Silly Putty. Hot Silly Putty. That moves. The swordsman doesn't think that any of them really think about it enough – Luffy least of all. How goddamn weird it is. How much weirder it gets when the idiot is trying to be affectionate.

"Look," he says, trying to put it simply, "putting your arms around me is one thing. Wrapping them around me about four times is not."

Luffy wrinkles his eyebrows which indicates that his two braincells are knocking together to generate some semblance of sentient thought. "What? How come?"

"Because I can't move when you do. And it's just weird to see your arms all distended like that."

"Like this?" Luffy arms grow to span the room, which is relatively large.

"Yeah," Zoro says, irritably, "like that."

"That's stupid," Luffy says, arms snapping back to their normal size with a rubber twang so that he can fold them across his chest.

"You're stupid," Zoro says.

"You're stupider," Luffy says, like it's a challenge.

And it is.

Theirs is a journey of growth, as are most things that pertain to Luffy. They keep to themselves about it – it is never intense, never burning, but rather a slow, persistent sinking into an abyss that neither of them really cares to explore too often. There are bigger and more important things; their dreams, for instance. Becoming the pirate king. Becoming the world's best swordsman. Roronoa Zoro is Monkey D. Luffy's second mate, first. His best friend, second. His sparring partner, third. And his bedmate, last. Their rendezvous are short-lived and spontaneous, smoldering and slow. They are together when they think of it. But they rarely think of it.

It does not occur to either of them to bring it up; Zoro, once, but he quickly forgets. It does not occur to them to be of any real significance, Luffy least of all. Nakama is always foremost. Nakama is everything.

And that is truly how they survive. Neither dwells so much on the relationship because to them, that is not what it is. Their relationship is already established.

Nakama, first.

Entendre, last.