#and for some reason ZORO ISN'T A PART OF THE WORST GENERATION DECK

[gildedmuse]

From my brother:

Just another totally normal day in my life.

[goodlucktai]

Hi! So, I read on ao3 that you were taking requests, so.. here's one. xD The scenario I have in mind is that Luffy can tell Sanji isn't feeling well just because of how the meat/ food tastes. (I was thinking physically sick, but could be like PTSD too) Like, maybe they go adventuring on an island or something, then after eating the packed lunch, Luffy suddenly and urgently wants to head back to the ship to check on Sanji. You can use the premise loosely or however you want too. Love your fics!<3

x

Sanji opts to stay with Sunny when they anchor off the coast of an unnamed island. 

Usopp doesn’t think anything of it—Sanji isn’t the only one. Franky is staying behind, too, holed up in the workshop with some improved schematics for the docking system that came to him in a dream. Brook has been composing a new song over the last couple of days, and cheerfully waves the rest of them off with his violin bow when they let him know they’re going ashore. 

All of them have kind of extreme personalities—some more so than others—so they can get stuck in their own heads sometimes. Usopp is guilty of it, too. It’s not really a bad thing, and their nakama are good at giving each other room to be mad scientist levels of intense when they need to be, and it all works out. 

A few months ago, Sanji locked them out of the dining hall for the two entire days leading up to the new year, carting their meals onto the deck and glaring at them evilly if they so much as glanced in the general direction of the galley door. But the incredible buffet he revealed to them on New Year’s Eve was more than worth it. 

So Usopp just assumes that Sanji is planning something big like that again, or testing a new recipe or something. It’s easy to put out of his mind in favor of the adventure spread out in front of him in the form of pink sand beaches and a dense, mountainous jungle. 

The Devil’s Fruit users clamber aboard the Mini Merry behind Nami, and Luffy drags Usopp and Zoro on, too. It’s a tight fit, and she’s not meant to seat more than four, but Chopper is tiny and content to sit in Robin’s lap, and Luffy and Zoro are sharing a seat less successfully but laughing uproariously about it, and for all Nami’s testy griping, her eyes are bright with good humor. It’s really a perfect sort of day, and they're all feeling it. 

So Usopp sits on the edge of their little paddle steamer, loops an arm through Luffy’s to keep himself steady, and lets his feet drag through the water as the tiny likeness of their beloved caravel carries them faithfully, if a little precariously, to shore. 

Nami and Robin don’t go very far past the beach; there’s some mossy driftwood in the surf that makes a handy lounger. They sit down, and less than one millisecond later, Chopper whips a bottle of sunscreen out of his little backpack, along with a very earnest, very adorable lecture about skin care that his nakama both listen to attentively. 

Luffy, for his part, isn’t happy unless he’s running circles around everyone else and generally being an unstoppable force of nature, so Usopp isn’t surprised in the slightest when he crashes straight into the jungle at full-speed. 

Zoro follows after him, because of course he does, so Usopp goes, too. This island may be small, but it’s big enough for Zoro to get lost forever, and he’s the absolute worst person to leave alone with Luffy in the first place, even at home. Sure, Usopp loves and respects them both, and would—and has!—put his life in their hands with absolutely no qualms or second thoughts.  And they’re both single-minded geniuses about the things they’re good at. 

But they’re also really dumb. And they just instantly compound each other’s qualities, good or bad, by virtue of existing on the same planet together. So Usopp resigns himself to being the voice of reason this afternoon and braces himself for whatever the jungle has in store.

Luffy is in fine form. He hops thickets and ducks under giant palm leaves and follows along natural trails left by native wildlife as easily as if he was taking a nostalgic trip through his hometown. He alternates chattering about the beast kings he hopes they encounter and singing one of his warbling impromptu songs. 

At one point he interrupts himself with a little hoot of delight and plucks a strange, smooth yellow pod from a fruit tree. Clearly he recognizes it by sight, and cracks it open to reveal the fleshy pulp and big, round seeds inside.

“Cacao beans!” Luffy exclaims, picking a few out and tossing them to Usopp and Zoro underhand. “We used to eat these all the time when I was little!”

They’re earthy and nutty, and taste almost like chocolate. Usopp reaches over for a few more and declares, “It was worth coming to this island just for these.”

Luffy nods firmly. Zoro is smiling a little at their captain’s enthusiasm, though he keeps it tucked away to himself. Usopp feels sort of buoyed along by it, too. Luffy is so often happy that sometimes Usopp forgets how important that happiness really is. How much he would be willing to do to keep it. 

They pick a bunch of the cacao pods to take home with them, and some mangoes, too, since there was a tree full of those nearby. Luffy shrugs off his bag and ooohs at the insulated snack boxes inside, as if he managed to forget about them despite hauling them around all morning, and unpacks those to make room for their fruit haul instead.

Usopp tucks into one of the boxes eagerly. The food inside is cool and crisp; cubed melon, hummus and sugar snap peas, a yogurt parfait. It’s perfect for a hot summer day, and desperately refreshing after a couple of hours romping through the humid jungle. 

Even Zoro starts eating without more than a single customary eye-roll at the scowly moss-ball drawn on the top of his lunch box. Luffy, however, takes one bite of homemade jerky and then stares down at the treasure box of snacks in his laps like it betrayed him. He chews slowly and swallows, brow furrowed. 

Then he shoots to his feet, crams the rest of the jerky in his mouth, and garbles out something Usopp absolutely has no hope of translating, before he takes off at a jog back towards the beach. 

“You—what—why—Luffy!” Usopp calls after him. That was too bizarre for Usopp to not need immediate clarification about. Zoro seems content to keep eating, so Usopp pauses long enough to give the swordsman his sternest glare. “Do not move! I swear to god, Zoro! And don’t let our stuff get eaten by a bear.”

“Luffy said crocodiles were more likely,” Zoro replies, unbothered by the idea. “If I see one I’ll catch it. We can have a barbecue.”

“Maniacs,” Usopp grumbles, mostly fond, and follows the obvious trail of flattened leaves and broken branches Luffy left behind him. 

On the beach, his captain is laying face-first in the sand, squirming around like a beached whale. He’s being restrained by a few of Robin’s extra arms. Nami looks exasperated, Robin looks amused, and Chopper looks frantic. So, totally normal on every count. 

“You can’t drink ocean-water Luffy!” their doctor cries. “It’s not good for you! Are you craving sodium?? Do you have a calcium deficiency??” 

“What,” Usopp says at length, bracing his hands on his knees to get his breath back. 

“Our fearless leader just tried to throw himself into the sea,” Nami says, throwing up her hands. “You know you can’t swim, right? You remember that minor detail?” she adds for Luffy’s benefit, who is still growling into the sand and trying to inch his way to freedom. 

“I gotta see Sanji!” he says, twisting his neck at an impossible-for-a-borderline-human angle to scowl up at them as if they’re the ones being unreasonable. “Robin—!”

“Oh, I see. Excuse me, captain,” she says peacefully, and releases him. He springs to his feet, only for his stomach to sprout hands that begin tickling him mercilessly, and he ends up back on the ground a second later, this time rolling with laughter. “If you need to get back to the ship, why don’t you simply slingshot yourself there?”

Luffy sits up, breathless and ruffled, and aims a glowing smile her way. “That’s a great idea!” 

“OR,” Nami says very loudly, “one of us can just take you back on the Mini Merry.” 

“I’ll do it,” Usopp says, in part because he wants to see this play out, and in part because he loves any excuse to spend time with Merry. “C’mon, Lu, let’s go. I left Zoro behind on crocodile duty.”

Luffy hops to his feet and leads the way back to the paddle steamer at a dead sprint. He’s racing the tide, weaving in and out of the way as the waves pull back and forth, and hops aboard the Mini Merry with a battle-cry. 

He’s so extra, about literally everything. Usopp loves him. 

They make it back to Sunny in a handful of minutes, and Luffy doesn’t bother waiting for the docking system. He stretches an arm up to her rail and loops the other one around Usopp’s waist, and with a neat, economic little yank, he has them both on deck. 

Brook glances up as his captain rushes by. “Yohoho! Was the island that boring?”

“He was having the time of his life like six minutes ago,” Usopp replies dryly, following Hurricane Luffy toward the galley. Their musician laughs again, that bone-deep cackle, and Usopp is smiling to himself when he lets himself into the kitchen. 

The smile withers and falls off his face a second later. 

Sanji is sitting at the dining table with his hands wrapped around a mug that looks like its gone cold. His visible eye is rimmed with red. He looks miserable. 

Or he looks like he was miserable, all of two seconds ago, before Luffy burst into the room. Now he looks stunned—understandable—but it’s creeping toward shame—less understandable. As if they haven’t all seen each other at their absolute lowest. As if crying is something to be embarrassed about. Barely a week ago Sanji sat up with Usopp in the middle of the night and let him bawl against his shoulder in a random burst of homesickness for Syrup Village. And what of it!

Usopp is getting worked up for no reason, at Sanji, for Sanji, in confused solidarity. 

Luffy, however, doesn’t miss a beat. He’s across the room in an instant, kneeling beside Sanji’s chair and gazing up at him with that look. That impossible, undivided stare that makes you feel like a mountain is bowing to give you its notice. The cook’s hands clench around his cup for a second, and then all the tension eases out of him like smoke escaping through an open window. His guard visibly goes down.

“Do I want to know how you could tell from three miles away?” Sanji asks ruefully. 

“Food tasted funny,” Luffy replies like it’s totally unremarkable. “Like your hands were heavier while they worked. I could just tell.”

Sanji shoots a bewildered glance at Usopp over Luffy’s head. Usopp shrugs expansively. The hummus tasted like hummus, as far as his refined palate was concerned. 

When Sanji glances back down at Luffy, he’s smiling crookedly, despite himself. “Is that right?” 

“Mm-hm!” Luffy settles tailor-style, and tilts until his spine is resting against the leg of the table, and he can lean his head on Sanji’s knee. “Sanji’s one of my favorite people in the entire world, so he can tell me anything. But if he doesn’t want to, we can talk about something else instead. Like what I found in the jungle!”

With a little huff, Sanji tugs at a piece of Luffy’s damp, sandy hair. It’s making a mess of his jeans, but he doesn’t seem to mind. His blue eye is soft, and there’s barely a trace of that earlier misery in it anymore. 

“Well, what’d you find?” Sanji prompts him, and Luffy launches into his tale. 

His chest is so warm and tender it might as well be slow-cooked meat about to fall off the bone. Usopp lets himself out of the galley, easing the door shut behind him as quietly as he can. Brook is waiting where they left him, head tilted, until Usopp gives him the OK-sign with his fingers to let him know all is well. Then he yo-ho-hos again and sets bow back to string, and Usopp swings himself back down to the Mini Merry with a serenade of violin music swelling behind him.

His friends are all waiting on the beach. Zoro has a dead crocodile with him, easily thirty feet long. Nami is shrieking about how the hell they’re going to cart that thing back to Sunny, and Chopper is hiding from it backwards, behind Robin, who is smothering a smile with her hand. 

Usopp is so abruptly, entirely grateful to know them all—to be sailing out to bring them home, to belong to the same place they belong to—that he can’t help but laugh. He thinks, for a second, he can hear Merry laughing, too.