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6 eggs, 1 cup sugar, 1 2/3 cup bread flour, 1/3 cup honey, 2 1/2 tablespoons water.

Zoro stared at his arm, trying to comprehend the mysterious words that had emerged.  Was Kuina playing some kind of prank on him?  He ran to find her, stumbling through the hallways of the dojo until he saw her meditating with Koushiro.

He held out his arm, glaring at her, “Did you do this?  How did you do it?”

Kuina stared at his arm, “Did I draw on your arm?  Zoro, I’ve been here all day, and that’s not even my handwriting.”  Koushiro stood and gently took Zoro’s arm, tracing over the words.

“Zoro,” he said quietly, “This means something very important.”

“What does it mean, sensei?”

“It means you have a soulmate,” Koushiro said, “Someone out there who shares a very special bond with you.”

“A bond, sensei?” Zoro frowned.

“Whatever is placed on their skin will be placed on yours as well,” Koushiro smiled, “I assume your soulmate is a cook, writing down ingredients to remind themselves of recipes.”

“Seems dumb,” Zoro flushed.

“It’s wonderful, Zoro,” Koushiro said, “A soulmate is someone who will understand you better than anyone else.  It’s very rare to have one.”

“I don’t know anything about cooking,” Zoro muttered.

“Why don’t you write something back?” Kuina asked eagerly, “Like, ‘Hi, I’m Zoro, you’re my soulmate.  Teach me how to cook.’”

“That’s just going to freak them out,” Zoro said, “And plus, I don’t care about having a soulmate.  I just want to be the world’s greatest swordsman.”

“Whatever,” Kuina said, rolling her eyes, “That will never happen because I’m going to be the world’s greatest swordsman.”

“Why don’t you two put some effort behind your words?” Koushiro laughed, “Let’s start training.”

As Zoro prepared himself for his practice bout against Kuina, his eyes lingered on the words written on his arm.  He allowed himself a tiny smile, feeling not quite so alone, and lunged forward.

---

“Have you said anything to them yet?” Kuina asked.

“No, I’m trying to think of what to say,” Zoro said, staring at his arm in concentration.  He had written down a few things he might want to start with, all of which involved him announcing his dream to his soulmate.  If they didn’t back him up on his dream, they didn’t deserve to be his soulmate.  He had practiced his letters over and over again, worried that he might spell something wrong on accident.  (“Greatest” was hard to spell after all).

“Well hurry up, I want to see what happens,” Kuina sniffed.

“Give me a sec,” Zoro glared.  He picked up a pen and took a deep breath.  Before he could start, he and Kuina both gasped at the purple blotch that slowly appeared on Zoro’s arm.

“Maybe that’s paint,” Kuina whispered, but they both had seen enough bruises to know what pain looked like.

Zoro looked at the mark, a few things clicking in his mind.  He had long found bruises all over his body, curious ones that didn’t hurt when he pressed them.  Kuina always said he was clumsy and was hitting things in the middle of the night.  Were those… were those all from his soulmate?  He stood and took his shirt off, looking desperately at his body, and found other bruises sprouting up on his ribs as well.

“Kuina,” he said desperately, “Kuina, they’re being hurt.”

“I know, I can see, Zoro,” Kuina replied, eyes full of sorrow, “Maybe, maybe they’re training like we do?”  Zoro knew this couldn’t be, touching each, feeling no pain but sensing it nonetheless.

“Stop it, stop it,” Zoro repeated over and over again, voice reaching a fevered pitch as he clawed at the bruises, wanting to find his soulmate, wanting to protect them.

“Zoro,” Kuina sobbed, grabbing onto his hands, “Zoro, you’re hurting yourself.”

“How can I help them?” Zoro cried, letting Kuina wrap him into a tight hug as they watched the path of the bruises marching along Zoro's skin.

“Write something to them, write something to show them they’re not alone,” Kuina said.  Without thinking, without planning, Zoro grabbed a pen and scrawled out on his arm: “I am your soulmate.  I am here.  You are not alone.  I’m going to help you.”

---

In the early morning hour, Zoro stared at the words on his arm, the ones he had written days ago.  He would meticulously check his entire body for a response, feeling a little ridiculous when he craned to look behind him on the off chance his soulmate replied with words on his back.

The bruises had faded to a light green.  Zoro hadn’t seen any additional bruises crop up.  He touched a small scar on his finger, now wondering if that had been his doing or his soulmate’s.  He winced suddenly, thinking about how often he had been hit by Kuina when they sparred.  He had given his soulmate a fair share of bruises himself.

Just as he was prepared to give up and rise for the day, he saw curling letters emerge on his arm.  “How can you help me?”

Zoro sat up quickly, banging his head on the bunk above his and wincing.  Heart racing, he ran to grab a pen.

“I don’t know, I will figure it out, trust me,” he wrote.

“My sister told me what a soulmate is.  I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?”

“You have to see bruises and stuff, right?”

Zoro frowned.  “It doesn’t bother me.”

“Okay.  Well, I’m fine.  I’ll try not to cause you trouble.”

“Wait.”  Zoro hit himself on the forehead.  Why would he write “wait,” his soulmate didn’t have a choice but to see the words he was writing.  “What’s your dream?”  He hit himself again.  His soulmate didn’t seem like he wanted much to do with Zoro, and here he was starting a conversation about his dearest ambition on limited arm real estate with his sprawling handwriting.

“I want to find a sea called the All Blue,” his soulmate responded immediately.

“I want to be the world’s greatest swordsman.”

After five minutes where his soulmate didn’t say anything in response, Zoro sighed, deciding to go find Koushiro to figure out what the deal was with All Blue.

“I believe in you,” appeared on his skin, and Zoro was struck with the sudden urge to tattoo those words onto him forever.

“I believe in you too,” he responded, hands shaking.

---

Zoro glared at the marks on his arm.  He had chosen poorly, a thick black marker.  The words written with it took forever to fade compared to his soulmate’s light-colored pen.  Kuina had laughed uproariously when he showed up to practice covered in black writing.  Koushiro covered his mouth with a hand but was clearly chuckling at Zoro’s expense.  He would need to write with a more discrete pen in the future.

For now, he set about trying to scrub off the marker, apologizing to his soulmate for the angry red marks he left behind from the soapstone.

When his arm was mostly clean, he found a pen and tapped it against his forehead, trying to think of what to write.

He settled for, “Hello.”

Moments later, he saw, “Hi” appear on his arm.

Trying to write as small as he could, he asked, “Are you a cook?"

“I want to be.”

“How old are you?”

“Seven."

“Me too,” Zoro wrote, excited, “We’re the same age.”

“Do you like to cook?”

“I’ve never really tried, but I like to eat.”

His soulmate drew a laughing face, and Zoro began laughing as well.

“What do you like to do when you’re not training to be the world’s greatest swordsman?"

Zoro was running out of room on his arm.  He switched to his right hand.  It would be good practice to try writing with his non-dominant hand.  Settling on his bed, Zoro explained that the cherry blossoms were at peak bloom, that it had been a warm spring so he and Kuina would swim in the lakes after practice, floating on their backs amongst fallen pink petals.

“Who is Kuina?”

“My sparring partner.  She’s the daughter of my sensei.”

“Is she pretty?”

Zoro frowned.  “I dunno.  Maybe?  She is strong.”

“How do you not know if she is pretty?  Are you blind?”

“How can I write to you if I’m blind?”

“Never mind, maybe I’ll meet her one day too.”

“You’ll like her, promise,” Zoro wrote, smiling to himself as he wondered if his soulmate was pretty.

---

The marks were showing up more frequently.  Zoro would wake up in the morning and run to the bathroom to survey the pattern of purple and mottled red on his chest and legs, and, once, a dark bruise on his eye that made him tremble with rage.  They were mostly easy to brush off as accidents, training or clumsiness, but every time Koushiro saw them, his mouth would become a tight line, and when Kuina saw them, she would make sure she hadn’t caused them and sit with him when he cried about not being able to do anything for his soulmate.

Today, there was a bruise on his stomach that radiated two fists’ lengths from his belly button.  In a fit of pique, Zoro grabbed a marker and began drawing on it, trying his best to turn it into a flower, the lotus blossoms that covered Shimotsuki’s ponds in the summer.

During lunch, he saw the words “It’s nice, the flower,” emerge on his arm and excused himself quickly to the training room.

“It’s a lotus blossom.  I can show you if you ever visit me,” he wrote.

“I would like to.”  Zoro didn’t need to see or hear his soulmate to recognize the longing in his handwriting.  He lashed out at a punching bag nearby, wanting to howl at his impotence.

“Why are they doing this to you?”

“Because I’m not enough.”

“You are.”  Zoro had only begun talking to his soulmate a few weeks ago, and he already could tell his soulmate was special.  Not just because he had to think that.  His soulmate spent an hour painstakingly writing out a North Blue recipe for onigiri so that Zoro could beg the cooks at the dojo to make it for him.  When Zoro confessed that he had never beaten Kuina in a fight, Zoro would wake up to 276-1 on his arm, 277-1, 278-1, on and on, his soulmate keeping track of his record against Kuina and predicting his eventual victory.  His soulmate was kind, thoughtful, smart, perfect.  If Zoro could find them, he would destroy everybody who hurt them.

“I want to see you.”  Zoro sank down onto the ground, feeling hot tears spilling from his eyes at the words appearing on his arm.  His soulmate needed him.  And there he was, stuck in a tiny village in East Blue, unable to do anything for them other than draw a dumb flower.

“Tell me about your day.”  Rubbing at his eyes, Zoro began writing on his legs, describing picking wild strawberries on the mountains, sneaking into the kitchen to steal cooking wine with Kuina, running laps on the beach for training and watching his footsteps disappear.  By the time he finished, he had created a tapestry of words on his legs.  Kuina would make fun of him, but he didn’t care when he saw his soulmate write, “I like living through you.”

“I’ll write every day,” Zoro replied.

---

“How do you still not know their name?” Kuina asked, “Do you even know if they’re a boy or a girl?”

Zoro shrugged, dodging to the side.  It never came up.  They didn’t need to call each other by their names, each of their messages so obviously for the other.  It had been months now of Zoro getting up early to talk to his soulmate through words written on his skin.  Months of turning each of his soulmate’s bruises into a flower or a heart or a misshapen animal.  His soulmate would respond with a smiley face each time, and Zoro could practically hear their giggles.  He had told his soulmate everything.  How he would never allow scars on his back, how he didn’t know his parents but Koushiro and Kuina were the world to him, how he was slowly getting over his fear of the ocean.

“Do you love them?” Kuina asked, sticking her tongue out as she swept Zoro’s feet from under him and pointed her training sword at his heart.

Flabbergasted, Zoro just stared up at her.

“I don’t know,” he managed to say, “How do you know if you’re in love?”

Kuina blinked, “I don’t know, I’ve never been in love.  And I was just teasing, Zoro.  How can you be in love with someone you’ve never met?”

Zoro contemplated this.  He didn’t know what his soulmate looked like or sounded like.  He just knew his heart skipped a beat whenever he saw their familiar handwriting begin on his arm.  He just knew that if he could do anything for them, he would.

“I’m going to ask them their name today,” he said resolutely.  At least, to be in love, he needed to know their name.

When he managed to find some time to write, he sat down and hesitantly scrawled out, “What is your name?”

His soulmate didn’t respond that night.  Instead, in the morning, Zoro stared curiously at the strange indents around his chin and behind his ears, like the ones he got on Spirits’ Eve when he wore oni masks and tried to scare villagers.

“Maybe you slept weirdly,” Kuina shrugged, when Zoro showed them to her.

The marks didn’t disappear, and his soulmate didn’t respond to Zoro’s question.

After a few days without hearing from them, Zoro frantically wrote, “Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked your name.”

Nothing.

“Are you mad at me?”

Nothing.

“Are you okay?”

Nothing.

“I miss you.”

Nothing.

A month after his soulmate stopped responding to him, Zoro gave up.  Deciding not to bother them anymore, Zoro settled with drawing a tiny smiley face on his wrist to let his soulmate know that he was there if they ever wanted or needed to talk to him.  Whenever the mark began to fade, Zoro would redraw it until he no longer remembered not having it.

---

Zoro pondered the scar on his forearm.  The strange line of puckered skin was new to him.  He wondered what his soulmate had gotten up to.  Zoro still drew the smiley face on his wrist whenever it faded, but slowly grew used to the idea that his soulmate may never want to talk to him again.

“You’ve been cooking, young Zoro.”  He looked up at the dojo’s chef who pointed at his forearm.  “That’s the sign of a young chef in training,” she teased, “Burned your arm on a hot oven rack or pan handle?”

“Y-yes,” Zoro said.

“Well, some aloe will help, come swing by whenever you’d like to grab some.”

Zoro smiled to himself.  His soulmate was cooking again.  He was proud of them.  When he showed Koushiro the mark later, his sensei smiled, “You’ll have that scar forever as well, Zoro."

“Sensei,” Zoro asked, scuffing his foot against the ground, “Is there any way… to find my soulmate?  Can I find them through our bond?”

Koushiro shook his head, “I’ve not heard of that before, Zoro, I’m sorry.  I have heard that once you do meet them, the sharing of skin stops.  So to me, this means your ability to communicate is to allow you two to find each other.”

“What if… what if my soulmate doesn’t want to talk to me, doesn’t want me to find them?”

“Why don’t you try talking to them again, Zoro?”

“It’s been years.  I think they don’t want me anymore,” Zoro said, looking down at his feet, “I don’t want to be a burden to them.”

“I’m sure you aren’t, Zoro,” Koushiro said kindly, “Maybe they’re waiting for you to say something.”

Three days later, Kuina died.  Zoro cried until his face ached, huddling with Koushiro after her funeral until his sensei carried him to bed.  When he woke, eyes puffy, he grabbed a pen and stared at his arm.  I need you.  Please talk to me.  Kuina is gone.  But he couldn’t write it, didn’t want to share his grief.  He stared at the fading smiley face on his wrist, a stupid, childish thing.  He ran to the bathroom, washed his face, then began scrubbing at the smiley face until it disappeared.  He was going to be the world’s greatest swordsman.  For himself, for Kuina.  He didn’t have time to be staring at a mark made for someone who no longer cared about him.  Someone whose name he didn’t even know.  Someone who was chasing after their dream and had forgotten about the equivalent of a childhood pen pal.  Zoro was alone now.  And that was fine.

---

There were bruises again, along his shins.  Zoro touched them gingerly, watching the pattern of tiny burst blood vessels, and resisted the urge to make them into roses or planets with silly faces.  What was his soulmate doing now?

He brushed the thought aside, getting out of bed to prepare for training.  He eyed himself in the mirror.  He was finally putting on some muscle, but it wasn’t enough.  He was 12 now.  He needed to be even stronger.

After training, he washed his hands, looking at the pockmarks on his arms, splashes of hot oil he was told.  His soulmate was still cooking, it seemed.  Once, Zoro had seen the beginnings of a recipe, which abruptly stopped as if his soulmate had suddenly recalled the effect of writing words on his arm.  Zoro had scoffed.  So his soulmate did remember he existed.

He looked at the bandages covering slashes on his side.  He had been using real swords for a few weeks now.  The first time he had been cut by a real sword, he had wondered if his soulmate would check in on him.  He was disappointed when they didn’t.

“You’ve been training your kicks?” his training partner asked when they began their katas during morning training.

“What?” Zoro asked.

“The bruises on your shin, classic rookie mistake from hitting a punching bag all wrong.”

“Oh, no, hit a table leg,” Zoro lied, wondering why a chef needed to be training his kicks.  Or maybe his soulmate was clumsy and had hit a table leg.

---

Zoro left Shimotsuki a few years later, determined to journey out of his home village and test his skill.  In every new town he arrived in, he wondered if he would run into his soulmate.  Would he know?  An instantaneous recognition with fireworks?  Or would they be two ships passing in the night, unaware of the significance of the person they brushed shoulders with on a crowded street?

He paid attention to cooks in particular, peering into kitchen doors to try and catch a glimpse of whomever was at the stove, staring at the hands of food stall workers to see if any had the tiny scars he wore on his own fingers.

By the time he met the boy with the straw hat, he had given up on somehow finding his soulmate in a random village in East Blue.  He had found someone with a dream as immense as his own, whom he would follow to the ends of the world.  Perhaps that was enough.

Then, they met a chef the same age as him who fought with his feet and was extremely pretty.  Zoro fixated on his hands when he placed a bowl of soup in front of Nami, cooing over her like an idiot.  The same scars.

“Swordsman?” he asked, gazing at Zoro’s swords by his side.  Zoro grunted, stuffing his hands under his armpits.  His eyes, Sanji’s eyes, betrayed nothing, moving on to berate Luffy for not doing his job properly.

---

After Arlong Park, Zoro tried to rewrap the bandages over the wound on his chest by himself.  He looked up when Sanji entered the sickbay, grabbed a chair, and sat in front of Zoro.  He beckoned for the roll of bandages, which Zoro handed to him, cautious.

“I suppose it’s a good thing I met you before this happened,” Sanji said, “I would not have wanted a hacker slash like this on my body.”

“So you know,” Zoro replied, “That you’re my soulmate.”

“You did announce your dream to become the world’s greatest swordsman in front of the whole of Baratie after you were nearly cut in half,” Sanji replied, “I suppose anybody can say it, but not with the same conviction you have.”  Zoro allowed him to slowly take off his old bandages.  Sanji winced at the bloody mess of stitches and reached for a first aid kit they had been given in Orange Town.  With careful hands, he dabbed at Zoro’s wound with disinfectant.

“Why did you stop talking to me?” Zoro asked.

“Straight to the point, huh, mosshead?”

Zoro didn’t respond, waiting.

“I…” Sanji said, choosing his words carefully, “I was in a situation where I couldn’t physically answer.  And I didn’t know what to say when I got out of it.  By the time I was ready to talk to you again, the… the smiley face was gone.  I thought you were done with me.”  He fiddled with medical tape.  “The smiley face meant a lot to me when I needed it the most.  Thank you for it.”

Zoro nodded, unsure what to do now that Sanji was in front of him.

“How’s Kuina?” Sanji asked, as he waited for the disinfectant to dry.

“Dead,” Zoro grunted, the pain from the loss muted to a dull, but ferocious, ache.

Sanji froze and stared at him, “I’m sorry, Zoro, I’m so sorry.  I—I could tell she was special.  Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought you were done with me too,” Zoro said.

Sanji’s forehead furrowed as he continued working on Zoro’s wound, “When did she pass?”

“Eleven years old.  I miss her, but I’m better now.”

“I’ve missed a lot of your life,” Sanji said quietly.

“Have you been well?”

“Mostly,” Sanji shrugged, “Found my way to Zeff, learned how to cook and to fight for the past nine years.”

Zoro raised a hand in the air, “You fucked up a couple of times.”

Sanji managed a laugh, “Every chef has scars like that.  It’s a mark of honor.”  He paused his ministrations to lift up the side of his shirt, “You’ve given me some nasty ones too.”  Zoro glanced at the smooth expanse of pale skin sharing his training wounds and gulped. 

After Sanji finished re-bandaging Zoro’s wounds, he sat back in the chair.  He blew his bangs out of his eyes momentarily, exposing clear blue.  “We found each other, somehow, despite it all.”

“Was doing fine without you,” Zoro said, letting a small smile grow on his face.

“I literally just saved you from gangrene,” Sanji glared.  He sighed, face sorrowful again, “I’m sorry about Kuina, I really am.”

“It’s fine, cook,” Zoro said, “You couldn’t have known.” 

Sanji pulled out a pen from his pocket and grabbed Zoro’s arm.

“It doesn’t work anymore if I write it on me now that we’ve met, but I can still give you this,” he said, drawing a smiley face on Zoro’s wrist, grinning happily at his work. 

(“Do you love them?” Kuina had asked.)

“I’ll redraw it whenever it fades,” he said, standing up, “I’ve got to get dinner started.”

What are we supposed to do now?, Zoro wanted to ask.  Instead, he nodded and began cleaning up the sickbay, his wounds, both new and old, feeling infinitely better.

---

After Drum Island, it was Zoro’s turn to sit with Sanji in the sickbay.  Sanji was lying flat on his stomach, grumbling about not being able to make lunch because of a creature that could be their lunch.

“Heard you almost broke your spine, cook,” Zoro said, looking at the bandage across his back.

Sanji turned to look up at him, “It’s funny, I’ve been worried my entire life about getting scars on my back, and as soon as you show up, it happens.  You’re bad luck, marimo.”

“You’ve been worried about scars on your back?” Zoro asked, confused

“So they wouldn’t end up on your back,” Sanji said, turning away, “I can’t be the reason you hurt or feel your resolve has been weakened.”

(“Do you love them?” Kuina had asked.)

“If we had kept talking,” Zoro blurted out, “If we had kept talking—”  Would we have fallen in love?

“Are you going to finish that thought?” Sanji asked, voice muffled in the pillow.

“If we had kept talking, would we have become friends?” Zoro managed.

“We were friends when we were seven, mosshead,” Sanji said, “And we are friends now, aren’t we?  Or are you planning to lean very hard into the rivals dynamic?”

“I guess we are friends,” Zoro said.

“Do me a favor, mosshead, go get some rice going, I’m making North Blue onigiri tonight.  That raccoon-rabbit can’t keep me lying on my stomach forever.  The recipe is in my notebook—”

“I know how to make it, cook,” Zoro said, heading out of the sickbay, “You wrote it on my arm for me, remember?  I haven’t forgotten anything you wrote.”

---

“We keep meeting like this,” Sanji joked, sitting next to him when Zoro woke up after everything that happened at Thriller Bark and wearing a blue hoodie not nearly as blue as his eyes.

“Cook,” Zoro rasped out.  Sanji quickly retrieved water for him and helped him sit up.

“You did quite a number on yourself,” Sanji said, looking at the swathes of bandages on Zoro’s body.  Zoro raised an arm, finding a small patch that had not been bandaged.  There was a bruise there.  Someone had drawn a fuzzy circle around it and added eyes, slanted eyebrows, and a scowl.

“When it heals, it’ll turn green and become a marimo,” Sanji grinned.

“Very clever,” Zoro said, closing his eyes.

“Thanks, mosshead, for what you did for me and Luffy,” Sanji said, after a beat, “Though… I could have taken it, you know, I’ve had worse.”  Zoro nearly snorted that there was no pain like the pain he had just suffered, but recalled the canvas of wounds he wanted to save Sanji from so many years ago.

“Back then, curly… How did you get your bruises?” Zoro asked.  He kept his eyes shut, wanting to give Sanji some measure of privacy, praying that Sanji wouldn’t leave.

Sanji didn’t say anything, but he didn’t leave.

Finally, just when Zoro was about to retract the question, Sanji began.  He explained how his brothers hurt him, how his father shunned him, how his mother left him behind, how darkness found him in the form of an iron mask and a dark dungeon that prevented him from talking to Zoro when he needed him the most.  When Zoro struggled to stand up, prepared to sail for the North Blue in the next hour, Sanji held his hand and told him what Zoro meant to him.  He had kept his arms and legs covered under bandages during the day but would remove them quickly at night to read Zoro’s words over and over again.  He had laughed at flowers that were either poorly drawn or just foreign (“Foreign,” Zoro hissed).  He had dreamed of a kinder ocean somewhere with a kind boy.

“And here I am, in a dangerous ocean with a dangerous man,” Sanji said.

(“Do you love them?” Kuina had asked.)

“I think I loved you,” Zoro said, expecting Sanji to tell him he couldn’t love someone he had never met.

“I know I loved you,” Sanji replied instead.

“Do you still?” Zoro asked.

Sanji stared into the distance and fiddled with an unlit cigarette in his fingers.

“You can smoke, I don’t mind,” Zoro said.

“Nah,” Sanji shook his head, “Chopper said you really fucked up your lungs.  Would be pretty rude of me to blow carcinogens at you right now.”  He put the cigarette back into the box and sat back, crossing his long legs in front of him.

“I don’t think I’d be here without you,” Sanji said finally.  Zoro closed his eyes, feeling the weight of those words and hoping he was strong enough to live up to them.  “When I was kid, it felt like… it felt like you were sharing my pain, shouldering it, taking some from me.  And I know physically that’s not how it works, but I was so alone, for so long.  Seeing your words for the first time… I finally learned what happiness could feel like.”

“When I lost you, I thought I was just being a foolish child, falling in love with the one person who gave me kindness.  I told myself that you were better off without me, that you couldn’t be everything I had built you up to be in my head.”  Sanji chuckled, “But, you know, Zoro, you turned out to be exactly the person I fell in love with and then some.  Do I still love you?  I’m not sure I ever stopped.”

Zoro couldn’t breathe, all function in his body going straight to supporting his raging heart.

(“Do you love them?” Kuina had asked.)

“I love you, cook,” he managed to say, “I would love you if I never saw your recipe on my arm twelve years ago.  Would love you if you weren’t my soulmate and I had to see some other dumbass’s recipes on my arm.  Would love you even if you were the reason for scars on my back.”  You are the reason for stars in my eyes.

“You know, mosshead, for two people who had a foolproof way to talk to each other, we sure don’t communicate well, do we?” Sanji said, cheeks red, eyes soft after the torrent of Zoro’s words.

Zoro shrugged and winced when the action tore a stitch in his side.

“Careful,” Sanji sighed, bringing his seat closer.  He examined the small blossom of blood on Zoro’s bandages and deemed it unworthy of calling for Chopper’s already stretched attention.  Zoro held out a hand.  Sanji grasped it.

When Zoro was seven, he often fell asleep holding his own hand.  After multiple times finding Zoro lost and napping, hands together as if in prayer, Koushiro had asked him if he knew why he slept that way.  “In case my soulmate can feel it,” Zoro had said, “We share the same skin.  Maybe they can feel me holding their hand.”  “That’s a very sweet thought,” Koushiro had said.

Holding Sanji’s hand now, Zoro thought maybe, just maybe, Sanji had felt the pressure on his palm, the grip between his fingers, the squeeze of reassurance when he most desperately needed it from so many miles away, so many years ago.  Because this felt so familiar, this felt so right.  The world teetered around the summits where their matching scars met.  An equivalency, a shared history, an intimacy that made Zoro want to shout their love from the mountaintops.

“You feel it too, right?” he asked.

“I feel it too,” Sanji said.  Zoro glanced down at their hands, at the smiley face on his wrist, and saw a matching one on Sanji’s.

“We should get tattoos, so you don’t have to keep drawing them,” Zoro said.

“You want to get permanent matching tattoos?” Sanji laughed, “And a childish one at that?”

“I should have tattooed myself when you wouldn’t have had a choice,” Zoro grumbled.

“Let’s do it,” Sanji said, squeezing his hand, “Let’s do it today.  What’s one more bandage for you, mosshead?”

“I want a few other things tattooed then,” Zoro said, “The first recipe you wrote too, with the eggs and the flour.”

“Absolutely not,” Sanji laughed, “I’ll just make it for you.  It’s a castella cake.”

“Can you use less honey?  1/3 cup is a lot.”

“Yes, marimo, I can do that.”

“And less sugar,” Zoro murmured, feeling sleepy.

“Yes, marimo, I can do that.”

“You’re nice, cook.”

“My sweet disposition is one of my main selling points.”

“I love you, cook.”

“I love you, marimo,” Zoro heard before he fell asleep holding his soulmate’s hand.