Disclaimer: One Piece not mine.

Summary: Prince of Retardia, indeed. A study in Sanji.

Red Strings

Dreams embody the dreamer. Straw Hat Luffy seeks to be the only King without land, law and palaces of gold. Pirate Hunter Zoro's ambition already bears the fingerprints of another, yet he nurtures and guards it with all the ferocity of the demon he is reputed to be.

Real pirates, pirates who live for distant shores and each other, will understand. They will know that no ocean, not even the Grand Line, will ever be vast enough to contain Monkey D. Luffy. They will know that the surest path to death would be to touch what Roronoa Zoro has claimed as his.

Black Leg Sanji would puzzle them. As a pirate, Sanji is already an aberration. He asks for too little, is sated too easily. If Luffy is smashing his way to Pirate King and Zoro slicing through to Undefeated Swordsman, Sanji is happy to meander towards All Blue.

Even fellow chefs searching for the same fabled sea would raise their eyebrows, because what Sanji truly desires is almost too artless to be believed. All he needs is to cup All Blue in his palm, feel the weight and reality of the myth, and it would be enough.

Passion is Sanji's second nature. When he gives himself, he gives joyously and without reserve.

When he proclaims loud devotion to his Nami-swaaan and his Robin-chwaaan, Sanji is deadly serious. He'd rather have the flesh torn from his body in bloody strips than see a single hair on their lovely heads harmed.

He worships Nami as much for the purity of her skin as the fire beneath. He reveres Robin for the sleek lines of her body and the intrepid heart it houses. In the same way he asks for nothing from All Blue other than its existence, Sanji's devotion is unswerving, but passive.

There might be a woman one day to change this, to eclipse all the others. Lechery, flattery, chivalry, all armour will be stripped from him. The hollow bite of starvation will not have prepared him for this. Sanji will be left reeling in the dark, plundered, ravenous. He will know then what love is.

When he was very young, Sanji read fairytales – princesses, dragons, white turrets in mist. He's never quite lost that sense of wonder, the slackening of mind and muscle before staggering beauty.

He'd known long ago that beauty would define him, and he sees it now, in the infinite minutiae. The scar Nami still bears on her hand; the shielding step Zoro takes before every fight; the lilt in Luffy's voice delivering a promise. These are his living fairytales. Here is beauty enough to live by, die for, drown in.