Sanji is awake. Sort of.
He feels himself being dragged, slowly, the old woman struggling with his deadweight. The ground is rough beneath him, scraping his cheek and bare arms raw. There's grit in his eyes. He can't even close them.
He doesn't feel any of it. All of this might as well be happening to someone else. He's only a silent passenger.
With a grunt of effort, the old woman manages to haul him through a narrow doorway. It's dusty inside, dimly-lit, and humid. Something is hard at work on the stove, a pot frothing past its boil. It smells good, but strange. It's not something Sanji recognizes.
He's dropped in a heap on the floor, his cheek pressed against the tile.
"I struck gold with you," the old woman says. She sounds winded, but cheerful enough, as she steps over his prone form and wanders toward the stove. "Once I take what I need from your body, I'll turn what's left of you in for the reward."
Her words should be alarming, but they're too distant. They're too far away to mean anything to him. Sanji is caught up in staring at his own hand where it's curled limply in front of his face, trying desperately to move one of his fingers.
It doesn't so much as twitch. He's paralyzed.
His heart is beating too slowly, his pulse weak and faint. It's as if his body is falling into a deep sleep. Sanji can feel himself starting to swim in and out of consciousness.
No, no, he babbles inwardly, and he would be thrashing and writhing if he were capable of it. His brain is babbling, panicked, but it's throwing signals out into a void. Nothing is responding. All systems offline. Sanji can't even move his fingers. Get up, he snarls at his own self, move!
He can't even blink.
"My Devil's Fruit synthesizes living tissue into whatever chemical compound I want," the old woman says. "It's so hard to find willing donors, especially when I need so much of them."
She picks up a wicked-looking instrument that wouldn't look out of place in Chopper's office, and sets it back down. Then she picks up a knife that Sanji recognizes; long and skinny and slightly curved, one he would use to fillet a fish.
Cold dread ices out whatever remaining warmth his body managed to retain.
He can't track her movement as she steps towards him. He can only watch her shoes shuffle closer across the cracked tile. She's humming as she lowers herself to her knees and reaches for him.
"This one, Chopper? Are you sure?"
"I'm sure! His scent goes this way!"
Those dear, familiar voices cut through the fog. Sanji feels like he just grasped a livewire. The old woman drops his arm with a startled hiss, struggling back up to her feet. She hurries away, out of his line of sight, and then the door bursts open.
"Sorry, old lady," Luffy says with absolutely no decorum. "I'm looking for my friend. Have you seen him? He's a cook."
"Luffy, describe him."
"I just did! He's a cook!"
"Oh, it's just me here," the old woman says in her disarming, warbling croon. "I live alone. Whoever you're looking for isn't- "
"He is," Chopper insists. "I can smell him."
"Sorry, we'll just take a quick look around," Usopp says.
The telling flip-flop of Luffy's sandals draws nearer. He leaves sheer pandemonium in his wake, as is his way; the old woman starts shrieking at them to leave her property, and Usopp tries to reason with her without raising his voice, and Chopper keeps saying, "I know he's here, I know it."
Sanji grapples to stay conscious, but it's a losing battle.
The last thing he hears is his name in Luffy's voice, exactly the same way he said it hours ago, before Sanji went storming off. Bewildered, concerned, the tonal equivalent of reaching a hand towards him.
"Sanji?"
He wakes up at home.
He lays there for a moment, blinking up at the familiar ceiling of Chopper's infirmary. Sunny is rocking, her wood and bearings groaning as she bears them across the sea. Rich golden light pours in from all the windows.
Blearily, he flexes his fingers. They tighten and loosen around the soft cotton blanket. He's never taking such a simple thing for granted again.
Nami's voice says, "Pull that shit again, and I'm keelhauling you."
Sanji turns his head. It takes a significant amount of effort, but it's worth it to see her thundercloud scowl.
"Sorry," he says hoarsely. He means it.
"Shut up," she replies. She gets up from her chair to sit on the edge of the bed and coax him upright with a gentle hand on his shoulder. "You're dehydrated. Get some of this water down or Chopper's putting you on an IV."
Her hands are shaking. For the life of him, Sanji can't tell if it's more from anger or worry.
"What happened?" he asks.
"We thought you were dead," Nami says thickly. "Your vitals were so low it took Chopper four tries to find your heartbeat. We thought- and Luffy- "
Sanji can only imagine. His heart is pounding now, as if to make up for earlier, and he scrambles in an ungainly way to get out from under the sheets.
It's telling, he thinks, that Luffy isn't in the room. Just that- it says more than enough. It fills him with a deeper dread than that old woman's fillet knife did.
"Where do you think you're going?" Nami demands, but there's a thread of resignation in her voice. She already knows. If it were her sitting in Sanji's place, God himself couldn't keep her from running to Luffy's side. But, probably because she was stationed here by Chopper, who trusts her to be the voice of reason against all odds, Nami puts her hands on Sanji's shoulders to still him. "Hold on, you died."
"It didn't stick," Sanji replies, drawing on every ounce of stubbornness in his body. "I need to see him."
"You need to not pass out when he sees you," she says, "because if you hurt him again even a little bit, I'm throwing your fancy pasta machine into the ocean."
This, Sanji can tell, is not an empty threat. She points at him severely, and then opens the infirmary door and steps outside. Sanji barely has time to wring the blanket in his lap anxiously before the door bursts open again and his captain is there.
Luffy's eyes are wide beneath his mop of hair, darting over Sanji's face as though there's no safe place for them to land. His hands are clenched in the front of his own shirt, above his scar. He's frozen where he's standing in the doorway. He looks like he doesn't know if he's welcome here or not.
What a fucking joke.
"Get over here," Sanji says shortly, waving at him with both hands. The distance between them is making him itchy with nerves. "What are you doing?"
That's all it takes. Luffy lurches into motion like someone prodded him in the back with a hot iron poker. He sprints across the room and doesn't stop at the bed; climbs right up next to Sanji instead and throws his arms around him. His embrace loops at least twice more than human arms rightly should.
He's shaking, face buried against Sanji's shoulder, and Sanji has never felt worse about anything in his entire life.
"I don't care what it takes," he says. "I don't care what I have to do. I'm going to make this up to you."
Luffy leans back enough to look at him. It's the same way he always looks at him. It's the way he looks at everyone he loves.
"You're alive," Luffy says. "I don't need anything else."
"I need to," Sanji insists quietly.
His captain frowns, uncomprehending, but unwilling to deny his nakama anything they need.
"Okay, I guess," he says reluctantly. He gives it some thought, brow wrinkled very seriously, and Sanji sees it when the lightbulb goes off in his brain. "How about pancakes for dinner? Then we'll be even."
It's Sanji's turn to close his eyes and lean against him. He just needs a minute. Sometimes Luffy is more impossible than usual. In a minute, he'll participate in a jailbreak from the infirmary and an exodus to the kitchen, and he'll cook chocolate chip and banana pancakes until Nami rips the spatula out of his hand and bodily drags him back to bed.
He just needs a minute.
Luffy seems content to sit still for the time being, warm and whole beside him- the two of them safe in this sunny room, with their family nearby, cradled in the invincible arms of the open sea.