The plan, said Nami (who had taken charge of the situation as usual because Luffy kept being distracted with poking at Sanji's unnaturally small form), was to ask around the island they were currently on for any information about that weird pomegranate. This was, as always, a brilliant plan and Sanji was completely ready and willing to go through with it (and also away from Luffy's goddamn prodding fingers).

"Absolutely not. You're staying on the ship."

"But – "

"We'll be going outside. With people. I don't even want to think about what disaster could happen with you like this."

"I've already thought of twenty," Usopp muttered from his seat.

"For instance, you are just the right size for a bird of prey to swallow you whole."

Everybody fell silent in the aftermath of Robin's words. Usopp groaned into his hands. "Twenty-one."

Sanji very gamely pushed his new nightmare for the next few days from his head, as well as Luffy's finger from his face. "I still need to get groceries, though!"

"Then just write down – er, well, just tell us what to write down and we'll buy it for you. Luffy, seriously, stop bothering him."

Luffy's cheeks puffed up with a pout as he finally withdrew his finger. Sanji found himself sympathizing with him, in that he found himself wearing the same expression. But it was easier to see on Luffy than it was on him, so he tried to express himself louder by crossing his arms and plopping down. But it wasn't like he could bear to just...ignore what Nami told him to do.

"Peaches," he muttered.

"What was that?" Nami stared helplessly down and then turned to everybody else. "Fishes?"

Usopp crossed his arms. "No, you say 'fish,' not 'fishes.'"

"Tell him that, not me."

"Nah, nah...ain't there that saying? 'Somethin' fishes in the sea?'"

"That's 'Plenty of fish in the sea.' Fish."

"I said peaches! PEA-CHES!"

"Oh, peaches. Okay."

"But we could use some pike."

"Um...right...just to make sure, does anybody here know what pikes look like?"

"Oh, I do. I'm a master of fish, you know. When I was a stalwart three years old – "

"Okay. So Usopp's on grocery duty."

"We also need chayotes."

Nami's pen jerked to a stop. "Ch...chay...otes...does anybody know what...those are?"

Uncomfortable silence.

"Hang on, I can try drawing it," Sanji said, only managing to grab Nami's quill because she grudgingly let him. He shouldered it, tried not to sneeze with all the feathers (or, rather, feather since there was only one, as much as he kept thinking there wasn't), and started to jog an oval-ish path.

The result was...well...some curves jagged because the pen nib caught on the paper, tripping him up, and then there were all the times he accidentally stepped in the still-wet ink, trailing behind footprints alongside the drawing, not to mention that in the end, he misjudged the distance to the beginning of the oval and ended up overshooting it, making the chayote look more like a really messed up 'U' than anything edible.

Nami squinted at the drawing.

"...Yeah. Okay. You'll have to go grocery shopping."


One, he had to stay hidden.

This took a lot of debate, as Sanji absolutely refused to be tucked away in some goddamn pocket like a piece of lint, and he needed to be able to see the produce anyways to properly judge the quality. But Usopp absolutely denied him his shoulder ("You'll fall off oh my god don't do this to me") and it turned out, in an embarrassing turn of fate, that Sanji was easily tangled in Usopp's hair. So it was decided that he would hide in Brook's head. Brook's eye sockets were slightly too small for him to curl up in, but his brain cavity was just about the right size for him to recline and still be able to peer out by opening his skull a crack.

This was, on all accounts, really creepy. "I suppose I shall have another voice in my head," Brook commented, his laugh sounding somewhat unhinged, and Sanji bounced around in his skull and shouted at him to shut up already. But it worked out. And besides, given the only clothes he had on right now, a scrap of fabric with a hole cut in the middle to pit his head through and another scrap he had to tie around his waist like a precarious skirt, he was very sure that hiding away from sight was a very good thing.

Two, no eating weird things he didn't recognize ever again.

Sanji technically didn't agree to this, but said, "You don't have to rub it in or anything," which was close enough.

Three, don't do that thing where he gets pissed off and throws himself into unreasonable situations, or at least if he gets pissed off, just stay put and do not explode into flames.

That one he responded to with a noncommittal grunt.

And with that, he was off, or rather, Brook and Usopp were off while he tagged along. The ride was a comfortable one; surprisingly so, considering just where he was. Brook had an uncanny ability to glide along the ground on legs that were suited for a giraffe's gait, ponderously slow but making a great amount of distance with each stride anyways. At every stall, he would bend his spine in angles so acute that Sanji could have fallen right out of his skull if he wasn't careful, and hover his spidery hands over every produce until Sanji said, "That one, that one," so he could pluck the designated specimen between his fingers. To the side, Usopp would ask the stall owner for any information about a weird pomegranate and produced a drawing of his own, one that was as close to blood red as crayons could manage. Every stall owner replied with pretty much the same answer.

"From the last island? Y'mean the one that nobody lives on?"

"Not like we get shipments from over yonder. Folks sailin' in tend t' buy, not sell."

"What kinda idiot would just go and eat a wild fruit like that?"

"Never heard of it. Never seen it. Dunno what 'weird effect' you're even talking about."

It would be discouraging if Sanji hadn't found the most perfect chayotes he had ever seen, and so instead of dwelling about his shitty size, he got distracted by banging against Brook's skull and demanding him to haggle lower, no, lower, this isn't the time to be a goddamn gentleman, stupid skeleton, everybody here are a bunch of crooks out to get your money (except also they have families and their own fees to pay, taxes and stuff) but also: they're all out to get your money.

So even as he could vaguely hear Usopp mumbling at his pomegranate drawing, he couldn't help but feel quite pleased with the haul they were getting for the low price that he had haggled. It turned out that negotiating the price from within a skull made for easy pickings. Probably because nobody wanted to deal with an intermittently yelping eight-foot-tall skeleton for longer than they had to.

"Jeez...I'm starting to think that, that...we really can't find this thing here. What're we gonna do?"

"If we cannot do anything, then that is all. But for now, let us not give up the ghost. Once was enough for me! Yohohohoho!"

In the middle of the skullquake, Sanji slammed a hand against the side of the cranium. "Oi! Brook! I told you don't laugh with me in here!"

"Ah, that's right."

"And tell Usopp to stop fretting about this shit – pomegranate or not, like hell I'm staying like this."

"Did Sanji say something?"

"Ah, yes. He says that next time, he will be a giant."

"Don't put words in my mouth!"

"Yohohohoho," Brook laughed, as though Sanji's kicks were tickling his (non-existent) brain, and his skull rattled and shook once more, throwing Sanji about until he landed on the one other occupant in Brook's head.

Piano music blasted in his ears and bounced off the walls of Brook's cavernous skull, leaving him dazed and somewhat deaf. For a moment, he thought that Brook was laughing again, that bastard, but no, it was a more deliberate laugh, one that was set to a melody, and it had that tinny quality that all recorded sounds had.

The goddamn Tone Dial, Sanji realized, and then there was sudden light and a lot of confused fumbling and the feeling of being grabbed and then Brook jabbed a thumb on his head about three times before Usopp pointed out, no, wait, that's Sanji, stop and in his surprise, Brook dropped him, actually dropped him and during his fall all Sanji could think about was that at least he got enough good fresh food for everybody to last another month or so before he bounced off the cobblestone twice and skidded to a stop for a few more inches.

There was a lot of screaming, a lot of crying, a lot of "WE KILLED SANJI OH MY GOD AAAAA" and the whole time goddamn Bink's Sake was playing because Brook had completely forgotten about the Tone Dial and he had to climb up Usopp's entire flailing body to get to his ear and shout, I'm fine you goddamn idiot, which just made Usopp scream and flail more but Sanji was prepared for that and held on for dear life but the thing he had held onto was Usopp's hair and the damn black cloud engulfed his arms and chewed them up into its curls and he was absolutely stuck again and he decided, you know what, this was enough groceries.


"Back already?"

"Yeah," Usopp heaved out as he wheeled the cart full of various produce carefully around Chopper's blanket of drying herbs. "Brook dropped Sanji."

"WHAT?!"

"Usopp-san! Please, could we not describe it like that?!"

"How else am I supposed to say it?"

"Is Sanji okay? Is there bleeding? Broken bones? Concussion?! Oh my god, I dunno if I have a cast small enough for him, where is he, oh my god, Brook, what happened?!"

"Ah, well," Brook said, raising a hand apologetically, "I dropped Sanji-san."

"Oi."

"How long ago?! Oh my god, oh my god, I don't have to amputate, do I? Oh no oh no oh no"

"Relax, I'm fine," Sanji drawled out, pushing open Brook's skull and waving down at Chopper, who was looking more and more like he was just chasing his own tail.

"How can you be fine?! You fell like eight feet!" Chopper paused in his frantic circling to consider the previous sentence. "That sounded less serious out loud than in my mind."

Taking advantage of the lull in the doctor's panic, Sanji continued, "Yeah, I kinda just bounced a few times. Not even bruised. Rather not do that again, though."

Chopper hummed, rocking on his hooves. "I, I guess...well, mice can survive long falls relative to their size..."

"Please don't compare me to a goddamn pest."

"Let me check you for signs of a concussion anyways, okay?"

"I need to put the groceries away," Sanji insisted, but ended up wilting under Chopper's medical glare. "Alright, alright..."

The check-up took a blessedly short amount of time. As hard as Chopper tried, he just couldn't find any symptoms of anything, besides the fact that Sanji was three inches tall. So with that out of the way, Sanji was free to go. No wait. Free to be carried. To the kitchen. Where Usopp and Brook were undoubtedly putting everything in the exact wrong place.

"Hey little bros!" Franky greeted them as Chopper escorted Sanji into his too-large workplace. "You're earlier than I expected, but I'm almost done building this thing for you – "

"Don't care. Chopper, fridge."

"It'd probably be easier if you just told us the – "

Sanji snapped and pointed. "Fridge."

Chopper complied with a sigh and a little mumbling about the herbs he left outside, and before Sanji even entered the code, he turned and glared at everybody in the room until he was reasonably sure nobody was looking. He braced his feet against Chopper's palm, planted both hands on the first button, and began to wish that he had made the code something more...compact on the keypad. Seven-three-two-six.

With the fridge open, he let Brook and Usopp take care of putting the perishables in, only giving them a briefing of his specific organizational system. After that, he got Chopper to set him by his ashtray on the bar counter and leaned back against it, breathing in the smell of ash and considering one of the errant cigarette butts he hadn't tossed out before the...this happened. It rose out of the tray like a leaning tree. The longer he stared at it, the more he was convinced that he could manage to squeeze it into his mouth.

He didn't look back towards the expanse of his kitchen. Its width was more like a canyon, the far side a hazy blur that all things in the distance became, which was stupid because this was his kitchen. But all the same, the bar dropped like a cliff and the oven stretched like a plain and even as he frowned at the two giant blurs fumbling with the innards of the white monolith known as his fridge, he couldn't be bothered to insist on supervising their actions. If his old cigarette butts were trees, then the refrigerator was a multi-floored cavernous monster and the thought of inspecting its entire insides was too exhausting for him to handle. So he looked at his ashtray instead and considered how badly he wanted a smoke.

"Hey," Franky breathed behind him, and he jumped into the air and landed straight into his ashtray.

"Sorry," said Franky, fishing him out of the piles and piles of ash. Sanji coughed and dusted himself off as best as he could. And now he needed to ask someone to draw a bath for him. In what, a mug? Maybe a soap dish? "Just wanted to show off the thing I just finished building for you."

"What thing?" Sanji asked, and Franky gestured grandly towards something on the dinner table.

Sanji squinted. "Yeah. I can't see that far."

Franky stuttered, laughed awkwardly, left to grab the thing and came back, holding it up to the edge of the bar. Now that it was right in front of him, he could see that it was a scale model of the Sunny. Cut in half. It was huge, and it had to be pretty huge from a normal perspective too because it was as big as the ship was supposed to be and if he was three inches then that had to make this...um...well, shit, he wasn't good at this sorta stuff. It was huge.

"Everything to make you feel at home," Franky said, sounding extremely proud of himself, though Sanji couldn't help but think that making a representation of your own ship being bisected was probably some form of bad luck. He paced until he could see the bathroom, stationed a little ways above him.

"You got running water working in this?" he asked, trying not to salivate at the idea. Franky lowered the model a little and he could see the detail in the tiles, the lovingly crafted faucets, the sheen of new ceramic.

"Nope, not at all!"

Well, he didn't need to try not to salivate anymore. "Franky, pretty much all of this shit is pointless. I just need a bed."

Franky looked down at him. Down at his ridiculous model. Back at him. "You're welcome for thinking about your comfort," he grumbled, but tucked the whole thing under one arm so that he could reach into the bedroom area and fumble about the carefully carved room.

"Yeah, yeah. Put it near the fridge for me or something."

Franky spun on his feet in automatic compliance, until the actual request caught up to his brain and halted him in his tracks. "You're...gonna sleep in the kitchen?"

And in that one question, Sanji couldn't help but hear myriad others: are you going to stay here now, are you too embarrassed to sleep with us, will you be okay all on your own here, don't you know all of us are fine carrying you back and forth, or is that exactly the thing you don't want us to do, can't you tell that we're worried (so worried), are you going to be safe out of our sight? And he couldn't conceivably answer all of them without making a mess of it (pretty much, maybe, no, yes, yes, yes, probably not), so he shrugged.

Franky paused, shrugged back like it was a secret handshake, and moved on until he too was a haze on the far side of the canyon.


"Um...how many drops do you think...?"

"Not sure..."

Luffy grabbed at the eyedropper in Chopper's hooves, making the table shudder with a clattering roar. "Hey! Hey! Lemme try! I wanna try!"

"This isn't a toy, it's for Sanji! You're just gonna spray it everywhere!"

"Oh Luffy~! If you don't pay attention, this biiiig hunk of meat is gonna disappear~!" Nami trilled from the other side of the table, and Luffy predictably abandoned his current pestering for that instead.

Sanji heard him shout, "Geez! You guys just eat everything when I'm not lookinnphfhf!" and then Luffy stopped talking because of the entire pig in his mouth. Chopper turned back down towards him, hovering the eyedropper back over his plate. Which was kind of also his table and also kind of his chair at the same time, currently. Water ballooned from the nozzle until its weight sent the globule down in front of him. Then another, which the first swallowed up into its mass.

"That look good?" Chopper asked, squinting as he tried to compare the volume of water to the estimated size of Sanji's stomach.

He couldn't say it was easy for him either, since it was in the form of a blob and not a cup, but looking at it, he was starting to think that one drop would have probably been enough. He looked up and shrugged. "It's smaller than my head."

If Chopper noticed the vague way he answered, he said nothing of it, instead turning back to his own plate before it could be upended in the never-ending struggle between dinner and Luffy's stomach. Sanji focused on trying not to flinch whenever Luffy's arm stretched overhead, far too close for comfort, and remaining as upright as he could on a table that was as shaky as Usopp's legs whenever he was trying to bluff. His own dinner was generously donated by Chopper, who had attempted to measure out a length of pasta that wasn't too overwhelming and also sacrificed a bean and a few grains of rice. Of course, Sanji hadn't cooked the evening's dishes himself, but he did direct their creation, mostly by shouting a lot in Usopp's ear and strategically kicking him in hairless places.

This wasn't permanent, of course – Usopp was just filling in until he worked things out. (Sanji tried not to think too hard about what he even meant by 'worked things out.' If he did, he might start defining it as 'got used to maneuvering his kitchen at this size.')

The table was really starting to heave, dinner having gotten to the stage where Luffy got creative and everybody had to resort to outright violence to save their food. Sanji started to scarf down his own meal, even though there was pretty much no danger of it getting stolen, and choked on the new texture of rice – or maybe it was the old texture, just magnified in a way that was too alien for him to recognize, like he had just stuffed an entire potato in his mouth but without the flavor. The bean he had to break apart by hand before swallowing the crumbly chunks one by one, and the water he figured out he could scoop in his hands like a particularly viscous bubble (thank god, because otherwise he would have to lap it up like a dog or something) and he pressed it to his lips.

The entire drop seemed to suck itself inside him like an eager parasite and, completely unprepared for water this lively, Sanji breathed instead of swallowed.

It burned. His lungs felt like they were swelling. He opened his mouth but nothing was going in or out and he fell over and writhed, hands clutching at his throat, and goddammit he was going to drown, he was drowning above water shit goddammit please someone notice, he didn't want to die alone, like he almost did when he was ten, and he absolutely didn't want to die a stupid death like this.

Something slammed down on top of him, and then the world gave a dizzying lurch and his vision blurred but he could feel soft skin pressing all around him. "Som'fin's wrong wif Ffanji!"

"Luffy, I told you, you can't just grab – AAAGH! SANJI'S SUFFOCATING!"

The table clattered, much noisier than he had ever heard before. A torrent of sound. He kept exchanging hands, tumbling into grasps that all felt different and if he concentrated maybe he could recognize them.

"Chopper, Chopper stop freaking out and do something!"

"I-I-I, I don't know, h-he's...he's so small, I can't, I don't,"

"CPR! CPR, right?! We can do CPR!"

"Usopp, don't, you'll break his ribs!"

"Hang on, I'm gonna pound his back!"

"Franky oh my god you're gonna break his spine."

"Well, girlie, maybe you can suggest something?!"

"I suggest that we shouldn't kill him!"

A different grip, in a sweaty hand that held him upside-down. And then something that felt much faster than falling, and if he wasn't already choking for breath that might have stolen it away. The table zoomed close, much too close, head-crushingly close, until it stopped zooming and all the organs in his body felt like they were compressing into his head and he opened his mouth and the goddamn drop of water caught in his throat, pushed its way out, and dripped to the wood below.

He breathed. Coughed. Breathed again. All the blood pooling to his brain pounded in his ears, ready to pop out of every orifice in his head. Zoro relaxed his grip, only slightly.

"There. Better."

After a few seconds, during which everybody else sounded like they were recovering from asphyxiation as well, the dining room was filled with sounds of multiple people beating Zoro up.


He wanted to sleep in the kitchen. Pretty much everybody else argued against him. "Sleeping here means I don't gotta walk the whole damn way to make breakfast," he shot back, and Zoro said, "Are you an idiot?" before suddenly succumbing to a mysteriously injured shin. Nami pushed the swordsman aside, gave a weary smile, and said, "Of course."

Everybody lingered a while longer before leaving, like a lingering end to an awkward dinner party, and only then did Sanji fall back onto the bed Franky had made, closed his eyes, and immediately didn't go to sleep.

They would have to leave. The log pose had already set and they couldn't just stay at some island forever just because ofhim. Even if they wanted to, it was plain dangerous for a pirate ship to stay docked at one place. They had found nothing, in the end, and he wasn't about to delay their whole journey and shit just for an unfounded hope. Which meant he would...that he...it meant...well...

...He would have to get used to this.

The darkness of the kitchen created unfamiliar shadows out of painfully familiar things. Whatever Franky had used for the bedding, it was made of bristles that bent oddly against his back, and though he could imagine the material feeling soft under different circumstances, he knew he would get up in the morning with a meaningless pattern imprinted on his body.

He would have to get used to this, too. To textures being coarser. To never wearing any proper clothes. To barely making out objects on the other side of a room because they were just so damn far, to being carried distances that would have normally been just a few steps, to being squirreled away, never able to contribute again, relegated to just a passenger, to looking up, looking up, always looking up.

And wasn't it maddening? Wasn't this utterly insane? For the universe to expect him to put up with this and stay on the right side of hinged. But that's just what he was planning on. He was just as crazy as the universe.

The kitchen door slid open. He could see moonlight sneaking in, and he tried to remember who was on watch but his brain skidded to a halt because no, no. He wouldn't, would he? When Sanji was in a situation like this?

But he would, he absolutely would. Luffy would totally try to sneak food out, even with all the shitty things his poor, cosmic punchline of a cook was going through already.

Sanji hopped out of bed and jogged towards the fridge, arriving at the same time as Luffy, who, he had to admit, got points for actual goddamn stealth, actually crawling around and shit. But considering that his method of cracking the fridge was still just gnawing at the handle for a bit and then staring longingly at the keypad for the rest of the night, Luffy would probably never get any closer to actually achieving a midnight snack.

Sanji rested a hand against the side of the fridge, leaned out over the edge of the counter as far as he could, and said, "What the hell d'ya think you're doing, huh?"

Luffy jumped, his head whirling around until he actually caught sight of Sanji, and he set his chin on top of the counter and stared at him balefully.

"Saaaaanjiiii...I wanna snaaaack..."

"Go back to sleep and wait for breakfast."

"C'moooooon...just tell me how to unlock it? You don't have t' do anything, I'll just help myself!"

"That's the worse case scenario," Sanji gritted out, grinding his foot against Luffy's cheek like he was violently grinding out the persistent embers of a cigarette. Luffy pouted, moaned, sighed, drifted bonelessly to the floor and moaned again, as if he couldn't just force the code out of Sanji by simply grabbing hold of him and squeezing. But tantrums didn't work against Sanji either and Luffy eventually pulled himself to his feet and started dragging his way out of the kitchen.

"Stupid mean Sanji...c'mon, let's go..."

Sanji squinted. "Go where?"

"Sleep, duh," said Luffy, and without warning, scooped Sanji up in a light fist and headed for the door. It took a moment, mostly because Luffy was as careful carrying him as he was carrying most things, and Sanji had a hard time keeping up with everything when everything kept swinging back and forth, but he eventually pounded against a finger and kicked hard enough to grab Luffy's attention once again.

"My bed's over there!" he shouted, pointing back at the kitchen counter, and he had to understand that much, right? But Luffy just rubbed his eyes and snorted and gestured his hand all around (with Sanji still in it that bastard) and said, "You weren't sleeping anyways. You shouldn't sleep where you eat, y'know."

Said the guy who ate where he slept, but Sanji was a little too dizzy to properly say this out loud. He tried expressing himself by kicking harder. Luffy didn't notice.

"I know you weren't sleeping, 'cause I was real careful sneaking in, you totally wouldn't've caught me if you were sleeping. Y'know, if you're lonely, you should just say so."

That was enough of a non sequitur for Sanji to pause in his struggles. Luffy was decent enough to hold him up face to face with minimal swinging.

"Sometimes you're really stupid, Sanji."

And with that, Luffy grabbed the side of his bunk, pulled himself up, curled around Sanji like he was a goddamn teddy bear, and started snoring.

He was completely and utterly pinned. Luffy had him cornered in the crook of his arm and his torso loomed overhead like a crashing blimp that occasionally pressed against him with each soft inhale. Whenever Sanji tried to extract himself, Luffy would just pull him closer until he was practically enveloped on all sides by his captain, like a prisoner in a living prison.

It was warm. It was soft, because despite everything Luffy wasn't made of muscle. A slow, calming beat thrummed into Sanji's back in time with the in and out of Luffy's breaths, both combining in an odd sort of massage, and this was just not fair, being held hostage by a giant with the only escape being an impossibly long fall and dammit Luffy, shitty goddamn asshole with a rubber ball for a brain, and Sanji buried his face in Luffy's skin and made a sound that could only be called a squeak.

Sanji drifted to sleep, the rhythm of his captain's life a comforting lullaby he just could not resist.