#binswrites

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Blame the Fire of Passion

Zoro/Sanji Tags: Major Character Death (Sanji), Cannibalism, Blood and Gore, Emetophobia, Introspection, Alternate Universe - College/University, Out of Character Word Count: 3,523 AO3 Link

Zosan fic for @ryiju-muunie! In which Zoro kills Sanji, and sorts out his feelings towards him in the two weeks it takes to eat him.

It had been maybe two weeks when the buzzing around campus began, and Zoro had done it. 

What had been a tentative missing person’s case early the week prior had now become a murder case, and Zoro had done it. 

He couldn’t even say why. His thoughts on the matter were scrambled in a very particular way, and his emotions were faring worse, the way things often were with many things he had done in his life. But he had. 

Sanji had gone missing two weeks ago, a report had been filed and people talked, but now they talked louder because they had found human bones and no matter how hushed the police tried to keep it for now, nobody was stupid. Zoro had taken Sanji two weeks ago and ran a knife through him and he had done it, and nobody knew. Nobody knew he had done it, much less what he had done.

Grief had ran through their friend group that first week like somebody had run a wire under all of their skin to connect them with. It trickled slower than he thought, and he’d been left at the very end where very little of it was spat out into him. It was present in Luffy’s newfound solemnity, in the way Usopp whispered, even in how Robin stopped with her morbid sense of humor… it trickled down all of them until it got to him, to Zoro, the Zoro that did not feel anything too particular but definitely felt, and when he answered what Nami asked him of his grief all he could say was: “... It was Sanji.” 

He supposed he should have been grateful for how scrambled his emotions were, because he wasn’t a very good liar at all. That vague statement became an expression of words he didn’t have, an echo of sadness or maybe something else, instead of a hasty admission of guilt. It was Sanji. 

Two weeks ago he had taken a knife to Sanji and Sanji had died then and there. The second thing he had done was dismember him, separate him into parts. It had been done with swiftness but it had been done with inexperience. He had never butchered anything before. Zoro cut him like that, primarily, because he couldn’t get the voice of his friend out of his head— Sanji would have hated the waste. All of the meat was still perfectly edible, even if it had once occupied the handsome face of his most equal counterpart. Even if they would have never admitted it out loud, there was a certain reverence Zoro had to afford the only man who had ever truly, deeply, understood and trusted him to his core. 

He separated skin from muscle inelegantly. He cut into Sanji’s torso and felt much like a child. He tugged at the small intestine and didn’t know what to do with it, working with only vague recollections of people eating liver but having no conception of if anyone had ever been willing to eat a pancreas. He kept the head untouched and told himself it was because he couldn’t eat the brain, but he let the head watch him. He propped it up and let it watch him.

The first thing Zoro tried was eating part of him raw, almost entirely because he hesitated at the thought of desecrating the kitchen with his presence. He was no Sanji, after all, and he’d already shown his ass with how unprepared he had been with preparing any of the meat to begin with. 

What he bit into tasted like iron, nothing but iron, cloying and clinging to his teeth and his mouth and so red he could have sworn he had eaten rust. He had eaten rust and it was iron and he was going to be encased in it, jagged, suffocating, too close to the skin, so close that if he might move it might scrape his skin right off his body but never would it pierce, encased— he was so sure of that fact. He felt it drip down to his chin and for a single second as the drop pooled there, still not big enough to succumb to gravity but slowly gathering and gathering and gathering, biding its time until it would, he swore he heard the twinkle of a key and the snapping of a cage door. 

He did not eat the rest of Sanji raw. 

Zoro scrounged up whatever knowledge he had gathered from Sanji on the art of cooking. Something about searing meat in a pan or something— or was the term browning?— first and then putting it in the oven later. Something about wrapping the top of the container used with tinfoil, for something or other. Moisture, maybe. Sanji had told him so much, things he had remembered because they were things the cook had been passionate about, but Zoro really didn’t have any of the technical skill to execute anything Sanji had rambled to him about. 

Still, he ate the first cooked piece with some joy. It had been part of Sanji’s thigh, and even if he had neglected to season it entirely, and even if his methodology was sloppy, it was good just by virtue of being Sanji. He ate like a starved man and something anonymous settled in Zoro’s soul as he did. The ordeal of packing the rest of Sanji’s body up to store became an exhilarating thing almost, knowing he had so many days of such good food… Well, it would make any man happy, surely. It made him forget entirely about the iron and the cage.

In an action that was somewhere between shameless and blasphemous he did end up taking Sanji’s cookbook. Rifling through it was a bit equivalent to having taken his soul as well, but somehow it didn’t feel as dirty when Zoro had all of his parts stored in the fridge. Dirty? Somewhat, sure. But it didn’t feel selfish in the least. It was mostly seafood recipes and a lot of the notes didn’t make any sense, but it was the most useful thing in the world because it felt better in his hands than it did outside of them. He liked having Sanji’s soul, he realized, the thought dim in the back of his head. 

It was what he had for breakfast and dinner every day after that fact. Only breakfast and only dinner because lunch was spent with his friends. 

His cooking didn’t actually get any better than a few increments, he only really got better at using basic spices even if he also tried to get better at everything else, but the taste on his tongue was so spectacular that it only took a handful of days for him to start picking at his food at uni like it had rotted on his plate and was crawling maggots. His friends’ voices would drift up and over his head and his fork would slide maybe one or two pieces of whatever was in front of him into his mouth before his stomach and then his throat gave up on it, and he never pushed himself to the point where his tongue would as well, though not for any particular fear of vomiting. 

Usopp clapped a hand on his shoulder one of those days and spoke to him affably, just barely containing that overwhelming heaviness that his voice and body had acquired ever since the group had all realized Sanji really was missing. At the time it was the heaviest Zoro had heard Usopp, but this was just the period where their friend group had only recently registered Sanji as just missing and not as outright dead.

“What’s up, big guy?” Usopp stood next to him when he asked though he quickly took a seat next to him, resting a cheek right on his shoulder. “You really haven’t eaten anything. Nami’s threatening to up your debt about it.” 

She couldn’t have come and told me that herself? Zoro said something along those lines, irritation not even bothering to filter through his voice— it was something much closer to going through the motions. He made no move to shrug Usopp off or otherwise tell him to leave. 

“Of course she could have,” Usopp sighed dramatically, “however you know me— couldn’t risk a maiden’s heart no matter how resilient, I had to offer my services as the undaunted Captain Usopp that never flinches at any challenge.” 

Zoro nodded once at that, and added nothing else. He picked at his food as he had been before his friend came to pester him and still did not put any in his mouth. 

It didn’t take long for Usopp’s face to soften, and his bravado to melt away as though it had never been there. He sunk just that little bit further into Zoro’s side as he murmured. “It really isn’t Sanji’s cooking, huh?” 

Zoro let the words hang in the air, looking at the scramble he had made of whatever he had decided to eat. It looked incomprehensible to him, as though it wasn’t just his stomach and his throat but now something like his mind had also given up on the food in front of him. He still took a forkful of it, sitting it on his tongue and letting it become ash there, swallowing it dispassionately. 

“Yeah, it really isn’t Sanji.” 

It was all he could say on the matter, and it wasn’t a lie either. Usopp had wrapped an arm around Zoro in an attempt to bridge some perceived gap, not even knowing that he would have tripped and fell into a void beyond nothing if Zoro had actually let him know how vast it had been. He just let the action wedge them further apart subtly and unbeknownst to his friend, the way most uncalculated gestures do.

Over the course of the week one Charlotte Pudding caught him by the arm to ask him something stupid, and though Viola and Pedro went on to do it a lot more elegantly, it was the same annoying crap when it was them. Many people did, coming out of the woodwork like someone had blown smoke up their ass. They felt like dregs clinging to him, trying to be subtle but so very loud, nosy in a way that was nothing short of fucking insufferable. Not close to anyone in their friend group enough but still feeling entitled to know things, to cling to Sanji as if he were theirs. 

Strange and shocking as it would be for anyone else, he didn’t take a knife to any of them. Easy as it would have been to associate the act of killing— of gutting and separating and rendering flesh to its most basic and still state— with anger, it wasn’t something Zoro did. As he dwelled on it he began to understand that what he had done he had considered an act of respect. His own passion presented to another, and their passion presented to him. Strange and lopsided, but a mutual exchange, predicated entirely on what was most important. It was an importance he couldn’t put a single descriptive word to, he just felt it. He let the dregs cling to him in its wake.

It was at a very steady pace after that realization that he also put a name to that anonymous thing that his eating habits had been settling in his system. For every bite he took he swallowed something distasteful like that, the feelings washing out of him and leaving a warmth in their absence. He ate part of Sanji’s forearm and found he had swallowed with it Pudding’s grating voice. With part of his calf he had swallowed that tone Pedro always spoke with. With the meat around the ribs he washed down Viola’s strange touchiness and her too-close proximity. On and on it went, with whoever else laid claim on Sanji when they had none. It motivated him through 

WIth every day they got easier to be around for a very simple reason. He had Sanji and they did not, in a very physical sense. That warmth kept a buffer between himself and whatever annoyances those people brought with them. He could almost hold their hands.

Now, when the bones were found, he very nearly did. 

The heaviness on everyone else got even worse upon announcement of the news and yet Zoro felt lighter than he ever had in his life. He had figured out the what and why of himself and of the last two weeks and he was relieved everyone was too heavy, mournful, and lost in their own feelings to ask him anything. His neutral face could be painted over with grief just fine, even if he could barely comprehend it anymore. That gentle, full feeling— there was no reconciling it with anything resembling any sadness. It was good that he could maintain his silence. 

It was a strange dance, but he managed it well enough. His relationship with Sanji meant a lot of people decided to give him “space”, which was just fine with him. It meant more time without being hampered by the otherwise funerary atmosphere.

It was some days after that he got a knock on his door. 

He had not expected Sanji’s older sister on the other side. He had heard she was in town, something about being called by the cops because Zeff wasn’t Sanji’s legal anything, but he hadn’t expected her to darken his doorstep in specific. She was a fine woman. Despite being shorter than him and despite the soft pink hair she had the exact same face Sanji did, down to the stupid eyebrows, and just as dead as Sanji’s own face had been these past two weeks when he had watched Zoro eat. Her eyes had this glassy quality to them and he didn’t know if it was because of her own grief or simply because she was fundamentally incomplete as a human being. Not like it mattered. 

She didn’t come in nor did she sit down until he told him exactly when and where she could, which was annoying. She got the couch and he got the seat off to the side in front of it.

“Your friends— they, uhm… They told me you were close. With Sanji.” She justified her presence with that after a short, horrible silence. It was like poking a hole in it and letting the air hiss out of it even louder, making its presence more known. 

Her tone had so many layers to it. Grief on top and a chasm deep underneath with all sorts of things stuffed there he didn’t care to parse for himself. She hadn’t once been relevant to him before and he wasn’t about to let her start now. 

“I wanted to—” she started, before seeming to think better of it. “I’m sorry for— I… I’m sorry.” She said that, having so very many things to be sorry for that not a single one of them tumbled out of her mouth. Condolences, regrets, all of them muddied into that single sentence that ultimately didn’t mean anything. God, her face really did look the exact same. “Maybe I was hoping to exchange stories… or something. That sounds so silly when I say it out loud.” 

Zoro personally thought it was downright stupid and not just silly, sentimental in a way he wasn’t feeling himself. It really was unfortunate that she’d come to his home and not someone else’s. This was the sort of stuff Usopp or even Brook may have been able to help her with effortlessly, but he wasn’t the sort of sap that had the words for stories. 

Still, something in the back of his head wanted to indulge her. His brain hadn’t fully caught up to his mouth when he said to her, “Do you want to know what happened to him?” 

She looked taken aback. “Pardon?”

“To Sanji. Do you want to know what happened to him?” he asked.

“What…? Did the police divulge things to you that they didn’t to me?” she said.

“Huh? No.” That warm feeling that had been haunting him everywhere curled around him as he spoke. It almost got a smile out of him. “I killed him. The knife’s still in the kitchen. His head’s still in my freezer. It took a while to scrub the blood off the floor.” 

Reiju let out an aborted, breathy laugh. Polite. “That is… A very morbid joke, Mister Roronoa.”

“Who said it was a joke? I killed him,” he told her. 

“I… why? Why would you—?” She paled as she asked that question, her expression falling. 

“Because I love him.” It was probably the easiest thing he’d ever said. 

Reiju was slowly, hesitantly, beginning to get up from the sofa. Had it been anyone else he wouldn’t have even flinched at being treated like some wild animal in the moment, but it was Reiju, and she shared Sanji’s face. Beyond simply paling and beyond her expression getting dimmer, it twisted. It twisted horribly, in ways a face like that should never— like witnessing someone break their bones, the fractures making things stick out in odd angles. There was shock, but also true, honest-to-god horror as the fact he wasn’t joking sank in and she realized she really was in the same room as the man who had killed her little brother. 

He didn’t care about her opinion but she shared a face with Sanji and he couldn’t help but see him in her. The crease of their frown was the same, the furrow of their brows, those damn eyes. That damn terror coupled with that face, the fact it was aimed at him, because of what his feelings had amounted to… 

Reiju was strong but she was not as strong as Zoro. He had been seated between her and the door so even if she had ran she wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. The crack of her head against his coffee table was louder to him than whatever scream he had ripped out of her, and he wanted to hear it again. He had her head bowed down, face away from him, as he slammed her into it over and over, the crisp noises of bone giving way to the wet noises of flesh as he kept going, but he needed to keep going. She had used one of her hands to grip his forearm, trying to tear him off of her, but he could feel slowly but surely how her grip lost its strength until that arm inevitably fell limp. 

When he was done he turned her over and found her face unrecognizable. Stained with so much red not even her mother or god would have recognized her. He saw as her blood pooled onto his table and then dripped off the corners, making the slightest little tinking rain sounds on his floor, consistently like a clock, like a jingling key and… 

The smell of iron hit him again. That cage came back to brush against him, taking one large terrible bite out of his lower spine, making him tremble where he stood. Before he knew it his guts were crawling and his chest had heaved just to make sure there was space at all for him to breathe, and he almost didn’t realize that what had hit the back of his mouth and fallen out of it had been bile and that he was vomiting. 

Once he had processed his body’s betrayal properly the sensation was almost enough to get him to wretch again, but he had originally had only acid to vomit out, and nothing else. He felt that warmth leave him with it, as though he had emptied himself of everything he had eaten the last two weeks, all of it splashing onto what used to be Reiju’s face. Sanji’s sister. Sanji. God he really did have nothing else to vomit out.

He could feel the rust against his skin and no matter what he did it would not let up. No matter how much he stepped back and no matter what he did it would not come off of him. He could feel it staining his hands, scraping them clean of their skin in some metaphorical way even though touching anything made it hurt like his skin was gone anyhow. He had done something thoughtless and he felt like it was going to tear him apart. He supposed this was what anger felt like. What actual murder felt like. Nothing he could do about it now, he supposed. 

He looked at the flesh of the woman in his living room and remembered that first bite he had taken out of Sanji, two weeks ago. The iron and the rust that had come with it, that claustrophobia. The way it had gone away when he cooked… But he had been angry now, and none of that was going to recede. There was no way he was putting that bile back in his mouth and swallowing it. 

He did not eat Vinsmoke Reiju.

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Genuinely though I want to see Reiju be able to leave Germa and just be like, so fucking dysfunctional as an individual for a while. I want her to be able to shed her piles and piles of masking she did all the time while with her family because it's so useless when not with them and realize there's kind of nothing underneath all that. She's lived so long assuming she would live and die a weapon of war for her father that when she's free of it there's no real underlying desires or things she remembers enjoying or anything.

She has Sanji, who she cares for unconditionally, but that doesn't do much for her. Sanji is fine and happy, and he is elsewhere while she is here, wherever here is. She can't cling to him.

I want her to come to terms with her reduced emotional capacity. Settle on looking "grumpy" to strangers and getting questions about that instead of putting on a smile, because she quickly learns the one she usually uses looks aggressively fake and is even more offputting . I want her to realize there's no magical line in the sand that makes her automatically more monstrous because she has a bit of a harder time empathizing with people and feeling things as strongly all the time. That folks are still kind to her here and there and she can choose to be kind back, because kindness is a set of actions and decisions and she can do them even if there's little feeling or conviction behind it. And I want guilt to crush her all the while, because that's never not going to happen. She is always going to feel so guilty.

I want her to find people that care about her. That she can just be with. People who try to help her fill all of that emptiness that is the space where her passions and earnest personality should be. People that don't really succeed in doing that but try anyway. Suggest hobbies that she takes up and doesn't feel a lot about but she does them anyway. People who are there when she finds something for herself and celebrate that she truly does enjoy it.

I want there to be a moment in the middle of the night where she realizes those words she cried to her little brother back when they were children apply to her too. That he would be so happy she found her own kind people. That this is what their mother wanted for her too. And I want her to realize she's allowed to be just as happy about that as well. That she doesn't deserve to die. That she's free.

I dunno I kinda think she deserves a nice and happy ending.

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Another Magnus Archives AU fic. This time a statement about Reiju, recorded by Sanji.

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Published my first wanpi fanfic 🎉 would be happy if people checked it out thank you

Summary from the ao3 blurb:

“Down in the heart of Germa, kept in the dungeons and away from prying eyes, is their greatest weapon— a tool that enables them to win any battle, to go at a conflict over and over until they come out victorious, no matter what. A weapon that, coincidentally, happens to be held by the failed third prince.

or

How Sanji gets locked in the basement for "becoming useful", gets told nothing, and gains a half-decent relationship with one of his brothers as a result.”

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Reiju/Tashigi The Summer Hikaru Died AU . I am once again asking everyone to pick up what I'm putting down.

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Vinspooky event day 5 - Free Day

Magnus Archives AU. Cosette's statement on her encounter with one Niji Vinsmoke.

@germasholidaycalendar

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Okay hashihime au nonsense because I have a lot of spare ideas. Love writing spinoffs for my own fanfiction

Something I realize I completely forgot to address even in the authors notes was that. Like, by the end there Niji totally also has a hashihime. Those transfer when you kill someone with one, not that any characters involved have any way of knowing that. He totally got the hashihime of the man that he killed, and to me sincerely he probably didn't realize for like, a hell of a while. He just doesn't have a reason to see his eyes under his goggles very often.

In any case I definitely think this Niji skipped town pretty much immediately after his Sanji disappears back in time. Sanji was one of the few things tethering him to Germa to begin with and one of the things making it bearable, and with him gone, he may as well try to abide by his wishes, "do something less upsetting", and he can't do that while living there and being a military commander and prince.

He takes Michael with him, not because he cares about her or anything, he's never really spoken to her, but because she's the only other person who knew Sanji at all and cared about him as well. It's not like she has a job anymore, she got put down in the dungeon as glorified babysitter for a reason— and it's not that she really wants to risk herself and leave either, but with enough strongarming everything is possible, and it spares her a crueler fate.

Niji's still not the sort of person who has his emotional capacities actually sorted out. He cared about Sanji, but Sanji isn't there anymore. Trying to sort out having emotions without the person that made you have them in the first place is a doozie, especially since they haven't fully developed but still do keep developing without him there. Whatever relationship he forms with Michael through their travels ends up being kind of weird and unhealthy on his end because he kinda sees similarities between her and his brother and keeps lowkey projecting Sanji onto her. She has to keep snapping him out of it, and the more she does the more she grows a backbone and stops being so scared of him, though she keeps the overly polite streak.

It's not all terrible, though. I know for a fact Michael christens him some silly name from one of her favorite books so they're less easy to track, and Niji takes to it as if he'd never been named no. 2 at all, much to her delight. And Niji on the other hand helps her feel more confident— his praise for her skills as a fighter and soldier are quite candid and slowly disabuse her of the notion that she was strictly bad at her job and thus useless as an individual. Really, her issues were mostly being soft, and if she is a failure for that, Niji tells her he's becoming one too just the same. His apparent selfishness lets him do whatever the hell he wants, too, even when it rains, so there's at least a little upside to his emotions still not being completely normal the way an average person's would be.

Eventually they'd end up traveling with the strawhats for a while, and they slowly help untangle Niji's too-tight grip on Michael and learn to let her go and do her own thing. They were good as traveling companions for a while but it wasn't really meant to be forever, and Michael deserves to live in peace and away from the threat of Germa hunting her down due to association with him. Niji stays with them even when they drop her off though.

When they ask him if he has a dream or not, he tells them he still doesn't think he's enough of a human being to really have one for himself yet, but that he really wants to build an honest-to-god time machine. He wants to be able to figure out how these things work, and honestly he just wants his little brother back so he can show him the outside world. The strawhats keep him while he figures out whether or not that ends up being his actual dream or if he has a more selfish one for self-fulfillment down the road, and if they keep him indefinitely even after he figures that out, well, that's just the way things go.

Also honestly I didn't know where else to put it here but I don't think he ever regains use of his arm. He just didn't care for it properly in the process of running away and at that point it wasn't fully healed, so the sling becomes a bit of a permanent fixture with him. He doesn't mind and doesn't want to particularly have it fixed in any capacity if it even can be, he regards it as a parting gift from Sanji.

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Vinspooky event day 3 - Ghost/Stalker

In which Tashigi and Reiju spend a perfectly normal week together looking for a staircase in the sky, and nothing is wrong.

@germasholidaycalendar

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Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: One Piece (Anime & Manga) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Roronoa Zoro & Vinsmoke Niji, Sanji & Vinsmoke Niji Characters: Vinsmoke Niji, Roronoa Zoro Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Hashihime of the Old Book Town Elements, Once again no knowledge of hashihime required, but the previous fic in this series is needed for context, Bickering, The Vinsmoke Siblings Have Emotions (One Piece), Well just the one, Niji's developing them give him some time, Vinsmoke Judge's A+ Parenting, Mentioned Sanji (One Piece) Series: Part 2 of Mizusanji AU Summary:

“Are you favored?”, which is to say, haunted.

That was what Zoro asked Niji some time into his stay with the Strawhat Pirates, months after Sanji vanished in his cell and Niji ran away with a Hashihime of his own. It makes for an awkward conversation, even if it brings them closer.

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In which Ango quits his job, gets split in half metaphorically (and physically, kinda? it's complicated), grieves poorly, and has a couple of mental breakdowns about it. Not necessarily in that order.

Promoting this again but this time it's because this fic is officially FINISHED!! Chapters 1-7 are done. Please do read it 🙇‍♂️

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Wrote something for Odango week on Twitter!

Day 6 - Odango in any AU

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Vince pinned (to make things easy to look for)

HI, I'm Vicente ! 20+ he/him lesbian

art tag | writing tag | talking tag | twitter | ao3 | strawpage | Writing requests are welcome, askbox is open

Currently fixated on: Hashihime and One Piece (Vinsibs focus)

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Oh yeah boo I remembered my tumblr existed to briefly plug my fic. AU Ango + Taneda interactions go brrrr