(WARNING: Coerced sexual situations, vague description of assault, also some "experiments" that are basically torture.)
Chopper let Sanji in only because he'd been the one to find Zoro in the first place, naked in that airless, bloody room with the meters-thick walls.
The hatch had only barely been dented from his kicks by the time he got the lock broken, and he'd given up on pushing the weight of it aside after forcing it open only just enough to get through.
Zoro had attacked, like a predator did prey, pinning him to the wall, grinding against him. Pupils blown, skin flushed hot under a slick of grime, sweat and blood, strong as ever, but clumsy, like he was drunk.
Sanji had kicked him across the room. Zoro had charged right back, trying to wrestle him down, pin him, force his thighs apart.
Now, Zoro was sitting on the bare floor of their room at the inn. Scrubbed clean of the filth, legs crossed and eyes closed like he was meditating, but there was no calm in him, only tension sharp as his white sword. His fists were set against the floorboards, the unbandaged parts of his torso and arms marked with the dark bruises where Sanji's heels had connected. It had taken more than a few hits before Zoro's mindless, drug-addled assault had ceased.
The drugs, Chopper had told them, were highly persistent in the body. Those people had taken Zoro as a test subject for a reason; stamina and metabolism like his set a high bar for potency and efficacy.
"This one is excellent," the thin voice said, a droning in Zoro's ears, a faint sound somewhere beyond the clouded sense of a cold metal table under his back and straps across his forehead, wrists and ankles.
He tried to move, felt his fingers twitch.
A satisfied noise. "Look how quickly he recovers. He'll do nicely."
Needle in his arm, and everything drifted away. He could not hold on.
"Fuck off, eyebrow," Zoro grated at Sanji as he slid down the wall to sit opposite Zoro's rigid shape. The feverish complexion and the harsh breathing hadn't let up, not in the hours since they'd gotten out, and not with the antagonist drug cocktail Chopper had dared to try either.
"And what, wait for your shitty blood start to pour out your ears because you won't do what our doctor told you?"
Flush the drug naturally through orgasm; Chopper had said that was the safest way, worry banishing embarrassment as he'd listened with dismay to the speed of Zoro's heart.
"You need... your brain and blood chemistry has to change that way to bind up the compounds... it's not getting filtered fast enough. Not even your body can keep this up forever," he'd said softly, as unwilling to say it as Zoro was to hear it.
Sanji watched as Zoro fought over his breathing, forcing it slower, more even. He almost shook with the effort. "I can see your stupidity wasn't affected," Sanji remarked.
"My. Choice." Zoro wouldn't look at him, hadn't since he'd stood up from that final kick. Instead of coming after Sanji again, he had only swayed and stared, eyes widening in sluggishly dawning horror. The dark gaze had torn away from him to unfocus against the blood-encrusted walls, and had not come anywhere near him again.
"Elapsed time seven minutes to awareness," the thin voice observed.
Zoro came to immobile consciousness, his heart loud in his ears, but the beats were slow... Icy water was dripping from his nose, his chin, his knees and fingers... He was still strapped in, but hanging, facedown. His eyes opened. He tried to pull in a breath. Everything was slow, too slow, none of it his own volition. His body breathed and blinked but wouldn't move. It only hung, like a dead thing.
Black water wavered inches from his face, the warping blur of his own reflection splattering apart with every drop that fell from him.
"Very good. Now, waking immersion test, shall we?"
The squeak of a pulley. He was lowered towards the water. No way to draw back, couldn't so much as suck in that last deep breath. Could only feel reflex working to stop him inhaling, the closing of his eyes and throat divorced from thought as he sank below the surface.
"Choosing to ruin your heart doesn't strike me as the best fucking idea ever," Sanji remarked. "Or blowing out your brain from the pressure, either." He slouched back, stretched his legs and crossed them at the ankles. The room wasn't very big, and his feet were only a few inches from Zoro's own ankles.
"Not helping, asshole pervert cook," was the reply. Zoro lifted his hands momentarily from the floor to shift them farther back from Sanji's feet. Even his head was angled away, eyes pointed elsewhere. "Fuck off back to the ship."
"There's a moss-ball I need to bring back with me. If he'd just rub one off, or two, or however many the fuck you need to get it out of your system before your arteries explode."
"They won't." The guttural sound of the words belied the next ones. "I'm fine."
"You're not," Sanji said bluntly. Then he added. "I am, though, if you'd bother to look for a second."
Zoro twitched, frown deepening, and Sanji supposed that hadn't been the best suggestion. The swollen hit on his jaw and the friction burn on his forearm where he'd been pushed after Zoro had torn off his jacket were quite plain to see. The finger-shaped bruises on his wrists and his legs and his shoulders weren't all covered by the shirt and trousers he wore now, either.
But he'd gotten and given much worse from sparring with the idiot during quiet times on the ship. Welts from the flats of Zoro's swords. Dark bruises-certainly darker than the ones he sported now-from the butt-ends. The occasional sliced-through strands of hair. "It's not even as bad as when we fight on purpose." Or when we fuck on purpose, he didn't say out loud, thinking of bites and bruises and more. Wasn't that obvious?
The red haze faded. Metallic blood sat thick on Zoro's tongue, muscles burning, hands hot and dripping. There was a slight itch on his arms, where serrated teeth had left puncture wounds.
Gore spattered across the metal under his feet and across the walls, huge shattered bones lay around him, hide and muscle rent apart, a giant horned lizard skull half-stripped of flesh stared at him from across the cylindrical room.
Shit-cook would hate the waste rose and faded back again.
"No apparent pain response while under the effects... consistently disregarded cautious angles to make direct attacks," he heard. "Metabolized in under a minute. Next dose, double please."
The hiss of gas.
"Send in two, please."
Screaming metal against metal as a hatch opened, the beasts' maddened roars preceding them into the room.
"When we do that it's on purpose, you stupid fucker," Zoro snapped. He unfolded from the cross-legged position, planting his feet on the floor and shoving his shoulders back against the wall, frustration overcoming his pretense of calm. He stared off to the side, and Sanji could see the line of his neck, flushed like the rest of him with the drug's effects. "When we do that I know very fucking well where my swords are and exactly how I'm trying to cut down your scrawny ass."
Sanji snorted. "Just goes to show you're a lot more effective when your shitty mind is actually calling the shots, huh?" Zoro hunched down slightly. Sanji listened to his harsh breathing for a few moments, then uncrossed his ankles and pushed himself a little ways towards Zoro. He put out one hand and leaned slowly forward until he touched one light fingertip to the widest bruise he'd put on that broad chest. "Sorry," he said, not sure if it was even audible. Zoro's next exhale went out with a shudder.
The sky was bleeding butterflies, pale green and white before they turned to glass and broke, the shards landing in Zoro's eyes and piercing through, into his head, curling and cutting, separating this thought from that action, smooth as a sword through skin.
A jagged-shelled scorpion climbed the rusty blade that was sticking out of his gut, up to the hilt, blotting out the sky and the breaking butterflies.
"Subject metabolizes narcotic well before hallucinogenic."
Zoro reached for the scorpion. It was in the way. His hand forgot what it was doing, and fell down beside him.
"Recommend readjusting balance for-" a pause, then the scorpion floated away and the sword dissolved. "Ah, have they? Unfortunate. Well, a parting gift, then."
Something slid into Zoro's skin, pooled under it, banished indolence with wet fire.
Everything turned slick and swollen, lust bloating him, and there was a dull metallic pounding somewhere far away.
He rolled over, writhing against the floor, sliding and rubbing and wanting, until the wall split open.
Black suit, lean lines, blond hair.
Faint disconnected wisp of not this, not him lost in blinding, ravening lust.
Sanji started to pull his hand back, but it was caught. Zoro's grip was feather-light, though. Sanji could simply move his hand and it would slide away.
That was not going to happen. He got a chokehold on his relief as well as his reflex to proclaim his triumphant success in the argument, and just went still, waiting.
Zoro held his hand, still resolutely looking elsewhere, and leaned forward, putting out his other hand so his fingertips brushed Sanji's chest. There was the very faintest increase in pressure and Sanji followed the direction and lay back under it. Zoro's brows had gone down, and though Sanji couldn't see his eyes, the expression of stolid concentration was obvious.
And it stayed, like Zoro's averted gaze. Zoro's hands landed on Sanji like air, undoing his shirt buttons and his fly almost delicately. Handling him not like he was fragile, though... more like he was dangerous.
Sanji held as still as he was able, pressed his hands flat down against the floor to stop them reaching up to the overheated, raggedly panting shape moving above him. The control in Zoro's muscles made them bunch and tighten as he exerted himself to do everything slowly and lightly, even while he stripped Sanji nude and touched him, put those hands on his arms, up over his chest, found the bruises and the burn, trailed down his legs, inside his thighs, brushed his cock and traced through the precome on his belly.
Zoro's hands did what exactly what he wanted, nothing more, and this time Zoro felt all of it. Sanji seemed cool against his own burning surface, but Zoro could see the reactions in that lean body, as much as he could feel the mad lust churning at the back of his throat, in his gut, under every inch of his skin.
He could stay unmoved, in between the push and the pull. Unless he chose to move.
Deliberate and slow, Zoro slid his hand from the slick patch on Sanji's stomach back down over his cock, tightened his fingers for the first time in a grip, and Sanji's entire body clenched with the effort not to push up against him.
Zoro let out a harsh grunt of amusement, the sound pretending to cover his gratitude at the dart-brow's consent to being so passive for the moment.
It was enough, now. On a normal day, Sanji was neither passive nor accommodating to him, and Zoro didn't want him to be, either.
Another wave of feverish hungry arousal was cresting. He swallowed. "The fuck are you waiting for, anyway," he managed. "An invitation?" He slid his thumb down the silky, taut skin of the shaft, and looked sidelong, finding the heated stare right there to meet him.
One unsurprised sound escaped Sanji as he surged up under Zoro, flipping him and pinning him with a kiss. Zoro let himself respond to it in a way that made Sanji chuckle a little against his mouth. He was already tearing at Zoro's pants, and Zoro allowed his own hands to grab and feel the lean energy of Sanji's own-natural-lust, pull that body up against his own, finally. He fought stubbornly with Sanji's apparent intentions to go slowly until the cook produced the lube he'd brought and put it to good use.
He grabbed at Sanji's hips as Sanji finally slid home, feeling the start of relief in every part of him that had been begging all this time for motion and fuck me now now now. He held on tight, because he could. And then he let go, because he could.
