Here is another chapter! ^^

Thanks so much for voting in my poll! I've got a lot more votes after last chapter and it really helped me make a decision! :D

I just want to say one thing before I continue. I've gotten a view questions about who the uke/seme in this story is. Well, I guess there isn't really a uke/seme in this story, because Zoro and Sanji are pretty equal and in my opinion, they're also in their relationship ;) So please don't ask that question again, you'll just have to see for yourself if you like it or not.

Well, that was it for now. Thanks to my pre-readers Aerle and Thérèse again!

Chapter 7

That morning he arrived just in time for the break from the Japanese Film lecture. Zoro scanned the room in search of Ace, after raising his eyebrows unimpressed at the disgusted looking homophobic guy sitting near the entrance. The green haired man had quickly spotted his friend and put his bag on the still empty table on his left side.

Ace looked up from watching the guy in the row before him. "I didn't expect you to show up anymore. You're an hour late!" A smirk appeared on his freckled face. "Why are you an hour late?"

"Just… had something to do," Zoro murmured.

"Something to do, huh," Ace said knowing. "So you finally got him into your bed?"

Zoro reddened, because the other man's words were true, though not in the way he meant them. "No, not like that! Just something…" He gave his friend a cocky smirk. "And what it was, is none of your business."

Ace pouted. "Aw, Zoro, don't be so mean. At least tell me if it's got anything to do with that guy you like."

Zoro still smirked. "Not saying anything."

The black haired guy sighed disappointed. "Well, at least you're not denying you've got a crush on him anymore."

The swordsman's ears turned red again. He hadn't even realized he'd stopped doing that. He wanted to start again, but figured it wouldn't be very believable anymore if he'd deny it now anyway.

"So…" Ace began, a small but triumphantly smile forming on his lips. "When will I get to see this man of your affection?"

"You won't," Zoro replied immediately.

His friend gave him a hurt look. "What? Why not?"

"Because I don't want you to scare him away." Sure, he was afraid if Ace would start flirting with Sanji too, the blonde would probably want to stay further away from Zoro, since the two of them were friends, but somewhere deep down, the green haired man was also a little afraid Ace would like him a bit too much. Or even worse, Sanji would take his flirtations seriously and would like Ace a bit too much.

"Why would I do that?" the dark haired man asked innocently.

"Because you aren't afraid to flirt with a good looking guy and he is still pretending to be straight," Zoro explained.

Ace's face didn't hide any of his interest in this story. "But your gaydar tells you he isn't?"

The green haired man nodded. "I'm pretty sure he's gay and just trying too hard to hide it."

"Well, just another reason to show him to me," Ace said. "I'm an expert when it comes to that."

Zoro sighed. "I told you no."

"Aw, come on! I promise I won't say any inappropriate things to him," Ace looked at him with what he probably thought looked like puppy-eyes.

"Che, where the line between appropriate and inappropriate lies with you is probably not the same as where it lies with most people," Zoro said.

"OK, I promise not to flirt with him or say anything about your affection. Please?" Ace begged.

Zoro sighed. "Promise?" he asked to be sure. When his friend promised again he said: "Fine, you can come with me to language practice, which he coaches."

Ace looked shocked, but at that moment the professor began talking again. "He's a teacher?!" the raven haired guy whispered.

"He's not a teacher! He's a student-assistant!" Zoro whispered back. His friend laughed quietly and relieved before returning his attention to the professor.

"So, you haven't told me his name yet," Ace complained when they walked out of the room after the lecture was over.

"Sanji," Zoro said simply. He needed all his focus this time, so he wouldn't open a wrong door again.

"Sanji…" Ace parroted as if tasting the name.

When they were about to walk past the building's main entrance, Zoro suddenly stopped, causing Ace to bump into him. The reason for his freezing was the man walking through the entrance. He wore a black with purple coat, short on the front and long at the back, a hat in the same colors with a long white feather on it and his eyes were like a hawk's eyes.

"Dracule Mihawk…" Zoro said, while wondering what the hell this man was doing at his university.

Said man had spotted him and was about to walk past them. "Roronoa Zoro," he said, walking a little slower. "So you attend this university." It sounded more like a note to himself, than to anyone else.

Behind him walked a broad guy with blood red hair and a kind of gothic look about him. He watched Zoro suspiciously.

"Yo, Kidd!" Ace greeted him enthusiastically. He got a scowl in return after which the duo walked on.

Zoro started to walk towards his destiny again too, with many questions wandering through his mind. He wanted to ask them, but Ace had beat him to it. "You two know each other?"

"How could I not know him?" Zoro said before remembering that he hadn't told the other man about his passion yet. He explained: "I practice kenjutsu, Mihawk is the current kenjutsu world champion! He's the best swordsman in the world, the goal I once hope to achieve."

"Really? That's admirable," Ace said impressed. "And you're so good already that he knows your name?"

"I'm not nearly good enough yet." Zoro sighed. "But we've had a duel a while ago. Which I lost big time."

"Ah… Well, he does remember your name, so you must have impressed him somehow."

"Oh, but I'm good," Zoro told his friend. "Just not good enough." He shook his head. "I wonder what he's doing here."

"Oh, you don't know?" Ace asked him. "Mihawk is the head of the science faculty, like Crocodile is our faculty head. Apparently being world champion doesn't pay enough." Ace chuckled. "The guy walking behind him was Eustass Kidd, physics student and Mihawk's personal assistant. I guess there's a meeting here."

"Ah, so that's the reason why he's here." Zoro turned left.

"Eh, Zoro… 1.49 you said, right?" Ace, who had stopped following him, asked.

"Yeah, so?" Zoro didn't understand why he had stopped.

"Shall we go this way, then?" Ace nodded in the other direction with his head, while pointing at a sign which showed you should turn right for that room.

"Ah… yes," Zoro muttered, while he didn't understand why they had put that sign there just today.

"Oi, Curly Brow!" Zoro called the blonde, when the duo walked through the door.

Sanji turned around to face them. "What is it, Moss-Head?" he asked as he walked towards them.

"I've brought a friend with me," Zoro said when the student-assistant had reached them. "He wants to see how things go here."

The blonde looked at Ace, who had stepped a bit to the side so he could peek at the other man's backside, though he didn't try to do it subtly. Sanji flushed. "What the…" He turned a bit so that the black haired man had to face him.

"Ace!" Zoro hissed at the same time.

His friend looked sheepishly, but put out his hand. "Hi, I'm Ace."

Sanji cautiously shook the hand. "Sanji." He looked from the one to the other and back. "You speak Japanese?"

"Not a word." Ace smirked. "But I have to wait until Zoro finishes anyway, since he has to copy some notes from me, so I thought to accompany him. If you are OK with it, of course."

Sanji seemed to think about it for a moment. "Fine," he agreed. "Your boyfriend can stay, Marimo."

Zoro froze, not sure if it was a joke or if the cook was serious. "What? He's not my boyfriend!" he said, just to make sure he wouldn't get the wrong idea.

"I'm not," Ace helped him out. "I wish I was! The one to be his boyfriend is a very lucky man." He winked to the blonde.

He winked?! "That's enough, Ace." Zoro grabbed his arm and pulled him along to the back of the room, where Vivi sat. "I already regret my decision. I should have never taken you with me," the green haired man hissed angrily.

"Ah, you shouldn't, Zoro." His friend put his hand on the swordsman's shoulder. "It could turn out good for you, you know?" Ace sat down next to the blue haired girl. "Hi Vivi."

"Ace, what are you doing here?" she asked.

"Checking out Zoro's crush," he said quietly so that not everyone would hear it.

Vivi giggled. "So he's not denying it anymore?"

Zoro gritted his teeth. "Ace, you shouldn't have said that to him. If he was stupid enough not to know I'm gay, he knows now and you very much implied he was 'the one to be my boyfriend'." He shook his head as he sat down. "How can that turn out good for me?"

"Well, he should know someday," Ace said, while putting his hands behind his head and leaning backwards.

"Sure, but now wasn't the right time!" Zoro put his head in his hand and sighed. It was not as if he could do something about it anymore, the damage had already been done.

"Maybe, but I still don't regret doing it." Ace smirked at him. "Say, shouldn't Robin be here too?"

Zoro looked around. "Yeah, where is she?"

"I don't know either," Vivi said, shrugging. "Maybe her last lecture overran its time?"

About ten minutes after they had started, the dark haired woman walked in, a faint smile on her lips and her hair a little messy.

"Ah, Robin-chwan! We missed you already, come in," Sanji said welcoming.

She nodded to him and quickly walked to the back to sit down next to Zoro.

"What happened, why are you late?" he asked her.

"Nothing happened," she answered while pulling her book from her bag. "Lecture just ended a little too late."

"A little too late?" Ace asked disbelieving. "You've got fifteen minutes to change classes and still you're ten minutes late."

"Oh, Ace, you're here too?" she asked surprised, but didn't react on what he'd said.

Ace gave her a thoughtful look. "Which course did you have?"

"Japanese Architecture," was Robin's answer.

"Aha!" Ace said and he smirked as if everything was crystal clear to him now.

After an hour Ace already got tired from all the Japanese talking and he left in the break, with the promise to wait for Zoro in the canteen, so that the latter could copy his notes from the first hour of the Japanese Film lecture.

However, when Zoro arrived in the canteen, he didn't saw Ace anywhere. He decided to wait for a while and sat down at a table on the right side of the canteen. His eyes fell on the guy standing beside a door in the big hallway nearby. It was Kidd, the personal assistant of Mihawk. He was staring at the other side of the hallway with a scornful smile on his face. The point of his attention was another guy, more slender, with short dark hair, a little goatee and tattooed arms. He wore a black and yellow hoody with a weird kind of smiley on it and he smirked as if he was looking at something very entertaining.

The guy walked towards Kidd until he was just a few inches away from him and let his hand rest against the wall behind them. He whispered something in his ear and Kidd said something back, but Zoro couldn't hear what they were saying. However, suddenly Kidd grabbed the guys arm, turned around and smacked him against the wall, causing them to switch positions. The dark haired man didn't seem to mind much and kept smirking. They looked into each other's eyes for a few seconds, apparently neither of them wanting to break the contact.

That was when Ace walked past them, probably coming from the men's room. He laughed when he saw the two of them. "A fresh start of a new year and the sexual tension between you two has already grown!"

"Shut up, Ace!" The man with the hoody scowled at him. This only made Ace laugh even more and he walked towards Zoro.

"You know him too?" the green haired man asked when Ace had reached his table.

"Yup, that's Trafalgar Law, medical student and personal assistant of their faculty boss. He's the friend I told you about," he explained. "The two of them have obviously been attracted to each other for a year now, but still haven't given in to it. God knows why." He looked around as if searching for something. "I don't see any of the other personal assistants, though. So it's probably a meeting with just those three faculty leaders."

"So if you know everybody, why aren't you becoming personal assistant?" Zoro asked him.

"Me?" Ace laughed. "Thinking of it makes me bored already. Besides, half of the complaints will probably be about me."

Zoro laughed. "You got a point there."

Ace sat down. "Hey, but that Sanji, he's got a nice ass!" He smirked. "And he's obviously gay."

Sadly Zoro didn't see Sanji anymore that weekend, since the blonde had already gone to work at the restaurant in Shells Town when Zoro came home. He knew that Sanji would stay there the whole weekend, because he would be finished late every day. And so the weekend passed on relatively boring for Zoro, though he did have problems on concentrating on his homework. His mind was with the blonde cook most of the time and he could only fully focus on something else when he was training.

Before he knew it, it was Monday again and he sat with the others at their table (they had already claimed one as theirs) in the canteen.

"You know, Zoro, you've got terribly sexy hands," Ace said out of the blue, while licking his lower lip.

Zoro watched his hands. What was so sexy about them? he wondered. They were big and muscled, nothing of them looked sexy to him.

"Hm, I can only imagine what you could do with them," the other man continued.

Zoro wanted to reply with an equally flirty comment for once, but his eyes caught sight of the man standing behind Ace. He was staring at Zoro in a way that made the green haired man glad said freckled guy was between them. Though he wasn't sure that would stop the man from killing him.

"Uhm, Ace," Zoro began carefully, looking back at his friend. "Your boyfriend, is he blonde, with a little stubble on his chin and a rather... different hairstyle?"

The freckled face before him gave him a surprised look. "Eh, yeah, it reminds me a bit of a pineapple." He smiled. "Why? Doesn't really have anything to do with your sexy hands, does it?"

Zoro almost didn't dare to look at the man standing behind Ace. "Well, I do think so. He's giving me a quite unfriendly look at the moment."

Ace had a non-understanding look on his face for a moment, before he turned his head to look behind him.

"Marco!" Ace happily jumped from his chair, intending to land on his boyfriend to hug him. However, the guy named Marco stepped aside, which resulted in Ace landing face down on the floor.

"Here I thought to surprise you by returning a few days earlier, only to find you flirting with some other guy," Marco said calmly, looking at Ace getting up from the floor.

"Wha– No! That was nothing serious!" The raven haired guy defended himself while he dusted off the little clothing he wore.

"Yeah and Ace flirts with every guy!" Luffy said enthusiastically.

Sabo hit him hard on the head. "That's not helping him, idiot!"

Marco looked at his boyfriend, demanding an explanation.

"Not with every guy…" Ace smiled insecure. "Only the good looking ones. But I was really just playing around with them."

In Zoro's opinion that couldn't give much comfort to Marco. Apparently Ace just realized the same, because he quickly continued: "And I didn't mean that the way it sounded." He sighed. "Jeez, Marco, I thought you'd know me a little by now. I would never cheat on you!" He flushed and added quietly: "I love you."

The blonde put his hand on Ace's shoulder and pulled him into a long, tender kiss.

They really made a good couple, Zoro thought. They looked cute, but at the same time seeing them kiss was actually quite sexy too.

When they broke contact, Marco was smiling. "I know."

Ace sat down again and gestured Marco to sit next to him. The latter gave Zoro a look that told him he would come for him later.

"Woa, Marco, you could kill him with a look like that!" Ace said worried as his boyfriend sat down.

Zoro raised his eyebrows slightly. "I'll survive," he murmured. Surely Marco didn't really scare him.

Ace ignored him. "Zoro knows I'm not serious, right?"

"Of course, if I thought you were serious, I wouldn't be here, I've made that clear enough," the green haired man answered.

"Besides," Ace continued talking to Marco. "He already has the hots for some other blonde."

Zoro sighed. "You're just telling anyone who cares or doesn't care, don't you."

"I'm sorry, but Marco is not just anyone," Ace smiled and placed his hand on his boyfriends upper leg. "Now, tell me all about your business trip and why you are back earlier… Or do you want to go somewhere… private?" he said in a way everyone (except Luffy probably) knew what he was hinting at.

Marco watched him with raised eyebrows. "You never change, do you?" Then he smiled. "I'll talk… for now."

So, now you know who the boyfriend is! I'm sorry if you hoped for anyone else, but it's Marco and it will stay Marco ;D not gonna change that :P

Ah, and a little Kidd/Law too. ;) You shouldn't expect a big story on their part though. It's just a minor little side story ;)

Anyway, I hope you liked it! And please leave a review, 'cause I really really love them! :D