"Brat! Your magazines are here!" Zeff shouts up the stairs, holding the stack in his arm with a scowl. Overly pretty men pouting on glossy pages look up at him and Zeff can't help but resent the humans that posed for these, they don't even know what they're doing but they'll make his kid miserable.
"Coming!" Sanji shouts and leaps down the stairs three at a time. Sanji rounds the corner suspiciously bright eyed and happy looking.
"Hn, you look happy." He tells Sanji, holding the magazines out of reach.
"I didn't realise that was a crime. Give them to me." Sanji demands, reaching up for the magazines. Sanji could just magic them out of Zeff's hands but he can do it back to Sanji and no one wants to get caught in an hour long tug of war like they have in the past.
"Why are you so happy?" Zeff asks suspiciously.
"None of your business, but don't worry it's wearing off. Now give me my magazines!" Sanji snaps at him and Zeff rolls his eyes. His kid isn't going to give up so he might as well hand them over.
"Here, go make yourself miserable with them." He sighs and Sanji magics them to his own hands now that Zeff isn't going to fight him for them.
"I'm not making myself miserable, I'm researching for work. If I don't keep up with what humans find attractive then I won't be any good, if incubi didn't do this then there'd be assholes running after humans in powdered wigs and ruffs. We have to do it." Sanji insists.
"Yeah and you always spend weeks afterwards hating everything about yourself. You know that even they don't look like this? It's all magic that they do afterwards with their… whatever you call them. The boxes with the pictures and the typing." Zeff says, tapping one pointed fingernail on the man on the cover.
"Computers old man, they're called computers. And what does it matter anyway? I have magic too." Sanji sneers, leaning forward and instantly looking just like the man on the cover including slicked red hair and the clearly altered jawline that the model doesn't even have.
"Yeah and how long can you hold glamour that thick?" he challenges. Sanji sighs and shakes it off, settling back to the low level of glamour he usually sticks at. He still doesn't have his glasses on though, kid's gonna give himself a migraine again.
"What does it matter? They stop noticing the fine details after ten minutes, tops." Sanji points out.
"So you get to spend all of your time never looking like yourself." Zeff argues back.
"I look how I HAVE to and how I WANT to!" Sanji shouts at him.
"Besides," Sanji mutters, clutching the magazines close to his chest. "There are only a couple of people who want to see what I really look like."
With that Sanji vanishes in a puff of smoke, no doubt only to the floor above. Zeff frowns, a couple of people? Usually Sanji would just shriek at him that Zeff was the only one who cared about that.
When dinner time rolls around and Sanji doesn't show up Zeff allows him an hour of grace, magazine day is one of the worst days of the month. Sure Sanji gets weekly ones but one or two don't hurt him that much. Today is the day when they all come at once, the glossy monthly high fashion ones especially. After an hour though Zeff is mad at his kid and awkwardly climbs the stairs on his own with Sanji's food in hand. He could just teleport up there but it's the principle of the thing.
He pushes Sanji's door open expect to find Sanji where he usually does at this time of night on magazine day, curled up in a ball under his blankets with a tearstained face, a broken mirror and magazine pages everywhere. All incubi make themselves look 'better' than they actually do, even when they're not working. But for some reason Sanji considers himself so far from how he's supposed to look that it hurts him over and over again.
Sanji isn't there though, his room isn't a mess and his mirror isn't shattered. Sanji isn't even in the room. Instead there are carefully removed pages from the magazines in a pile by the mirror and though the floor is littered with paper it's not fashion pages.
"What the hell?" Zeff mutters, looking down as he slides closer to them. They're not fashion shoots, they're star charts and Sanji is nowhere to be seen.