"The one moment I look away because the weather's perfect and Luffy's not bothering me and I'm trying to finish a map those two idiots have to go and get themselves lost!?" Nami screeched, running a hand furiously through her hair. "And because of a giant whale! How did this happen!? Tell me how this happened!"
"I don't know!" Usopp moaned, walking in circles on the Sunny's deck nervously. "One moment they were there, and then they weren't!"
Chopper's jaw dropped. "Eehhhhh!? Did they get eaten!?"
"That's weird stuff, bro," Franky added helpfully.
Robin looked at the seas pensively. The sun was setting rapidly, and the soft glow of dusk glinted on the tips of the waves. "How come the cook, the swordsman and I were the only ones who noticed the whale?" she asked.
"Perhaps, if I may," Brook said, "it was no normal whale? It was certainly not the same kind as Laboon, since it was white."
"But how is that supposed to mean anything!?" Nami shot back. "A whale's a whale! It's not like it can just pop up and grab two guys and then disappear, I'd feel the currents in my sleep. Besides, it's thosetwo guys we're talking about. Zoro I could understand - but Sanji? He'd never purposely leave Robin waiting!"
The colorful ensemble of a pirate crew paused for a moment, considering this new situation.
"Then, it's obvious what we gotta do, right?"
Five pairs of eyes (and one pair of eye sockets) turned to the speaker. Their captain slapped his knees and rose to his full height, hand on his straw hat. His grin split his face from ear to ear.
"I've got a bad feeling about this," Usopp muttered. Nami pressed a hand to her forehead in tacit agreement.
"It's a mystery!" Luffy declared, bright black eyes shining out from below his hat. "And we're gonna figure it out!"
A sharp crack cut him off, and the crew jerked their attention to the sea. In the distance, a ship was rapidly closing in on the Thousand Sunny, cannon blasts peppering the ocean dangerously close, so that choppy waves beat against the hull. The deck swayed.
"It's the marines!"
"What!? Why now!?"
"I'm so sorry, I should have kept an eye out for them! (Though I don't have eyes.)"
"Gyaahh! My nose! That cannonball just grazed my nose!"
"It's the G-5, guys, it's the Smoker dude!"
Nami dashed toward the helm as the rest of the crew scrambled into defensive positions. "Franky, let's get out of here! We don't have time to challenge the marines, especially without Sanji and Zoro. Finding those two is top priority right now!"
"Wait wait wait-"
"What!?" Nami roared at Usopp. He cowered.
"It's Luffy," he blubbered.
"Luffy, he's - he's-" Chopper choked.
Nami looked up just in time to glimpse a flash of red and two long rubbery arms snap in the direction of the marine ship.
Zoro surveyed the oceans with a piercing gaze.
"It's that way," he said suddenly, and prepared to dive into the ocean.
A hand grabbed him by the scruff of his coat and threw him back. "We're not swimming!" Sanji roared. "You idiot! How do you know where the Sunny is!?"
"Because it's that way," he responded, as if it were obvious. He pointed at a random cloud in the placid sky. "I remember seeing that when I got out of the water. We came from there."
"That's not how things work! Have you ever noticed that clouds move!? Not to mention those currents probably mixed up all the directions anyways..."
Sanji's voice, angry and slightly husky but definitely female, trailed off. He glanced at Zoro, then looked away hastily and starting taking deeper, more anxious drags from his cigarette. Zoro glanced at him quizzically.
And burst out laughing again.
"What!? What're you laughing at!?"
"Ha! Haha! A dartboard will always be a dartboard, haha!"
"Sh-shut up!"
Sanji still had the scruffy blonde hair, the eyebrow that was permanently cocked up in a swirl, and the furiously puffing cigarette between gritted teeth. But he had taken off his jacket ("Only because it's wet, marimo, if you make any shitty comment about this I'll kick your ass), revealing a slim, gently sloping frame beneath his loose-fitting suit, and could it be - Zoro laughed harder - this feminized Sanji was blushing.
"You're not any better off, Brussels sprout! Your damned mug is insulting every lady on this planet!"
"You're - pwahaha!"
"Would you stop laughing already!?"
And maybe it was because of Sanji's girlishness, or the ridiculous situation the two of them had gotten into, or the sun and the island were doing weird things to his brain; but Zoro couldn't stop laughing.
"Okay, at first it pissed me off, but now this is plain weird. Would you quit it!?"
He finally regained control of himself and stood beside Sanji again, chuckling quietly to himself. "You look as dumb as ever, swirly-brow."
The cigarette had burned through in record time, and Sanji spat it out and ground it under his heel before lighting a new one. "Forget it. We need to figure out where we are, how we ended up - like this; and then fix it before dear Nami and Robin see me."
"Sure they won't prefer you like this? Being a girl suits a sissy like you."
"I'll show you who's a sissy - " he began, launching up one long leg. Frustration then flashed across his face, and the kick landed weakly in the sand. He was blushing again.
Zoro raised an eyebrow. "Chickening out?"
He spat out yet another cigarette and pulverized it under his shoe. "Like hell. Just trying to figure out if a shitty disgraceful muscle-brain could possibly count as a woman if he happens to be wearing a lady's face." He looked wistfully at the crumpled remains of the cigarette butt, but decided against smoking more. His one box of nicotine relief would have to last for the indefinite period of being marooned to an island with the one living creature whose guts he hated the most.
Zoro glanced down at himself briefly, trying to see what kind of "wearing a lady's face" could make even the cook back off from a fight.
"Coward," he snickered.
Sanji stared at him, a muscle in his pale face twitching. "Oh, fuck it." He thrust his hand into his pocket and lit a cigarette with determination. "At least I'll get to enjoy these before I drown myself."
Zoro looked down at himself again, and frowned. It was slightly disconcerting to see himself there, drastically altered, strangely foreign, yet also his own self, somehow, as if in some other life he had always been female. But he was thinner, in most areas at least; and that worried him. He flexed his arm experimentally, and though it was a comfortable motion that remembered the grasp and steadiness he had pounded into his body with years of training, it seemed to be missing something.
Nervously, his hand fell and almost subconsciously touched the hilts of his swords. Zoro's life centered around the sword - if his fighting prowess was undeterred, he would barely notice a few harmless transformations here and there. But at his core, he was also a swordsman, and he had a feeling that becoming a swordswoman overnight was not a challenge he particularly looked forward to.
An image of an indignant woman's face, glasses pushed up to her forehead, skittered briefly at the edges of his mind. He pushed it away hastily.
"Sad excuse of an island," Sanji muttered then. Zoro looked up.
He was standing dejectedly in the island's single patch of shade, beneath a palm tree that seemed to spring out of the sand like a plastic prop. The island itself was roughly circular, and barely extended more than twenty feet in diameter. He leaned against the palm tree before closing weary blue eyes.
"How long d'you think you could last without water?" he asked quietly.
"Long enough," Zoro responded easily. But he watched his companion, and he noticed. "We could always find the others faster if we swam, you know."
"No way in hell." His voice cracked. But his eyes were open and focused again. "Three days is the usual. We've got time. Now let's catch us some fish."
Words of the Sheep: if Sanji and Zoro get marooned on an island...that has nothing but one palm tree on it...I realized that Sanji would probably get bad memories of his starvation period. And so the story became slightly more angsty than I predicted.
But Tashigi is coming soon, and we'll have a new flavor of angst: feminism/food/bushido angst.
Shush I like this kinda stuff.
and WARNING: OOC's will appear quite liberally as gender swappings are played with.