The campus thinned out after eight, the daytime churn of chatter and deodorant and cheap cafeteria grease fading until the buildings became considerably more tolerable. The air outside cooled down. The fountains stopped competing with a thousand conversations, and Sanji could hear the water spilling from one tier to the next as he crossed the quad.
He had his bag strapped high on his shoulder, blue button-down crisp beneath his coat. His blond hair had fallen forward over his right eye sometime during the drive over. He left it there. The curled spiral of his other eyebrow drew enough attention on its own.
Most of the humans crossing campus at this hour carried a different sort of exhaustion than the daytime students. Working adults, nursing students, EMT trainees, people chasing certifications after spending eight hours earning a paycheck somewhere else. A woman in scrubs hurried past him while eating crackers from a sleeve. Two men in construction shirts argued over an anatomy worksheet as they walked. Someone farther ahead had a thermos large enough to supply a small office.
Sanji liked night students. They came to class to get something done.
He’d signed up for Bloodborne Pathogens & Safety Protocols because three hundred years could become extremely tedious without new things to occupy them. Knowledge helped, too. Every era came with a fresh collection of rules for passing as human. Language changed. Manners changed. Clothes changed. Medicine changed fast enough to become annoying. Sanji had already sat through several decades of watching humanity discover things about blood that vampires had learned through considerably uglier trial and error.
This formal course sounded interesting, at least. Lately, that was reason enough. The last few hobbies had burned themselves out faster than usual, and Sanji had reached the familiar point where too many nights looked exactly like the ones before them. He needed something new. A class gave Wednesday somewhere to go. It also had blood in the title, which amused him on principle. Being a vampire made the subject feel appropriately on-brand.
Sanji found the building, checked the classroom number, and slipped inside early enough to choose his seat. The tiered lecture hall climbed toward the back in shallow rows, each one fitted with narrow desks. A whiteboard covered most of the front wall. The projector hung from the ceiling above it. Recycled air carried marker ink, old carpet, coffee, and the chemical bite left behind by the evening custodians.
A few students had already settled in. Bags opened. Phones disappeared into pockets. Someone clicked a mechanical pencil over and over until the woman beside him turned an irritated stare on him.
The instructor stood at the lectern loading slides. Sanji took three steps into the room and caught another scent beneath everything else. Metal. Sweetness followed it, faint but distinct. Fresh blood carried its own warmth and salt. This came from deeper than that, threaded through the blood itself.
The retrovirus.
An old infection settled into the body until its scent became difficult to separate from the host. Sanji barely noticed it on himself anymore. Younger vampires carried it much more strongly. The virus had spent fewer years colonizing everything it intended to colonize, and the result announced itself to anyone with enough experience to recognize it.
This one was young. Very young, by Sanji’s standards.
His gaze swept the room and landed on the man seated in the front row. Green hair. Three gold earrings hanging from his left ear. A heavy scar crossed the closed left eye, pale against tanned skin. The black hoodie stretched over shoulders that belonged on a competitive bodybuilder rather than a community college student. Even sitting down, the man was enormous. His forearms rested on the desk, thick with muscle and marked with several old scars. A long sword case leaned against the side of his chair. Three handles rose from it.
The hair was a strange water-moss green from the roots onward. Probably dyed before his turning. Whatever state the virus preserved at death tended to stay preserved. Sanji had known a vampire in the nineteenth century who spent eighty years regretting a tattoo of a dancing pig.
The stranger turned toward the clock. His open eye caught the fluorescent light. A faint green luminescence flashed in the iris before disappearing.
The man sat very still afterward, attention fixed on the front of the room. Humans constantly adjusted themselves without realizing it. They scratched, shifted, swallowed, bounced knees, rolled shoulders. Vampires could hold a posture for a long time before their bodies reminded them to move. Sanji had learned to fake the restless little motions years ago. This one apparently hadn’t.
Sanji felt an immediate stab of irritation. Grand Line City had enough of them already.
He took a seat one row behind and to the side. Close enough to keep an eye on the stranger, which was sensible. Sanji preferred knowing what another vampire was doing in a room full of humans.
The fact that the man was extremely attractive had nothing to do with the seating decision.
Sanji put his bag down and took out his notebook. The stranger opened his own. Plain black cover. Fresh first page. Cheap ballpoint pen. Across the top, in careful block letters, he wrote:
BLOOD SAFETY – FEEDING ETIQUETTE.
Sanji checked the title slide at the front of the room.
BLOODBORNE PATHOGENS & SAFETY PROTOCOLS
WEEK 1: CONTAINMENT
His attention returned to the notebook. The stranger had added IMPORTANT and put a box around it.
Sanji pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth. Interesting.
“All right, everyone. Welcome. Tonight we’re starting with containment,” the instructor said after clearing her throat. “Exposure and incident response come later. The goal is to keep a manageable problem from becoming a crisis.”
The room settled. The stranger’s pen started moving immediately.
Containment – stop crisis before it starts.
Sanji caught himself reading over his shoulder and shifted his attention to his own page. He lasted perhaps thirty seconds.
“Containment begins with barriers,” the instructor continued. “Physical barriers, procedural barriers, and behavioral barriers. Depending on your workplace, that can mean personal protective equipment, restricted work areas, disposal protocols, or simply knowing when to stop what you’re doing and call someone with better training.”
The stranger wrote every category down. Beside behavioral barriers he added SELF CONTROL.
Sanji’s eyebrow rose.
“Before we get too deep into this, who wants to read the definition from the handout?” the instructor asked as she advanced to the next slide.
The class developed a sudden fascination with paper.
The green-haired man raised his hand.
“Thank you. Go ahead,” the instructor said, pointing to him.
He stood. Sanji got a much better idea of how large he was. The hoodie had been doing its best and failing. Thick thighs filled out black athletic pants. His shoulders were broad enough to make the desk seem undersized. He planted both feet, held the handout in front of him, and read in a low, rough voice.
“Containment. The process of preventing the spread of potentially infectious material by establishing barriers, limiting movement, and maintaining controlled procedures.”
“And why do we start there?” the instructor asked.
He glanced down at the definition again. “Because it’s easier to keep something in one place than chase it around afterward.”
A few people laughed.
The man scanned the nearby students, confusion forming between his brows.
“A little informal, but accurate,” the instructor said with a smile.
He nodded and sat. Then he wrote: Contain first. Saves trouble later.
Sanji covered his mouth with his hand. He had come here expecting an uneventful certification course. The night had improved considerably.
The lecture continued through biohazard symbols, controlled access, barrier methods, disposal procedures, and the proper handling of contaminated materials. The stranger approached every slide with intense concentration. Controlled access received a box. Isolation got underlined. Report exposure immediately received three lines underneath it.
When the instructor explained that sharps containers should remain within arm’s reach during procedures, he raised his hand.
“Yes?” the instructor said.
“How close?” the man asked.
“Within arm’s reach.”
“Whose arm?”
The instructor paused. “Yours.”
“What if somebody has longer arms?”
Several people laughed again. The man glanced toward them. Sanji could see him trying to figure out what had been funny.
“The point is that you should be able to dispose of the sharp without walking across the workspace,” the instructor explained.
“Oh.” He nodded. “That makes more sense.”
He wrote something down. Sanji leaned just enough to see it.
Can reach without moving feet. Useful.
Sanji sat back. The man’s questions came from odd angles, but there was a method underneath them. He wanted the procedure stripped down to its working parts. Once he had that, he seemed satisfied.
During a section on exposure routes, he raised his hand again. “Would an old scar matter?”
“In what context?” the instructor asked.
“If the skin healed all the way.”
“Generally, intact scar tissue still functions as a barrier. Fresh injuries are another issue.”
The man nodded. His hand moved briefly toward the massive scar that disappeared beneath the collar of his hoodie. Sanji caught the gesture. So did the instructor.
“You work in a field with frequent injury exposure?” she asked.
“Swordfighting.”
Three people turned toward the sword case. The instructor’s attention followed theirs.
“Swordfighting,” she repeated.
“Yeah.”
Sanji rubbed his thumb over the edge of his pen. That explained the case slightly better. But only slightly.
The first break came after fifty minutes. Chairs scraped and students headed into the hallway in search of caffeine, toilets, or both. Sanji stayed seated long enough to finish writing a note about exposure reporting.
The stranger remained at his desk. He had his syllabus spread beside his notebook now and was comparing the course schedule to his notes. His brow furrowed.
Sanji packed away his pen. He could leave the man alone. A young vampire misunderstanding a college course hardly qualified as Sanji’s concern.
The man wrote: Week 7 – ethical obligation. Probably feeding law?
Sanji closed his eyes and made a probably regretful decision. He picked up his coffee money and walked down the row.
The stranger raised his head as Sanji approached. Up close, the retrovirus scent was stronger. Metallic sweetness rested beneath laundry detergent, old leather, sweat, and the faint woody scent coming from the sword case. Two years turned, perhaps. Five at the outside.
He focused on Sanji, and green flashed briefly across his dark iris.
“Hey,” Sanji said.
“Hey.”
“What exactly do you think this class is about?” Sanji asked, pointing toward the syllabus.
“Blood safety,” he said.
“Yes.”
“For feeding.”
The answer had come with complete confidence. “Feeding,” Sanji repeated.
“Yeah.”
“This is a workplace safety course.”
The man’s brow drew together.
“Bloodborne pathogens,” Sanji said, tapping the title with one finger.
“Right.”
“A pathogen carried through blood.”
The man read the words again, then met Sanji’s eyes. “Oh.”
One syllable. No embarrassment or defensive explanation. He picked up his pen and crossed out FEEDING ETIQUETTE. Underneath, he wrote MEDICAL SAFETY.
He paused, then added: Still useful.
Sanji laughed before he could stop himself. He turned the laugh into a cough that fooled absolutely nobody. “You signed up for an entire community college course because the title had blood in it?”
“And pathogens.”
“That makes it worse.”
“I’m a vampire.”
Sanji’s attention snapped toward the open classroom door. Two students were passing in the hallway, still arguing about parking permits. One had a heart rate around ninety and smelled strongly of energy drink. The other’s pulse stayed slow and even beneath the conversation. Neither changed pace. They hadn’t heard him.
“You could say that a little louder,” Sanji said, lowering his voice anyway. “I don’t think the woman in the stairwell heard you.”
“You’re one, too.”
Sanji went still.
The stranger sniffed once, barely enough to move his nostrils. “You smell the same.”
Sanji hadn’t expected a fledgling to recognize the infection on him.
“Similar,” the man corrected after a moment. “Yours is weaker.”
“You can smell it?”
“Yeah.”
Sanji folded his arms. “Do you have any sense of self-preservation?”
“Yes.”
“Develop more.”
The man accepted this with a small nod.
“What’s your name?” Sanji asked.
“Roronoa Zoro.”
Sanji ran through three centuries of names, families, territories, old courts, blood-bank gossip, and people who had annoyed him enough to remember. Nothing. Roronoa had apparently entered vampirism without crossing any network Sanji knew.
“I’m Vinsmoke Sanji.”
Zoro smiled. The severe concentration disappeared and several years seemed to fall away from his face despite the scars and the intimidating amount of muscle.
Plus, he had dimples.
“Nice to meet you.”
Sanji felt an inconvenient little jolt in his stomach. Damn him.
They moved into the hallway. Sanji fed coins into the vending machine and bought a coffee because caffeine still tasted good even if it hadn’t done anything useful to his nervous system since powdered wigs were fashionable. The machine hummed, churned, then dispensed a paper cup that felt dangerously light for what he’d paid. He took one sip. Burnt. Bitter. Possibly brewed before sunset. His face tightened.
“You hate that,” Zoro said.
Sanji turned toward him. “I’ve had embalming fluid with a better body.”
“Then throw it away.”
“I paid two dollars for it.”
“You can get another two dollars,” Zoro said after considering this argument.
Sanji arched his brow.
“Probably,” Zoro added, lifting one shoulder.
There was something deeply irritating about receiving sensible advice from a man who had enrolled in an occupational safety class because he thought the community college offered vampire feeding lessons.
Sanji drank the coffee out of spite.
“I thought this part meant accidents while feeding,” Zoro said as he unfolded his syllabus and pointed to Incident Response.
“It means needle sticks, spills, contaminated surfaces, that sort of thing,” Sanji said, stepping closer to read it.
Zoro nodded.
“What were you expecting the class to teach you?”
“Where to get blood safely. How much. Storage. What happens if you take too much from somebody.” Zoro counted each item off on thick fingers. “How to tell when you’re getting too hungry. Rules if you feed from someone directly. Whether blood type matters.”
Sanji lowered his coffee. “Who turned you?”
“Mihawk.”
Sanji nearly dropped the cup. “Dracule Mihawk?”
“Yeah.”
The name explained the swords. It explained absolutely nothing else.
Sanji knew Mihawk by reputation rather than acquaintance. Ancient. Powerful. Irritatingly private. A fixture in several vampire circles despite behaving as though circles were beneath him. Sanji had heard three contradictory stories about his age and believed none of them.
“You were turned by Mihawk.”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re taking Bloodborne Pathogens & Safety Protocols because you need somebody to explain feeding.”
“That’s what I said.”
Sanji rubbed between his eyebrows. “How long ago were you turned?”
“Two years.”
Sanji’s estimate had been generous. “And what did Mihawk teach you?”
“Sun is bad,” Zoro said after thinking about it.
“And?”
“Feed regularly.”
“And?”
“Fangs are private.”
“That’s it?”
“He taught me some feeding stuff.”
Sanji lowered his hand. “Such as?”
“When to stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Feeding from someone.”
Sanji’s attention sharpened. “You’ve fed directly?”
“Twice,” Zoro said with a nod.
“Recently?”
“Before I moved here.”
“And how did you arrange that?”
Zoro frowned. “I didn’t. Mihawk did.”
“Did you know the people?” Sanji asked.
Zoro shook his head. “No.”
“Did they agree to it?”
Zoro’s brow pulled tighter. “I think so.”
“Did you ask them?”
“Mihawk did. Maybe.”
Sanji studied him for a moment. Zoro appeared entirely untroubled by the distinction. “So you know how to bite someone, but you’ve never actually arranged a feed yourself.”
“Guess not,” Zoro said.
“What did Mihawk teach you about stopping?”
“To stop if their pulse changed too much.”
“That’s useful.”
Zoro nodded.
“It’s also about four steps after the part where you establish how much they’re willing to give.”
“Oh.”
“You really were expecting a class to explain all this.”
“Yeah.”
Sanji took another drink of the terrible coffee and immediately regretted having a mouth. His attention returned to the earlier answer. “You said ‘fangs are private.’”
“Yeah.”
“Can you control them?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Reliably?”
“Yeah.”
Sanji considered him. “Show me.”
Zoro opened his mouth. Sanji had expected a conscious effort. Some younger vampires still needed one. Zoro’s fangs descended almost immediately, the canines lengthening smoothly until the points rested well below the neighboring teeth.
Sanji forgot about the coffee for a second.
The change was small compared with the rest of him, but it altered Zoro’s face anyway. His jaw sat slightly differently around the extra length, and the vampiric green flashed across his normally dark iris again. Sanji could smell the retrovirus more strongly now, stirred by the increased blood flow through the tissue around the fangs. Young. Healthy. Very capable of putting those teeth through somebody’s throat.
A pair of footsteps turned into the hallway at the far end.
“Put those away,” Sanji said.
Zoro did. The fangs retracted before the approaching student rounded the corner.
Sanji watched them disappear. “At least that works.”
“Mihawk made me practice.”
“Apparently he found one useful subject to teach.”
“He taught me other things.”
“About being a vampire.”
“Oh.” Zoro thought about the distinction. “Just what I told you.”
Sanji suddenly had several opinions about Dracule Mihawk and none of them good.
“I figured most stuff out,” Zoro said as he folded the syllabus again.
“I can tell.”
Zoro either missed the sarcasm or decided it deserved no response.
Sanji had known newly turned vampires who survived on direct feeding because they had a reliable donor network. Others bought stored blood and treated feeding as another grocery expense. Most switched between the two depending on convenience. The responsible ones asked first, agreed on an amount, stopped early, and made sure the human left upright and coherent. The irresponsible ones were the reason older vampires spent so much time teaching fledglings discretion.
Somehow Mihawk had left Zoro with the physical mechanics and almost none of the rest.
Sanji took another swallow of terrible coffee and regretted it instantly. “What have you been drinking?”
“Blood.”
Sanji closed his eyes at the obvious answer. “Where are you getting it?”
“Online,” Zoro said.
“From where?”
“A medical supplier.”
“Which one?”
Zoro pulled out his phone. He unlocked it, opened his browser, tapped through several tabs, backed out, opened something else, and frowned.
“You lost the website?” Sanji said.
“I know where it is,” Zoro said.
“You’re currently checking the weather.”
“I hit the wrong thing.” Zoro backed out again, opened his email, and finally found an order confirmation. He held out the screen.
Sanji read it. Then read it again. “You’ve been buying expired teaching stock?”
“It says human blood.”
“It’s sold for laboratory training.”
“Yeah.”
Sanji raised his eyes from the phone. “The laboratory part didn’t strike you as relevant?”
“It’s blood.”
“You refrigerate it?”
“Yeah.”
“What temperature?”
Zoro paused.
Sanji felt dread gathering.
“My refrigerator temperature.”
“Which is?”
“Cold,” Zoro said after a moment of thought. He remained completely earnest.
Somewhere in the building, a vending machine dropped a bottle with a heavy thunk.
“You’re coming for coffee after class,” Sanji said, pointing at him.
“I don’t need coffee.”
“I do.”
“Oh.”
“And I’m going to explain how you’ve managed to spend two years doing nearly everything the difficult way.”
“Okay.”
“You could pretend to be insulted.”
“Why?” Zoro said with a furrow of his brow.
Sanji opened his mouth, reconsidered, and gave up.
The instructor called everyone back inside.
Zoro turned toward the classroom. Sanji caught his arm before he took the first step. The muscle beneath the hoodie felt ridiculous. Zoro’s attention dropped briefly to Sanji’s hand before returning to his face.
“Keep the vampire talk down around humans,” Sanji said as he released him.
“Right.”
“Especially the words ‘I’m a vampire.’”
“Got it.”
“And stop buying laboratory blood.”
“I already paid for the next shipment.”
“Cancel it.”
“Now?” Zoro asked as he pulled out his phone. His thumb was already moving over the screen.
“Yes. Now.”
They went back inside, Zoro’s thumbs working quickly. Sanji returned to his seat one row behind and to the side. He had selected it to keep an eye on a possible problem. He now knew the problem’s name, sire, approximate age, blood supplier, refrigerator-management philosophy, direct-feeding experience, and inability to distinguish a public-health course from feeding instruction.
The second half of the lecture started. Zoro wrote steadily.
Sanji tried to focus on his own notes. He managed almost four minutes before his gaze dropped to Zoro’s page. At the bottom of the syllabus, beneath MEDICAL SAFETY, Zoro had added another line. Ask Sanji about blood.
Sanji shifted his attention back to the instructor. The bastard had even spelled his name correctly.
By the end of class, Sanji had almost convinced himself the coffee invitation had been a temporary lapse in judgment.
Then everyone stood.
Zoro swung the sword case over one shoulder and headed through the side door into the adjoining lecture hall. He reappeared a second later, checked the room number beside the door, and turned toward the actual exit.
“Wrong door,” Zoro said.
Sanji grabbed his bag and followed him into the hallway. Zoro opened his notebook as they walked.
“If containment fails, who’s responsible?” he asked.
“In the class content?” Sanji said.
Zoro shook his head. “For feeding.”
“You’re still applying the lecture to feeding?”
“It works.”
Sanji started to argue, then reconsidered. Annoyingly, Zoro had a point. “What exactly are you asking?”
“If you hurt somebody by accident.” Zoro tucked the notebook against his palm. “Even if you were trying not to.”
The question carried more weight than the others he’d asked during class. Zoro wanted a rule he could actually use. He’d already told Sanji he’d fed directly twice, both times arranged by Mihawk. Apparently the question of what happened when feeding went wrong had stayed with him through the rest of the lecture.
He’d enrolled in the wrong class because he wanted to learn how to feed safely. The execution remained idiotic. The intention was decent.
“If you make the choice, you own what comes from it,” Sanji said.
“Even if you screw up?”
“Especially if you screw up.”
Zoro nodded. “So if something goes wrong, you stop first.”
Sanji glanced over.
“Containment,” Zoro said.
“You really are going to turn this entire course into feeding etiquette.”
“It still works.”
“It’s deeply annoying that it does.”
Zoro opened the notebook again and wrote something while walking. Sanji leaned just enough to catch it. If something goes wrong: stop first.
“Add ‘check the human,’” Sanji said.
Zoro wrote that underneath.
“And if they need medical help, you get it,” Sanji added.
Another line.
“And you don’t disappear afterward because you’re afraid somebody might ask inconvenient questions.”
Zoro’s pen slowed. “People do that?”
“People do considerably worse.”
Zoro’s expression tightened.
Sanji had no intention of introducing him to the full catalog tonight. “The important part is that feeding from someone gives you responsibility for what happens to them while you’re doing it.”
Zoro nodded. “Makes sense.” He added another note and closed the book. Sanji found that more satisfying than it had any right to be.
They pushed through the glass doors and stepped into the parking lot. The temperature had dropped several degrees while they were inside. Cool air moved across the open pavement carrying damp grass from the watered lawns, exhaust from a car idling near the curb, and the faint cigarette smoke of somebody hiding beyond the science building. Tall lamps washed the rows of vehicles in pale light. Moths battered themselves against one fixture overhead while a sprinkler clicked steadily beyond the sidewalk. Only a scattering of cars remained.
Sanji unlocked his. Zoro stopped several spaces away. His head turned slowly from one row to the next.
Sanji put his bag into the passenger seat. “Where’s your car?”
“I parked near the building,” Zoro said.
“This is near the building.”
“Yeah.”
Sanji shut the passenger door as Zoro started down one row, reached the end, doubled back, and headed into the next.
“Can’t find your car?” Sanji called to him.
“I know where I parked,” Zoro said.
“Wonderful. Where?”
Zoro pointed across the lot. “I parked by a brick building.”
“They’re all brick.”
Zoro surveyed the cluster of campus buildings. Nearly every one had the same brown-red exterior, dark windows, and square concrete trim. A blue security light flashed near one entrance. Beyond it, the humanities building glowed beneath a large illuminated sign.
“What color is the car?” Sanji asked.
“Black.”
“What kind?”
“A car.”
Sanji pinched the bridge of his nose. “Make.”
“A Toyota.”
“Model?”
Zoro paused. “It says Toyota on the back.”
Sanji started laughing.
“What?” Zoro said, clearly confused.
“Nothing. Come on, marimo.” Sanji locked his car again and started walking.
Zoro caught up beside him. “What’s a marimo?”
“You.”
Sanji knew there had to be a word for Zoro. Broad shoulders. Excellent body. Swords. Dimples. Capable of taking a public-health lecture apart and rebuilding it into surprisingly functional vampire etiquette, yet apparently unaware that Toyota made more than one car.
Then he remembered there was, in fact, a word for this.
Himbo.
Sanji had lived long enough to watch humanity invent increasingly specific vocabulary for increasingly familiar kinds of men. He had never expected the term to become personally relevant. Unfortunately, Roronoa Zoro appeared determined to provide a working definition.
Their footsteps carried easily across the nearly empty lot. Near the faculty spaces, a car locked with a faint electronic chirp. Both of them turned toward the sound. Zoro’s reaction came a fraction faster. Vampire hearing. Sanji caught the answering flash of headlights between two rows of parked cars.
A bus rumbled past the street entrance, its interior lights revealing three exhausted passengers before it disappeared behind the administration building. The smell of diesel lingered after it was gone.
They found the Toyota two lots over. Sanji stopped beside it and took in the building directly behind the car.
HUMANITIES.
Three enormous illuminated letters stretched across the entrance, tall enough to read from the road. He decided against commenting. Zoro had already supplied enough material for one evening.
“Thanks,” Zoro said, opening the driver’s door.
“For finding your own car?”
“For explaining the class stuff.” Zoro rested one hand on the top of the door. “And the vampire stuff.”
The green hair had darkened beneath the parking lamps, nearly black except where the light caught it. The scar over his closed eye caught a faint silver sheen. The three earrings shifted when he turned his head. His visible iris was dark now, without the brief vampiric luminescence Sanji had caught inside.
Zoro had the build of a man who could probably move Sanji’s car without bothering with the engine and the earnest expression of someone genuinely grateful for an after-class conversation about not accidentally injuring people while drinking their blood.
Sanji sighed. “Come to Crimson & Co. after class next Wednesday.”
“What’s that?” Zoro said.
“A vampire café.”
Zoro blinked. “They have those?”
“Yes.”
“Huh.”
Sanji studied him for a beat. “Mihawk never mentioned them?”
“No.”
Naturally. It fit the pattern. Sanji added vampire cafés to the growing list of things Mihawk had failed to mention. “Wednesday. After class.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll text you the address.”
“Maps mess me up sometimes,” Zoro said, pulling out his phone. “Just so you know.”
“Sometimes?”
“I get where I’m going eventually.” Zoro smiled. With dimples.
“Fine,” Sanji said. “I’ll meet you here and we’ll go together.”
Zoro nodded. “Okay.”
“And at Crimson & Co., I’m going to explain several things Mihawk apparently considered optional.”
“Like what?”
“Proper blood sources. Storage. Donor etiquette. How much you actually need. What hunger feels like before you’re already miserable.”
Zoro nodded again. “Okay. See you then.”
Sanji gave him a brief nod and headed toward his own car. Gravel scraped under his shoes at the edge of the pavement. A moth fluttered past his shoulder toward one of the lamps. Behind him, Zoro’s Toyota started on the first try, which felt unexpectedly reassuring.
Sanji got halfway across the lot before realizing exactly what he had volunteered to do. He had met a two-year-old vampire less than two hours ago. He now knew the man’s sire, feeding history, blood supplier, refrigerator-management philosophy, and inability to navigate a parking lot.
Next Wednesday, Sanji was apparently going to escort him across the city and teach him how vampires actually lived.
This had escalated quickly.
Sanji went out for blood on Saturday. He could have stayed home. There were six bags in the refrigerator downstairs, another four units frozen for emergencies, and a standing order with the bank that had served him reliably for longer than most of its current employees had been alive. But stored blood and fresh blood were different things.
Both worked. Both gave the virus what it needed. A bag was convenient, measured, screened, and unlikely to complicate anyone’s evening. Sanji had gone months at a time without feeding directly when work or travel made it inconvenient.
Eventually, though, he wanted something fresh. Time had done very little to change that.
He left the townhouse shortly after ten and drove downtown. The building he wanted occupied the upper two floors of an old hotel that had been converted into offices sometime in the seventies. From the street, the only indication that anything still operated there after business hours was a brass plaque beside an unmarked door.
THE RED ROOM SOCIETY
PRIVATE MEMBERS
Humans tended to assume it was either a social club or somewhere rich people went to do things they didn’t want photographed. They weren’t entirely wrong.
Sanji pressed his thumb to the reader beside the door. The light changed from red to green. Inside, the lobby smelled of old wood, perfume, wool coats, human blood, and vampires.
A lot of vampires.
The scent settled around him before the door had fully shut. Older infections were faint unless he concentrated. Younger ones announced themselves more readily. Beneath both ran the unmistakable warmth of living humans.
Sanji handed his coat to the attendant.
“Good evening, Mr. Vinsmoke.”
“Evening.”
“Dining or social?”
“Dining.”
The distinction had become necessary sometime around the turn of the millennium. Sanji had personally argued that they should call it feeding. The board had voted against him.
“Second floor,” the attendant said, passing him a narrow brass token. “There are four donors available without reservations.”
“Thank you.”
Sanji headed upstairs.
The Society had existed in one form or another since the nineteenth century. Before that, there had been private houses, salons, back rooms above taverns, estates owned by old vampires with enough money and influence to protect everyone involved. Cities changed. Governments changed. Buildings burned down or got demolished. Technology grew. The system persisted.
Vampires needed blood. Humans willing to provide it had always existed. The reasons varied. Money accounted for some of them. Others liked vampires. Some liked the secrecy. Some liked being useful. Others came because a vampire bite did interesting things to the human nervous system.
The virus itself couldn’t infect anyone through saliva, but the glands around a vampire’s fangs produced several compounds once feeding began. Anticoagulants kept the blood flowing. A mild analgesic dulled the puncture. Something else – nobody had isolated exactly which component last Sanji checked – triggered a brief rush of endorphins and dopamine.
Humans described the effect in considerably less clinical terms. High came up often. So did blissed out. One man in 1968 had called it better than hash and immediately asked Sanji to bite him again.
Sanji hadn’t.
The effect faded quickly. That hadn’t stopped humans from building an entire mythology around it. The modern internet had made everything worse.
Vampires had spent centuries encouraging humans to dismiss them as fiction while simultaneously inspiring novels, films, clubs, fashion, pornography, and several truly unfortunate music subcultures. Half the human population seemed convinced that getting bitten by a vampire involved candlelight, black silk, and somebody losing their shirt.
Sometimes it did. Usually it involved paperwork.
Sanji showed his token at the second-floor desk. The woman behind it was human. He could hear the quick, regular beat of her heart beneath a fitted black blouse. A small bandage covered the inside of one elbow.
“Evening,” she said. “Preferences?”
“Healthy adult. No intoxication. Neck or wrist is fine.”
“Any gender?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
She checked the tablet in front of her. “Elena, Marcus, and Camille are currently open. Camille prefers neck feeding. Marcus is wrist only tonight.”
“Camille.”
The woman tapped the screen. “Room twelve. Her current limit is two hundred milliliters. Stop immediately for dizziness, nausea, confusion, pulse irregularity, or if she asks.”
“Understood.”
She gave him the expression of someone reciting rules to a man who had been following them since before her great-grandparents were born. Sanji didn’t object. Rules only worked if everyone heard them.
Room twelve was farther down the corridor. He knocked.
“Come in.”
The room beyond was closer to a hotel sitting room than anything medical. Sofa. Two chairs. Low table. Soft lamps instead of fluorescents. A small cabinet in the corner held water, juice, glucose tablets, gauze, antiseptic, and sealed emergency supplies.
Camille sat on the sofa reading something on her phone. She was perhaps thirty. Dark hair tied back. Jeans, boots, loose gray sweater with a wide collar. No black lace. No dramatic makeup. No visible desire to be swept into an immortal romance.
Sanji appreciated her immediately. Once upon a time, he would’ve swooned and acted like a bloody-nosed fool. Now, he simply liked a beautiful woman without announcing it ridiculously.
She set down the phone. “Sanji?”
“That’s me.”
“Camille.”
They shook hands. Her pulse stayed even.
“You’ve done this before?” he asked.
“About fifteen times,” she said.
“With any reactions?”
“Got lightheaded once. I hadn’t eaten.”
“Have you eaten tonight?” Sanji said.
Camille nodded. “Burger and fries about an hour ago.”
“Alcohol?”
“No.”
“Medication changes?”
“No.”
“Any reason you want to change the listed limit?”
“Two hundred is fine.”
“And neck?”
“Right side.”
Sanji nodded. “If you want me to stop, tell me. You don’t need a reason.”
“I know,” Camille said.
“I like to say it anyway.”
“That’s probably why your rating is good.”
Sanji paused. Camille smiled.
“You people rate us?”
“Obviously.”
He wasn’t going to ask where. Experience had taught him when ignorance was a gift.
Camille shifted toward one end of the sofa and moved her hair away from her neck. Sanji sat beside her. Up close, the scent of blood grew stronger. Not exposed blood. Living blood. Warm beneath skin. Moving through arteries and veins. The pulse in her throat was easy to isolate from the quieter beats elsewhere in the building.
Sanji could hear three other human hearts through the walls if he concentrated. Four vampires. A plumbing pipe knocking somewhere above them. Camille’s breathing. The elevator arriving downstairs.
He let the rest fall away.
Hunger sharpened his attention without controlling it. He’d fed from a bag the previous evening. This wasn't a necessity. His body still recognized what sat beside him.
His fangs descended. Camille noticed and her pulse climbed a few beats.
“Still all right?” Sanji asked.
“Yep.”
“Any nerves?”
“A little.”
“Want to stop?”
“No.”
Sanji placed two fingers against the side of her neck. The artery answered beneath them. “You’ll feel pressure first.”
“I remember.”
He leaned in and bit. Her breath caught. Blood reached his tongue almost immediately.
Fresh blood had heat that stored blood lost no matter how carefully it was warmed. The taste carried salt, iron, hormones, whatever Camille had eaten, whatever her body had spent the day doing. The virus reacted at once.
The retrovirus had colonized nearly every tissue in Sanji’s body centuries ago. It kept damaged cells repairing, replaced what age would normally wear down, and maintained him in roughly the state he’d been in when the infection took hold. None of that came free. He wasn’t dead, not really. But he wasn’t alive either. The virus needed blood to keep the process running, drawing on it for the raw material his body no longer produced or replaced normally enough on its own.
Fresh or stored made little difference to biology. His body could use either. Fresh blood simply felt better.
Sanji felt it before he had swallowed twice. Warmth spread through tissue that hadn’t actually been cold. His senses sharpened another degree. The faint dryness behind his eyes vanished. A tiny split in the skin beside his thumbnail, earned while restoring a cabinet hinge that afternoon, sealed without ceremony.
Camille exhaled slowly. Her pulse sped up again, though not dangerously. The compounds from his saliva were beginning to take effect. Her shoulders loosened against the sofa. One hand flexed against her thigh and relaxed again.
Sanji kept count. He could have estimated volume by experience alone. Most older vampires could. The Society still provided measured collection guidelines because confidence and accuracy weren’t the same thing.
Camille’s heart rate rose another six beats. Still fine. She made a quiet sound in the back of her throat. Sanji ignored it. That was another thing young vampires sometimes needed explained.
Humans reacted to feeding in ways that sounded sexual even when they weren’t having a sexual experience. Breathing changed. Muscles loosened. Skin flushed. Some laughed afterward. Some went quiet. Some became affectionate. A few got embarrassingly enthusiastic. The reaction belonged to them. It wasn’t permission for anything beyond the feeding they had agreed to.
Camille’s hand touched his sleeve. Two taps.
Sanji stopped immediately. His fangs withdrew before he lifted his head. “You all right?”
“Yeah.” Her voice sounded slightly distant. She blinked twice. “Just enough.”
Sanji pressed gauze to the punctures and checked her pulse. Regular. “Dizzy?”
“No.”
“Nauseous?”
“No.”
“Vision?”
“Fine.”
He kept pressure on the gauze.
Camille smiled lazily. “You’re making a face.”
“What kind of face?”
“A serious one.”
“I just drank your blood.”
“Very professionally.”
“I’m delighted my technique meets industry standards.”
She laughed. The sound was normal. Her pupils were slightly wider than they had been before, but her focus remained good.
Sanji replaced the gauze and handed her the packet to hold herself. “Stay seated a few minutes.”
“I know.”
“Drink something.”
“I know.”
“Humor an old man.”
Camille reached for the juice in the cabinet. “How old?”
“Old enough to know better than to answer that.”
“Three hundred?”
Sanji turned his head. She grinned over the bottle.
“That rating site is becoming a concern,” he said.
“No ages on there.”
“Then how did you guess?”
“You have old-person energy.”
Sanji stared at her. Camille laughed hard enough that he had to check her pulse again.
“Cruel woman,” he said.
“You asked.” She drank the juice.
Sanji sat back and let his body finish settling. The hunger was gone. More than that, there was a sense of physical completion stored blood rarely produced. His hearing remained unusually crisp. He could smell the antiseptic in the emergency cabinet without turning toward it. Camille’s pulse had begun descending toward its original pace.
Across the corridor, somebody laughed. A vampire answered. Farther away, another human heartbeat accelerated rapidly. Sanji chose not to investigate.
The Society’s social floor occupied the level above them. Some members went upstairs after feeding. Some arrived specifically for whatever happened upstairs and treated blood as part of the evening.
Sanji rarely bothered. He had nothing against mixing feeding and sex when everyone involved wanted both. He simply disliked the assumption that one automatically meant the other. Humans had eroticized vampires long before Sanji was born. Vampires, being people, had eventually figured out they could profit from it.
Camille finished half the juice. “You good?” she asked him.
Sanji flexed his hand. The split beside his thumbnail had vanished completely. “Excellent.”
“Good.”
He checked the punctures. Bleeding had slowed to almost nothing. “You’ll bruise.”
“I usually do.”
“Leave the dressing on for an hour. Longer if it starts again.”
Camille gave him an amused look. “You know there’s staff downstairs whose entire job is telling me this.”
“They aren’t here,” Sanji said.
“You do this to everyone?”
“Yes.”
“That explains the rating.”
“There is no rating.”
“There absolutely is.”
Sanji stood before curiosity could become a mistake. Camille laughed again.
At the door, he paused. “Thank you.”
Her expression softened. “You’re welcome.”
The words mattered. They always had. Sanji left her with the rest of the juice and went downstairs.
The lobby was busier now. Two vampires waited near the desk, one young enough that Sanji could smell the strength of the infection from several feet away. A human man beside them wore a leather collar around his throat with two small silver fang charms hanging from the front.
Sanji kept walking. There were limits to his tolerance for symbolism.
Outside, the city felt louder. Cars moved through the intersection. Someone argued into a phone half a block away. Music thumped behind the doors of a bar across the street. Sanji could pick individual heartbeats out of pedestrians when they passed close enough.
The effect would soften as his body used what he’d taken. For now, he enjoyed it.
He crossed toward the parking garage and thought briefly of Zoro. Two direct feeds in two years. Both arranged by Mihawk. No donor network. No knowledge of cafés. Expired teaching blood delivered through the mail. Apparently no idea that places such as the Red Room Society existed, either.
Sanji had spent so long assuming younger vampires knew more than his generation had at the same age. They had blood banks now. Private suppliers. Medical screening. Refrigeration. Community networks. The internet and home delivery. Entire businesses hidden inside the human world because vampires had collectively decided centuries ago that stalking strangers through alleys was both immoral and an excellent way to get themselves discovered.
Zoro had somehow been handed immortality and none of the infrastructure built around surviving it.
Sanji unlocked his car.
Wednesday was going to require considerably more than coffee.
Wednesday night, Sanji came out of the building after a conversation with the professor and found Zoro standing beside the wrong set of stairs.
At least he was still on campus.
“You remember where we parked two hours ago?” Sanji asked as he approached. Fallen leaves scraped across the concrete in the evening breeze. A pair of students hurried past carrying instrument cases while music thudded faintly from somewhere inside the union.
“Mostly,” Zoro said, scanning the quad.
“That inspires confidence.”
“I know which direction.”
“Show me.”
Zoro started walking. Sanji followed.
They went the wrong direction.
Sanji let him continue for thirty seconds out of scientific curiosity. Zoro crossed a courtyard, passed the student union, and stopped beside a bike rack beneath a sycamore tree, looking around in confusion. The man’s internal compass had apparently been assembled by a drunk.
“Come on,” Sanji said, turning around.
Zoro fell into step beside him without argument.
They found the correct lot several minutes later. Sanji’s car sat where he had left it. Zoro’s Toyota was farther down the next row, once again parked in a place that seemed to surprise him despite the large HUMANITIES sign glowing behind it.
“You’re following me,” Sanji said.
“To the café?” Zoro said.
“That was the plan.”
“I know.”
“Good. I’d rather not spend the evening searching Grand Line City for you.”
“I have your number,” Zoro said.
“That assumes you know where you are when you call.”
“I have Maps, too.”
Sanji pointed at him. “Just stay behind me.”
They pulled out of the lot a minute apart.
Sanji checked his rearview mirror at the first light. Zoro’s headlights were directly behind him. At the second light, still there. At the third, a delivery truck moved between them. By the time it turned, the Toyota was gone.
Sanji’s phone rang before the light changed. He answered through the car speaker. “Where are you?”
“I’m following Maps.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“I took a wrong turn.”
Sanji glanced at the navigation screen on his own dash. “Already?”
“It rerouted.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Yeah.”
That was more reassuring than Sanji expected.
“Fine. Follow the directions.”
“I am.”
Sanji pulled into the garage on Maple Street several minutes later. A minute after he parked, the Toyota pulled into the space beside him. “Made it,” he said with a grin.
Sanji pretended he found this less charming than he did.
Maple Street stayed busy later than the university district. Restaurant signs glowed across the sidewalks, and strings of bulbs hung over the patio of a wine bar farther down the block. A city bus groaned away from the curb as Sanji and Zoro approached. Warm light filled Crimson & Co.’s front windows, catching on the gold lettering painted across the glass.
Crimson & Co. occupied the ground floor of an old brick building tucked between a bookstore and a tailor that had been there longer than Sanji had lived in Grand Line City. The café had opened in 2003 and immediately offended half the older vampires in the city by branding itself as a cellular wellness lounge.
Sanji had laughed for twenty straight minutes when he first saw the brochure. He had also become a regular within a month.
A chalkboard outside advertised espresso, pastries, and seasonal drinks to the human clientele. A small red droplet had been painted in one corner.
“You see that?” Sanji asked.
“The blood drop?” Zoro said.
“Means the place serves us.”
Zoro looked from the chalkboard to the café windows. “Humans know?”
“Most think it’s branding.”
“They don’t ask?”
“Humans are extremely good at ignoring things that look decorative.”
Sanji opened the door. A bell chimed overhead. Warm air brought roasted coffee, steamed milk, vanilla, baked sugar, and blood. The last scent sat quietly beneath everything else.
Zoro stopped just inside. His nostrils moved once. His visible eye widened. “Oh. They serve blood here?”
“They do.”
Zoro took another breath and looked toward the counter, then around the café. “Huh.”
Sanji smiled. “Mihawk really never brought you anywhere like this?”
“No.”
The interior had changed very little since the last remodel. Dark wood tables filled the front half of the room beneath low brass pendant lights. Shelves along one wall held coffee tins, mugs, bags of beans, and several discreet boxes of blood supplements mixed among the retail stock. An old brick wall remained exposed behind the espresso bar. Refrigerators beneath the pastry case gave off a constant low hum.
A couple occupied the window table with a laptop between them. Three nursing students had colonized a larger table near the back, textbooks and fluorescent highlighters scattered everywhere. A man in a suit sat alone with earbuds in, drinking coffee beside a red-labeled bottle.
Vampire businesses survived by looking ordinary from the outside. Cafés. Private clubs. Clinics. Night pharmacies. Members-only gyms. A handful of apartment buildings with UV-treated common areas and blackout systems built into every unit. None advertised what they actually were. Most had signs, symbols, or phrases vampires learned to recognize. Or were supposed to learn.
“Americano. S-positive,” Sanji told the barista once they reached the counter.
She tapped it into the register without comment. Sanji had known her for at least six years, and she barely glanced up before entering it.
Zoro looked up at the menu board, then at Sanji. “S-positive isn’t on there.”
“No.”
“What did you order?”
“Coffee.”
“With blood?” Zoro said.
“Yes.”
Zoro looked at the board again. “How was I supposed to know they served that?”
“You weren’t. That’s why I brought you,” Sanji said.
That seemed to satisfy him. “What do I get?” he asked.
“What do you like?”
“I don’t know. Coffee, I guess?”
“Blood type?”
“Mine’s XF.”
Sanji turned toward him. “I meant what types you prefer?”
Zoro shrugged. “Dunno.”
“You’ve just been drinking whatever they send you?” Sanji said.
“Yeah.”
Sanji tipped his face briefly toward the ceiling. “Give him a dark roast with S-positive,” he told the barista. “And put it on mine.”
“I have money,” Zoro said. “I can pay.”
Sanji glanced over. “From work?”
“No. Mihawk gave me some when I left.”
That caught Sanji’s attention. “How much?”
Zoro named it.
Sanji’s hand stopped halfway back to his wallet. It was decent for someone living modestly. It was nowhere near enough to support an immortal life. “How long is that supposed to last?”
“I’ve been stretching it. So maybe a year?”
“You’ve already been here eight months.”
“Yeah.” Zoro shrugged. “I don’t spend much.”
That, Sanji believed. “What happens when it runs out?”
“Mihawk gave me a card.”
Sanji’s attention sharpened. “What card?”
Zoro reached into his wallet. Sanji expected a bank contact. Maybe a lawyer. Possibly some old vampire intermediary with questionable taste in stationery.
Zoro handed him a black business card embossed in silver. Sanji recognized the name before he finished reading it. Velvet Fang. Private Companionship. Discretion Guaranteed. There was a phone number beneath it.
Sanji had known Velvet Fang existed for decades. The company changed owners, locations, and branding every few years, but the business remained the same. Wealthy vampires paid for attractive vampire escorts who could pass easily among humans, accompany them to private events, feed with clients who preferred that arrangement, and provide sex when contracted for it. The service was legal within the little structure vampire society had built for itself.
Sanji raised his eyes. “What did Mihawk tell you this was?”
“Work.”
“What kind?”
“He said to call when the money got low.”
“And that was all?”
“Yeah.”
Sanji looked back at the card. The barista was obviously listening behind the counter. She knew the name, too.
Sanji handed it back to Zoro. “Don’t call them.”
Zoro tucked the card between two fingers. “Why?”
“They’re an escort service.”
Zoro frowned.
“Paid companionship,” Sanji said.
The frown remained.
“For vampires.”
Still there.
Sanji lowered his voice. “Some clients hire them for events. Some hire them to feed. Some hire them for sex.”
Understanding arrived. “Oh.” Zoro looked at the card again. His expression barely changed, but his grip tightened enough to bend one corner.
“Mihawk didn’t tell you?” Sanji said
“No.”
Sanji believed him immediately.
Zoro stared at the silver lettering for another second, then slid the card back into his wallet. “I wasn’t going to call yet.”
“That’s very much not the point.”
“I still have money.”
Sanji pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth. There were several things he wanted to say about Dracule Mihawk. None belonged at the café counter.
Their drinks arrived before Sanji could decide whether he was angrier about the card or the fact that Zoro had carried it around for eight months without knowing what it meant.
They took a small table near the window. Streetlights reflected across the glass while people moved along the sidewalk outside. A bicycle courier stopped at the curb, checked his phone, then pushed off again. Inside, the espresso machine hissed and cups knocked softly against saucers behind the counter.
Zoro placed the sword case against the brick wall where nobody could trip over it, then took out his notebook. He opened to a fresh page and wrote: CRIMSON & CO. Underneath it: S-positive – good?
Then Zoro took a drink. He sat very still for a moment, then swallowed again. His eyebrows rose. “Okay. That’s way better than the blood bags.”
“Yes, mosshead. Properly sourced blood stored at the correct temperature tends to beat expired teaching stock.”
“What temperature?”
Sanji explained.
Zoro wrote it down. “How long does it keep?”
Another answer.
“What about freezing it?”
Sanji told him.
“What about different blood types?”
“Most matter more for taste and processing than compatibility once you’re fully turned. You aren’t getting transfused.”
Zoro wrote that down. “What happens if you mix them?”
Sanji paused. “Why would you mix them?”
“I’m asking before I do it.”
Sanji considered that. “Fine. Sensible question.”
Zoro’s pen moved again as Sanji answered.
One of the nursing students laughed quietly over something on her laptop. Near the window, the man with the red-labeled bottle took another drink without anyone paying him any attention. Sanji took a drink of his Americano.
Zoro glanced toward the front window. “How was I supposed to know this place was for vampires?”
“This place is one of the easier ones to recognize once you know what you’re looking for,” Sanji said. “The red drop outside. Some places use a crescent around a glass. Some put a black stripe through the bottom of the menu. Depends on the city.”
“Who decides?” Zoro asked.
“Nobody, officially,” Sanji said. “Symbols simply get known over time for their meaning. Every fifty years or so, someone invents a new symbol nobody recognizes and it takes a while to catch on.”
Zoro nodded as though this confirmed something about society in general.
“Most vampire businesses operate through referrals,” Sanji continued. “Blood banks. Donor networks. Night clinics. Places like this. Human customers can walk through the same door and never realize half the menu has another purpose.”
“Why hide it?” he asked.
Sanji gave him a flat look.
Zoro thought for a moment. “Right. Humans.”
“Precisely.”
“They’d freak out.”
“Some would. Some would want interviews. Some would want proof. Some would want to kill us. Some would want us to bite them for reasons that would make you regret literacy.”
Zoro wrote something down. Sanji leaned across the table. Humans complicated.
“Excellent summary,” Sanji agreed.
They talked for nearly an hour. Sanji explained reliable suppliers, screening, subscriptions, storage, emergency reserves, safe feeding intervals, and the difference between ordinary hunger and allowing the virus’s demand to outrun intake. He didn’t repeat everything they had covered during the first class. Instead, he filled in the pieces Zoro had never been given.
Where to buy.
Who to trust.
Which places asked for identification.
How vampire blood banks concealed their customer lists.
Why some donors worked through private networks instead of clubs.
Why direct feeding required more than finding a willing neck.
The café gradually thinned around them as the night wore on. The nursing students packed up first. One of the baristas dimmed the lights over the far section after wiping down the empty tables. Outside, traffic became sporadic enough that Sanji could hear tires passing over damp pavement whenever the door opened.
Zoro asked a ridiculous number of questions. Some were basic enough to make Sanji wonder. Others were irritatingly good.
“If the virus uses blood for regeneration, would healing from something big make you need more right after?” Zoro asked.
Sanji paused with his cup halfway to his mouth. “Yes.”
“How much more?”
“Depends on the injury.”
“So if you get hurt, you might need to feed sooner.”
Sanji lowered the cup. “Exactly.”
Zoro wrote that down and turned the page. “What about feeding from people?”
“Directly?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t arrange that through the café.”
Zoro frowned. “Then how?”
“They can give you the contact for a donor network if you ask. Screened humans, scheduled appointments, agreed limits. Some people use private clubs instead.”
“You can just call?”
“Once you’re registered,” Sanji said.
“What do the humans get out of it?”
“Usually money. Sometimes they like the bite.”
Zoro’s brow furrowed. “Mihawk just brought those two people to me.”
“I gathered.”
“Was that normal?”
“No. Your sire should have taught you much more.”
Zoro went still for a second, then wrote something down.
Sanji left it there. This wasn’t the night to unpack every ugly implication of Mihawk’s version of vampire education.
Eventually their drinks ran out.
“I’ll get these,” Zoro said, gathering both empty cups. Sanji let him.
When he returned, Zoro opened the notebook again to finish his notes. Sanji sat back while he wrote. The pendant lamp above them cast warm light across his green hair and the scar over his eye. His earrings gave a faint metallic click when he shifted his head. Outside, a bus rolled through the intersection and washed the window briefly in white light.
The evening had started as an obligation Sanji had manufactured after one class. A practical measure. Young vampires created problems when they lacked basic information, and Sanji preferred Grand Line City without avoidable vampire incidents. Perfectly sensible.
Zoro finished the line he was writing and turned the notebook around. Ask Sanji before buying weird blood.
“That might be the smartest thing you’ve written all week,” Sanji said with a snort.
“Thanks.”
“I was insulting you.”
“I know.”
Zoro grinned. Sanji smiled back before he could stop himself. Experience had taught him to recognize trouble early. Avoiding it appeared to be a separate skill.
By the third Wednesday of Bloodborne Pathogens & Safety Protocols, Zoro had apparently decided they sat together.
Sanji arrived ten minutes early, took the same seat he’d used during the first two classes, and opened his notebook. A few minutes later, Zoro came in with the sword case over one shoulder. He spotted Sanji, crossed the room, and dropped into the empty seat beside him.
“Hey,” Zoro said.
“Hey.”
Zoro tucked the sword case beneath the desk, pulled out his black notebook, and opened to a fresh page.
The arrangement made sense. Zoro asked questions. Sanji usually knew the answers. Sitting beside him meant they could whisper instead of carrying on a conversation across two rows. Perfectly practical.
The instructor started promptly at seven thirty. Tonight’s lecture covered chains of infection – reservoirs, transmission routes, portals of entry, susceptible hosts, and the points where intervention could break the chain. A diagram filled the projector screen while she worked through the terminology.
Zoro lasted four minutes.
“What’s a reservoir?” he whispered.
“The place a pathogen normally lives and reproduces.”
Zoro wrote it down.
Two minutes later, his pen stopped again. “Vector?”
“Something that carries a pathogen between hosts.”
“Mosquito?”
“Yes.”
“Got it.”
The pen resumed.
Sanji kept taking his own notes. He had started recognizing the pattern. Zoro rarely had trouble once he understood what a word actually referred to. The academic terminology slowed him down. The mechanism underneath it usually didn’t.
The instructor moved into modes of transmission.
“If something’s bloodborne, why does saliva matter?” Zoro whispered.
Sanji glanced at the slide. “Depends on the pathogen. Some can be present in other body fluids, too.”
“Then bloodborne is kind of a bad name.”
Sanji’s mouth twitched. “Take it up with medicine.”
Zoro frowned at the screen. The hand went up.
“Yes, Mr. Roronoa?” the instructor asked.
“If something is called bloodborne but it can spread through other body fluids, why call it bloodborne?”
Several students turned.
The instructor had already begun adjusting to Zoro’s questions. She lowered the presentation remote instead of giving him the bewildered pause he had earned during the first class.
“It refers to the primary occupational risk category,” she explained. “The terminology groups diseases according to common exposure routes. It doesn’t mean blood is always the only infectious fluid.”
“So it’s a category name instead of an exact description.”
“That’s a good way to think about it.”
Zoro nodded and wrote something down. Sanji leaned slightly toward the page.
CATEGORY NAME ≠ EXACT.
Astute. Annoyingly astute.
The lecture continued. Dry-erase marker joined the smells of old carpet, coffee, and recycled air as the instructor drew the infection chain across the whiteboard. Outside the high windows, darkness had settled over campus. Reflections of students and laptop screens filled the glass.
Zoro’s handwriting spread across the page in compact blocks. Arrows connected one concept to another. Anything important received a box. Anything he didn’t understand acquired a question mark until Sanji or the instructor explained it. Sanji had seen enough of the notebook by now to know the apparent chaos had rules.
That was becoming true of Zoro in general.
The man couldn’t identify the model of his own car. He had spent nearly a year drinking expired laboratory blood because the label said human and that had apparently concluded his investigation.
Then he would take a technical explanation apart in seconds, discard the unnecessary terminology, and rebuild it into something perfectly functional.
Himbo remained accurate. It was simply becoming a more complicated diagnosis.
The instructor dismissed them for a ten-minute break. Chairs scraped as half the class headed into the hall. A nursing student two seats over took off her glasses and lowered her forehead onto her folded arms. Someone nearby opened a bag of chips, filling the room with artificial cheese.
Zoro stretched his arms over his head. His hoodie rode up enough to expose a strip of hard stomach and the lower edge of the scar crossing his chest.
Sanji lowered his attention to his notebook. He had plenty of practice with restraint. Some lessons required ongoing maintenance.
“You wrote that backward,” Zoro said.
Sanji turned his head. “What?”
Zoro pointed at his notes. “You put entry before transmission.”
Sanji checked. He had. He corrected the arrows. “Happy?”
“Yeah.”
Zoro returned to his own page.
Sanji gave him several seconds before reaching over and pulling the notebook closer.
“What are you doing?” Zoro asked.
“Checking something.”
Zoro let him take it.
The instructor’s definition of portal of entry occupied four lines in Sanji’s notes. Zoro had written: how it gets inside
Underneath:
broken skin / eyes / mouth
Sanji flipped back a page.
reservoir = where it lives
vector = thing carrying it
host = thing it lives in
He turned another page.
The notes from their first class ended halfway down the sheet. Beneath them, written later in a different pen, Zoro had gone back through the material and rewritten sections in his own words. Some connected the class concepts to hunger, storage, feeding, and the retrovirus. Others had nothing to do with vampirism at all.
The second week had received the same treatment. Zoro apparently went home every Wednesday and taught himself the lecture again. Sanji had assumed the notebook was primarily a survival project. It wasn’t anymore. Zoro was actually learning the course.
“You do this every week?” Sanji asked.
Zoro leaned over enough to see which page he had reached. “Yeah.”
“Go through everything again?”
“If I don’t understand it.”
“You could use the textbook.”
“I do.”
Sanji glanced at him.
Zoro shrugged. “It uses more words.”
That was difficult to dispute.
A small drawing of a refrigerator occupied one margin, complete with shelf labels and a temperature.
“Thirty–nine degrees,” Sanji said.
“That’s from what you told me.”
“You changed yours?”
“Yeah. Bought a thermometer.”
“When?”
“After the café.”
Sanji tapped the drawing. “Middle shelf?”
“That’s where you said to put it.”
“Good.”
Zoro nodded as though this were no more remarkable than tying his shoes.
There was something unexpectedly pleasant about giving him useful information. Zoro didn’t defend the old mistake, explain why he had made it, or turn the correction into a contest. He fixed the problem and carried on.
Sanji had known plenty of people who could argue for hours rather than admit they were wrong. He had dated a few of them.
One particularly beautiful vampire in Marseille had once spent six months insisting a feud with his neighbor wasn’t his fault despite having started it by throwing a piano through the man’s window. Sanji had loved that vampire for nearly twelve years.
The piano had eventually been easier to leave behind.
Before that there had been humans. More than one. Enough that Sanji no longer counted the years by relationships unless he had a reason to remember them. A woman in Naples who hated mornings and loved opera. A man in London who could make Sanji laugh hard enough to lose entire arguments. Some lasted months. Some years. One lasted long enough for Sanji to watch gray work its way through dark hair while his own face remained unchanged.Sanji had had ample opportunity to learn what attracted him.
Apparently the current answer involved green hair, swords, a catastrophic sense of direction, and a notebook full of aggressively simplified epidemiology.
Zoro reached over and tapped Sanji’s page. “You missed that part.”
Sanji looked down. He had. “Stop reading my notes.”
“You’re reading mine.”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“Because mine are better.”
Zoro considered both notebooks. “Mine are shorter.”
“Exactly my point.”
“That doesn’t make yours better.”
Sanji narrowed his eyes. Zoro grinned. Sanji handed the notebook back. “I liked you better when you thought ‘cold’ was a refrigerator setting.”
“It is a refrigerator setting.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah.”
The second half of class moved into transmission chains and intervention points. The instructor drew a sequence across the whiteboard, connecting source, exit, transmission, entry, and host with arrows.
“If you interrupt any one of these stages, you reduce the chance of successful transmission,” she said.
Zoro’s pen moved faster. His hand went up. “Which stage matters most?”
“All of them,” the instructor said.
“If you had to pick one.”
A few students laughed. Zoro kept his attention on the front.
The instructor considered the question. “From a prevention standpoint, the earliest one you can reliably control.”
“Because stopping it sooner gives you fewer chances to screw up later.”
“Exactly.”
Zoro wrote something down. Sanji leaned slightly closer.
PANIC MAKES IT WORSE.
“Did Mihawk teach you that?” Sanji whispered.
“Koushirou.”
“Who’s Koushirou?”
“My teacher back home.”
“Swords again?”
“Kendo,” Zoro said, with the same tone Sanji might have used if someone confused béarnaise with hollandaise.
Sanji looked at him. “You have separate sword categories.”
“Kendo isn’t the same as using a real sword.”
“I gathered that.”
“Koushirou taught me when I was a kid.”
Sanji turned his pen between his fingers. Zoro had mentioned Shimotsuki before, usually in passing. A small town. Rural. A dojo. Early morning training. The apparent novelty of having more than one twenty-four-hour grocery store nearby. “For how long?” he asked.
“Most of my life.”
“And now you carry three actual swords to a community college class.”
“They’re expensive,” Zoro said. “I don’t want to leave them in the car.”
Sanji had no useful response to that. “And Mihawk?” he asked instead.
Zoro’s expression changed very little, but Sanji had started learning the smaller shifts. The pause before an answer. The slight tightening through his shoulders. “Mihawk was different.”
“Different how?”
“Real swords.”
“That sounds considerably more dangerous.”
“It was better.” The answer came immediately.
“Better teacher?” Sanji asked.
Zoro thought about it. “Better swordsman.”
Sanji turned that over. “Koushirou taught you. Mihawk trained you.”
Zoro nodded once. “Yeah.”
There was something in that distinction Sanji didn’t understand yet. He left it alone.
The instructor moved into factors affecting transmission risk. Dose. Duration of exposure. Route of entry. Condition of the host. Zoro listened with the same concentration he gave everything else. He whispered fewer questions now. Not because he had stopped having them. Sanji could see him mark small question marks beside terms and continue until the instructor reached the explanation naturally. Only when one remained unresolved did he angle the notebook slightly toward Sanji.
Sanji answered. At some point, without discussing it, they had developed a system. The realization sat strangely with him. Pleasantly, too.
Near the end of class, the instructor put a case study on the projector and asked them to identify every point where transmission could have been prevented. They both read through it.
“Gloves,” Sanji murmured.
“Earlier than that.”
Sanji glanced over. Zoro tapped the first paragraph. “They stored the contaminated equipment wrong.”
Sanji reread it. The bastard was right.
When the instructor called for answers, Zoro raised his hand and gave that one first.
“Exactly,” she said. “Prevention is strongest when you identify the earliest controllable point.”
Zoro wrote: fix cause before it becomes problem
“That one’s almost grammatical,” Sanji whispered.
“Shut up.”
Sanji smiled.
Class ended at nine thirty. Students packed laptops, shoved papers into bags, and stretched stiff backs while the instructor reminded them that the next five Wednesday sessions would move through traceability, incident response, reporting requirements, and the final assessment.
Eight weeks total. A quarter of a semester, more or less. Sanji had taken longer courses for less useful reasons. He had also spent entire decades learning skills humanity later replaced with machines. But five Wednesdays suddenly didn’t sound like very many.
Zoro zipped his notebook into his backpack. “You understand this stuff pretty well,” he said.
“I’ve been around blood for a while.”
“Three hundred years.”
Sanji’s hand stopped on the zipper of his bag. “Keep your voice down.”
Zoro lowered his. “Three hundred years.”
“That was better.”
“You told me.”
“To keep your voice down?”
“No, I mean that’s why I remember. You told me.”
Sanji looked at him. Zoro adjusted the strap of the sword case over his shoulder.
Three hundred years was a number people tended to react to. Humans romanticized it when they believed it was fiction. Young vampires sometimes treated age as rank. Older ones compared wars, plagues, migrations, and disasters until the whole conversation became unbearable.
Zoro treated it as a fact Sanji had given him. Apparently facts went into the same part of his brain as sword maintenance and refrigerator temperatures.
“What else do you remember?” Sanji asked.
Zoro thought for a moment. “Your coffee order. Americano. S-positive.
Sanji’s fingers paused against the strap of his bag. “You wrote that down.”
“I remember it anyway.”
Something warm and inconvenient stirred beneath Sanji’s ribs. He busied himself adjusting the strap even though it required no adjustment. “Anything else?”
“You hate the vending-machine coffee,” Zoro said.
“That hardly requires a brilliant memory.”
“You said it tasted like embalming fluid.”
“It did.”
“You still drank it.”
“I paid for it.”
Zoro smiled. Dimples.
Sanji slung his bag over his shoulder. “You remember a disturbing amount of useless information.”
“It’s about you.”
The answer came so easily that Sanji almost missed it.
Zoro had already turned toward the aisle.
Sanji remained beside the desk for half a second longer than necessary. He had been flirted with in more languages than Zoro probably knew existed. He had received poetry, flowers, jewels, serenades, letters sealed with wax, telegrams, photographs, drunken telephone calls, and one regrettable sculpture.
Zoro hadn’t sounded as though he were flirting at all. That made it considerably worse.
Sanji followed him into the aisle. “How’s the blood situation?” he asked once they reached the hallway.
“Better.”
“Using Crimson & Co.?”
“Sometimes. And the bank you gave me,” Zoro said.
“Good.”
“I canceled the lab order.”
“Even better.”
Zoro glanced toward him. “You sound proud.”
“Don’t get carried away,” Sanji said quickly.
“You are.”
“I have successfully raised your blood-storage practices to the level of basic competence. I’m allowed a small amount of professional satisfaction.”
“You’re not a professional.”
Sanji turned toward him. Zoro continued two steps before stopping. “I know more than you,” Sanji sid.
“Yeah.”
“That makes me a professional.”
“That’s not what professional means.”
Sanji pointed toward him. “You knew what Toyota meant and still couldn’t tell me what model you drove.”
“What does that have to do with blood?”
“Nothing. I needed to restore balance.”
Zoro snorted.
They continued down the hall.
The science building had mostly emptied. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. A custodian’s cart rattled somewhere around the corner, and bulletin boards along the walls advertised tutoring hours, blood drives, lab positions, and clubs that had finished meeting hours ago.
Zoro walked beside him instead of ahead. His pace matched Sanji’s without either of them mentioning it.
“You still train every day?” Sanji asked.
“Yeah.”
“Kendo?”
“Some. Mostly sword work,” Zoro said.
Sanji glanced at the case over his shoulder. “Koushirou would approve?”
“Probably.”
“And Mihawk?”
Zoro’s answer came after a shorter pause this time. “He’d say I’m getting slow.”
Sanji’s expression tightened. “Are you?”
“No.”
Sanji shoved his hands into his coat pockets.
They crossed the lobby and stepped outside. The campus had settled into its late-night rhythm. Sprinklers hissed over the lawns, darkening the grass beneath the path lamps. The last buses moved along the street beyond the quad, brakes sighing at scattered stops. A food-delivery driver waited at the curb with hazard lights blinking while a student in pajama pants hurried out to meet him.
Zoro shifted the sword case higher on his shoulder. “Next week’s traceability.”
“So?”
“I looked it up already.”
Sanji glanced at him. “Voluntarily?”
“I didn’t know what it meant.”
“And now?”
“Keeping track of where something came from and where it went.”
“More or less.”
Zoro nodded, satisfied.
Sanji smiled faintly. Three weeks ago, he had deliberately chosen a seat behind a stranger because another vampire in a room full of humans had seemed worth monitoring. Now Zoro saved him a seat.
Sanji answered questions in the margins of his notebook. Zoro remembered his coffee order. They had gone to Crimson & Co. together after class once, and Sanji had been thinking about it more than he cared to admit.
Next Wednesday, Zoro would almost certainly be sitting in the same chair. Sanji already expected to sit beside him.
Five weeks remained in the course. For the first time since he’d enrolled, that seemed inconveniently short.
The community college library stayed open until ten on weekdays, which Sanji considered one of its better qualities.
The building sat across the central courtyard from the science wing, three floors of concrete and glass with narrow windows running along the upper levels. During the day, students filled nearly every table. At eight on a Thursday night, the population had thinned to nursing students, people writing papers they had clearly put off until the last possible moment, and one man asleep upright in a chair with a statistics textbook open across his chest.
Sanji had claimed a table near the windows. His textbook sat open beside his notebook. Two pens lay across the page, his coffee safely removed from anything expensive enough to ruin. The overhead lights were softer than the ones in the science building, and the tall shelves absorbed most of the remaining noise. Every few minutes, the printer station across the room coughed out another assignment.
They had agreed on eight. At seven forty-three, his phone buzzed.
ZORO:
lost
Sanji looked at the message. Five weeks. Zoro had been coming to this campus for five weeks.
SANJI:
Where are you?
Several seconds passed.
ZORO:
outside
Sanji pressed his lips together.
SANJI:
Outside what?
The response took longer.
ZORO:
building
Sanji set his coffee down.
SANJI:
That narrows it considerably.
Three dots appeared.
ZORO:
has a fountain
There were several fountains on campus.
SANJI:
Send me a picture.
A photograph arrived thirty seconds later. Zoro had managed to photograph mostly his own thumb. Behind it, Sanji could make out a brick wall, glass doors, a vending machine, and half of a blue sign. ATHLETIC CENTER.
Sanji closed his eyes briefly.
SANJI:
Library is across the quad from the science building.
SANJI:
You are at the athletic center.
SANJI:
Use the map and call me if you end up somewhere with a swimming pool.
ZORO:
ok
Sanji went back to his notes. Eight minutes later, the elevator doors opened across the floor and Zoro stepped out.
Zoro crossed between the tables with his backpack over one shoulder and the sword case over the other. He wore a fitted black T-shirt instead of one of his usual hoodies. The shirt stretched across his shoulders and upper arms. The scar across his chest showed pale above the collar before disappearing beneath the fabric. His earrings caught the library lights when he reached the table.
Zoro smiled when he saw Sanji. “Made it,” he said. “The map worked.”
“So I see,” Sanji said.
Zoro pulled out the chair beside Sanji rather than the one across from him. Sanji had stopped pretending to be surprised by that. The table was small. Zoro was not. He sat close enough that Sanji could smell soap, faint sweat, leather from the sword case, and the metallic sweetness of the retrovirus beneath it all. The scent no longer registered first as another vampire. It registered as Zoro.
Sanji chose not to examine that development.
“I found a taco place,” Zoro said. “Over by the bus stop.”
Sanji’s brows lifted. “You went far enough off course to discover a restaurant.”
“It smelled good.”
Sanji tried to stay irritated.
“There was a cat behind it,” Zoro went on.
Sanji sighed. “What kind?”
“Orange.”
“I meant the restaurant.”
“Oh. Mexican.”
Sanji smiled despite himself.
Zoro unpacked his textbook, black notebook, three pens, and a bottle of water. “What are we doing?” he asked.
“Going through whatever you’re still shaky on,” Sanji said.
“Vocabulary.”
“I know.”
Zoro opened his notebook.
Sanji tapped the first marked term. “Reservoir.”
“Where it lives.”
“Actual definition.”
“The place a pathogen normally lives and reproduces,” Zoro said.
“Better,” Sanji said. “Host.”
“Thing it lives in.”
“Try again.”
“Organism that can carry it.”
“Good enough.”
“Vector.”
“Thing carrying it.”
“Such as?”
“Mosquito.”
“Good.”
Zoro wrote a few notes in the margin.
They worked through the vocabulary first. It remained his weakest point, but the processes themselves were solid. When Sanji gave him a scenario, Zoro usually identified the problem before Sanji finished asking the question.
Sanji tested him. “A nurse removes contaminated gloves incorrectly and touches the outside surface with bare fingers.”
“Exposure risk,” Zoro said immediately.
“Where?”
“Hand.”
“Assuming the skin is intact?”
“Low risk.”
“Good.” Sanji moved on to the next. “A contaminated needle falls onto the floor.”
“Don’t pick it up by hand.”
“What do you use?”
“Tongs.”
Sanji gave Zoro a look. “Forceps.”
“Same thing,” Zoro said.
“No.”
“It grabs things.”
“So do your hands. I’m not calling those forceps.”
Zoro wrote forceps with obvious reluctance. He bumped his knee against Sanji’s under the table and didn’t move away. Neither did Sanji.
They continued working. An hour passed more easily than Sanji expected. Zoro had always listened, but studying with him made the habit harder to ignore. He asked when he didn’t understand something. Accepted an explanation if it made sense. Challenged it if it didn’t. Remembered almost everything once he had reduced it to a way he understood.
The quiet worked, too. Sanji had spent more nights in libraries than he could count. Gas lamps, candles, early electric lights, fluorescent tubes. Universities had cycled in and out of his life whenever boredom pushed him toward another degree, certification, language, or profession.
A long life produced a considerable amount of education if one refused to stay bored. It also produced a considerable number of study partners. Friends. Lovers. People he wanted to sleep with. People he regretted sleeping with. One vampire who had spent an entire winter correcting Sanji’s Latin despite knowing less Latin than Sanji did.
Usually there had been more effort involved. Conversation to keep moving. Silences to fill. Some awareness of whether the other person was entertained.
Sitting beside Zoro required none of it. They could spend ten minutes bent over separate pages without speaking, then pick up again when one of them had something to say. Sanji liked it way too much.
“Explain why reporting an exposure quickly matters,” Sanji said.
Zoro turned a page. “Because waiting makes things harder to fix.”
“More.”
“Treatment works better sooner.”
“Good.”
“And somebody needs to know what happened,” Zoro added. “So they can keep it from happening again.”
Sanji nodded. “Write that.”
Zoro wrote it down. His forearm moved beside Sanji’s, muscle shifting beneath scarred skin. Sanji dragged his attention back to his own notebook. This was becoming ridiculous. Attraction itself was hardly new. What had become less familiar was enjoying someone this much before anything had actually happened. The questions, the ridiculous notes, the easy stretches of silence between them – Sanji had gone on dates that required far more effort and provided considerably less entertainment.
“Describe the proper response to a sharps injury,” Sanji said.
“Stop. Wash it. Report it.”
“Anything else?”
“Get evaluated.”
“Good.”
“Feed after.”
Sanji turned toward him. “What?”
“If I got hurt.”
“This is asking about humans.”
“I know.”
“Then why add feeding?”
Zoro shrugged. “Mihawk always made me feed after.”
Sanji paused. “After injuries?”
“Big ones.”
“How big?”
“Swordfight big.”
The answer carried enough casual weight to make Sanji set his pen down. “How often were you having swordfights that ended with severe blood loss?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Mihawk’s mood.”
Sanji studied him. Zoro remained focused, unconcerned, on his notebook. “And Mihawk would feed you afterward?”
“Sometimes,” Zoro said.
Sanji thought of what Zoro had told him at Crimson & Co. Two humans brought to him. No explanation of donor networks. No real instruction beyond when to stop.
“Was that how you learned you needed more blood after a bad injury?”
“Yeah.”
“And the first time?”
Zoro glanced over. “First time what?”
“You needed that much blood.”
“Oh.” Zoro scratched lightly at the scar crossing his chest. “When I woke up after he turned me.”
For all Zoro had told him about Mihawk, Sanji knew almost nothing about the night he was turned. “You were injured when he turned you?”
“Yeah.”
“How badly?”
Zoro&rldquo;s finger brushed his eye, then his chest again. “Pretty bad. I was bleeding a lot.”
Sanji immediately understood. “And Mihawk turned you then?”
“Eventually.”
Eventually.
Sanji’s fingers tightened around his pen.
Zoro lowered his eyes to the notebook again as though the conversation had wandered into boring territory.
“What happened first?” Sanji asked.
Zoro’s pen stopped. A brief silence passed. Then he shrugged. “Think we messed around. Don’t remember much. Except the alley smelled like piss. Then I woke up somewhere else.”
Sanji went very still. The fluorescent lights buzzed softly overhead. Someone several tables away turned a page. The printer station began another job.
“You were bleeding out,” Sanji said.
“Yeah.”
“And he had sex with you.”
“Basically.”
“Basically.”
Zoro shifted one shoulder. “He said he liked me.”
Sanji looked at him. The response bothered him more than the story. There was no embarrassment in it. No anger. No recognition that anything about the sequence deserved examination. Zoro stated it with the same acceptance he brought to everything Mihawk had apparently told him.
Fangs are private.
Sun is bad.
Feed regularly.
Bleed half to death in an alley and let your sire use you before deciding whether to save your life.
Sanji’s jaw tightened. “Did you want that?”
Zoro paused again. The question seemed to require more thought than Sanji wanted it to. “I wanted him.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Zoro’s brow furrowed.
Sanji kept his voice quiet. “You were badly injured. Did you want sex then?”
Zoro sat still for a few seconds. “I didn’t tell him to stop.”
Sanji felt his temper sharpen. “That still isn’t what I asked.”
Zoro turned toward him fully now. His expression held confusion rather than defensiveness.
Sanji understood, suddenly and unpleasantly, that nobody had ever asked Zoro to separate those things.
Wanting Mihawk.
Wanting his approval.
Wanting sex.
Wanting not to die.
They had all been handed to him together and apparently connected to the same box like in Zoro’s notes.
Sanji forced his hand to loosen around the pen. “You don’t have to answer me.”
Zoro watched him. “You’re mad.”
“Yes.”
“At me?”
“No.”
Zoro’s shoulders eased.
The reaction made Sanji angrier. He picked up his coffee, discovered it was empty, and put it back down. “Mihawk treated you badly.”
Zoro frowned. “He trained me.”
“I’m sure he did.”
“He taught me a lot.”
“I’m sure he did that, too.”
Zoro’s brow tightened further.
Sanji stopped. This conversation was heading somewhere Zoro clearly had never gone before, and a community college library was a terrible place to drag him there. He exhaled slowly. “Forget the old bastard for now. We’re studying.”
Zoro hesitated, then nodded. He returned to his notebook.
Sanji looked down at the next question without reading a word. Mihawk had nearly killed Zoro. Then slept with him. Then turned him. And Zoro had accepted that all of this was okay because Mihawk liked him.
Sanji had spent several weeks wondering how someone that powerful could turn Zoro and then leave him with so little practical knowledge about vampirism. The answer had become uglier. Mihawk hadn’t wanted a student. He had wanted Zoro. The rest had apparently been optional.
Sanji pushed the thought aside before his temper ruined what remained of the study session. He picked up his pen. “Next one. What affects exposure risk?”
“Dose. How long you’re exposed. Where it gets in.”
“Route of entry,” Sanji corrected.
“That’s what I said.”
“No, you translated it into Zoro.”
Zoro snorted.
They kept going.
The conversation about Mihawk didn’t disappear. Sanji could feel it sitting behind everything else. But Zoro answered questions. Sanji corrected terminology. Zoro continued insisting that forceps were just tongs. Sanji informed him that civilization had developed specific nouns for a reason.
By nine thirty, their books and notes had spread across most of the small table. Zoro leaned closer to read something Sanji had written. Their shoulders touched. Neither moved.
“What’s fomite again?” Zoro asked.
“An object or surface capable of carrying infectious material.”
Zoro frowned. “Why isn’t it just called an object?”
“Because medicine enjoys making simple things expensive.”
Zoro sighed and wrote it down.
Sanji watched the letters form. “You’re going to pass this class.”
Zoro stopped writing. “Yeah?”
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“You understand the material.”
“I suck at the words.”
“You suck at several words.”
“Thanks.”
“You know enough of them.”
The satisfaction in Zoro’s expression was small, but Sanji caught it.
“You might even get a respectable grade,” Sanji said.
“Better than yours?” Zoro said.
“Absolutely not.”
“Could.”
“You’re one fomite away from academic failure.”
“I know what it means now.”
“Because I told you ten seconds ago.”
“Still know it.”
Sanji laughed.
The librarian announced fifteen minutes until closing. Students began packing around them. Chairs scraped across the carpet. Laptop chargers disappeared into bags. The sleeping statistics student finally woke and left with the expression of someone unsure what decade it was.
Zoro stacked his papers while Sanji gathered his own materials. The business card Mihawk had given him flashed briefly inside the wallet pocket of his backpack when he reached for his phone. Velvet Fang.
Sanji’s mood threatened to sour again. He looked away. One problem at a time.
They headed downstairs with the remaining students. The lobby smelled faintly of old books, coffee, and the rain that had started while they were studying. Water streaked the glass doors, turning the parking lot lights outside into blurred yellow patches.
Outside, Sanji opened his umbrella beneath the overhang. Zoro stepped under it beside him. He was much too large for an umbrella intended for one person. His shoulder pressed against Sanji’s while half his other arm remained exposed.
Sanji adjusted the umbrella farther over him.
“You’re getting wet,” Zoro said.
“I’m aware.”
“You can move it back.”
“You’re larger.”
“So?”
“So shut up and walk.”
Zoro did.
They crossed the wet courtyard together, shoulder to shoulder beneath an umbrella designed for one normal-sized person. Rain tapped against the fabric overhead. Water ran along the curbs, carrying leaves toward the storm drains. The campus had emptied almost completely now, leaving only the hum of parking-lot lights and the distant rush of cars on the main road.
Zoro stayed close enough that their arms brushed whenever their strides shifted.
Sanji thought about the study session. About Mihawk. About Zoro going home every week and rewriting everything he didn’t understand until it made sense. About the way his shoulders had relaxed the instant Sanji told him he wasn’t angry at him.
Sanji tightened his grip on the umbrella handle. He had learned plenty about monsters over the years. Some had fangs. Some had excellent manners. The worst ones usually knew exactly what they were doing.
Sanji stopped at Crimson & Co. on Monday night because he wanted coffee and because his townhouse felt unusually quiet.
The café was busier than it had been during his last visit with Zoro. Maple Street had filled with the usual late-night crowd, people drifting between restaurants and bars beneath strings of patio lights. A line of cars crawled past the intersection outside while a delivery driver double-parked with his hazards flashing. Inside, every table near the front windows was occupied. The espresso machine hissed behind the counter, the grinders ran in short bursts, and conversation filled the room beneath the low brass lights.
Sanji stepped inside and caught the smell before he saw anything else. Coffee. Sugar. Milk. Blood. But beneath it ran something familiar and wrong. Metallic sweetness. Young retrovirus. Laundry detergent. Leather.
Zoro.
Sanji found him near the far wall at a small table by himself. His notebook lay open in front of him, although the pen sat untouched beside it. One elbow rested on the table, his head supported loosely in his hand. The sword case leaned beside his chair. He wore a dark gray hoodie with the sleeves pushed up, exposing scarred forearms and wrists broader than Sanji’s ankles.
He also looked terrible.
Sanji crossed the room.
Zoro raised his head. “Hey.”
His skin had lost some of its usual color. The shadow beneath his visible eye had deepened, and the vampiric luminescence in the dark iris was barely there. His movements carried a fraction more drag than usual, almost invisible without Sanji’s experience around vampires.
“You look awful,” Sanji said.
Zoro glanced down at himself. “I’m wearing the same thing I always wear.”
“I mean your face.”
Zoro rubbed one hand over his jaw. “Tired.”
Sanji pulled out the chair across from him and sat. “How long since you fed properly?”
Zoro paused. “Yesterday.”
“How much?”
“Some.”
“Define some.”
“Half a bag.”
“And today?”
Zoro gestured toward the empty cup near his notebook. “Had one of these earlier.”
“A café drink is meant to tide you over, marimo. You can’t live on coffee with blood in it.”
“I know.”
“You smell depleted.”
Zoro frowned. “I smell?”
“Yes.”
“Bad?”
“Different.”
Zoro leaned toward his own shoulder and sniffed.
Sanji pressed his lips together. “That isn’t going to tell you anything.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re smelling your shirt.”
“Oh.”
Sanji waved over a server. “Dark roast. S-positive.”
“I already had one,” Zoro said.
“You’re having another.”
The server left.
Sanji folded his arms. “Start at the beginning. What happened to your supply?”
“Delivery’s late.”
After their first trip here, Sanji had given Zoro the names of reputable subscription services and helped him open an account with a local blood bank for backup. The subscription handled regular supply. The bank covered missed deliveries, emergencies, or the occasional increase in need after an injury.
Apparently Zoro had managed to find the point where both systems stopped helping at once.
“How late?” Sanji asked.
“Supposed to come last Wednesday. They moved it to tomorrow,” Zoro said.
“Six days.”
“Yeah.”
“And you used the blood bank?”
“Thursday.”
“How much did they give you?”
“My weekly allotment.”
“And that’s gone.”
“I stretched it.”
Sanji already disliked the answer. “Meaning?”
“Half portions.”
“For how many days?”
“Four.”
Sanji pressed two fingers against his forehead. One delayed shipment. One backup pickup. Then Zoro had hit the new-account limit and decided the obvious solution was to make himself increasingly sick until Tuesday arrived. “You should’ve told me.”
Zoro frowned. “Why?”
“Because I know how to fix this.”
“I was handling it.”
“You were rationing.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
Zoro’s expression tightened slightly.
Sanji caught himself. “You followed the system I gave you,” he said, lowering his voice. “The system ran out before the delay did. Fine. That means you move to the next option.”
Zoro absorbed that. “You?”
“Yes, me.”
“Why would you be able to get more?”
“Because I’ve used that blood bank longer than you’ve been alive.”
“Oh.”
“Several times over.”
“Right.”
The server arrived with the dark roast. Sanji pushed it toward him. “Drink.”
Zoro took the cup without argument. Some of the tension eased from his shoulders after the first few mouthfuls. The change was subtle, but Sanji saw it. His movements loosened. A trace of color began returning beneath his skin.
“How bad do you feel?” Sanji asked.
“Achy.”
“Headache?”
“Yeah.”
“Nausea?”
“A little.”
“Cold?”
“Sometimes.”
Sanji exhaled through his nose. The progression was familiar. Regeneration slowed first. Then came muscle pain, headaches, trouble regulating temperature, nausea. Leave it long enough and the body began cannibalizing whatever reserves it could manage to maintain.
Zoro remained early in the process. He was also entirely too comfortable with being miserable.
Sanji looked at the cup in his hands. “Why didn’t you call the donor network?”
Zoro stopped drinking and looked at him questioningly.
“I told you about it when we came here,” Sanji said.
“I remember,” Zoro said.
“Then why didn’t you use it?”
Zoro’s brow drew together. “I don’t know how.”
Sanji paused. “You have the number.”
“Yeah.”
“They arrange screened donors.”
“I know.”
“So what part don’t you know?”
Zoro looked down at the cup. “The part where I call somebody and tell them I want to bite them.”
Sanji’s lips pressed into a thin line.
Zoro went on. “You said they agree on how much beforehand. And appointments. And registration.”
“Yes,” Sanji said.
“I haven’t registered.”
“Why not?”
Zoro shrugged one shoulder. “Didn’t think I needed to yet.”
“You need blood now,” Sanji pointed out.
“I thought the delivery would come.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you’d rather ration than make one phone call.”
Zoro’s fingers shifted around the cup. “I’ve never done it.”
“Called a donor service?”
“Any of it.”
Sanji leaned back slightly.
Zoro glanced at him. “Mihawk brought the other two.”
“I know.”
“He said when to stop. That was it.”
Sanji remembered. Two feeds. Two strangers. Mihawk had arranged everything. “Before you left him, what did you normally drink?”
“Bags.”
“From where?”
“Mihawk got them.”
“And after you moved here?”
“I had some with me. When those ran out, I found the medical supplier.”
The expired laboratory stock. Then Sanji. Zoro’s feeding history finally made complete sense.
For two years, someone else had put blood in front of him. Bags appeared. Humans appeared. Zoro consumed what he was given and followed the few rules Mihawk had bothered to teach. Then Mihawk sent him away. Zoro had learned how to buy blood because he had to. Direct feeding required something entirely different.
“You could have fed from a human,” Sanji said.
Zoro’s brow furrowed. “Which one?”
“A random one,” Sanji said. “It’s not ideal, and I don’t support it – most vampires don’t – but it’s an option.”
Zoro shook his head. “I don’t want to do that.”
Sanji considered him. “Why?”
Zoro took another drink. “Seemed worse to screw that up than to be hungry.”
Sanji’s irritation disappeared. That answer was so thoroughly Zoro that he should have anticipated it. Give him a procedure and he would follow it exactly. Leave out the procedure and he would apparently starve before improvising on another person’s body.
“You’re not supposed to figure that out by yourself,” Sanji said.
Zoro looked over.
“Someone should have taught you.”
“Mihawk didn’t.”
“Yes. I’m painfully aware.”
Zoro drank again. Sanji pulled out his phone.
“What are you doing?” Zoro asked.
“Getting the bank to release another pickup.”
“They said Tuesday.”
“They told you Tuesday.”
Zoro’s brow furrowed.
Sanji’s blood-bank contact had been the same woman for nearly twelve years. Before her, it had been her father. Sanji had maintained an account there long enough that the staff knew him by voice, which was either convenient or evidence that he desperately needed more hobbies.
The line rang twice.
“Sanji?”
“Sorry to bother you this late, my sweet.”
“You’re never sorry.”
Sanji smiled faintly. “I need an emergency release on a new account.”
“For you?”
“For Roronoa Zoro.”
Across the table, Zoro’s attention lifted from his cup.
Keyboard taps sounded through the phone.
“He already used his weekly pickup.”
“I know,” Sanji said. “His subscription delivery got pushed back six days.”
“New accounts have the cap for a reason.”
“He’s two years turned and didn’t plan for the overlap.”
A pause.
“How depleted?” she asked.
“Headache, muscle pain, some nausea. Still functional.”
“I can authorize two additional units. One-time exception until his account review clears.”
“Perfect,” Sanji said.
“Pickup by eleven.”
“Thank you.”
“You owe me.”
“I always do.”
Sanji ended the call.
Zoro lowered his cup. “You got them to give me more.”
“Yes.”
“They told me I had to wait.”
“They told you the standard rule. I asked for an override.”
“You can do that?” Zoro said.
“Apparently.”
Zoro smiled softly at him. “Thanks.”
Something unpleasantly warm settled in Sanji’s chest. He ignored it. “Two units. Pickup before eleven. Your subscription arrives tomorrow, so that gets you through the gap. After this, keep at least one extra unit in reserve in your freezer instead of running your supply down to the day.”
Zoro nodded. “Okay.”
“If a delivery gets delayed long enough that you have to touch the reserve, call the company and the bank immediately.”
“Okay.”
“If both fail, call me before you start cutting portions.”
Zoro reached for his notebook. Sanji watched him write: CALL SANJI FIRST.
“Anything else?” Zoro asked.
“Yes. We’re going to get you registered with the donor network.”
Zoro’s pen paused.
“Not tonight,” Sanji added. “You’ve got blood coming. But you need to know how direct feeding actually works before this happens again.”
“You’re going to show me?”
“Yes.”
Zoro nodded and wrote that down, too. Sanji caught the words upside down.
learn feeding from Sanji
Something about seeing it written there made his chest tighten strangely. He chose not to examine that.
“Anything else?” Zoro asked.
“Stop treating discomfort as proof you can tolerate something.”
Zoro frowned. “I train.”
“This isn’t training.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
For once, the answer took longer. “Mihawk used to say pain tells you what still works.”
Sanji went still. A blender started behind the counter. Someone near the door dropped a spoon. Outside, a motorcycle passed along Maple Street, the exhaust loud enough to vibrate the glass. Zoro picked up his cup again and sipped.
“What else did Mihawk say?” Sanji asked.
“That mostly,” Zoro said.
“About feeding?”
“About everything.”
Sanji’s jaw tightened. Why teach a young vampire to recognize danger when you could teach him to endure it instead? Much more convenient when you wanted him to be useful.
“Pain tells you that something hurts,” Sanji said.
Zoro’s brow furrowed. “I know that.”
“You don’t get extra points for taking worse care of yourself.”
“I know.”
“Then act like it.”
Zoro continued frowning as he raised the cup again.
Sanji let the subject drop.
They stayed another twenty minutes while Zoro finished the drink. Sanji ordered his own Americano and finally relaxed enough to enjoy it.
The café began thinning around them. One of the baristas wiped down the empty tables near the front while another restocked the refrigerated case. Outside, rain earlier in the evening had left Maple Street dark beneath the streetlights, headlights flashing across the pavement whenever a car passed.
By the time Zoro checked his phone, some of his normal color had returned. “I should go get the blood.”
“Bank’s on Third and Bell.”
“I know,” Zoro said as he opened Maps.
Sanji leaned across just far enough to see the route. “Fifth is under construction. Take Bell all the way down instead.”
Zoro changed it. “I would’ve found it.”
“I know,” Sanji said. “Text me when you get there.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know you actually got there.”
Zoro’s expression softened. “Okay.”
Sanji reached for his coffee. He was beginning to hate that word.
Zoro stood, slung the sword case over one shoulder, and tucked the notebook into his backpack. Then he hesitated beside the table. “Do you want to get food sometime?”
Sanji paused with the cup near his mouth. “What?”
“Food.”
“I know what food is.”
“So do you want to get some?” Zoro said. “There’s that taco place by campus.”
“The taco place you found while getting lost on the way to the library.”
“Yeah.”
Sanji’s brain supplied several completely reasonable reasons to say no. He ignored every one of them. “When?”
Zoro thought. “Saturday?”
“Saturday works.”
Zoro smiled.
Dimples.
“Okay.”
“Go get your blood,” Sanji said.
Zoro nodded. “Yeah.”
“And text me.”
“I heard you.”
Zoro left.
Sanji caught himself following Zoro’s progress through the café to the door and redirected his attention to his coffee before the habit could become embarrassing.
He had just arranged emergency blood for a two-year-old vampire, lectured him about keeping a reserve, agreed to teach him how to feed directly from a human, ordered him to report his safe arrival, and accepted a dinner invitation.
Sanji took a drink.
This was becoming a problem.
The irritating part was that he couldn’t decide which part of it he wanted to stop.
Sanji discovered the following Saturday that he had apparently agreed to a date.
The realization arrived at seven twelve in the evening while he stood in his bedroom fastening the cuff of a pale blue shirt.
His phone buzzed on the dresser.
ZORO:
tried mexican taco place with cat out back. nothing came up
SANJI:
That’s because search engines generally require the name of the restaurant.
ZORO:
didnt know the name
SANJI:
Then how were you planning to take me there?
ZORO:
ill find it again
Sanji looked at the screen. There were days when Zoro’s confidence bordered on inspirational.
SANJI:
You found it the first time while lost.
ZORO:
yeah
SANJI:
Which means you don’t know how you got there.
ZORO:
i know roughly
Sanji snorted and opened Maps. Zoro had given him four useful facts: near the community college, near a bus stop, Mexican, orange cat behind it. Sanji searched the surrounding blocks, discarded the chains, and found a small family-owned place four blocks east of campus. One customer photo showed a narrow stucco building with a faded mural along the side.
Beneath a plastic patio chair sat an orange cat.
Sanji sent the address.
SANJI:
That one?
ZORO:
yeah
ZORO:
thats the cat
Sanji laughed under his breath.
He finished dressing and checked himself in the mirror. Dark trousers, button-down, fitted charcoal vest. He had rolled the sleeves to his forearms because the evening remained warm. His blond hair fell where he wanted it, hiding his right eye, and the spiral of his visible eyebrow had behaved itself for once. Casual enough for tacos. Still civilized.
His phone buzzed again.
ZORO:
ill meet you there for our date
Sanji paused. He’d spent the entire week interpreting the invitation as food. Food with Zoro, admittedly, which presented its own growing collection of problems, but still food. He had agreed because Zoro had asked and because Sanji wanted to spend time with him somewhere that contained neither lectures nor emergency blood supplies.
His thumbs hovered over the screen.
SANJI:
Date?
ZORO:
i watched something that said asking somebody to get food is a date
ZORO:
did i get that wrong?
ZORO:
thats why i asked
Sanji remained beside the dresser with his coat in one hand. Zoro had apparently watched something about dating, learned that asking someone to dinner counted, and then applied the information exactly as presented.
Sanji sat on the edge of the bed. He was three hundred years old. He had been courted in powdered wigs. Zoro sending thats why i asked shouldn’t have rattled him this badly.
Sanji typed a response. Deleted it. Typed another. Deleted that, too. Eventually he finally sent:
SANJI:
You didn’t get it wrong.
ZORO:
good
Sanji left the townhouse smiling.
The restaurant sat exactly where the map promised, tucked into a strip of older storefronts east of campus. A laundromat occupied one side and a small market the other, its windows stacked with produce crates and handwritten specials. The restaurant itself had probably been a house once. Cream stucco walls surrounded a narrow front patio beneath a patched red awning. Strings of faded papel picado hung beneath the roofline, and the mural Sanji had found online covered the side wall in painted agave, mountains, and deep blue evening sky.
The smell reached the sidewalk first. Corn tortillas warming on a griddle. Charred meat. Onion. Cilantro. Roasted chiles. Sanji slowed appreciatively.
Cooking had consumed the better part of fifty years of his life once. He had learned from anyone willing to teach him, traveled for ingredients, worked in kitchens under names he barely remembered anymore, and spent eleven deeply unreasonable years trying to perfect a single pastry. Immortality encouraged terrible decisions about hobbies. Eventually the obsession had faded. Most did. Good food still got his attention.
So did the man waiting near the entrance. Zoro had dressed up. Unfortunately, Zoro’s understanding of dressing up had apparently been inherited from Mihawk.
His usual hoodies and T-shirts were gone. Fitted black trousers clung obscenely to his legs, and the sleeveless black shirt above them seemed to have been designed under the assumption that fabric was optional. The neckline dropped below his sternum. Deep openings beneath both arms exposed most of his sides. His shoulders and arms were entirely bare, and the pale scar across his chest cut through all that tanned skin.
Sanji’s thoughts stalled. He already knew Zoro had an excellent body. This was unnecessary confirmation. Broad chest. Defined stomach. Narrow waist. Thick arms. Three gold earrings hanging beside his neck. Water-moss hair sticking up in every direction. Sanji wanted to put his mouth on him. Immediately.
Then his brain resumed functioning. “Where the hell did you get that shirt?”
Zoro glanced down. “Had it.”
“That answers nothing.”
“Mihawk bought it.”
Naturally.
Sanji came closer. The back consisted largely of straps and optimism. “What did you wear this for?”
“Going out,” Zoro said.
“Where?”
“Clubs sometimes.”
Several varieties of club suggested themselves. “Did Mihawk tell you to wear it?” Sanji said.
“Usually.” Zoro adjusted one of the straps near his shoulder. “He said it suited me.”
Sanji could practically hear the implication from a man he had never met. Wear this. Stand where I put you. Let people look. Zoro seemed to hear none of it.
“Do you have a hoodie in your car?” Sanji said.
“Yeah.”
“Go get it.”
Zoro frowned. “Why?”
“Because we’re eating tacos, not auditioning for whatever sex dungeon your sire frequented.”
Zoro looked down again. “You don’t like it?”
Sanji nearly choked. “That’s very much the opposite of the problem.”
“Oh.”
“Hoodie.”
“You said it looks good,” Zoro said.
“It looks obscene,” Sanji said.
“That sounds good.”
“Marimo.”
Zoro smiled. Dimples.
Sanji briefly considered walking into traffic. “The hoodie.”
Zoro headed toward his car.
Sanji immediately regretted the decision for selfish reasons. The trousers were doing enough work on their own.
A few minutes later, Zoro returned wearing a dark green zip-up hoodie over the offending shirt. He had left it open. Sanji accepted the compromise.
“You dress up all the time,” Zoro said as they headed inside. “So I wanted to dress up, too.”
Sanji ignored what that did to him.
The dining room was narrow and busy, tables packed close beneath warm ceiling lights. Framed family photographs shared the walls with old soccer posters and a calendar from a local panadería. Spanish music played near the counter, mostly drowned out by conversation and the clatter from the kitchen. A television mounted in one corner showed a football match with the volume off.
A woman behind the register greeted them in Spanish before switching easily to English when Zoro answered with an uncertain, “Hey.”
Sanji bit back a smile.
They studied the menu.
“What are you getting?” Zoro asked.
“Al pastor.”
“What’s that?”
Sanji pointed toward the open section of the kitchen where marinated pork rotated slowly on a vertical spit beneath a browned cap of pineapple. “That.”
Zoro watched the cook shave crisp pieces from the outside. “I’ll have that, too.”
Sanji ordered tacos al pastor, pozole because it smelled excellent, and horchata. Zoro ordered four al pastor tacos, three birria tacos, rice, beans, and whatever Sanji was drinking because apparently one successful choice had exhausted his interest in making another.
They found a table against the wall.
“How often do you eat actual food?” Sanji asked as he sat.
“Whenever Mihawk wanted food.” Zoro pulled napkins from the dispenser and divided them between the two sides of the table. “Doesn’t do anything for me, so I don’t bother much by myself.”
Sanji almost asked why Zoro had chosen a restaurant for their date. Then he remembered the instructional video. He left that alone.
Their food arrived on brightly colored plastic plates with small bowls of chopped onion, cilantro, lime wedges, sliced radishes, and two house salsas. Zoro immediately picked up a taco. Sanji squeezed lime over his pork, added onion and cilantro, and took a bite. Excellent. Fresh tortillas. Crisp edges on the pork with enough fat left underneath. Pineapple adding sweetness without taking over the marinade.
Across from him, Zoro chewed.
“Well?” Sanji asked.
“It’s good.”
“A stunning review.”
Zoro took another bite. “Really good.”
Sanji accepted the improvement.
Zoro tried the salsa verde next, then the red. His brow furrowed.
“What?” Sanji said.
“How’d they make this?” he asked.
“The red?”
“Yeah.”
Sanji tasted it. “Chile de árbol. Probably some guajillo. Tomato, garlic, salt. Vinegar.”
“Why vinegar?”
“Acid cuts through the fat and brightens the rest.”
“Same reason for lime?”
“Basically.”
Zoro took another bite, then tasted the salsa by itself. “If the lime goes right on the meat, why put acid in the sauce, too?”
“Because they do different jobs. The lime hits fresh. The vinegar has been sitting with the chiles, so it changes the sauce as a whole.”
“So too much vinegar makes the chile weaker.”
“Or harsher, depending on the balance.”
Zoro nodded and returned to eating.
Sanji shook his head. The man who had once defined refrigerator temperature as cold could apparently work out acid balance after two bites of salsa.
A streak of red salsa remained at the corner of Zoro’s mouth. Sanji noticed. Then continued noticing. He wanted to lean across the table and remove it with his tongue. Instead he drank his horchata.
Zoro caught him. “What?”
“You have sauce on your face.”
Zoro wiped the wrong side of his mouth.
“Other side.”
He wiped his cheek.
Sanji closed his eyes briefly. “Here.”
He reached across and swiped the salsa from the corner of Zoro’s mouth with his thumb. Zoro stopped moving. Sanji’s thumb remained beside his lower lip half a second longer than necessary. Zoro’s dark eye dropped toward his hand. Sanji withdrew and wiped his thumb on the napkin. “There.”
“Thanks.”
Sanji returned to his pozole. His face felt warmer than it had any right to. The retrovirus had made blushing less reliable centuries ago, but apparently immortality had preserved several other indignities.
They ate for another few minutes.
“How’s your blood supply?” Sanji asked.
“Fine.”
“Actually fine?”
“Yeah. Delivery came Tuesday.”
“And you kept the emergency units?”
“One left.”
“Good.”
“Bank raised my limit, too,” Zoro said.
“Excellent.”
“I called them myself.”
Sanji smiled faintly. “Very grown-up.”
“Asshole.”
Sanji laughed.
The conversation wandered through class and the strange collection of people who ended up in night courses. Zoro knew almost none of their names.
“The nurse with the purple bag.”
“Marisol.”
“The guy who falls asleep.”
“Derek.”
“Woman who always has chips.”
“Angela.”
Zoro frowned. “How do you know everybody?”
“They introduce themselves,” Sanji said.
“When?”
“Constantly.”
“Huh.”
Sanji smiled into his drink.
Zoro finished another taco. “What do you do for fun?”
The question caught Sanji off guard. “For fun?”
“Yeah.”
“Read. Travel occasionally. Museums. Music. I collect cognac.”
“You drink cognac?”
“For the taste.”
Zoro nodded. “Same thing as food.”
“Essentially.”
“What else?”
Sanji considered his current assortment of hobbies. “Photography. Architecture, mostly. Theater. I restore old furniture when I feel patient enough.”
“You cook.”
“Sometimes.”
“You talk about food a lot.”
“I used to do it professionally.”
Zoro’s eyebrows rose. “Really?”
“For about fifty years,” Sanji said.
“That’s a long time.”
“For humans.”
“Still fifty years.”
Sanji laughed.
“Why’d you stop?” Zoro asked.
“I got interested in other things.”
“Just stopped liking it?”
“More or less. When you live long enough, interests come and go. I spent thirty years obsessed with sailing once. Nearly forty collecting rare books. There was an unfortunate period involving orchids.”
“What happened?” Zoro said.
“I had too many orchids.”
“How many?”
“Enough to require staff.”
Zoro grinned. Sanji found himself smiling back.
“What about you?” he asked. “Outside getting lost and buying dangerous blood on the internet.”
“Swords.”
“I walked into that one.”
“Kendo, too,” Zoro said.
“That’s still swords.”
“It’s different.”
“So you keep telling me.”
Zoro wiped his hands and rested his forearms on the table. “I fight.”
“In tournaments?”
“Some.”
“Some?”
“There’s a circuit.”
The shift was subtle, but Sanji recognized it. Zoro became easier to read when the subject was something he understood deeply. His attention sharpened. The answers came without the pauses that academic vocabulary sometimes required.
“What kind of circuit?” Sanji asked.
“Classical swordsmanship. Real blades,” Zoro replied.
Sanji raised an eyebrow. “Legal?”
“No.”
“I imagine the city frowns upon people carving each other open for recreation.”
“It’s organized.”
“That somehow reassures me less.”
“There are rules.”
“Beyond keeping your organs on the inside?”
Zoro smiled. “Yeah.”
Matches happened in rented warehouses, private clubs, old gyms, anywhere organizers could control access and spectators. Fighters built reputations through regional matches and private invitations. Some specialized in historical schools. Others combined styles. Vampires appeared disproportionately near the highest ranks. That part required little explanation as to why.
“There’s money?” Sanji asked.
“Betting,” Zoro said.
“You bet?”
“Not much.”
Sanji stored that among the growing collection of subjects for another evening. “And Mihawk?”
“At the top,” Zoro said.
“Meaning?”
“Best one.”
“You’re very articulate tonight.”
Zoro ignored him. “He’d been around forever. Makes more sense now.”
“Because he’s a vampire.”
“Yeah. Centuries of training.”
Sanji understood the appeal. A human swordsman eventually lost something to age. Speed. Strength. Joints. Reflexes. Mihawk had apparently accumulated human lifetimes of experience without paying that price. “How did you get into it?”
“Kendo first.”
“With Koushirou.”
“Yeah.” Zoro paused. “There was a girl, too. Kuina. We trained together when we were kids. She was better than me.” There was no embarrassment attached to the admission. “We watched old samurai movies. Period shows. Anything with swords. Wanted to do the real thing eventually.”
“Real blades.”
“Yeah.” A small smile touched Zoro’s face. “We promised we’d become the greatest.”
Sanji could picture two children treating the promise with absolute seriousness. “What happened to her?”
“She died.”
Sanji’s chest tightened. “How old?”
“Eleven. Almost twelve.” Zoro turned his glass slowly between his palms.
“So you kept going.”
“Yeah.”
“For both of you.”
Zoro nodded.
Sanji left the condolences alone. Zoro hadn’t told him in search of comfort. “How did you get from kendo to illegal swordfighting?”
“Found somebody around Shimotsuki who knew real blade work. Trained with him. Mostly mornings before the dojo.”
Zoro started entering small matches around seventeen. Regional events first, far enough from Shimotsuki that Koushirou apparently never learned about them. Zoro won often enough for his name to travel upward. Eventually it reached Mihawk.
“He came to watch?” Sanji asked.
“A few times,” Zoro said.
“You knew?”
“Eventually.”
“Did he introduce himself?”
“After I called him creepy.”
Sanji laughed. “What was he doing?”
“Standing around watching me.”
“That does sound creepy.”
“He said he wanted to see if I was worth his time.”
Sanji’s amusement faded. “And then?”
“Eventually we fought.” Zoro took another drink. “I lost.”
Sanji already knew where it went from there. The library conversation returned whether he wanted it to or not: blood loss, the alley, Zoro barely conscious, Mihawk deciding what happened next. He kept his voice even. “How old were you?”
“Twenty-one.”
Human, then. Still human. “And you knew Mihawk was a vampire?”
“No.”
“Did the organizers?”
Zoro shrugged. “Probably.”
Sanji disliked everybody involved a little more. “What happened when the match ended?”
“They wrapped my chest.”
“At the venue?”
“Yeah. Circuit doesn’t have doctors. Too many questions.”
Sanji’s mouth tightened.
“Somebody told me to go to a hospital,” Zoro said.
“Did you?”
“Started to.”
“How far did you get?” Sanji said.
“The alley.”
“The one you told me about.”
“Yeah.”
Sanji nodded once. He didn’t make Zoro repeat what had happened there. He already knew enough of that part. “What do you remember after?”
Zoro thought about it. “Not much. Woke up somewhere else.”
That was new. “Where?” Sanji asked.
“Mihawk’s place. Didn’t know that yet.” Zoro motioned at his eye and chest. “I had stitches. My clothes were gone. There was blood all over everything.”
Sanji’s appetite faded.
Zoro continued with the same matter-of-fact tone. “I felt wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
“Everything was loud. Could smell too much. Hurt everywhere.”
Newly turned. Sanji knew the experience well enough, even if time had softened the memory of his own.
“My mouth hurt,” Zoro added. “Fangs kept coming down.”
“What did Mihawk tell you?” Sanji said.
“That I would’ve died.”
“That part was probably true.”
“He said I was better this way.”
Sanji’s fingers tightened around his glass. “Did he tell you why he chose to turn you?”
“Said it would be a waste.”
Sanji hated that answer.
Zoro appeared to take it as an explanation.
“So you woke up injured, somewhere unfamiliar, already turned, and Mihawk informed you afterward.”
“Yeah.”
No need to ask whether Mihawk had obtained permission. Sanji already knew he hadn’t. The knowledge sat differently now that Sanji could picture the aftermath. A twenty-one-year-old human waking in a stranger’s home with stitches, missing clothes, senses exploding, and a body permanently altered before he understood what had happened.
“And then you stayed,” Sanji said.
Zoro nodded. “He trained me.”
“And the rest?”
Zoro understood what he meant. “We were together.”
Sanji chose his next question carefully. “Did you think of him as your boyfriend?”
Zoro frowned. “Guess so.”
That answer explained more than Sanji wanted it to. “How long?”
“Almost two years.”
“And then he told you to leave.”
“Pretty much.”
There was no visible resentment. It remained one of the stranger pieces.
“What exactly did he say?” Sanji asked.
“That I should go somewhere else if I wanted stronger opponents,” Zoro replied.
“Grand Line City.”
“Yeah.”
Sanji remembered the money. The business card. Velvet Fang. Apparently Mihawk had discarded Zoro with enough cash to keep him fed for roughly a year and employment instructions that amounted to sell the same thing I valued you for once the money runs out. Sanji kept that thought to himself.
Zoro had already learned what the card meant from him. Tonight was their first date. Sanji had no intention of turning tacos into an intervention. He settled for, “He remains an asshole.”
Zoro frowned. “You’ve never met him.”
“I possess excellent instincts.”
“He’s really good with a sword.”
“I’m sure that compensated for his entire personality.”
“Some things.”
Sanji felt irritation rise and let it pass. This wasn’t the library. He wasn’t going to ask Zoro to pull apart another two years of his life over half-finished tacos. Instead he pointed at the salsa. “You’ve been eating that with a spoon.”
“It’s good.”
“You have tortillas.”
“The spoon works,” Zoro said with a shrug.
“Barbarian.”
Zoro grinned.
The evening recovered surprisingly easily. It might have bothered Sanji if he thought Zoro had been avoiding the previous subject. He wasn’t. The conversation had simply moved on, and Zoro moved with it.
They stayed until employees began stacking chairs on the unused tables. Zoro finished every scrap of food he had ordered, including the remaining salsa after Sanji surrendered the argument about the spoon.
“We should come back,” Zoro said.
Sanji glanced toward him.
Zoro looked pleased. Good food. Full plates. A conversation that had wandered through cooking, swords, dead childhood friends, ancient vampires, and table manners without apparently diminishing his opinion of the evening.
“You liked the date?” Sanji said.
“Yeah.” Direct and easy. “I want to do it again.”
Sanji’s chest tightened. “You realize dates traditionally involve determining whether the other person wants another one.”
Zoro frowned. “Do you?”
Sanji had been courted by people who considered strategic uncertainty an art form. He had more than enough experience with flirting, delayed answers, carefully rationed interest, and making somebody work for confirmation. None of it seemed useful with Zoro. “Yes.”
Zoro smiled. Dimples.
Sanji sighed. “Stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Nothing.”
They headed outside. The restaurant had emptied enough that the orange cat had reclaimed the back corner of the patio. It sat beneath a plastic chair near the side gate, tail wrapped around its feet.
“There’s your cat,” Sanji said.
Zoro looked over. “Told you.”
“I never doubted the cat.”
The night had cooled. Traffic on the main road had thinned, leaving longer gaps between cars. The laundromat remained brightly lit next door, dryers turning behind fogged windows.
They stopped beside Zoro’s Toyota. Zoro shoved his hands into his hoodie pockets. Sanji became aware of the shirt underneath again. Unfortunately, knowing where it came from hadn’t made Zoro any less attractive in it.
“This was good,” Zoro said.
“It was.”
“Saturday again?”
Sanji smiled. “We’ll see.”
“That means yes?”
“It means I’ll text you.”
“Okay.”
Zoro reached for the car door, then stopped. “Thanks for finding the restaurant.”
“You found it first,” Sanji said.
“Yeah, but I couldn’t find it again.”
“At least you understand the problem.”
Zoro grinned.
Sanji started toward his own car.
He made it several spaces before Zoro called, “Hey, Sanji.”
Sanji turned. “What?”
Zoro stood beside the open driver’s door. “I meant what I said.”
“About what?”
“Wanting another date.”
Sanji’s expression softened before he could stop it. “I know.”
Zoro nodded and got into the car.
Sanji continued toward his own. By the time he slid behind the wheel, he had reached two conclusions. He wanted to date Zoro. And the more he learned about how Zoro had ended up here, the more difficult it became to separate wanting him from wanting someone, for once, to treat him carefully.
Sanji asked Zoro out Wednesday. He waited until after class, mostly because asking him while Professor Bell was explaining post-exposure prophylaxis seemed inappropriate even by their standards.
They had reached the parking lot before Sanji said, “Are you free Friday?”
Zoro adjusted the sword case over his shoulder. “Yeah.”
“Dinner?”
Zoro stopped walking. Sanji made it another two steps before noticing and turned back.
Zoro stood beneath one of the parking-lot lights, dark eye fixed on him. “A date?”
“Yes, marimo. A date.”
A smile spread across Zoro’s face, complete with dimples. “Yeah.”
Sanji immediately felt better about the entire week.
Then Zoro started walking again. “Tacos?”
“No. You took me to a human dinner last time.” Sanji smiled. “This time I’m taking you to a vampire one.”
Understanding arrived slowly, followed by interest. “Direct feeding?”
“Yes.”
“You set it up?”
“We’re setting it up. You’re doing the talking this time.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll send you the address.”
Friday night, Sanji reached the Red Room Society ten minutes early. The old hotel sat near the edge of downtown, close enough to the entertainment district that people came and went at all hours without attracting attention. Its entrance remained deliberately unimpressive: dark stone, brass fixtures, narrow windows, and a discreet plaque beside the door reading PRIVATE MEMBERS.
Zoro arrived four minutes later. On foot.
Sanji raised an eyebrow. “Where’s your car?”
“Garage was full.”
“There are three garages on this block.”
“I used one.”
“Which one?”
Zoro pointed vaguely behind him.
Sanji decided he didn’t want to know.
Zoro had dressed normally this time. Dark jeans, fitted black T-shirt, green hoodie left unzipped. Sanji appreciated both the restraint and the T-shirt.
Zoro’s attention shifted toward the building. His head lifted slightly. Sanji noticed exactly when he caught the scent. Human blood. Several heartbeats inside. The metallic edge of other vampires. Green flashed briefly across Zoro’s dark iris.
“This is dinner?” he asked.
“This is dinner.” Sanji opened the door. “Hungry?”
Zoro took a second longer than usual to answer. “Yeah.”
Good. Sanji had made sure he fed normally that morning. Teaching a depleted fledgling direct feeding would have been spectacularly irresponsible with his own hunger gnawing at him.
Inside, the attendant recognized Sanji and greeted him by name. Zoro’s attention moved across the lobby. Dark wood. Brass lamps. A staffed coatroom. Upholstered chairs occupied by people dressed for anything from cocktails to the theater.
“Mr. Roronoa,” the attendant said.
Zoro looked at him.
“Your registration cleared yesterday. I just need to see your identification.”
Zoro handed it over. Sanji had walked him through the donor-network paperwork earlier in the week. Medical disclosures. Feeding history. Emergency contact. Preferences he hadn’t known how to answer because Mihawk had never asked him what he preferred.
He had called Sanji twice while filling it out. Once to ask what preferred anatomical site meant. Once to ask whether feeding style meant swords. Sanji had laughed hard enough the second time that Zoro hung up on him.
The attendant returned his ID. “You’re all set.”
Zoro tucked it into his wallet.
They continued through the inner doors. The main lounge was busy without being crowded. Low conversation filled the room beneath piano music coming from somewhere out of sight. Vampires occupied most of the tables, though Sanji could pick out humans easily from their heartbeats.
Zoro could, too. His eye tracked briefly toward a woman laughing at the bar. Then to a man carrying two drinks between tables. Then toward a hallway where a human pulse approached from the other direction. His nostrils flared once.
Sanji touched two fingers lightly against his elbow.
Zoro’s attention snapped back to him.
“This is normal,” Sanji said quietly.
“What?”
“You’re doing fine.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“I know.”
That earned him a suspicious look.
Sanji led him toward the quieter dining rooms in the rear.
“What am I doing?” Zoro said.
“Meeting somebody.”
Zoro’s shoulders tightened.
“You’ve met humans before,” Sanji said.
“Not ones I’m supposed to bite.”
“That’s precisely why we’re here.”
A staff member showed them into a small private room furnished with three armchairs around a low table. Water waited beside sealed juice bottles and wrapped snacks for donors. A medical kit sat discreetly inside an open cabinet along one wall.
Zoro noticed it immediately. “What’s that for?”
“Exactly what it looks like,” Sanji said.
“Do people need it a lot?”
“Rarely. But it’s still there..”
Zoro nodded.
Sanji took the chair beside him rather than across the room. “You remember what we discussed?”
“Ask first. Agree how much. Ask where. Stop if they tell me. Stop if the pulse changes.”
“Good. And?”
“Check them after.”
“And if they change their mind before you bite?”
“Stop.”
“After you bite?”
“Stop.”
“If you’ve barely started?”
“Still stop.”
Sanji nodded. “Perfect.”
Zoro frowned at him. “I knew that.”
“I know you did.”
The door opened. A woman in her mid-thirties stepped inside with one of the coordinators. She wore jeans, ankle boots, and a loose red blouse pushed to her elbows. Her dark hair was gathered into a braid over one shoulder.
Human.
Her heartbeat quickened briefly when she saw Zoro. Sanji heard it. So did Zoro. His body reacted before his expression did. Green swept through his iris. His fangs dropped immediately. One moment his teeth were human. The next, the canines had extended fully.
Zoro clamped his mouth shut.
The woman smiled. “First time arranging your own?”
Zoro looked at Sanji.
Sanji kept his expression neutral. “You can answer her.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Elena.”
“Zoro.”
She offered her hand. Zoro looked at it for half a second before taking it. The pulse in her wrist jumped beneath his fingers. His grip loosened immediately.
Sanji had seen fledglings react in a dozen ways to a live donor. Some became restless. Some stared. Some talked too much because they were trying desperately to prove they weren’t hungry.
Zoro went very still.
Predatory stillness was different from relaxation. Every unnecessary movement disappeared. His breathing slowed even though neither of them needed much air. His attention narrowed onto Elena with enough intensity that a human might have mistaken it for staring.
Sanji recognized it. The virus did more than repair tissue. Hunger recruited every enhanced sense vampires possessed toward finding blood. Hearing separated a pulse from surrounding noise. Smell resolved skin, sweat, circulation. Low-light vision sharpened tiny movements. Centuries taught older vampires how to let those signals fade into the background. Zoro had two years. And only two direct feeds.
Elena sat opposite them. The coordinator remained near the door. “Elena’s approved for up to two hundred milliliters tonight. You two can agree on less. Her preference is shoulder or forearm.”
Zoro looked at Sanji again.
“You’re having dinner with her,” Sanji said. “Talk to her.”
Zoro faced Elena. “How much?”
She smiled slightly. “Straight to business.”
Zoro frowned. “Should I ask something else first?”
“You can ask whatever you want.”
Zoro thought. “You do this a lot?”
“Couple times a month,” she said.
“Why?”
Sanji stayed quiet.
Elena seemed unsurprised by the question. “Extra money. And I like it.”
“The bite?”
“Yes.”
Zoro’s brow furrowed. “Because of the saliva.”
“Partly.”
“You know it changes how you feel.”
“I do.”
“And you still want it.”
“I do.”
Something in Zoro’s shoulders eased. Sanji understood. This was probably the first donor Zoro had ever spoken to before feeding. The first who had personally told him yes.
“How much do you want to give me?” Zoro asked.
“One-fifty?”
Zoro looked toward Sanji.
“That’s fine,” Sanji said.
“Shoulder or arm?” Elena asked.
Zoro considered her for a moment. “Shoulder.”
“Works for me.”
Elena shifted in her chair and pulled the loose neckline of her blouse far enough aside to bare the top of her left shoulder.
Zoro’s entire body changed. It was subtle. A human might only have noticed that he stopped moving again. Sanji saw the rest. The green returned to his iris and stayed. His pupil widened. His nostrils flared. The tendons along his hands stood out as his fingers curled once against his thighs and released.
Elena’s pulse had accelerated. Zoro heard it. Sanji could tell by the slight turn of his head.
“Zoro,” Sanji said.
His eye moved to Sanji.
“Stay with me.”
“I am.”
Sanji leaned back in his chair. “Now ask.”
Zoro looked confused. “We already did.”
“You agreed on the amount and location. Ask if she’s ready for you to bite her.”
“Oh.” He faced Elena. “You ready?”
“Yes.”
Zoro moved. Fast. He caught himself halfway out of the chair. Sanji almost smiled. Young vampires.
Zoro slowed deliberately for the remaining distance and knelt in front of Elena instead. He hesitated with one hand hovering near her arm. “Can I hold you?”
“Yes.”
His hand settled around her upper arm. Carefully. Elena’s heartbeat jumped again.Zoro’s fangs showed between parted lips.
Sanji could smell the sudden increase in retroviral activity from where he sat. The metallic sweetness beneath Zoro’s normal scent sharpened as blood flow increased through the specialized tissue around his jaw and gums.
Zoro leaned closer. Stopped.
Sanji waited.
Zoro looked at Elena. “Still good?”
Her expression softened. “Still good.”
Then Zoro bit. Elena inhaled quickly. Zoro’s fingers tightened around her arm. For one second, every trace of his usual personality vanished. Instinct took over. His shoulders locked. His eye flared brilliant green. A low sound caught somewhere in his throat before he swallowed it.
Sanji became very attentive. Zoro had been hungry when Mihawk gave him his previous donors. Sanji had no idea how much control he had been expected to exercise or how closely anyone had watched him. Here, Zoro’s entire body wanted one thing.
Blood.
Fresh blood hit differently. Stored blood satisfied the virus perfectly well, but a living source arrived warm, oxygenated, full of hormones and salts and everything else storage gradually flattened. Every vampire knew the difference. A fledgling experienced it full on, while older vampires learned grew used to it.
Zoro swallowed. Again. His grip tightened another fraction.
“Elbow,” Sanji said quietly.
Zoro heard him. The grip loosened. Good. Elena exhaled, her muscles beginning to relax as Zoro’s saliva took effect. Her heartbeat remained quick but even. Zoro heard that, too.
Sanji watched his eye. Green. Focused. Hungry. But present.
“That’s it,” Sanji said. “Listen to her.”
Zoro swallowed again. Elena’s fingers flexed against the chair. Zoro immediately stopped drinking. He pulled his fangs free and leaned back. Too early.
Elena blinked down at him. “I’m okay.”
“You moved.”
“I did.”
Zoro looked at Sanji. “She moved,” he said.
Sanji had to suppress a smile. “People do.”
“I thought she was telling me to stop.”
“I wasn’t,” Elena said.
Zoro remained kneeling in front of her. “You sure?”
“Yes.”
“You want me to keep going?”
“Yes.”
Sanji felt something in his chest shift. Mihawk had taught him to stop when the pulse changed. Zoro had apparently converted that into stopping at absolutely anything that might conceivably mean something was wrong. There were worse errors for a young vampire to make.
“Go ahead,” Sanji said.
Zoro bent again. This time the bite was slower. His fangs slid back into the same wounds with enough precision to avoid tearing the skin further. Elena made a soft sound. Zoro froze.
She touched his shoulder. “Good sound.”
“Oh.”
Sanji covered his mouth with one hand.
Zoro shot him an irritated look without lifting his head.
Sanji lowered his hand. “Continue.”
Zoro did. The second stretch went more smoothly. Sanji watched him settle into the rhythm. Swallow. Listen. Breathe out of habit. Monitor Elena’s pulse. His grip stayed careful. The predatory focus remained. That wouldn’t disappear. It shouldn’t. Vampires were predators by biology even if civilization had given them appointment systems and consent forms. Control meant remaining capable of choice while the instincts were active. Zoro was learning.
After another minute, Elena’s pulse shifted. Only slightly. Zoro stopped instantly. He withdrew his fangs and sat back on his heels. “Done.”
Elena touched two fingers to her neck, then smiled. “That was fine.”
“You feel okay?”
“Very.”
“Dizzy?”
“A little floaty. Normal for me.”
Zoro looked at Sanji.
“Saliva,” Sanji reminded him.
“Right.”
Elena laughed softly. “You really are new.”
Zoro frowned. The coordinator stepped forward with gauze and a small dressing, but Elena waved her off and handled it herself.
Zoro remained nearby until she finished. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Yes.”
“How much was that?” Zoro asked the coordinator.
The coordinator checked the small monitoring display built into her tablet. “Just under one-fifty.”
Zoro nodded. Exactly what they had agreed.
Elena drank some water and opened one of the juice bottles. Zoro returned to his chair beside Sanji. His eye was still faintly green. His fangs had retracted, though Sanji could smell the virus working harder through him. Fresh blood was already being distributed, metabolic demand rising briefly as his body processed it.
“How do you feel?” Sanji asked.
Zoro thought about it. “Good.”
“Very descriptive.”
“Really good.”
“Better.”
Zoro wiped one thumb across his lower lip and looked at the trace of blood left there. His tongue caught it automatically. Sanji’s thoughts went somewhere profoundly unhelpful. He redirected them.
Elena finished half the juice and stood.
“Thank you,” Zoro said.
She paused. Sanji did, too.
Elena smiled. “You’re welcome.”
Zoro looked mildly uncertain, then added, “For letting me.”
Her expression changed. Softer. “You did fine.”
Zoro nodded.
Once she and the coordinator had left, the room became quiet. Zoro leaned back in the chair. “That was different.”
“From Mihawk’s donors.”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
Zoro thought about it. “I knew she wanted to be here.”
Sanji rested one ankle over his knee. “Good.”
“And I knew how much.”
“Yes.”
“She talked a lot.”
“She spoke perhaps twelve sentences.”
“That’s a lot more.”
Sanji’s amusement disappeared. Two anonymous humans delivered to him. No conversation. No independently established consent. Mihawk instructed him where to bite and when to stop.
“Yes,” Sanji said. “It is.”
Zoro rubbed his thumb over a scar on his opposite wrist. “What happens now?”
“Now?”
“Dinner.”
Sanji smiled. “That was your dinner.”
Zoro frowned. “You didn’t eat.”
“I was supervising.”
“That’s not a date.”
Sanji raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
“You asked me to dinner. I ate. You watched.”
A laugh escaped Sanji before he could stop it. Zoro remained completely serious.
“Fine,” Sanji said. “Would you like to watch me eat?”
“Yeah.”
There were at least six indecent ways Sanji could have answered that. He chose civility. “All right.”
They returned to the main lounge. Sanji spoke briefly to the host, who checked the evening roster. His own registration needed no explanation. He’d been coming here longer than some of the staff had been alive.
“Dining preference?” the host asked.
“Whatever’s available.”
Zoro leaned closer. “You don’t pick blood type?”
“For direct feeding? Usually I care more about the person.”
“Huh.”
The host glanced between them. “Together?”
Sanji opened his mouth.
Zoro answered first. “We’re on a date.”
The host’s professional expression survived admirably. Sanji’s did not. “Yes,” Sanji said. “We are.”
A donor named Daniel joined them in one of the semi-private alcoves twenty minutes later. Sanji made a point of doing exactly what he had asked Zoro to do. Introductions. Conversation. Amount. Preferred location. Confirmation. Then, immediately before he leaned toward Daniel’s wrist, Sanji asked, “Ready?”
“Yes.”
Sanji fed. He had done this more times than he could count. Centuries stripped away the frantic edge. His fangs descended because he allowed them to. His senses sharpened, but they didn’t overwhelm. He drank slowly. Stopped before Daniel needed to ask. Checked him afterward. Thanked him.
Across the small table, Zoro watched everything. Sanji thanked Daniel again when he left. Then he turned toward Zoro. “That,” he said, “is how boring competent feeding looks.”
Zoro shook his head. “Wasn’t boring.”
“No?”
“Your eye changes.” Zoro leaned his forearms on the table. “Gets brighter.”
“It does.”
“Didn’t know.” Zoro smiled. “Good date.”
Sanji laughed. “Your standards are appalling.”
“I got dinner.”
“So did I.”
“And I learned stuff.”
“You consider that romantic?”
Zoro nodded. “Yeah.”
Sanji should have expected the answer.
They left a little after ten. Outside, music escaped every time a bar door opened. A rideshare idled at the curb while three people argued over who had ordered it. Farther down the block, someone laughed loud enough for both vampires to hear it clearly above traffic.
Zoro walked beside Sanji toward the car.
“You know you can use the donor network without me now,” Sanji said.
“Yeah.”
“If the blood bank screws you again, you have another option.”
“I know.”
“You still keep emergency bags.”
“I know.”
“And you don’t wait until you’re sick.”
Zoro looked at him. “I know. I’d still call you. If something went wrong.”
The ridiculous warmth returned to Sanji’s chest. “That’s fine.”
“Okay.” Zoro continued walking beside him. “So what do vampires do after dinner?”
“Usually the same things humans do,” Sanji said.
“Dessert?”
Sanji laughed.
“Was that wrong?”
“No,” Sanji said, still smiling. “Dessert sounds good.”
By late October, Sanji had gone on four dates with Zoro.
After their vampire dinner, the third had been at a restaurant considerably nicer than the taco place, mostly because Sanji wanted to find out what Zoro would do when presented with a menu that required more than pointing at a photograph. Zoro had worn an ordinary black button-down Sanji strongly suspected he had bought specifically for the occasion. He had let Sanji order the appetizers, eaten everything placed in front of him, and spent fifteen minutes asking questions about a sauce built around browned butter and preserved lemon. The chef had eventually come out after hearing that somebody at table twelve wanted to know whether the acidity had been adjusted before or after emulsification.
Sanji had enjoyed himself far too much.
The fourth date had been a movie. Zoro picked an action film because it had swords in the trailer, then complained quietly through most of the fight choreography while consuming an enormous bucket of popcorn. Vampires gained nothing nutritional from regular food, but the body still processed it perfectly well, leaving taste and habit intact. Zoro seemed to approach eating with the same uncomplicated enthusiasm he applied to most things once somebody put them in front of him.
Sanji pretended he didn’t notice every time their hands met in the bucket. The lie had become harder to maintain by the fourth accidental touch.
By Thursday morning, Sanji had reached the conclusion that dating Zoro was either going surprisingly well or destroying his judgment in ways he would only recognize later.
At ten fourteen, his phone buzzed.
Sanji was at home, halfway through reading an article for class with coffee on the table beside him. Morning sunlight filled the windows at the far end of the room, safely filtered through UV-treated glass. The townhouse had been renovated around his needs years ago. Heavy curtains. Protective film. Interior routes between rooms that let him avoid direct exposure when necessary.
His phone buzzed again. He picked it up.
ZORO:
problem
Sanji sat straighter.
SANJI:
What kind?
The reply came quickly.
ZORO:
sun
His hand tightened around the phone.
SANJI:
Where are you?
A pause.
ZORO:
garden
Sanji stood.
SANJI:
Which garden?
ZORO:
big one
“Fantastic,” Sanji muttered.
He crossed the room and pulled the curtains farther closed.
SANJI:
What can you see? Any signs? Street names?
Nothing came back for almost a minute.
Sanji’s irritation gave way to something colder.
SANJI:
Zoro?
The answer appeared.
ZORO:
sun is moving in
Sanji was already heading upstairs.
SANJI:
Get as far into the shade as you can.
SANJI:
Cover your skin.
SANJI:
Send me a picture of anything around you.
He reached his bedroom and pulled open the wardrobe reserved for daylight emergencies. Vampires could survive the sun. For a while. The retrovirus degraded under sustained ultraviolet exposure, and once enough of it broke down, cellular regeneration followed. Short exposure hurt and left damage similar to a severe burn. Give the body blood and darkness afterward and most vampires recovered by the following night.
Hours in full sunlight were another matter.
Sanji had experienced that exactly once in three centuries. He remembered the sensation better than he wanted to. The pain had been secondary. The worst part was feeling the body come apart at the cellular level, every system losing cohesion by degrees. Being unstitched from the inside, like the thing holding him together gradually losing interest.
He had never repeated the experiment.
His phone buzzed. A photograph loaded. Mostly leaves. A stone wall. Part of a bench. Zoro’s knee. And, behind a flowering shrub, the upper half of a bronze statue.
Sanji enlarged the image. A woman holding some kind of bowl. Decorative stonework behind her. He had no idea where it was.
SANJI:
Anything else?
ZORO:
thats what i can see
Sanji swore. He saved the image and ran a reverse search on the statue. The first few results were useless. The fourth showed a tourism photograph. Grand Line Botanical Gardens.
Sanji opened the page, confirmed the statue, then checked the map. The gardens sprawled across several acres on the northern side of the city. Outdoor paths. Courtyards. Desert exhibits. Rose gardens. Decorative alcoves. Very little solid roofing.
Sanji typed:
SANJI:
I found you. Stay where you are. I’m coming.
ZORO:
ok
He shoved the phone into his pocket.
Daylight clothing for vampires had never been designed with dignity in mind. Sanji pulled on heavy trousers first, then a high-necked long-sleeved shirt, leather gloves, boots, and a long leather coat thick enough to block direct light. A fitted hood covered his hair and neck. The final piece went over the lower half of his face, leaving only a narrow strip around his eyes exposed behind dark UV-rated glasses. He caught himself in the mirror. He looked prepared to attend a very specific kind of club.
Sanji grabbed the largest umbrella he owned and headed downstairs. The protective blanket lived folded in the back of his car beside an emergency medical kit and two spare blood units. Heavy, UV-resistant, ugly as sin. It would work.
The drive took twelve minutes because Sanji broke several traffic laws. He turned into the botanical garden entrance, ignored the first available parking rows, and stopped in a restricted loading space close enough to the main gate that the security guard had already begun approaching before Sanji opened the door.
“I’ll move it shortly,” Sanji said.
“You can’t park there.”
“I’m aware.”
“Sir–”
Sanji opened the back door, grabbed the folded blanket, umbrella already braced over one shoulder, and headed toward the entrance.
The guard called after him. Sanji kept walking.
The woman at admissions gave him one hell of a look. Sanji set cash on the counter. “One adult.”
Her eyes moved over him again. “Costume event?” she asked.
“No.”
She handed him the ticket.
Sanji decided that was enough human interaction for the morning.
The gardens were beautiful. Under different circumstances, he might have appreciated them.
Late October had taken the edge off the heat, leaving the morning warm rather than brutal. Gravel paths wound between beds of desert flowers, cactus gardens, citrus trees, and shaded courtyards. Water trickled somewhere behind a stone wall. Volunteers in wide-brimmed hats moved between planting beds, and a family pushed a stroller toward the butterfly pavilion.
Sanji hurried through all of it under a black umbrella large enough for patio furniture. People stared. He ignored them.
The map on his phone placed the statue near a Mediterranean garden on the eastern side. Sanji cut across two connecting paths, passed a tiled fountain, and found the bronze woman from Zoro’s photograph.
Then he found Zoro.
The garden nook had probably been designed as a quiet place for visitors to sit. A curved stone wall enclosed a wooden bench beneath a trellis thick with vines. In summer, the leaves might have provided deeper cover. By late October, gaps had opened in the canopy.
Sunlight had already crossed half the bench.
Zoro had folded himself into the remaining shadow as tightly as a man his size could manage. His shoulders pressed into the stone corner. His knees were drawn up. He had his hoodie pulled over his head and his hands tucked into the sleeves. The toes of his shoes sat in direct sun.
Sanji’s chest tightened. “Move your feet.”
Zoro’s head lifted. His visible eye widened slightly as his attention traveled over Sanji’s clothes. “You look like someone from one of those clubs Mihawk liked to take me to.”
Sanji reached him and shoved the blanket into his arms. “Cover yourself.”
Zoro kept looking at him. “I’m serious.”
“I know. That makes it worse.”
He unfolded the blanket and pulled it over Zoro’s head and shoulders himself. Zoro disappeared beneath it. Sanji adjusted the umbrella to cover the bench while making sure every exposed inch of Zoro vanished beneath the heavy fabric. “Can you stand?”
“Yeah.”
“Any burns?”
“Hands a little.”
“Anything worse?”
“My foot hurts.”
Sanji crouched and checked. The toe of Zoro’s right shoe had been sitting in the sun long enough that heat had transferred through the material. The skin beneath would probably be red and painful, but manageable.
Sanji exhaled. “Stay under the blanket.”
“Okay.”
Getting Zoro out of the garden attracted even more attention than Sanji’s arrival. Sanji held the umbrella over both of them while Zoro walked beneath the blanket beside him, one hand gripping Sanji’s sleeve so he could follow without seeing much. The result looked deeply suspicious.
A child pointed. The mother redirected him immediately. An elderly couple stepped off the path to let them pass. The admissions woman saw them coming from twenty yards away and developed an expression Sanji chose never to interpret.
“Keep walking,” he muttered.
“I am.”
“You’re drifting.”
“I can’t see.”
“Then follow my arm.”
“I am.”
“You’re pulling me toward the cactus.”
“Your directions suck.”
Sanji nearly laughed. He hurried them through the gate, across the pavement, and to the car. The illegal parking spot remained miraculously unoccupied by a tow truck. Sanji opened the rear door. “Get in.”
Zoro climbed into the back seat with the blanket still wrapped around him.
“Stay covered.”
“I will.”
Sanji shut the door, folded the umbrella, and got into the driver’s seat as quickly as the sunlight allowed. Once inside, he locked the doors, threw the umbrella onto the passenger floor, and started the engine.
From beneath the blanket in the back seat, Zoro said, “If you want to do that club stuff to me, too, I wouldn’t mind.”
Sanji’s hand slipped on the gearshift. Heat shot straight through him at the offer, immediate and embarrassingly enthusiastic. He tightened his grip on the wheel before his imagination could get any further. “Your address.”
The blanket rustled as Zoro gave it to him. Sanji entered it into the navigation system.
“You heard me, right?” Zoro asked.
“I heard you.”
“Okay.”
“Stay under the blanket.”
“I am.”
Sanji pulled out of the parking space. He drove with both hands on the wheel. Very firmly.
Zoro’s apartment was farther south than Sanji had expected, in a part of Grand Line City where the streets grew narrower and the storefronts had more security bars than decorative lighting. Older apartment buildings crowded close together between small markets, laundromats, repair shops, and a pawn shop with faded lettering across its awning.
Sanji glanced at the navigation display, then at the neighborhood. His irritation acquired another target. Naturally Zoro lived here. Rent was probably cheap. The building itself had sun-faded stucco, exterior stairs, and an entry door with three layers of old paint around the frame. Somebody had left a bicycle chained to the railing with both wheels missing.
Sanji pulled into the narrow covered parking area behind the building. “Wait.”
“Okay.”
Sanji got out first, opened the umbrella again despite the partial shade, then pulled open the rear door. Zoro emerged beneath the blanket.
They crossed the short distance to the building entrance with considerably less spectacle than they had created at the botanical garden.
The hallway inside smelled faintly of laundry detergent, old carpet, and somebody cooking onions two apartments away. But it was inside and away from the sun. Safe.
Zoro pulled the blanket off. His hair stood up in several directions from static. The hoodie remained pulled high around his neck. His face looked fine.
Sanji checked his hands. A little red across the backs. Nothing serious.
Zoro held the blanket out. “Thanks.”
Sanji took it and finally pulled off his hood. Cool hallway air reached his face. “How did you manage to get yourself trapped in a botanical garden at ten in the morning?”
Zoro shifted the strap of his bag higher on his shoulder. “Got turned around too close to sunrise. Couldn’t find my way out.”
Sanji rubbed a hand over his face. “Do you understand how dangerous that was?”
“Yeah.”
“No, you understand that sunlight hurts. I’m asking whether you understand what prolonged exposure actually does.”
Zoro’s expression sharpened in the way he had when he was learning something new.
Sanji lowered the blanket to his side. “The virus is what keeps your cells regenerating. Sunlight damages it faster than it can repair itself. A few minutes gives you burns and pain. Longer exposure starts interfering with regeneration everywhere at once.”
Zoro listened.
“Hours can kill you.”
His brow tightened slightly.
“It doesn’t just hurt,” Sanji continued. “Your body starts breaking down because the thing keeping it stable stops doing its job properly. You lose healing first. Then tissue starts taking damage faster than you can repair it.”
Zoro absorbed that. “That sounds bad.”
Sanji stared at him. “It is bad.”
“I knew the sun was something to avoid, but not to that extent.”
“You knew the three-word version Mihawk bothered to give you.”
Zoro’s mouth flattened slightly.
Sanji pushed on before his anger could redirect the conversation. “And sunlight is only one thing. You’re harder to kill than a human. Harder is not the same as impossible.”
“I know.”
“You bought expired laboratory blood.”
“Once.”
“You rationed yourself into flu symptoms.”
“Also once.”
“You wandered into a botanical garden at sunrise.”
Zoro frowned. “That’s three things.”
“Yes, thank you for counting.” Sanji pointed at him. “Bad blood can carry contaminants your body still has to deal with. Feeding directly from humans in public means cameras, witnesses, police reports, and humans eventually noticing that the man biting somebody has fangs.”
Zoro nodded.
“And regeneration has limits. A broken bone heals quickly. A severed limb is still a severed limb unless medically reattached. Enough trauma at once can overwhelm the virus. Blood loss matters. Fire matters. Decapitation matters.”
Zoro’s eyebrows rose slightly. “You can survive that?”
“Sometimes.”
“Huh.”
“Don’t make that your takeaway.”
“I wasn’t going to try it.”
Sanji narrowed his eyes.
Zoro raised both hands. “Seriously.”
“Good.”
Zoro leaned one shoulder against the hallway wall. “Wish I had my notebook.”
Sanji paused. “You want to take notes on ways you can die.”
“I’ll remember better.”
Something in Sanji’s irritation softened. “Fine. I’ll text it to you.”
“All of it?”
“Yes.”
“Sun exposure times, too?”
Sanji sighed. “Approximate ranges. It depends on UV levels, age, feeding status, previous exposure, and how well integrated the virus is.”
Zoro nodded. “Okay.”
Sanji already knew he would write every word down. He adjusted the folded blanket under his arm.
Zoro’s hands had returned to their normal color. His eye was clear. His posture had loosened now that they were safely inside. He was fine.
Sanji wanted to put both arms around him anyway. He wanted to pull Zoro against his chest and hold him there until the memory of finding his feet in the sunlight stopped replaying. He wanted physical proof that the idiot remained intact. The instinct hit hard enough to annoy him.
Sanji tightened his grip on the blanket instead. “I’ll send the information tonight.”
“Okay.”
“And put something in your car.”
“For sun?”
“Yes. Blanket. Heavy coat. Anything that blocks UV.”
“I can do that.”
“Good.”
Zoro smiled faintly. “Thanks for coming.”
Sanji’s chest tightened again. “Try making it unnecessary next time.”
“I’ll try.”
Sanji turned toward the exit before he did something embarrassing and affectionate.
Behind him, Zoro called, “The club thing was a real offer.”
Sanji kept walking. “I heard you the first time, marimo.”
Zoro laughed behind him.
Sanji pushed through the building door, pulled the hood back over his head, and opened the umbrella. He had rescued Zoro from sunlight. He had delivered him home. He had explained several ways vampires could die. That should’ve been enough emotional activity for one morning.
Wanting to go back upstairs and kiss him senseless could wait until after dark.
Five days after the botanical garden incident, Sanji followed through on his promise to send Zoro the information they had talked through in the hallway.
What began as a more organized version of the sunlight explanation quickly expanded. Exposure times. How feeding status affected UV damage. Storage limits. Contaminated blood. Public feeding and surveillance cameras. Regeneration thresholds. Fire. Blood loss. What to do if a limb was severed badly enough to require reattachment.
Some of it repeated what Sanji had already told him. Zoro wanted it written down anyway. Then the questions started.
ZORO:
if the virus repairs muscle faster than tendon can you make an injury worse by moving too soon
Sanji stopped halfway through making coffee.
SANJI:
Yes. Depending on the injury.
A minute later:
ZORO:
what if you get poisoned but the poison doesn't damage the virus
Sanji had to sit down for that one.
Some of Zoro’s questions covered situations Sanji had encountered personally. Others made him realize he had spent years relying on experience without ever bothering to articulate the mechanics behind it.
By midnight, Zoro had reached electrocution. Sanji answered that, too. He told himself the entire exchange was practical. Zoro needed information. Sanji had it. Sending twenty-three messages about the circumstances under which a vampire could lose consciousness from blood loss was simply responsible mentoring.
Tuesday night, Sanji stopped at Crimson & Co. on his way home. Maple Street was busy despite the late hour. Restaurant patios remained open beneath heaters. Cars moved slowly through the intersection, headlights sliding over pavement still dark from a brief evening rain.
Sanji saw Zoro before he reached the café door. He stood near the brick wall beside the entrance, sword case over one shoulder, talking to a woman. Human. Dark hair cut at her jaw. Glasses. Fitted jacket over a white blouse. She carried a long narrow case of her own, smaller than Zoro’s but unmistakably made for a sword.
Sanji slowed. The first thing he noticed was how close Zoro stood to her. The second was Zoro’s expression – animated, interested. Happy. His hands moved while he talked, one occasionally reaching toward the sword case to indicate something. The woman answered with the same energy, leaning toward him to see where he pointed.
Zoro smiled broadly at something she said.
Dimples.
Sanji stopped several storefronts away.
The woman touched Zoro’s forearm.
Something unpleasant tightened in Sanji’s chest.
It was ridiculous. Zoro was allowed to have friends. He was allowed to talk to women. Humans and vampires dated each other all the time, and Sanji had certainly never assumed Zoro’s interest began and ended with vampire men simply because they had been seeing each other.
Seeing the possibility in front of him proved considerably less academic.
Sanji had survived wars, revolutions, epidemics, terrible fashion, worse lovers, and several complete changes in social convention. He didn't stand on sidewalks feeling jealous because a man he had gone on four dates with was smiling at somebody else.
The woman laughed. Zoro leaned closer.
Sanji’s jaw tightened. Zoro stood too close to everyone. Sanji knew that. Zoro crowded people at counters, leaned over shoulders to read things, sat close enough to bump knees, and had spent half a movie with his arm pressed against Sanji’s because apparently two inches of empty armrest had never occurred to him. This was the same. Exactly the same.
The woman said something Sanji couldn’t hear. Zoro’s face brightened again.
Sanji hated that.
He corrected himself immediately. He hated nothing. He was fine. Completely fine.
Sanji turned around and kept walking. He got coffee somewhere else.
The next evening, he arrived at class eleven minutes early and chose a seat farther back than usual. The room filled gradually around him. Backpacks dropped beneath desks. Laptops opened. Somebody near the front complained about an assignment while another student tried to peel the label off a water bottle in one continuous strip.
Sanji arranged his notebook and pen. He had slept perfectly well. He had spent very little time thinking about Zoro and the woman outside Crimson & Co. Almost none. The fact that he knew exactly where she had touched Zoro’s arm meant nothing.
Zoro arrived two minutes later. Sanji heard the sword case before he saw him, the faint click of the hardware as Zoro moved down the aisle.
“Hey,” Zoro said.
“Hello.”
Zoro stopped beside the row. Sanji kept his attention on his notebook. A second passed. Then another.
“You sitting here now?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I felt like it.”
Zoro shifted the sword case off his shoulder. “Okay.”
The answer should have relieved Sanji. Instead it irritated him. Zoro took the seat beside him. Sanji’s pen tightened between his fingers.
The instructor began with a review of exposure-control procedures before moving into incident documentation. Sanji took notes with unnecessary depth. Dates. Terminology. Reporting sequence. Every heading underlined neatly.
Beside him, Zoro wrote steadily for several minutes. Then his pen stopped. A few seconds later, Zoro leaned closer. “What does contemporaneous mean?”
“At the time it happened.”
“Okay.”
The pen started again. Five minutes later, Zoro shifted in his seat. “What’s wrong?”
Sanji kept his eyes on the front. “Nothing.”
“You’re being weird.”
“I’m taking notes.”
The instructor continued discussing documentation standards. Sanji copied down a sentence he already understood. Beside him, Zoro stayed unusually still.
During the break, students began filtering into the hallway. Zoro remained seated.
Sanji closed his notebook. “I’m getting coffee.”
“I’ll come,” Zoro said.
“I can manage.”
Zoro frowned.
Sanji stood.
Zoro stood, too. “Sanji.”
“What?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong.”
Zoro studied him. Sanji hated that expression. Zoro’s face became unusually open when he was confused, all the blunt certainty dropping away while he tried to locate whatever piece of information he had missed.
“You’ve been pissed at me since you got here,” Zoro said.
“I’m not pissed at you.”
“You are.”
“I said I’m not.”
Zoro’s nostrils flared slightly and tilted his head. “You smell different when you’re lying.”
The sentence landed with devastating efficiency.
“Excuse me?” Sanji said tightly.
“Your scent changes.”
“My scent.”
“Yeah.”
“When I lie.”
“Yeah.” Zoro frowned, concentrating. “Gets sharper.”
Sanji suddenly remembered every conversation they had ever had. Every sarcastic dismissal. Every nothing. Every I’m fine. Every time he had insisted something didn’t matter while standing close enough for Zoro to smell him.
Wonderful. A lifetime of social skill defeated by a nose.
Sanji started toward the door. “Forget it.”
Zoro moved into the aisle with him. “You said nothing was wrong.”
“And now I’m saying drop it.”
“That means something is wrong.”
Sanji stopped. A pair of students passed behind them, talking about an assignment. He lowered his voice. “Not everything requires investigation.”
Zoro’s expression tightened. “I’m trying to understand.”
“I know.”
“Then tell me.”
Sanji’s irritation flared because that was exactly what Zoro always did. He asked. Directly. Sanji, meanwhile, had watched Zoro talk to a woman for less than two minutes and constructed an entire romantic interpretation without asking one question. He disliked the comparison intensely.
“There’s nothing worth discussing here,” Sanji said.
Zoro’s eye narrowed. Sanji could practically see him smell the lie again. He turned toward the hallway. “I’m getting coffee.”
This time Zoro stayed behind.
The vending-machine coffee was terrible. Sanji drank it anyway.
When he returned, Zoro had opened his notebook but hadn’t written anything.
The instructor called the class back before either of them spoke again. The second half went badly. Sanji understood every word of the lecture and retained almost none of it. Zoro asked two questions of the instructor and none of Sanji. It should have been a relief. It wasn’t.
His awareness of Zoro had become unbearable. The quiet scratch of his pen. The shift of his sleeve against the desk. The faint metallic sweetness of the retrovirus beneath soap and leather.
Sanji spent most of the hour angry at himself. He also had no claim on Zoro beyond four dates and an increasingly intimate collection of conversations. They had kissed exactly zero times. They had discussed exclusivity exactly zero times. Zoro had every right to stand outside a vampire café talking closely with an attractive woman. Sanji understood all of that.
He was still jealous.
The instructor dismissed them at nine thirty. Sanji packed quickly. Zoro had barely closed his notebook before Sanji stood.
“Sanji–”
“I’ve got to be somewhere.”
“You said you were going home,” Zoro pointed out.
Sanji slung his bag over his shoulder. “I changed my mind.”
Zoro’s expression shifted. Confusion first. Then something quieter.
Hurt.
Zoro looked as though he had reached for something familiar and found it gone. Sanji hated that more than the jealousy. He also had no intention of having this conversation while still irritated enough to make it worse. “I’ll see you next class.”
Zoro frowned. “We don’t have class until next week.”
“I know.”
“You usually walk out with me.”
Sanji tightened his grip on the bag strap. “I’m aware.”
He left.
The hallway was mostly empty. Fluorescent lights reflected off the polished floor, and the building had already settled into its late-night hush. Sanji took the stairs quickly and pushed through the glass doors into the cool October air.
Behind him, the door opened again.
“Sanji!”
He kept walking.
Zoro called his name once more. “Sanji!”
Sanji crossed the courtyard without responding.
By the time he reached his car, he felt terrible. He got inside, shut the door, and sat in the dark for several seconds before starting the engine. The problem had very little to do with the woman outside Crimson & Co. The problem was that Sanji cared who Zoro smiled at. He cared who stood close to him. He cared enough to become cold and petty rather than ask one simple question. Worse, Zoro had noticed immediately.
Sanji rested his forehead against the steering wheel.
“You smell different when you’re lying,” he muttered.
The bastard had no idea what kind of weapon he had just discovered.
Sanji suspected he was going to spend the next several days learning exactly how much damage it could do.
Sanji managed two days of impeccable distance. He answered Zoro’s messages when they were about class. He responded to questions about vampires with concise, useful information. He didn’t ask what Zoro was doing. He didn’t suggest coffee. He didn’t stop by Crimson & Co. at any hour when there was a reasonable chance Zoro might be there.
It was mature. Controlled. Completely sustainable.
By Friday evening, Sanji hated it.
The community college library was quieter than usual, the kind of quiet that only happened late in the week when most students had either gone home or given up on whatever assignment had brought them there. Rain had passed through earlier, leaving the windows streaked and the walkways outside dark beneath the lamps. The second floor smelled faintly of paper, carpet, and coffee from the café downstairs.
Sanji had come to return two books and pick up an article the instructor had recommended. He had no plans to stay.
That lasted until he rounded a corner near the west stairwell and walked directly into Zoro. They collided shoulder first. Sanji staggered half a step. Zoro barely moved.
“Watch where you’re going,” Sanji snapped automatically.
“You walked into me,” Zoro said.
“You were standing in the middle of the hall.”
“I was trying to find the elevators.”
Sanji glanced toward the sign on the wall beside them.
WEST STAIRWELL – FACULTY OFFICES – ARCHIVES
The elevators were on the opposite side of the building.
Sanji exhaled through his nose. “Why are you over here?”
“I took the wrong stairs.”
“How do you take the wrong stairs when you’re looking for an elevator?”
“I thought they connected,” Zoro said with a frown.
Sanji closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, Zoro had shifted the sword case higher on his shoulder. He wore a dark hoodie over a black T-shirt, the hood bunched at the back of his neck. His hair was still damp at the ends from the rain. A few drops had darkened the fabric near one shoulder.
Sanji noticed all of that immediately. Impeccable distance. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you where the elevators are.”
Zoro didn’t move.
Sanji took two steps before realizing he was still standing there. “What?”
Zoro glanced toward the stairwell door beside them, then reached for the handle. “What are you doing?”
“Taking a break.”
“From being lost?”
“Yeah.”
He pushed the door open and went inside. Sanji stared after him. Then he followed, because apparently several days of careful emotional restraint hadn’t done anything to improve his judgment.
The stairwell was concrete and cinder block, painted the same institutional beige as most of the building. Fluorescent fixtures buzzed overhead. The narrow window in the exterior wall showed only rain-dark brick and a slice of the parking lot beyond it. A metal handrail ran down both sides of the stairs, cool and slightly chipped from years of use.
Zoro sat on the third stair and rested his forearms on his knees.
Sanji remained standing for several seconds.
He was tired. Tired of being irritated. Tired of avoiding Zoro. Tired of thinking about the woman outside Crimson & Co. Tired of replaying the expression on Zoro’s face when Sanji walked away after class.
He sat beside him. The concrete step was cold through his trousers.
Zoro glanced over. Sanji leaned his elbows on his knees and stared at the closed door in front of him.
For a while, the only sounds were the fluorescent hum and muted footsteps somewhere beyond the stairwell door. Then Zoro asked, “Why were you upset?”
Sanji rubbed his thumb against the edge of his ring finger. “I wasn’t.”
“You were.”
“I was tired.”
“You were pissed off about something.”
Sanji turned his head. Zoro’s expression remained calm. There was no accusation in it. Sanji opened his mouth. The automatic denial was ready. He could feel it. Then he remembered Wednesday.
You smell different when you’re lying.
Sanji shut his mouth again. Zoro waited. For once, Sanji decided not to make both of them work harder than necessary. “Yeah, I was.”
Zoro’s brow tightened slightly. Sanji looked toward the stairwell window. A car moved through the lot outside, headlights briefly washing across the wet pavement. “I saw you outside Crimson & Co. Tuesday.”
Zoro nodded.
“With a woman.”
Another nod.
“You were standing very close.”
Zoro’s eyebrows rose. Sanji immediately resented having to continue. “You seemed interested in her.”
Zoro’s expression changed. First confusion. Then recognition. Then something Sanji could only interpret as disbelief. “You thought I was interested in Tashigi?”
Sanji hated hearing the name. “Yes.”
Zoro stared at him for a moment. Then his brows drew together again. “She asked me about the swords.”
Sanji pressed his lips together. “Okay.”
“I like talking about the swords.”
“I know.”
“She knew the difference between my blades.”
Sanji turned toward him.
Zoro had started warming to the subject already. “She recognized Wado before I said anything. Most people don’t.”
There it was – the expression Sanji had seen outside the café. The brightened eye. The animated face. The easy enthusiasm.
“She practices kendo,” Zoro continued. “She’s been trying to find people who know more about the classical circuit.”
Sanji gave him a tired glance. “You can stop defending yourself.”
“I’m explaining.”
“You don’t need to.”
Zoro fell quiet.
Sanji leaned back slightly against the wall. The concrete was cold against his shoulders. “I misread it.”
“Yeah. You did.”
Sanji turned his head. Zoro’s expression was completely sincere. Sanji almost laughed. Then Zoro shifted, angling himself a little more toward him and the amusement vanished.
There was a directness Zoro used when something mattered enough to deserve his full attention. Sanji had seen it during lectures, during discussions about swords, during the botanical garden aftermath when Sanji explained exactly how sunlight could kill him.
Zoro used it now. “I’m interested in you,” he said.
Sanji’s thoughts stopped.
Zoro continued. “Just you.”
Sanji felt abruptly, profoundly stupid.
The stairwell seemed suddenly smaller. Sanji heard the fluorescent fixture overhead. The faint rattle of air through the vent. His own breathing.
Zoro frowned slightly. “I thought that was obvious.”
Sanji stared at him. Obvious.
knew had spent three hundred years learning how people concealed interest. He knew flirtation delivered through implication. Strategic distance. Manufactured indifference. Carefully chosen invitations. Touches designed to seem accidental. Entire conversations in which nobody said what they wanted because saying it would ruin the game. He was very good at those games.Zoro didn’t appear to know they existed. Or perhaps he simply refused to play them. He’d asked Sanji to dinner because he’d learned asking someone to dinner was a date. He’d said he wanted another date because he wanted another date. He’d offered sex because he wanted sex. And now he sat on a community college stairwell and told Sanji, plainly, exactly where his interest was directed.
Sanji rubbed a hand over his face. “You’re very difficult to deal with.”
“I thought I was easy.”
“That’s part of the problem.”
Zoro considered Sanji’s words. Sanji could almost see Zoro deciding whether it was worth asking for clarification. Thankfully, he let it go.
For several seconds they sat together in silence. The tension that had followed Sanji all week had begun to drain out of him. What remained was embarrassment, relief, and an increasingly inconvenient amount of affection.
He glanced sideways. Zoro had relaxed against the wall, one knee raised, forearm resting across it. His sword case leaned beside him. Damp green hair stuck up around his ears, and the three gold earrings shifted slightly when he moved.
Sanji had been jealous of a woman named Tashigi. A woman asking about swords. He felt stupid enough to laugh. So he did.
Zoro turned toward him. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s usually a lie.”
Sanji laughed harder. “Don’t start.”
Zoro smiled.
The dimples appeared.
Sanji was gone. Completely. Hopelessly. He’d known this was becoming a problem for weeks. Apparently the problem had progressed into something considerably worse while he was busy denying it.
Zoro waited until Sanji recovered. “We good now?”
Sanji looked at him. Simple question. Simple answer. “Yes.”
Zoro’s smile widened.
Sanji felt his remaining dignity pack a bag and leave.
“Good,” Zoro said. He stood and picked up the sword case.
Sanji remained seated for another second. Then he sighed and got up. “Come on.”
“Where?”
“The elevators.”
“Oh.”
Sanji opened the stairwell door. Zoro followed him into the hallway. They made it twenty feet before Zoro started toward the faculty offices.
Sanji caught the back of his hoodie and redirected him without breaking stride. “This way.”
“I was going this way.”
“You absolutely weren’t.”
Zoro smiled again.
Sanji kept hold of the hoodie for several more steps than necessary.
This time, he didn’t bother pretending he had a practical reason.
The final exam started at seven and, according to the instructor, would take most of the two-hour class period.
He settled into the seat beside Zoro, set his pens beside the exam booklet, and glanced toward the clock above the whiteboard. The classroom had taken on the strained silence peculiar to final exams. Someone in the back was already bouncing a knee hard enough to shake the row of desks. A nursing student two seats over had lined up three pencils with the precision of surgical instruments. The instructor moved between the aisles distributing packets while reminding them for the third time to put their phones away.
“Begin.”
Pages turned throughout the room.
Sanji worked steadily through the first section. Multiple choice. Definitions. Exposure routes. Incident procedures. Storage requirements. Several questions repeated material he could have answered before taking the course, although he had learned enough over the course to keep the class from feeling entirely redundant.
Beside him, Zoro moved quickly. Zoro answered the scenario questions first. Sanji could tell from the way he flipped forward three pages, stopped, and began writing. Then he came back to the vocabulary section and sat motionless for long enough that Sanji knew exactly what had happened. Clinical terminology. His mortal enemy.
Sanji continued with his own test. He certainly didn’t notice Zoro cross out one answer, write something shorter underneath it, then circle a key word.
Sanji finished a page. Zoro turned another. A short-answer question appeared near the bottom of Sanji’s next sheet: Explain the appropriate response following a potential occupational exposure involving a contaminated sharp.
Sanji wrote the textbook answer. Beside him, Zoro wrote considerably less. He caught it out of the corner of his eye.
STOP. WASH. REPORT.
Sanji pressed his lips together. Structurally sound. Completely correct. Entirely uninterested in the vocabulary the instructor had spent eight weeks teaching them.
He turned his own page. Another question required them to identify the correct term for an inanimate object capable of carrying infectious material. Sanji wrote fomite.
Zoro stopped writing. Sanji felt the pause beside him. He kept his attention on his own paper. Several seconds passed. Then Zoro wrote something. Sanji absolutely didn’t look.
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Outside the windows, the late-October night had settled over campus. Reflections turned the glass into dark mirrors, showing rows of tired students hunched over their desks. A custodian pushed a cart slowly through the hallway beyond the classroom door.
By eight fifteen, Sanji had finished. He reviewed the exam once, changed one answer, and stood to turn it in. Zoro kept working.
Sanji left the classroom and debated on getting a terrible coffee from the vending machine while he waited in the hall. The machine hummed beside a bulletin board crowded with tutoring flyers and notices for spring registration. He made it as far as putting a hand in his pocket for change before remembering the taste of the last cup and deciding he had suffered enough for one evening.
A few students emerged one at a time as they finished, each wearing some variation of relief or dread. One woman immediately pulled out her phone and started checking an answer. Another leaned against the wall and announced to nobody in particular that she never wanted to hear the word pathogen again. Sanji stayed near the classroom door, pretending he wasn’t listening for the familiar click of Zoro’s sword case.
Zoro finally came out several minutes later with his exam finished. They joined the slow migration toward the exit. Students gathered in the hallway afterward, comparing answers despite repeated claims that they didn’t want to know how badly they had done. Someone complained loudly about fomites.
“You put contaminated object, didn’t you?” Sanji said.
Zoro glanced over. “How do you know?”
“I don’t.”
“You were looking.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You knew what I wrote.”
“Educated guess.”
Zoro’s mouth curved. “You were looking.”
Sanji pushed open the glass door. “Prove it.”
Cool night air met them outside. The campus had already begun emptying for the evening, leaving scattered groups near the walkways and a few students heading toward the parking lots. Path lights cut across the lawns, and the fountain in the central courtyard ran loudly now that daytime traffic had disappeared.
They walked side by side toward Sanji’s usual lot. Zoro shoved his hands into his hoodie pockets. “I might take another class next semester.”
Sanji glanced toward him. “You voluntarily want to do this again?”
“Yeah.” He sounded almost pleased about it.
Sanji had created a monster. “Which class?”
“Found one called Conflict Resolution.”
“That isn’t a fighting class.”
Zoro frowned. “Then why call it that?”
“Because most people resolve conflict without swords.”
“Still related though,” Zoro said after a moment.
“You’re technically right.”
Zoro smiled and pulled out his phone. “I found a chicken place that looks good.”
“Where?” Sanji said.
Zoro studied the screen. “Somewhere close.”
Sanji’s steps slowed. “What’s it called?”
Zoro frowned. “Pollo something. I can find it again and then text you.”
“I got it.” Sanji pulled out his own phone, searched restaurants within a few miles of campus and found a small chicken place less than ten minutes away. He showed Zoro. “This?”
Zoro nodded. “Yeah, that one.”
Sanji pocketed his phone. “We’ll take my car.”
“Okay.”
They headed into the parking lot. Most of the students had already cleared out, leaving broad stretches of empty pavement beneath the tall lamps. The air had cooled enough that Sanji could see faint condensation gathering on a few windshields. Out on the main road, a bus pulled away from the curb with a low diesel rumble, then the lot settled again. Their footsteps carried farther than they should have between the rows of parked cars.
Sanji’s car sat alone toward the back beneath one of the lamps, dark paint reflecting the white glow overhead. A shopping cart someone had abandoned near the curb rattled slightly when the breeze caught it. Zoro walked beside him with his sword case over one shoulder, close enough that their sleeves brushed once when they crossed between rows.
They had nearly reached Sanji’s row when Zoro asked, “Are you ever going to kiss me?”
Sanji stopped abruptly. Zoro stopped beside him and turned fully toward him. The sword case shifted against his shoulder, the metal fittings giving a faint click. Under the nearest lamp, Sanji could make out every detail of his expression – the slight lift of his brows, the faint green catch in his open eye, and the complete absence of embarrassment over what he’d just asked. His expression was completely open. The same directness he brought to everything that mattered.
Sanji swallowed. “Is that what you want?”
“Yes.”
One word. Immediate. Certain.
They were vampires. The darkness gave Sanji every detail a human might have missed from several feet away. The faint green luminescence in Zoro’s open eye. The anticipation held around his mouth. The tiny shift of his weight toward Sanji. The earnest hope written clear across his features.
Sanji had spent centuries becoming very good at reading hidden motives. Zoro kept refusing to have any.
Sanji stepped closer. His hand rose to Zoro’s jaw, thumb settling beneath the scar along his cheek. Zoro leaned into the touch with enough ease to send a rush through Sanji’s chest.
Then Sanji kissed him.
Zoro answered immediately. There was none of the awkward uncertainty Sanji might have expected from someone capable of misunderstanding nearly every social convention placed in front of him. Zoro knew how to kiss. Very well.
His hand settled at Sanji’s waist and pulled him closer. Sanji’s other hand caught the front of Zoro’s hoodie. The first contact had been careful; the second wasn’t. Zoro tilted his head and deepened it, warm mouth moving against Sanji’s.
The change in him came almost at once. The metallic sweetness of the retrovirus sharpened beneath his usual scent, and green flashed across his dark iris when his eye opened briefly. Then one of his fangs pressed against Sanji’s lower lip.
Zoro pulled back a fraction. “Sorry.”
Sanji caught the front of his hoodie before he could go any farther. “Don’t be.”
His own fangs had started to descend. Zoro noticed. Something pleased passed over his face before Sanji kissed him again.
This time they both adjusted for the fangs without thinking much about it. Sanji had centuries of practice controlling his; Zoro had considerably less, and his kept extending whenever Sanji pulled him closer. Sanji could feel the difference every time their mouths shifted, along with the increased blood flow beneath Zoro’s skin and the stronger retroviral scent that came with it.
The heightened senses made everything else unfairly precise. Coffee still lingered faintly on Zoro’s tongue. Sanji could hear the change in his breathing, feel each movement of the hand at his waist, catch the quiet sound Zoro made when Sanji tightened his grip on the hoodie.
That nearly finished him.
When they finally broke apart, Zoro stayed close enough that their foreheads nearly touched. He hummed happily. “Been waiting for that.”
Sanji was still trying to remember how language worked. “What else have you been waiting for?”
Zoro’s mouth curved. “For you to take me home and fuck me senseless.”
Sanji’s thoughts dropped right into his boxers. His car sat twenty feet away. He glanced toward it, then back at Zoro. “How about the back seat?”
Zoro grinned. “Wouldn’t mind that either.”
Sanji dragged him into another kiss.
Zoro came willingly, one hand catching at Sanji’s waist while the other slid around the back of his neck. His fangs had dropped again almost immediately. Sanji felt one graze his lower lip, careful this time, and the metallic sweetness of Zoro’s retrovirus sharpened with the increased blood flow beneath his skin.
Sanji’s own fangs answered.
That seemed to please Zoro. Green flashed across his dark iris before his eye closed again, and he pulled Sanji closer until there was no space left between them. Sanji could hear everything with irritating clarity – the quickened rhythm of Zoro’s pulse, the scrape of fabric beneath his hands, the faint hitch in Zoro’s breathing whenever Sanji kissed him harder.
The parking lot had gone mostly quiet around them. A car passed on the street beyond campus. Across the lot, a shopping cart rattled against a curb. Neither sound mattered enough to make Sanji move away.
Zoro backed him toward the car. Sanji’s shoulder met the side of it with a muted thump. “Careful.”
“You heal.”
“That’s not permission to dent my car.”
Zoro grinned against his mouth.
Sanji kissed the grin away.
His hand slid beneath the hem of Zoro’s hoodie, finding warm skin at his waist. Zoro made that same low, pleased sound again, and Sanji’s restraint deteriorated another degree. The virus made every point of contact too easy to track – fingertips, mouth, the pressure of Zoro’s body against his, the faint vibration of that sound through his chest.
Zoro’s fangs caught lightly against Sanji’s lip again. This time Sanji deliberately pressed closer, as the taste of blood joined into the kiss.
Zoro stopped. Sanji opened his eyes. The green in Zoro’s iris had brightened. “You okay?”
Sanji almost laughed. Even halfway to losing whatever remained of his judgment, Zoro stopped to ask. “Yes.”
That was all Zoro needed. He kissed Sanji again with considerably less restraint.
Sanji got the back door open somehow. He couldn’t later remember doing it. One moment they were pressed against the side of the car, and the next Zoro was climbing backward into the rear seat while keeping one hand knotted in Sanji’s shirt.
“This is a terrible idea,” Sanji murmured.
“Yeah.”
“You agree?”
“Still doing it.”
Sanji followed him inside and pulled the door shut behind them. The lot dimmed to vague shapes and reflected lights. Zoro’s vampire vision adjusted instantly; Sanji saw the exact moment his attention settled back on him.
Then Zoro smiled.
Dimples.
Sanji dove in and kissed him again.
The windows offered some privacy, but not enough to make any of this a good idea. The lot was mostly empty, the campus quieter by the minute, and anyone walking past the wrong row would still have an excellent view.
Sanji didn’t care. Zoro’s hoodie came half off, Sanji’s shirt came untucked, and things deteriorated rapidly into the sort of behavior that could get them arrested for public indecency if they were caught.
Much later, they ended up tangled together across the back seat, clothing rearranged enough to preserve only the bare minimum of dignity. Zoro was half underneath him, one arm around Sanji’s waist, his hair thoroughly ruined.
Sanji felt fantastic. Zoro seemed equally pleased. For several minutes, neither of them bothered moving. Then Zoro asked, “Still want to go for chicken?”
Sanji started laughing, then pushed himself up enough to kiss Zoro. Zoro responded lazily this time, satisfied and warm beneath him.
“I’ll take you home and make it instead,” Sanji murmured when they broke apart.
Zoro’s eyebrow rose. “You know, I don’t really care about the food.”
Sanji smiled. “I know.” He kissed Zoro again. “Neither do I.”
They never made the chicken.
The townhouse was quiet when they entered, the rooms dim except for the lamps Sanji had left on downstairs. Zoro followed him through the entryway and deposited the sword case carefully against the wall.
Sanji caught the back of his hoodie before he could get any farther. “Bedroom.”
Zoro turned toward him. “Yeah.”
Sanji tugged him closer. Zoro came willingly, and by the time they reached Sanji’s bedroom, he was kissing Sanji again.
The following morning technically began sometime after sunset.
Sanji woke up first. Zoro had managed to occupy most of the bed despite arriving with no possessions beyond his clothes, his phone, and three swords downstairs. One thick arm lay across Sanji’s stomach. His green hair had been flattened on one side and stood nearly vertical on the other.
Sanji studied him. Months ago, he had enrolled in a community college course because immortality had become boring again. He’d expected fluorescent lights, mediocre coffee, and another piece of knowledge to occupy a few evenings.
Instead he’d found a two-year-old vampire who had been buying teaching blood, got lost inside buildings, asked questions Sanji had never thought to ask, and approached romance with the subtlety of a brick through a window.
Zoro stirred. His eye opened. “Hey,” he said, voice rough from sleep.
“Hello.”
Zoro shifted closer. “What time is it?”
“After six.”
“Morning?”
“Evening.”
“Oh.” He seemed satisfied with that, then rested his chin briefly against Sanji’s shoulder. “I like waking up here.”
Sanji turned his head. “Do you?”
“Yeah. Your bed’s good.”
Sanji laughed. “Naturally, that’s the important part.”
“And you’re here.”
The answer came just as easily.
Sanji smiled. “I suppose that improves it.”
“Yeah.” Zoro tucked himself closer. “I like you.”
Sanji’s smile softened. “I like you, too.”
Zoro grinned.
Dimples.
Sanji kissed him.
Three hundred years had given Sanji enough time to become bored with careers, cities, hobbies, fashions, and whole generations of people. Zoro had somehow become the opposite problem.
Next semester, he would probably enroll in Conflict Resolution and point out that a sword would be faster. He would keep reducing intricate concepts to six words or less. He would keep asking questions Sanji had never thought to ask, then listen to the answers with that same maddening concentration.
For once, Sanji wasn’t looking for something to make the years pass faster.
End