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At first, Sanji is too focused on plating an order to pay attention to someone getting loud and pissy in the dining room. The old geezer stomps out, grumbling, and that’s generally a sign that everything will be just fine within a few minutes.
Instead, right as he finishes with the last line of artfully arranged sauce, Sanji jumps at the sound of a BANG. Not a gunshot- thankfully not a gunshot, although the various screams and shouts certainly indicate something of equal severity has happened.
This time, Sanji’s feet move of their own accord.
There’s a haze of green-blue smoke concentrated around a spot in the center of the room, next to an overturned table and a guy smirking in distinctly unpleasant fashion. Without bothering to consult any of the horrified looking waitstaff, Sanji gives himself a running start, leaps, and delivers a perfect kick directly to the backside of the customer’s head. The impact launches him straight into a (thankfully empty) booth, hard enough the guy doesn’t get back up. Sanji chances turning his back for the moment, and crouches down next to the body laying on the floor, underneath the rapidly dispersing cloud of smoke-
Kid.
It’s a kid.
A familiar kid, not that Sanji can quite put his finger on why. Maybe a former customer-? Regardless, the child can’t be more than 8 or 9 years old, lean in a way that speaks of limited food, and covered in bruises: his face, his throat, the bare arms revealed by his sleeveless shirt. At least a few are distinctly hand-shaped, lurid red and purple and hard to the touch when Sanji dares to ghost his fingers over them.
The kid is, thankfully, too deeply unconscious to twitch from pain, so at least that’s something. “Where’s the geezer?” Sanji asks, glancing over at the nearest waiter, who still is staring at the kid with horror, as if no one saw him when he came in. “I thought he came out here to handle someone refusing to cough up payment, not ignore a hurt kid-”
“Sous Chef,” the waiter wheezes. Two words, in a wary whisper, prove more than enough to make the hairs on the back of Sanji’s neck stand on end. “That- that is the Head Chef!”
Devil Fruit.
That bastard had a Devil Fruit, and for at least the next few days, Zeff is going to be stuck in ‘his most miserable form’.
Sanji would have thought that’d mean a pirate captain newly crippled and stuck starving on a rock in the middle of the ocean, but no, the effect took his shitty geezer all the way back to childhood.
Which means, uh. Sanji is now In Charge.
Once that thought sank into his thick head, he snapped out a few quick orders to finish service for the remaining customers and then close up Baratie an hour earlier than usual. They’ll stay closed tomorrow, too, and- he’ll figure out the rest later. After Zeff is handled.
Hefting the kid up into his arms hardly takes any effort. Rather than take any other staff away from their jobs, Sanji spirits Zeff up to the third floor where just he and the old man have their rooms, with one brief pause along the way to snag a first aid kit. They’ve got several, scattered throughout the restaurant, with different contents depending on the location: extra burn cream in the kitchen itself, brightly colored bandaids out in the dining hall in case a dumb brat needs distracting, that sort of thing. The one that Sanji goes for is by the staff quarters, stocked mostly with bruise balm and bandages for when tempers run high and hits are exchanged.
...honestly, he might need to go pillage a second kit in case this one runs out.
But at least it’s a start.
Zeff stirs right as Sanji uses a foot to open his bedroom door, and kicking it closed again makes the kid jolt in his hold. “Wha-?”
“Easy,” Sanji murmurs, making a beeline for his bed. “You’re okay, let me set you down here-” He’d have expected a kick, honestly, which means the small fist colliding with his jaw is an unpleasant surprise. “Ow! Hey, knock it off!”
“Let me go!”
“I’m trying to, you little- there!” Brat deposited as gently as he can manage, Sanji takes two large steps backwards, first aid kit held up protectively in front of his chest. “Sheesh, you do that to everyone who wants to help you?”
Little Zeff doesn’t answer. He’s looking around wildly, eyes wide, breath coming faster. “What- what is this place? Where’s my mom?!”
...shit.
Brain scrambling, Sanji slowly tells him, “She’s not here. Your name is Zeff, right? You’re going to stay here for a little while - it’s safe, I promise.”
“No-” Hell, the brat’s trying to get down, wobbling as soon as he puts weight on his feet, “No, no, I gotta go back, I gotta be there or Dad will hit her even worse-!” Doesn’t even make it halfway to the door before he stumbles, and only Sanji catching him keeps the kid from a painful sprawl across the floor. “I need to go home! I need to!”
“You can’t,” Sanji says, feeling oddly detached. “I’m sorry.”
Maybe he sounds as helpless as he feels. Maybe it’s the view out the window when Zeff straightens up, his glimpse of the ocean waves. Either way, the kid releases a desperate, wordless cry, and sags in Sanji’s grasp. “Mom- Mom-”
Swallowing, Sanji tries to hug the kid without jostling him too badly. Probably a testament to how defeated he feels more than anything else, how Zeff slumps into it. Definitely a sign of how scared the boy feels, when he starts to cry into Sanji’s blazer.
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen,” Sanji answers absently, most of his focus on gently rubbing the pale paste that helps with inflammation into the skin of Zeff’s cheek. They’ve already done both arms, and wrapped them up from shoulder to palm; after this, Sanji will still have to do his neck, and hope the kid trusts him enough by then not to flinch away.
Even holding still, Zeff scrunches one side of his face - an expression that normally looks a hell of a lot more disdainful with his long braided mustache adding exaggeration. Like this, the brat just appears doubtful. “That’s not grown-up.”
“It’s close enough. How old are you, anyway?”
“Eight.”
Sanji guessed right, then. He still kind of hates the answer anyway. “You like to cook?”
Wonder of wonders, a tiny grin creeps into view. “Yeah. My aunt Zeminah has a ramen stall down by the shore. She’s been teaching me some stuff.”
“Good for her. Want to learn some more skills while you’re here? We have a whole kitchen and restaurant downstairs.” Bruise balm on the kid’s face finished, Sanji reaches for a stack of larger gauze pads, and starts to delicately tape them into place over the worst of the damage. Takes him a minute to realize he hasn’t gotten an answer, Zeff’s eyes aimed at the floor. “What? Sea King got your tongue?”
“...s’that why she dumped me here?”
It takes a second for Sanji to figure out what the brat means.
He finishes taping the last square of gauze. Sets down the extras. Bends forward, to pointedly bonk Zeff’s forehead with his own. “You’re here because it’s a safe place, and you’ll get to eat as much as you want, and maybe help cook some food if you want to. You did not get dumped. You’re going to heal up, get your strength back, and then we’ll figure out what happens next, okay?”
A small sniffle. Zeff still won’t meet Sanji’s gaze. But he does whisper, “Okay.”
Sanji knows good and well the staff take a bunch of photos, but at least after the first blatant giggling attempt from Patty and Carne (and their subsequent ass-kicking as a direct result) everyone else makes a token effort at being subtle, which he’s willing to let slide.
Besides. It’s way more enjoyable to focus on Zeff.
The brat hardly knows any of the lessons his older self taught Sanji as a kid, which makes for some entertaining hours in Baratie’s kitchen. He also has no idea how to fight with his legs - the way his eyes practically pop out of his head the first time Sanji shows off a spinning kick that shatters an empty crate is hilarious. For three days, the two of them cook, and spar, and fish off of the rear dock, and cook some more.
It’s... fun.
Even if Sanji does miss the shitty geezer.
“That’s my old man’s room,” he says when the kid asks, on their way to bed one night. “He’s away right now. Don’t know if you’ll get to meet him or not.”
Zeff stiffens up. “Am I- I’m not staying?”
Sanji blinks at him, hand on his own room’s doorknob. “I dunno. I don’t know how long you’re going to stay, and I also don’t know when he’s coming back, so. Don’t worry about it, Eggplant.”
He gets a few steps into his bedroom before the indignant demand, “Eggplant?”
“Oi. Eggplant.”
Hrm.
“Eggplant, wake up.”
Nnnno. No, he’s just going to roll over, thank you.
“Sanji.”
Yes, that’s his name, don’t wear it out. Snuggling down deeper into the blanket and futon combo he’s been sleeping on lately, Sanji tries to drift away again into the hazy realm of sleep. Even so, he hears a deep sigh overhead. Feels calloused fingers briefly stroke over his hair and cheek. Listens to the familiar step-thump combo fading away.
Zeff isn’t entirely certain of why he woke up tucked into Sanji’s bed instead of his own, kid sleeping on a spare mattress on the floor, but he can suspect. Last thing he clearly remembers was stepping out into the dining room to deal with an unruly customer, after which things went... fuzzy.
It’s the middle of the night, only a single dim lamp in the hallway to provide illumination, but after years of stomping around Baratie he knows the way well enough, and it isn’t like he’s going far. Zeff heads into his own room first and foremost to change clothes, splash a bit of water on his face. Then he goes down the stairs and halfway down another corridor to his office, where nothing seems out of place, but one never knows with the idiots in his employ-
The stack of photographs sitting on his desk is a surprise.
Warily, Zeff turns up the light, reaches to pick up the first one - almost drops it immediately out of pure shock.
That’s him.
Been a hell of a long time since he was a brat, but Zeff recognizes his own face and haircut well enough. Recognizes Sanji, too, grinning as he hands the child next to him the same tiny apron he wore during Baratie’s early days.
Zeff flips the photo over, and sure enough, whoever took it included the date: the day after he distinctly remembers a smoke bomb erupting in his face.
The rest of the pictures are dated within a short timeframe, just a few days, so at least things weren’t bent out of shape for too long. But it is incredibly surreal, to see images of himself (small and bandaged and for once NOT looking halfway to miserable at all hours) interacting with the kid that Zeff himself has been looking after these past years. He finds his favorite towards the end: a snapshot taken at an odd angle, cameka probably badly hidden, of Sanji smiling softly as he and little Zeff work side by side making ramen.
The ingredients piled beside them are familiar.
Same ones for the very first recipe Zeff ever memorized as a brat.
He stares at that photo for a long while, something tight wrapped around his heart.