You Started It
Disclaimer: I don't own One Piece and its characters but Zoro's heart belongs to me, and mine to him.
Summary: YAOI. Who started it? Zoro woke up and found a topless Sanji beside him. Sanji woke up and found Zoro standing before him.
A/N: Scant dialogues. I suck at dialogues huge time so spare me.
oooooOOOOOOOOOOOooooo
Be like and you'll never want---Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
Chapter 1
A vertigo. It swallowed his vision, just like that. He tried to walk or even to stand up, virtually careening through the space and tripping from time to time while looking for his consciousness that fled earlier. He tried to grab it when he saw it, there just inches above his shoulder, looking still from the corners of his eyes. But it was gone before he could move and he fell, fell down somewhere and dreamed of something that he couldn't for all the world remember when he woke up. He didn't hurt himself but his head was nipping when the morning lights plashed through the windows. 'Inclement hangover.' He muttered to himself and collapsed again, smashed flat on the sheets.
The pain didn't taper even as he buried his face on the pillows. It was foolish to count on that; he knew too well pain doesn't disappear like smoke. Slowly, his senses returned and he received them with a less than warm welcome. He knew his name still, thank fuck. 'Zoro', he whispered and felt a modicum better; better, not good. Last night he was pretty sure his name was severed from the world along with his mind.
Waking up felt like a good-mood repellent, and trying to move after that only maximized his exhaustion. That being said, he knew that feeling tired when one just woke up is stupid. He also knew that lying down for the next hours wouldn't tender the headache. Why then should a petty pain as that trouble him so? Whereas typically fate could play him on, beat him up to a pulp and leave him with no scar. He was just too tough to trump everything, anything, like a juggernaut would; he was a pirate after all.
Something moved from beside him and caused the bed to shake a little. He craned his neck in surprise—which he couldn't as of yet identify if pleasant or not--and got its full blast when he realized that he wasn't alone on that bed. That bed that couldn't even accommodate a couple at a time. He uttered a near goddamn remark, almost forgetting about that murderous hangover, but was crushed to a stop by what he saw. Blond head. Curled eyebrows. And oh yeah. It was a rude surprise alfuckingright. He had been there, that tyke. He was so still that all the while he never seemed to make his presence felt even in a very accidental way, changing positions for instance. Well, he was asleep. Sanji was asleep and if he was asleep forget about trying to force common sense on him.
Zoro stared at him; Sanji was topless, just like himself, beside himself. It was pointless; pointless for him, for anybody, even for Luffy who might, not for long, have a mental condition named after him. 2 men, pirates, naked in one bed. Even a flying elephant seemed plausible. It wasn't anything of the ordinary, nor something that could be found in the vast sense of 'anything'. It was weird, shell-shocking weird, to say the least.
Zoro ran a finger to Sanji's hair just to double check if he really existed. No, it wasn't an imagination. It was reality, like the ground they stood on, like the waters they sailed on, like the sky and all that crap. But seeing Sanji there was odder than not seeing his own reflection in a mirror. Damn, what in the name of suffering fuck happened last night?
He raked his head for last night's events. They were drinking in an inn cum pub called Stomping Stallion. He was with the crew; Luffy, Usopp, Chopper, Nami, Robin and…Sanji. They got pretty drunk and tipsy like pro dipsos; nothing bad occurred, no free-for-all or anything like that. The girls were sent to a hotel nearby should anything happen. And them boys got a room for themselves and they slept in one room, but not on one bed. There were 5 beds, one for each of them, which goes to say it didn't make sense whatsoever why the 2 of them should share. He then began to wonder where the other 3 were as he surveyed the room and found them gone. Bad decision. He shouldn't have chugalugged that much of alcohol last night. But hell, wasn't making bad decisions a part of the story? Weren't books written to illustrate that point? Shit.
Zoro felt angry all of a sudden, that kind of anger that he felt superior to all obligations of explanation. He was flushed to the roots of his hair and his teeth were on edge. 'Nothing happened. Nothing happened. Nothing fucking happened between us.' He chanted, cursing his unhealthy mental hygiene for the sake of convincing himself. But suppose—well, the humiliation of being ripped in a sword battle by a girl or anything was not a patch compared to this cataclysmic shit, that's for sure. He finally stood up, tried but, sad to say, failed to forget the fleeting image of the 2 of them together in bed, naked, he hastened to add. He grabbed his over-alls and put them on. For the last time, he looked at Sanji, sound asleep and looking as innocent as a child. But the longer Zoro held his gaze the more he seemed a revolting maniac to him. He was boring, this Sanji; even the poor selection of food in his menu was more exciting than himself.
He balled his fist at the height of his frenzy, intending to revert to childhood just to justify ramming a knuckle on Sanji's face. But something wasn't right and at the very critical moment that something literally pulled him from doing what he would. Sanji's eyelids batted; he was awake, probably marking the intensity of the green-headed sword man's glare. Zoro attempted to sneer but couldn't complete it; not having found the means to respond naturally, he turned around and upped which left Sanji a spatial room for befuddlement. The boy chef followed the other's gaits with muddy eyes. It almost freaked him out to see Zoro like that and strangely enough, he didn't know what to feel about it. He certainly felt something, there between the narrow moment he opened his eyes and lifted his gaze to Zoro, like the sensation one gets if something important happened prior. But if he was given a dictionary of the types of feelings, he wouldn't be able to identify which. It was, make no mistake about it, a lot of meaning to convey just through the exchange of looks.
So left Zoro, vaguely feeling guilty as charged and hoping, hoping so badly that in case they really shared a bed they would live through it in a silent pact, in other words, without referring to it.
'Is there a state when I can ask someone to hurt me? I feel like I'm near that point.' He told himself quietly.
TBC
A/N: I have to take note of, or in any case apologize for, the distortion of original details, or lack thereof, in this piece. To count, I have only watched 40 or less episodes of the series but that didn't stop me from being hooked. It's pathetic to live in a country where the schedule of beautiful programs like One Piece should coincide with my schooling. It sucks. And should anyone ask why I didn't get the monikers of the characters correct, it's because the turds who aired them here translated the anime in Tagalog, my native tongue; a move that is all too non-reliable. They call Zoro 'Manunubos', and I haven't the remotest idea what that is in English hence I simply call him the Swordsman.