#goodnight zosan nation

[inoreuct]

*drums my fingers on the table* so… weretiger zoro angst, anyone? (happy ending tho bcs. always happy endings) [cw: slight gore]

Zoro is on the hunt. There is something in the back of his brain snarling protect them, protect them, chase it down—

“—arimo!”

He’s so hungry. Hell, he doesn’t even need to chase— His prey is right there in front of him, fresh blood racing through its veins as its tiny heart works overtime. He can taste its fear at the back of his throat, and he bares his fangs in a grin; the poor thing screams, a sharp, high keen of terror as it scrambles backwards, and Zoro pounces. 

“—arimo!”

He is kind enough to give it a quick death. Its throat rips out easily, trachea crushing between his jaws as he slits its torso open with his blades. Blood sprays across his body. Why hadn’t he shifted? He spits out a mouthful of bone and cartilage, pierces his fangs through a forearm and yanks, feels something pop and hears a wet tear. This would be so much easier with his claws—

“Zoro!”

Oh. His human is calling for him. 

Sanji looks scared. Why, though? He drops the arm in his mouth, lets it hit the deck with a wet splat as he croons a soothing apology at not replying sooner. Gore is sticky beneath his boots as he stalks forward and he holds in a growl of irritation, nimbly avoiding the guts strewn across the wooden planks. 

Rumbling his reassurance does nothing. Sanji still looks vaguely afraid, and so Zoro tries again; safe, he purrs, and the tip of his tail does not swish through the blood puddled on the ground like it’s supposed to. He cannot feel it at all. 

The cook doesn’t budge. Zoro can smell his apprehension, his nerves, the slight sour tang of fear that makes him want to go hunt down whatever’s causing it and make it hurt. He smells it on the rest of his crew, too, and he doesn’t get it. The threat is gone, no? He senses no danger. Scanning their surroundings on the enemy boat yields no answers; all the men around them are still very, very dead. Zoro had made sure of that, so what was the problem? They should be back on the Sunny right now, sitting in the galley debriefing and having dinner—

Something clicks into place in the recesses of his mind, and dread starts to prickle through his body. 

He had been so… He’d almost eaten—

Oh, no. 

Zoro tries to shift the shape of his soul and fails. He does not feel his body changing. His shadow is, has been, in the shape of a man’s, and the blood on his skin suddenly feels disgusting. 

In the span of a moment he becomes hyper-aware of it all, pouring down his front, dripping off his chin, salty-sweet-metallic on his tongue. He turns to the side and spits multiple times, tries to get the cloying taste out of his throat as he raises a hand before realising that it, too, is coated in red. Zoro almost retches as he swallows instinctively, nausea slamming into him in a wave so strong that his stomach churns. He tastes bile. He’s thankful for it— It’s better than blood. 

Anything is better than blood. 

“Zoro?”

His head snaps around so fast that something cricks in his neck. His eyes are saucer-wide. Sanji takes a step forward and he is rooted to the spot, frozen statue-still; he is sure his heart stops beating for a second. Fitting. He knows he should step back— Knows now that he had been the threat, and yet he cannot move. 

“Let’s just… go back to the ship, how about that?” Sanji says tentatively, wincing as he kicks aside something that looks like a liver to put his foot down again, and he’s so close. Too close. “Let me—”

“No,” Zoro rasps, and God, fuck, he sounds like a fucking death rattle and he wants to claw his own voice box out of his fool mouth. The cook’s expression is a twist between desperation and something else, something that makes Zoro want to gag and cry and scream. Sanji should never look like that and it’s because of him. “No,” he tries again, quieter. He looks away. He doesn’t think he can stand looking into those blue, blue eyes. “It’s my mess, I’ll clean up.” Sanji makes a noise like he’s about to protest, and Zoro pierces through his own heart as he turns his back. “Alone.”

A beat of silence, and then Sanji is walking away. His crew is walking away. Zoro stands, surrounded by bodies he’d ripped apart, and thinks that perhaps this is how everybody that has ever been under his claws had felt. 

And that’s that. 

*

The following days are hell. He breathes in and everything he smells is wrong; anxiety, worry, an undercurrent of tentativeness that makes him throw himself into his training with renewed fervour. He is torn between the urge to bare his throat, show his belly and prove to his crew that they will never come to any harm from him, and the pride that insists he will not go against his nature to make himself more palatable for anybody else. 

He is all fang and claw and wickedly sharp teeth. He is a predator by nature, given humanity and a mortal form. This is the shape of his soul.

But they are his family. His nakama. And sitting here on the floor of the crow’s nest after running every kata he knows countless times, Zoro feels painfully, inexplicably sad. It is unfamiliar; he doesn't really do regrets, but it reminds him that at least some part of him is still human.

He lost control. He doesn’t do that, either. He never does that. But he did, and now none of his nakama can look him in the eye. 

Somebody climbs up the ladder, and his nostrils flare.

“Zoro?” Chopper asks, peeking his head up, and the swordsman immediately tries to look like he’d been busy, which… is ridiculous. He is sitting on the floor and moping. The sigh that whooshes from his lungs is defeated.

“Hm?” he prompts, when the tiny reindeer doesn’t say anything else.

Chopper climbs up fully, rubbing his hooves together. “I’ve checked everybody over except you.” 

Zoro can see the way he takes a fortifying breath and walks closer with a purpose. He stretches out his legs and allows Chopper to do as he wishes. 

“…We’re all worried about you,” the reindeer says after a while, staring intently into Zoro’s eye and testing his pupillary reflex. 

The swordsman gives a non-committal hum. “Scared of me, you mean.”

“No!”

Zoro jumps when a hoof whacks him across the forehead. “Wh—?!”

“We’re scared for you!” Chopper scolds, sounding dangerously close to tears. His distress turns Zoro’s stomach. “Do you know how scary it was to see you like that?! And then! You haven’t eaten in three days, and you probably haven’t slept, either, have you? Sanji’s been trying not to push because he knows you’re upset, but he’s been pacing a hole into the galley floor and chain-smoking like—”

“Wait,” Zoro interrupts. Replays that chunk of speech in his head. “You just said it was scary to see me like that.”

“Because we didn’t know what happened to you!” Chopper cries, huffing shakily. “And the look on your face when you realised—”

Zoro’s back bumps into the bench as Chopper grabs him in a hug, arms around his neck. His breath catches in his chest.

“Don’t do that again,” Chopper says firmly, shoving Zoro’s shoulder for good measure as he pulls back. “You seem okay, at least physically. Any pain?”

“No.”

“Any trouble shifting?”

“Haven’t tried.”

The doctor makes a noise, a cross between displeasure and something softer. “Well, try soon. Can Sanji come and see you?”

“…Yeah.”

“Okay.” Chopper stands, giving Zoro one last look. “For the sake of our cook’s lung capacity, come down to dinner.” 

Zoro sucks down a breath and holds it until it burns. He smells worry-care-care-anxiety-care and pats a hand over Chopper’s hat. “Alright.”

He sits back against the bench as their tiny doctor leaves, and within a minute someone is climbing up again. Sanji stands, silhouetted by the late-afternoon light. Zoro’s chest aches.

“Marimo,” the cook says evenly, and Zoro resists the urge to scent the air.

“Swirly-brow,” he returns, neutral. Testing the waters. “Heard you missed me.”

Sanji is silent, and Zoro’s heart gives a sickening squeeze. Has he overstepped already? He opens his mouth to say something, anything, and nearly jumps when he ends up with a lapful of gangly limbs, his spine pressed hard into sanded wood.

There are hands on his face, in his hair, lightly callused and holding him in place as Sanji kisses him like he���s got a point to prove. Zoro freezes up at first, because even in his human form his teeth are sharp and he doesn’t know what he will do if he draws Sanji’s blood. Maybe run away to live out the rest of his life in well-deserved exile. 

But then he smells salt, and something wet smears against his cheek, and Sanji’s lashes are clumped with tears as he pulls back and there is a slender finger jabbing hard into his sternum. 

“Don’t you ever,” Sanji hisses, poking him again for emphasis, “do that shit to me again, you fucking bastard.” 

He smells like bitter fatigue, acrid worry sharpened with anger and underneath all of it— love, lemon-bright and so goddamn sweet that it coats Zoro’s tongue like honey, wipes every memory of red iron and rust from his mind. “I’m sorry,” he breathes, eyes roving over Sanji’s face; the curled ends of his brows, the long lashes, the high cheekbones and strong nose and a sharp cupid’s bow, so familiar he could trace it in his sleep. “I thought you— wouldn’t want to see me.”

“Fucking bullshit,” Sanji spits, his face crumpling, and he goes easily when Zoro coaxes him to his chest. “Do you know how long I spent worrying about whether or not you were okay?” 

“I know,” Zoro soothes, and his heart is beating so fast that his ribs hurt. “I’m alright.” 

“Well, I’m not,” Sanji announces, digging his knee up into Zoro’s side with a vengeance until he gets a wheeze. “You owe me three packs of cigs. You owe the whole crew an apology. Luffy’s damn near lost his appetite; even Nami won’t so much as insult me when I try and get a rise out of her.”

Sanji’s glaring at him with the force of the sun, fierce and beautiful and golden-bright, but the dark circles beneath his eyes make guilt drag razor-thin talons across Zoro’s stomach. “You shouldn’t smoke so much,” he says softly, brows furrowing as he cards Sanji’s bangs out of his face and cups his cheek. 

“You shouldn’t go berserk and then isolate yourself without considering the fact that your crew would be worried sick about you,” the cook fires back without missing a beat. He leans into Zoro’s touch anyway, and Zoro smooths a thumb into the hollow between his bridge and brow.

“Weren’t you scared?”

“More— unsettled, maybe. Marimo,” Sanji’s throat bobs, eyes flickering over Zoro’s face. “Your eyes were slits. Like you were expecting to get attacked. We didn’t know how to talk to you without you panicking and running away.”

“I do not run—” he begins, scowling, and then shuts his mouth. What has he been doing these past three days, if not running away? “I think…” He digs deep into the memory, lays everything out in his head and ah. 

That man had crept up in Sanji’s blind spot, a wickedly long knife in his hand, and Zoro hadn’t thought. Hadn’t planned, just jumped. “He was gonna get to you,” he mutters, forcing himself to hold Sanji’s gaze even as the cook frowns. “I’m sorry, cook. I lost control. It won’t happen again.” 

The words are clunky and unfamiliar in his mouth. He’d almost eaten a man in his human form. That had to have looked all kinds of fucked up; he really didn’t blame his crew if they—

“Oi,” Sanji scoffs, flicking him in the forehead. “Are you always so distracted even with pretty people in your lap?” 

Zoro huffs through his nose. “Oh, I’m sorry, princess. Just contemplating how I nearly ate someone.”

The cook’s mouth twitches. “There are a great many jokes I can make about that, but I’ll save them for later. You’re a tiger, marimo. You were just protecting us. We really can’t hold it against you.”

“…You’re not scared of me,” he murmurs one last time, because he has to be sure.

“I’m not,” Sanji confirms easily, rubbing his thumb over the shell of Zoro’s ear, dragging through his earrings and making them tinkle like wind chimes. “Come down and the rest of them won’t be, either.”

Something in him gives. Shifts, releases, crumbles in his chest like a little collapsible galaxy as he pulls the cook down for another kiss. He feels Sanji’s tongue trace over the points of his teeth, utterly fearless— It steals the breath right from his lungs, this blatant, unwavering trust that he’s been allowed to hold cupped in his battle-rough palms. He gathers flaxen hair into his hand so that he can look the cook in both eyes, blue as the sky at high noon and crystal clear. Sanji leans into his chest with a ragged exhale and Zoro slides one palm up to the nape of his neck, one over his ribs, if only to feel him breathe, and the words slip out. “I love you.”

He doesn’t know why it feels like he’s never said them before. They must have crossed his tongue hundreds of times by now, his mind a hundredfold more. He loves Sanji, he knows; it aches under his ribs, next to his heart, woven into his soul. He loves his crew, he knows; he gives them leeway he would allow nobody else, and refuses to accept that he needs their affection as much as they want his. 

But it feels new. Every single time, it feels brand-new. Like a freshly-minted coin that never tarnishes, pure, solid gold— So he lets himself be greedy and leaves his fingerprints all over it, goes to sleep with it tucked in his fist like a child holding on to a dream. “I love you,” he whispers into Sanji’s hair, and he feels the cook shift in his arms, feels the same words shaped against his throat, teeth to bone, fingers around his heart.

He purrs the words subsonic, over and over even when his crew cannot hear. He will put them out into the world until his nakama know and he will think them a thousand times more. 

But for now, they have an hour left till dinner. Sanji is breathing slowly, his arms tucked against Zoro’s chest. The lines of worry between his brows are smoothed out.

Zoro thinks he’ll take a nap.