The Morning After
WHO: Sanji & Zoro WHERE: Oni Giri (Residence) WHEN: Week 2. Monday. Early Morning. WHY: Zoro explains what happened with Noctis' punishment the night before. WARNING: Snuggling. talk of slavery/punishment, pleasure/pain.
When Zoro left Noctis' room the next morning, there was a light scent of tea, Sanji's cigarettes, and bleach coming from the main apartment. The cook had heard the ruckus during the night, and while he'd stayed back so as to not interfere. It bothered him to stay out of things, but this was really something that needed to happen between Zoro and Noctis. Still, there was no way he was going back to sleep that night.
Instead, he sat next to the table in the dining room of their flat, curled up under a blanket on the window seat with the current book he was re-reading. When the sun started to rise, he'd gotten up, made tea, and tucked back in. It was almost an hour later, when the pink sunlight had turned into yellow beams of heat, that the blonde had fallen asleep with his book on his chest and his glasses pushed up into his hair.
It had been a long night, but Zoro hadn't dozed off for a minute, and he hadn't left the boy's room. Maybe Noctis would have had a more pleasant time of it if Zoro had left himself be sweet-talked into letting him free from the chains and leaving him alone. Maybe the real work between them had already been done, and it was just his stubbornness that kept him there. He was pretty sure the pup was being sincere about staying put for now.
All Zoro knew was that he wasn't going to tell a kid that clearly had abandonment issues he would be there through the night and then decide to ditch out early.
Once the first rays of sun had started to slip around the edges of Noctis' window, Zoro had unlocked him carefully, cleaning off the wounds, coiling the chains, and tucking the blankets in around the exhausted, grumbling dragon, all of which took a while. Then he was yawning a growl and blearily blinking into the golden sunlight gleaming off of Sanji's all-white kitchen with its large windows, still as naked as when he'd wolf-shifted the keep guard over the boy.
The window seat wasn't really meant to sleep two grown men. Zoro didn't really care, sliding the book neatly out from under Sanji's forearm and lifting the reading glasses out of his hair. He wriggled and shoved to make room, scooping Sanji in close under one arm, nosing against the back of the cook's neck under the blanket.
At first Sanji made a noise of protest but then Zoro was snuggling into him. He closed his eyes with a content smile, and then lined himself back against Zoro. "Mm. Morning Marimo." He didn't sound the most awake despite his words. "Did you get any sleep at all?"
There came a flat, dull grunt of a noise from behind Sanji, the arm around him already heavy. It loosely translated as "no".
Sanji wrapped his arm around Zoro's and hugged it close. "Did Noctis?" he asked, brushing his fingers over Zoro's skin.
The play of Sanji's fingers made Zoro exhale against the back of Sanji's neck, nice and deep. "Think he dozed."
Zoro was quiet enough that Sanji might think he'd fallen asleep for a minute. But then: "Did we wake you?" Sanji was out here, after all.
Sanji shivered at the feeling, and tipped his head back to bump it against Zoro's forehead. "Mm. A bit." He was a little tense while he quieted, and then said, "What's... What's the situation with Noctis?" He was a little worried that everything had been messed up, tense that Zoro had been thrust into an honest to God master/slave situation, worried that Noctis would just keep trying to run and end up getting himself killed. "Are you okay?"
Admitting to himself that they were having this conversation now, Zoro cracked his eye open, shifting enough that he could get his elbow under him. "What do you think he could do to me, enh?" He reached to rest a warm hand on Sanji's shoulder, thinking of how to explain. "He tried to run. I had to drag him back. Punishing him turned into...something else."
It wasn't what Nox could do to Zoro physically, but what Zoro punishing Nox might have done to Zoro emotionally. He shouldn't worry, but he did. Stupid swordsman making him worry... Sanji rolled when he felt Zoro sit up on his elbow. He looked up at Zoro's chin from where he was laying, then tucked his head in closer in a snuggling gesture. A... very manly, and not at all adorable snuggling gesture. "What's 'something else' supposed to mean, asshole?"
Zoro huffed wryly, resting his chin over Sanji's soft hair. "It means I chained him immobile and he took the kind of a beating that would leave a Human with permanent injuries - and he liked it so much I had to towel him off." After a moment, he added, "I had to towel both of us off."
Sanji tensed at the first statement, then shifted uncomfortably. Then a little more again. He didn't know how to take the fact that their new house mate was so turned on by being hurt that he'd come, and he really didn't know how to take that about Zoro enjoying just how much Noctis enjoyed being hurt. He looked at Zoro's chest, lips pursed, and played with the front of his shirt. Finally he worded, "Is that a were thing?" The weres he'd known had been rough with each other. If Sanji got in the middle, he usually ended up with broken bones that didn't heal near as fast as anyone else's. Was that something Zoro needed in his life? Was Sanji... deficient?
Sanji cleared his throat and shook his head, and pushed those foolish thoughts away. He realised he hadn't been speaking or listening in a few minutes, and just leaned up to press their lips together in a sudden and furious deep kiss.
Zoro hadn't made to answer right away, trying to think of how best he could explain it to Sanji. They'd enjoyed roughhousing their way into the bedroom back when he'd been Human. But when he'd Changed, so had his appetites. He'd never felt his mouth water at the idea of snapping a sheep's neck and tearing its belly open when he was Human, but he could now. And the way he processed arousal, the things he wanted to do-
But then there was no more room for thinking, and definitely not for talking. He moaned quietly, though it was mostly smothered by the welcome invasion of Sanji's tongue. He shifted, tipping his chin into it, climbing over Sanji and gripping his blonde hair with both hands as he went.
Sanji groaned hard into Zoro's mouth. He rolled onto his back and wrapped his arms around Zoro's big frame as the swordsman climbed over him. The hands in his hair held their faces together and prevented the kiss from breaking. When Zoro was fully over him he ran his nails sharply down Zoro's back, just short of breaking skin, while he leaned up in an attempt to deepen the kiss. Though with the way they were already kissing, he wasn't sure that was even possible.
Zoro's back arched a bit at the bite of Sanji's nails with a taut hum of approval, then curved, straining right into the light pleasure-pain against his skin. It was a reminder, though, of the words he'd been trying to make, and why it mattered for Sanji to hear them.
So he slid gradually out of the kiss, feeding tongue and glancing teeth easing into wet presses of his lips against Sanji's, his hands smoothing out of Sanji's hair to hold either side of the cook's neck instead. "It's a Were thing, but we're not all the same," Zoro simplified. And in the boy's case, it probably had to do with a need to be kept, to have someone who cared enough to want to discipline him instead of throwing him out. "But he said he didn't know before we'd started. He was surprised too."
That really didn't make a lot of sense to Sanji without knowing the details, but he got what he needed to from it. "So then he's happy to stay, and you're happy to have him. And other than that, everything is normal?"
"That's too strong a word for it," Zoro complained. "I don't doubt he'll still be a pain. He's willing to stay, and that's more than we had before." But snarking was as much a sign of affection from him as anything. All you had to do was hear some of how he and Sanji trash-talked in Japanese when they thought they could do it privately to know that.
Zoro looked at Sanji closely for a moment, turning over the simple enough question. "You're still my mate," he told Sanji, though it wasn't exactly what the blonde had asked. With him having bought someone new - something Zoro had never actually thought about before - it was hard to say things were 'normal'. But it'd become 'normal' again, sooner or later. "Wolves mate for life."
"Well, obviously," Sanji replied in a tone that rivaled that of a teenage girl snapping back at her mother. The way he tipped his head to nuzzle at the hands on his neck, however, told a story of how he'd actually been a little concerned. His arms squeezed a briefly tighter embrace, but Sanji himself was quiet for a long beat. It was his idea in the first place, but the sounds from the night before as well as the blood on the floor made him think they'd made a mistake. That Sanji had made a mistake. It was good to hear the reassurances, even if they weren't explicitly required. "bed? Or are you planning on crushing me here all day?"
"Crushing," Zoro yawned widely, flopping down on top of Sanji with his full weight and pushing his face into one of the pillows Sanji had under him. "Collar the puppy tomorrow," he mumbled.
"Asshole..." Sanji replied getting comfortable under Zoro's heavy frame. He closed his eyes and decided to go back to sleep for at least a little bit.